Page:Confessions of an English opium-eater (IA confessionsofeng00dequrich).pdf/75

 some medicines for a violent cough and hoarseness with which she was troubled, I wholly forgot it until it was too late to recal her.

It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester coffee-house: and, the Bristol mail being on the point of going off, I mounted on the outside. The fine fluent motion of this mail soon laid me asleep: it is somewhat remarkable, that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some months, was on the outside of a mail-coach—a bed which, at this day, I find rather an uneasy one. Connected with this sleep was a little incident, which served, as hundreds of others did at that time, to convince me how easily a man who has never been in any great distress, may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, any thing of the possible goodness of the human heart—or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So thick a