four o'clock
Ten miles out of town , a space which we traversed in forty-four minutes , a second relay of horses was ready ; but we carried on the same postilions throughout . Six miles ahead of this distance we had a second relay ; and with this set of horses , after pushing two miles further along the road , we crossed by a miserable lane five miles long , scarcely even a bridge road , into another of the great roads from the capital ; and by thus crossing the country , we came back upon the city at a point far distant from that at which we left it . We had performed a distance of forty-two miles in three hours , and lost a fourth hour upon the wretched five miles of cross-road . It was , therefore , four o'clock , and broad daylight , when we drew near the suburbs of the city ; but a most happy accident now favored us ; a fog the most intense now prevailed ; nobody could see an object six feet distant ; we alighted in an uninhabited new-built street , plunged into the fog , thus confounding our traces to any observer . We then stepped into a hackney-coach which had been stationed at a little distance . Thence , according to our plan , we drove to a miserable quarter of the town , whither the poor only and the wretched resorted ; mounted a gloomy dirty staircase , and , befriended by the fog , still growing thicker and thicker , and by the early hour of the morning , reached a house previously hired , which , if shocking to the eye and the imagination from its squalid appearance and its gloom , still was a home -- a sanctuary -- an asylum from treachery , from captivity , from persecution . Here Pierpoint for the present quitted us : and once more Agnes , Hannah , and I , the shattered members of a shattered family , were thus gathered together in a house of our own .