Jilted! , Volume I by W. Clark Russell — Read

"Take my word for it, when relations choose to be obliging, they're better friends than any a man can make for himself. " -- _The Vagrant._

I had to change carriages at Canterbury in order to get to Updown, which was twelve miles distant from that city. I felt as lonely as a German who can't speak a word of English, and who must either make his way from Leicester Square to Mile End Gate, or starve. A guard took me for a foreigner, perhaps a fire-worshipper, because I had to get him to repeat a question three times before I had the faintest idea of his meaning. I will put it to the most intelligent of my readers -- if a man with a face like the countenance of a skate, were to thrust his head into a window and roar with a voice turbid with hops, "F-r-sh-f-rd-s-r! " what would you think? Would you call for the police; or fall back, and resignedly give yourself up for lost? What I gathered after a bold and narrow cross-examination was, that the man, who enjoyed his right senses, wanted an answer to this question: "Are you for Ashford, sir? " Considering that I look as much an Englishman as blue eyes, a fair complexion, and a yellow, or auburn, or red, or tawny (take your choice; they all mean one colour) mustache can make a man; and considering, moreover, that I could articulate the national dialect in a manner Dr. Johnson himself -- his immortal name, I am proud to say, heads chapter one -- would have held unimpeachable, I maintain that I had a right to consider myself aggrieved, by being set down as a foreigner, by a man who looked like a fish, and spoke like a Yahoo.