I regarded it as a brief holiday, permitted for once to work-weary faculties, rather than as an adventure of life and death.

There is nothing like taking all you do at a moderate estimate: it keeps mind and body tranquil; whereas grandiloquent notions are apt to hurry both into fever.
Fifty miles were then a day's journey (for I speak of a time gone by: my hair, which, till a late period, withstood the frosts of time, lies now, at last white, under a white cap, like snow beneath snow).

About nine o'clock of a wet February night I reached London.
My reader, I know, is one who would not thank me for an elaborate reproduction of poetic first impressions; and it is well, inasmuch as I had neither time nor mood to cherish such; arriving as I did late, on a dark, raw, and rainy evening, in a Babylon and a wilderness, of which the vastness and the strangeness tried to the utmost any powers of clear thought and steady self-possession with which, in the absence of more brilliant faculties, Nature might have gifted me.
When I left the coach, the strange speech of the cabmen and others waiting round, seemed to me odd as a foreign tongue.

I had never before heard the English language chopped up in that way.

However, I managed to understand and to be understood, so far as to get myself and trunk safely conveyed to the old inn whereof I had the address.