This unpropitious state of the weather detained me until noon, when a cabriolet for Tours drove up, and taking a seat within it, I left the hostess of the Boule d'Or in the middle of a long story about a rich countess, who always alighted there when she passed that way.

But if the "post equitem sedet atra cura" was the maxim in the days of Augustus, the man who drives the slower cabriolet in the days of George the Fourth, cannot expect to escape.