A Bride’s Lost Luggage
The trouble which is bestowed by railway companies to cause the restitution of lost property is incalculable. Some years ago, a young lady lost a portmanteau from the rest of her luggage—a pardonable oversight, for she was a bride starting on a honeymoon trip. The bridegroom—never on such occasions an accountable being—had not noticed the misfortune. When the loss was discovered, and application made respecting it, the lady spoke positively of having seen it at the station whence they started, then again at a station where they had to change carriages; she saw it also when they left the railway; it was all safe, she averred, at the hotel where they stopped for a few days. She was also certain that it was among the rest of the “things” when they again started for a watering-place; but, when they arrived there, it was missing. It contained a new riding habit, value fifteen pounds. The search that was instituted for this portmanteau recalled that of Telemachus for Ulysses; the railway officials sent one of their clerks with a carte blanche to trace the bride’s journey to the end of the last mile, till some tidings of the strayed trunk could be traced. He went to every station, to every coach-office in connection with every station, to every town, to every hotel, and to every lodging that the happy couple had visited. His expenses actually amounted to fifteen pounds. He came back without success. At length the treasure was found; but where? At the by-station on another line, whence the bride had started from home a maiden. Yet she had positively declared, without doubt or reservation, that she had, “with her own eyes,” seen the trunk on the various stages of her tour; this can only be accounted for by the peculiar flustration of a young lady just plunged into the vortex of matrimony. The husband paid the whole of the costs.