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ROMANCE AND REALITY.
219

you will make a bad traveller; however, I shall rely upon your amendment."

Emily was not asleep, but she was oppressed by that sense of nothingness with which the native of a great town is too familiar to be able to judge of its effect on a stranger. She had been accustomed to live where every face was a familiar one—where every one's affairs had, at least, the interest of neighbourhood—and where a stranger had all the excitement of novelty. Here all was new and cold: the immensity was too great to fix on a place of rest—the hurry, the confusion of the streets bewildered her. She felt, not only that she was nobody, but that nobody cared for her—a very disagreeable conviction at which to arrive, but one very natural in London.

That journey is dreary which does not end at home; and I do not know whether to despise for his selfishness, or to pity for his situation, the individual who said, that he had ever found

"Life's warmest welcome at an inn."

It was paying himself and his friends a compliment.