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212520_The_Adve ... _Way_Through_The_World.pdf - OUDL Home

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454 THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP<br />

O<br />

CHAPTER XXIX<br />

IN THE DEPARTMENTS OF SEINE, LOIRE, AND<br />

STYX (INFÉRIEUR)<br />

UR dear friend Mrs. Baynes was suffering under the influence<br />

of one of those panics which sometimes seized her, and<br />

during which she remained her husband's most obedient<br />

Eliza and vassal. When Baynes wore a certain expression of<br />

countenance, we have said that his wife knew resistance to be<br />

useless. That expression, I suppose, he assumed, when he announced<br />

Charlotte's departure to her mother, and ordered Mrs.<br />

General Baynes to make the necessary preparations for the girl.<br />

" She might stay some time with her aunt," Baynes stated. " A<br />

change of air would do the child a great deal of good. Let everything<br />

necessary in the shape of hats, bonnets, winter clothes, and<br />

so forth, be got ready." " Was Char, then, to stay away so long ?"<br />

asked Mrs. B. " She has been so happy here that you want to<br />

keep her, and fancy she can't be happy without you ! " I can fancy<br />

the General grimly replying to the partner of his existence. Hanging<br />

down her withered head, with a tear mayhap trickling down her<br />

cheek, I can fancy the old woman silently departing to do the<br />

bidding of her lord. She selects a trunk out of the store of Baynes's<br />

baggage. A young lady's trunk was a trunk in those days. Now<br />

it is a two or three storied edifice of wood, in which two or three<br />

full-grown bodies of young ladies (without crinoline) might be<br />

packed. I saw a little old countrywoman at the Folkestone station<br />

last year with her travelling baggage contained in a band-box tied<br />

up in an old cotton handkerchief hanging on her arm; and she<br />

surveyed Lady Knightsbridge's twenty-three black trunks, each wellnigh<br />

as large as her Ladyship's opera-box. Before these great<br />

edifices that old woman stood wondering dumbly. That old lady<br />

and I had lived in a time when crinoline was not; and yet, I<br />

think, women looked even prettier in that time than they do now.<br />

Well, a trunk and a band-box were fetched out of the baggage heap<br />

for little Charlotte, and I daresay her little brothers jumped and<br />

danced on the box with much energy to make the lid shut, and the<br />

General brought out his hammer and nails, and nailed a card on the

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