About night our cars whizzed into the depot at Birmingham; but just
before we came in a difficulty was started in the company. "Mr. Sturge
is to be there waiting for us, but he does not know us and we don't
know him; what is to be done?" C. insisted that he should know him by
instinct; and so, after we reached the depot, we told him to sally out
and try. Sure enough, in a few moments he pitched upon a cheerful,
middle-aged gentleman, with a moderate but not decisive broad brim to
his hat, and challenged him as Mr. Sturge. The result verified the
truth that "instinct is a great matter." In a few moments our new
friend and ourselves were snugly encased in a fly, trotting off as
briskly as ever we could to his place at Edgbaston, nobody a whit the
wiser. You do not know how pleased we felt to think we had done it so
nicely.
As we were drinking tea that evening, Elihu Burritt came in. It was
the first time I had ever seen him, though I had heard a great deal of
him from our friends in Edinburgh. He is a man in middle life, tall
and slender, with fair complexion, blue eyes, an air of delicacy and
refinement, and manners of great gentleness. My ideas of the "learned
blacksmith" had been of something altogether more ponderous and
peremptory. Elihu has been for some years operating, in England and on
the Continent, in a movement which many in our half-Christianized
times regard with as much incredulity as the grim, old warlike barons
did the suspicious imbecilities of reading and writing.
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