`If so be as you're quick, sir.'

The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye On the horseman, answered curtly, `Sir.'

`There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson's Bank. You must know Tellson's Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown to drink. I may read this?'

`If so be as you're quick, sir.'

He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read--first to himself and then aloud: `"Wait at Door for Mam'selle." It's not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE.'

Tellson's Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger--with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his comer, whenever the coach got a special jolt--nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson's, with all its foreign and home connexion, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson's, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.

But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach (in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was always with him, there was another current of impression that never ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one out of a grave.