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Punctually at four-thirty Miss Quincey vanished from the light of St. / Sidwell's, Regent's Park, into the obscurity of Camden Town. Camden Town / is full of little houses standing back in side streets, houses with / porticoed front doors monstrously disproportioned to their size. Nobody / ever knocks at those front doors; nobody ever passes down those side / streets if they can possibly help it. The houses are all exactly alike; / they melt and merge into each other in dingy perspective, each with its / slag-bordered six foot of garden uttering a faint suburban protest / against the advances of the pavement. Miss Quincey lived in half of one / of them (number ninety, Camden Street North) with her old aunt Mrs. Moon / and their old servant Martha. She had lived there five-and-twenty years, / ever since the death of her uncle.
Tollington Moon had been what his family called unfortunate; that is to / say, he had mislaid the greater portion of his wife's money and the whole / of Juliana's and Louisa's; he, poor fellow, had none of his own to lose. / Uncle Tollington, being the only male representative of the family, had / been appointed to drive the family coach. He was a genial good-natured / fellow and he cheerfully agreed, declaring that there was nothing in the / world he liked better than driving; though indeed he had had but little / practice in the art. So they started with a splendid flourishing of whips / and blowing of horns; Tollington driving at a furious break-neck pace in / a manner highly diverting and exhilarating to the ladies inside. The / girls (they were girls in those days) sat tight and felt no fear, while / Mrs. Moon, with her teeth shaking, explained to them the advantages of / having so expert a driver on the box seat. Of course there came the / inevitable smash at the corner. The three climbed out of that coach more / dead than alive; but they uttered no complaints; they had had their fun; / and in accidents of this kind the poor driver generally gets the worst of / it.