Travelling in the
interests of the well-known firm in which it is my lot to be a junior
partner, I had been called upon to visit not only the capitals of Russia
and Poland, but had found it also necessary to pass some weeks among
the trading-ports of the Baltic; whence it came that the year was
already far spent before I again set foot on English soil, and that,
instead of shooting pheasants with him, as I had hoped, in October,
I came to be my friend's guest during the more genial Christmastide.
My voyage over, and a few days given up to business in Liverpool and
London, I hastened down to Clayborough with all the delight of a
school-boy whose holidays are at hand. My way lay by the Great East
Anglian line as far as Clayborough station, where I was to be met by
one of the Dumbleton carriages and conveyed across the remaining nine
miles of country. It was a foggy afternoon, singularly warm for the
4th of December, and I had arranged to leave London by the 4.15 express.
The early darkness of winter had already closed in; the lamps were
lighted in the carriages; a clinging damp dimmed the windows, adhered
to the door-handles, and pervaded all the atmosphere; while the
gas-jets at the neighboring bookstand diffused a luminous haze that
only served to make the gloom of the terminus more visible.
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