Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/105

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A VAMPIRE.
97

with a hog-mane. Nay, I once steered a Hansom cab up Bond Street in the early morning, freighted with more subalterns than I should like to specify of her Majesty's Household Troops, but I never thought I should come to a Bath chair!

"Nevertheless I found myself at last an inside passenger of one of these locomotive couches, enjoying the quiet and the air of the gardens at Hampton Court in complete and uninterrupted solitude. The man who dragged me to this pleasant spot having gone to 'get his dinner,' as he called it, and the nursery-maids, with their interesting charges, having retired from their morning, and not yet emerged for their afternoon, stroll, I lay back, and thought of so many things—of the strength and manhood that had departed from me for ever; of the strange, dull calm that comes on with the evening of life, and contents us so well we