1815. NOVEMBER 8. (Wednesday.)
I LEFT London, and reached Gravesend at nine in the morning,
having been taught to expect our sailing in a few hours. But although the vessel left the Docks on Saturday, she did not
reach this place till three o'clock on Thursday the 9th. The
Captain now-tells me, that we may expect to sail certainly in the
afternoon of to-morrow the 10th. I expect the ship's cabin to
gain greatly by my two days' residence at the "***** ****,"
which nothing can exceed for noise, dirt, and dulness. Eloisa
would never have established "black melancholy,"-at the Paraclete
as its favourite residence, if she had happened to pass three
days at an inn at Gravesend: nowhere else did I ever see the
Sky look so dingy, and the river so dirty: to be sure, the place
has all the advantages of an English November to assist it in those
particulars. Just now, too, a carriage passed my windows, conveying
on board a cargo of passengers, who seemed sincerely
afflicted at the thoughts of leaving their dear native land! The
pigs squeaked, the ducks quacked, and the fowls screamed; and
all so dolefully, as clearly to prove, that theirs was no dissembled
sorrow! And after them (more affecting than all) came a
wheelbarrow, with a solitary porker tied in a basket, with his
head hanging over on one side, and his legs sticking out on the
other, who neither grunted nor moved, nor gave any signs of
life, but seemed to be of quite the same opinion with Hannah
More's heroine,
"Grief is for little wrongs; despair for mine!"
As Miss O'Neil is to play "Elwina" for the first time to-morrow, it is a thousand pities that she had not the previous
advantage of seeing the speechless despondency of this poor pig;
it might have furnished her with some valuable hints, and enabled
her to convey more perfectly to the audience the "expressive
silence" of irremediable distress.
