After two-and-twenty years' absence from London, Mr. Binnie returned to
it on the top of the Gosport coach with a hatbox and a little
portmanteau, a pink fresh-shaven face, a perfect appetite, a suit of
clothes like everybody else's, and not the shadow of a black servant. He
called a cab at the White Horse Cellar, and drove to Nerot's Hotel,
Clifford Street; and he gave the cabman eightpence, making the fellow,
who grumbled, understand that Clifford Street was not two hundred yards
from Bond Street, and that he was paid at the rate of five shillings and
fourpence per mile--calculating the mile at only sixteen hundred yards.
He asked the waiter at what time Colonel Newcome had ordered dinner, and
finding there was an hour on his hands before the meal, walked out to
examine the neighbourhood for a lodging where he could live more quietly
than in a hotel. He called it a hotel. Mr. Binnie was a North Briton, his
father having been a Writer to the Signet, in Edinburgh, who had procured
his son a writership in return for electioneering services done to an
East Indian Director.
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