As the dogs of shy neighbourhoods usually betray a slinking consciousness

of being in poor circumstances—for the most part manifested in an aspect

of anxiety, an awkwardness in their play, and a misgiving that somebody

is going to harness them to something, to pick up a living—so the cats of

shy neighbourhoods exhibit a strong tendency to relapse into barbarism.

Not only are they made selfishly ferocious by ruminating on the surplus

population around them, and on the densely crowded state of all the

avenues to cat’s meat; not only is there a moral and politico-economical

haggardness in them, traceable to these reflections; but they evince a

physical deterioration. Their linen is not clean, and is wretchedly got

up; their black turns rusty, like old mourning; they wear very

indifferent fur; and take to the shabbiest cotton velvet, instead of silk

velvet. I am on terms of recognition with several small streets of cats,

about the Obelisk in Saint George’s Fields, and also in the vicinity of

Clerkenwell-green, and also in the back settlements of Drury-lane. In

appearance, they are very like the women among whom they live. They seem

to turn out of their unwholesome beds into the street, without any

preparation. They leave their young families to stagger about the

gutters, unassisted, while they frouzily quarrel and swear and scratch

and spit, at street corners. In particular, I remark that when they are

about to increase their families (an event of frequent recurrence) the

resemblance is strongly expressed in a certain dusty dowdiness,

down-at-heel self-neglect, and general giving up of things. I cannot

honestly report that I have ever seen a feline matron of this class

washing her face when in an interesting condition.

Not to prolong these notes of uncommercial travel among the lower animals

of shy neighbourhoods, by dwelling at length upon the exasperated

moodiness of the tom-cats, and their resemblance in many respects to a

man and a brother, I will come to a close with a word on the fowls of the

same localities.

That anything born of an egg and invested with wings, should have got to

the pass that it hops contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls

_that_ going home, is a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing

more in this connexion to wonder at. Otherwise I might wonder at the

completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the

birds of the air—have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and

mud—have forgotten all about live trees, and make roosting-places of

shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I

wonder at nothing concerning them, and take them as they are. I accept

as products of Nature and things of course, a reduced Bantam family of my

acquaintance in the Hackney-road, who are incessantly at the

pawnbroker’s. I cannot say that they enjoy themselves, for they are of a

melancholy temperament; but what enjoyment they are capable of, they

derive from crowding together in the pawnbroker’s side-entry. Here, they

are always to be found in a feeble flutter, as if they were newly come

down in the world, and were afraid of being identified. I know a low

fellow, originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole

establishment of wives, in single file, in at the door of the jug

Department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manœuvres them

among the company’s legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and

so passes his life: seldom, in the season, going to bed before two in the

morning. Over Waterloo-bridge, there is a shabby old speckled couple

(they belong to the wooden French-bedstead, washing-stand, and

towel-horse-making trade), who are always trying to get in at the door of

a chapel. Whether the old lady, under a delusion reminding one of Mrs.

Southcott, has an idea of entrusting an egg to that particular

denomination, or merely understands that she has no business in the

building and is consequently frantic to enter it, I cannot determine; but

she is constantly endeavouring to undermine the principal door: while her

partner, who is infirm upon his legs, walks up and down, encouraging her

and defying the Universe. But, the family I have been best acquainted

with, since the removal from this trying sphere of a Chinese circle at

Brentford, reside in the densest part of Bethnal-green. Their

abstraction from the objects among which they live, or rather their

conviction that those objects have all come into existence in express

subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me, that I have made them the

subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of

the two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I have

come to the conclusion that their opinions are represented by the leading

lord and leading lady: the latter, as I judge, an aged personage,

afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of quill, that gives

her the appearance of a bundle of office pens. When a railway goods van

that would crush an elephant comes round the corner, tearing over these

fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses, perfectly satisfied

that the whole rush was a passing property in the air, which may have

left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of

kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric

discharge, for fowls to peck at. Peg-tops and hoops they account, I

think, as a sort of hail; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew. Gaslight comes

quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a

suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at

the corner has superseded the sun. I have established it as a certain

fact, that they always begin to crow when the public-house shutters begin

to be taken down, and that they salute the potboy, the instant he appears

to perform that duty, as if he were Phoebus in person.

XI

TRAMPS

THE chance use of the word ‘Tramp’ in my last paper, brought that

numerous fraternity so vividly before my mind’s eye, that I had no sooner

laid down my pen than a compulsion was upon me to take it up again, and

make notes of the Tramps whom I perceived on all the summer roads in all

directions.

Whenever a tramp sits down to rest by the wayside, he sits with his legs

in a dry ditch; and whenever he goes to sleep (which is very often

indeed), he goes to sleep on his back. Yonder, by the high road, glaring

white in the bright sunshine, lies, on the dusty bit of turf under the

bramble-bush that fences the coppice from the highway, the tramp of the

order savage, fast asleep. He lies on the broad of his back, with his

face turned up to the sky, and one of his ragged arms loosely thrown

across his face. His bundle (what can be the contents of that mysterious

bundle, to make it worth his while to carry it about?) is thrown down

beside him, and the waking woman with him sits with her legs in the

ditch, and her back to the road. She wears her bonnet rakishly perched

on the front of her head, to shade her face from the sun in walking, and

she ties her skirts round her in conventionally tight tramp-fashion with

a sort of apron. You can seldom catch sight of her, resting thus,

without seeing her in a despondently defiant manner doing something to

her hair or her bonnet, and glancing at you between her fingers. She

does not often go to sleep herself in the daytime, but will sit for any

length of time beside the man. And his slumberous propensities would not

seem to be referable to the fatigue of carrying the bundle, for she

carries it much oftener and further than he. When they are afoot, you

will mostly find him slouching on ahead, in a gruff temper, while she

lags heavily behind with the burden. He is given to personally

correcting her, too—which phase of his character develops itself

oftenest, on benches outside alehouse doors—and she appears to become

strongly attached to him for these reasons; it may usually be noticed

that when the poor creature has a bruised face, she is the most

affectionate. He has no occupation whatever, this order of tramp, and

has no object whatever in going anywhere. He will sometimes call himself

a brickmaker, or a sawyer, but only when he takes an imaginary flight.

He generally represents himself, in a vague way, as looking out for a job

of work; but he never did work, he never does, and he never will. It is

a favourite fiction with him, however (as if he were the most industrious

character on earth), that _you_ never work; and as he goes past your

garden and sees you looking at your flowers, you will overhear him growl

with a strong sense of contrast, ‘_You_ are a lucky hidle devil, _you_

are!’

The slinking tramp is of the same hopeless order, and has the same

injured conviction on him that you were born to whatever you possess, and

never did anything to get it: but he is of a less audacious disposition.

He will stop before your gate, and say to his female companion with an

air of constitutional humility and propitiation—to edify any one who may

be within hearing behind a blind or a bush—‘This is a sweet spot, ain’t

it? A lovelly spot! And I wonder if they’d give two poor footsore

travellers like me and you, a drop of fresh water out of such a pretty

gen-teel crib? We’d take it wery koind on ’em, wouldn’t us? Wery koind,

upon my word, us would?’ He has a quick sense of a dog in the vicinity,

and will extend his modestly-injured propitiation to the dog chained up

in your yard; remarking, as he slinks at the yard gate, ‘Ah! You are a

foine breed o’ dog, too, and _you_ ain’t kep for nothink! I’d take it

wery koind o’ your master if he’d elp a traveller and his woife as envies

no gentlefolk their good fortun, wi’ a bit o’ your broken wittles. He’d

never know the want of it, nor more would you. Don’t bark like that, at

poor persons as never done you no arm; the poor is down-trodden and broke

enough without that; O DON’T!’ He generally heaves a prodigious sigh in

moving away, and always looks up the lane and down the lane, and up the

road and down the road, before going on.

Both of these orders of tramp are of a very robust habit; let the

hard-working labourer at whose cottage-door they prowl and beg, have the

ague never so badly, these tramps are sure to be in good health.

There is another kind of tramp, whom you encounter this bright summer

day—say, on a road with the sea-breeze making its dust lively, and sails

of ships in the blue distance beyond the slope of Down. As you walk

enjoyingly on, you descry in the perspective at the bottom of a steep

hill up which your way lies, a figure that appears to be sitting airily

on a gate, whistling in a cheerful and disengaged manner. As you

approach nearer to it, you observe the figure to slide down from the

gate, to desist from whistling, to uncock its hat, to become tender of

foot, to depress its head and elevate its shoulders, and to present all

the characteristics of profound despondency. Arriving at the bottom of

the hill and coming close to the figure, you observe it to be the figure

of a shabby young man. He is moving painfully forward, in the direction

in which you are going, and his mind is so preoccupied with his

misfortunes that he is not aware of your approach until you are close

upon him at the hill-foot. When he is aware of you, you discover him to

be a remarkably well-behaved young man, and a remarkably well-spoken

young man. You know him to be well-behaved, by his respectful manner of

touching his hat: you know him to be well-spoken, by his smooth manner of

expressing himself. He says in a flowing confidential voice, and without

punctuation, ‘I ask your pardon sir but if you would excuse the liberty

of being so addressed upon the public Iway by one who is almost reduced

to rags though it as not always been so and by no fault of his own but

through ill elth in his family and many unmerited sufferings it would be

a great obligation sir to know the time.’ You give the well-spoken young

man the time. The well-spoken young man, keeping well up with you,

resumes: ‘I am aware sir that it is a liberty to intrude a further

question on a gentleman walking for his entertainment but might I make so

bold as ask the favour of the way to Dover sir and about the distance?’

You inform the well-spoken young man that the way to Dover is straight

on, and the distance some eighteen miles. The well-spoken young man

becomes greatly agitated. ‘In the condition to which I am reduced,’ says

he, ‘I could not ope to reach Dover before dark even if my shoes were in

a state to take me there or my feet were in a state to old out over the

flinty road and were not on the bare ground of which any gentleman has

the means to satisfy himself by looking Sir may I take the liberty of

speaking to you?’ As the well-spoken young man keeps so well up with you

that you can’t prevent his taking the liberty of speaking to you, he goes

on, with fluency: ‘Sir it is not begging that is my intention for I was

brought up by the best of mothers and begging is not my trade I should

not know sir how to follow it as a trade if such were my shameful wishes

for the best of mothers long taught otherwise and in the best of omes

though now reduced to take the present liberty on the Iway Sir my

business was the law-stationering and I was favourably known to the

Solicitor-General the Attorney-General the majority of the judges and the

ole of the legal profession but through ill elth in my family and the

treachery of a friend for whom I became security and he no other than my

own wife’s brother the brother of my own wife I was cast forth with my

tender partner and three young children not to beg for I will sooner die

of deprivation but to make my way to the sea-port town of Dover where I

have a relative i in respect not only that will assist me but that would

trust me with untold gold Sir in appier times and hare this calamity fell

upon me I made for my amusement when I little thought that I should ever

need it excepting for my air this’—here the well-spoken young man put his

hand into his breast—‘this comb! Sir I implore you in the name of

charity to purchase a tortoiseshell comb which is a genuine article at

any price that your humanity may put upon it and may the blessings of a

ouseless family awaiting with beating arts the return of a husband and a

father from Dover upon the cold stone seats of London-bridge ever attend

you Sir may I take the liberty of speaking to you I implore you to buy

this comb!’ By this time, being a reasonably good walker, you will have

been too much for the well-spoken young man, who will stop short and

express his disgust and his want of breath, in a long expectoration, as

you leave him behind.

Towards the end of the same walk, on the same bright summer day, at the

corner of the next little town or village, you may find another kind of

tramp, embodied in the persons of a most exemplary couple whose only

improvidence appears to have been, that they spent the last of their

little All on soap. They are a man and woman, spotless to behold—John

Anderson, with the frost on his short smock-frock instead of his ‘pow,’

attended by Mrs. Anderson. John is over-ostentatious of the frost upon

his raiment, and wears a curious and, you would say, an almost

unnecessary demonstration of girdle of white linen wound about his

waist—a girdle, snowy as Mrs. Anderson’s apron. This cleanliness was the

expiring effort of the respectable couple, and nothing then remained to

Mr. Anderson but to get chalked upon his spade in snow-white copy-book

characters, HUNGRY! and to sit down here. Yes; one thing more remained

to Mr. Anderson—his character; Monarchs could not deprive him of his

hard-earned character. Accordingly, as you come up with this spectacle

of virtue in distress, Mrs. Anderson rises, and with a decent curtsey

presents for your consideration a certificate from a Doctor of Divinity,

the reverend the Vicar of Upper Dodgington, who informs his Christian

friends and all whom it may concern that the bearers, John Anderson and

lawful wife, are persons to whom you cannot be too liberal. This

benevolent pastor omitted no work of his hands to fit the good couple

out, for with half an eye you can recognise his autograph on the spade.

Another class of tramp is a man, the most valuable part of whose

stock-in-trade is a highly perplexed demeanour. He is got up like a

countryman, and you will often come upon the poor fellow, while he is

endeavouring to decipher the inscription on a milestone—quite a fruitless

endeavour, for he cannot read. He asks your pardon, he truly does (he is

very slow of speech, this tramp, and he looks in a bewildered way all

round the prospect while he talks to you), but all of us shold do as we

wold be done by, and he’ll take it kind, if you’ll put a power man in the

right road fur to jine his eldest son as has broke his leg bad in the

masoning, and is in this heere Orspit’l as is wrote down by Squire

Pouncerby’s own hand as wold not tell a lie fur no man. He then produces

from under his dark frock (being always very slow and perplexed) a neat

but worn old leathern purse, from which he takes a scrap of paper. On

this scrap of paper is written, by Squire Pouncerby, of The Grove,

‘Please to direct the Bearer, a poor but very worthy man, to the Sussex

County Hospital, near Brighton’—a matter of some difficulty at the

moment, seeing that the request comes suddenly upon you in the depths of

Hertfordshire. The more you endeavour to indicate where Brighton is—when

you have with the greatest difficulty remembered—the less the devoted

father can be made to comprehend, and the more obtusely he stares at the

prospect; whereby, being reduced to extremity, you recommend the faithful

parent to begin by going to St. Albans, and present him with

half-a-crown. It does him good, no doubt, but scarcely helps him

forward, since you find him lying drunk that same evening in the

wheelwright’s sawpit under the shed where the felled trees are, opposite

the sign of the Three Jolly Hedgers.

But, the most vicious, by far, of all the idle tramps, is the tramp who

pretends to have been a gentleman. ‘Educated,’ he writes, from the

village beer-shop in pale ink of a ferruginous complexion; ‘educated at

Trin. Coll. Cam.—nursed in the lap of affluence—once in my small way the

pattron of the Muses,’ &c. &c. &c.—surely a sympathetic mind will not

withhold a trifle, to help him on to the market-town where he thinks of

giving a Lecture to the _fruges consumere nati_, on things in general?

This shameful creature lolling about hedge tap-rooms in his ragged

clothes, now so far from being black that they look as if they never can

have been black, is more selfish and insolent than even the savage tramp.

He would sponge on the poorest boy for a farthing, and spurn him when he

had got it; he would interpose (if he could get anything by it) between

the baby and the mother’s breast. So much lower than the company he

keeps, for his maudlin assumption of being higher, this pitiless rascal

blights the summer road as he maunders on between the luxuriant hedges;

where (to my thinking) even the wild convolvulus and rose and

sweet-briar, are the worse for his going by, and need time to recover

from the taint of him in the air.

The young fellows who trudge along barefoot, five or six together, their

boots slung over their shoulders, their shabby bundles under their arms,

their sticks newly cut from some roadside wood, are not eminently

prepossessing, but are much less objectionable. There is a

tramp-fellowship among them. They pick one another up at resting

stations, and go on in companies. They always go at a fast swing—though

they generally limp too—and there is invariably one of the company who

has much ado to keep up with the rest. They generally talk about horses,

and any other means of locomotion than walking: or, one of the company

relates some recent experiences of the road—which are always disputes and

difficulties. As for example. ‘So as I’m a standing at the pump in the

market, blest if there don’t come up a Beadle, and he ses, “Mustn’t stand

here,” he ses. “Why not?” I ses. “No beggars allowed in this town,” he

ses. “Who’s a beggar?” I ses. “You are,” he ses. “Who ever see _me_

beg? Did _you_?” I ses. “Then you’re a tramp,” he ses. “I’d rather be

that than a Beadle,” I ses.’ (The company express great approval.)

‘“Would you?” he ses to me. “Yes, I would,” I ses to him. “Well,” he

ses, “anyhow, get out of this town.” “Why, blow your little town!” I

ses, “who wants to be in it? Wot does your dirty little town mean by

comin’ and stickin’ itself in the road to anywhere? Why don’t you get a

shovel and a barrer, and clear your town out o’ people’s way?”’ (The

company expressing the highest approval and laughing aloud, they all go

down the hill.)

Then, there are the tramp handicraft men. Are they not all over England,

in this Midsummer time? Where does the lark sing, the corn grow, the

mill turn, the river run, and they are not among the lights and shadows,

tinkering, chair-mending, umbrella-mending, clock-mending,

knife-grinding? Surely, a pleasant thing, if we were in that condition

of life, to grind our way through Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. For the

worst six weeks or so, we should see the sparks we ground off, fiery

bright against a background of green wheat and green leaves. A little

later, and the ripe harvest would pale our sparks from red to yellow,

until we got the dark newly-turned land for a background again, and they

were red once more. By that time, we should have ground our way to the

sea cliffs, and the whirr of our wheel would be lost in the breaking of

the waves. Our next variety in sparks would be derived from contrast

with the gorgeous medley of colours in the autumn woods, and, by the time

we had ground our way round to the heathy lands between Reigate and

Croydon, doing a prosperous stroke of business all along, we should show

like a little firework in the light frosty air, and be the next best

thing to the blacksmith’s forge. Very agreeable, too, to go on a

chair-mending tour. What judges we should be of rushes, and how

knowingly (with a sheaf and a bottomless chair at our back) we should

lounge on bridges, looking over at osier-beds! Among all the innumerable

occupations that cannot possibly be transacted without the assistance of

lookers-on, chair-mending may take a station in the first rank. When we

sat down with our backs against the barn or the public-house, and began

to mend, what a sense of popularity would grow upon us! When all the

children came to look at us, and the tailor, and the general dealer, and

the farmer who had been giving a small order at the little saddler’s, and

the groom from the great house, and the publican, and even the two

skittle-players (and here note that, howsoever busy all the rest of

village human-kind may be, there will always be two people with leisure

to play at skittles, wherever village skittles are), what encouragement

would be on us to plait and weave! No one looks at us while we plait and

weave these words. Clock-mending again. Except for the slight

inconvenience of carrying a clock under our arm, and the monotony of

making the bell go, whenever we came to a human habitation, what a

pleasant privilege to give a voice to the dumb cottage-clock, and set it

talking to the cottage family again! Likewise we foresee great interest

in going round by the park plantations, under the overhanging boughs

(hares, rabbits, partridges, and pheasants, scudding like mad across and

across the chequered ground before us), and so over the park ladder, and

through the wood, until we came to the Keeper’s lodge. Then, would the

Keeper be discoverable at his door, in a deep nest of leaves, smoking his

pipe. Then, on our accosting him in the way of our trade, would he call

to Mrs. Keeper, respecting ‘t’ould clock’ in the kitchen. Then, would

Mrs. Keeper ask us into the lodge, and on due examination we should offer

to make a good job of it for eighteenpence; which offer, being accepted,

would set us tinkling and clinking among the chubby, awe-struck little

Keepers for an hour and more. So completely to the family’s satisfaction

would we achieve our work, that the Keeper would mention how that there

was something wrong with the bell of the turret stable-clock up at the

Hall, and that if we thought good of going up to the housekeeper on the

chance of that job too, why he would take us. Then, should we go, among

the branching oaks and the deep fern, by silent ways of mystery known to

the Keeper, seeing the herd glancing here and there as we went along,

until we came to the old Hall, solemn and grand. Under the Terrace

Flower Garden, and round by the stables, would the Keeper take us in, and

as we passed we should observe how spacious and stately the stables, and

how fine the painting of the horses’ names over their stalls, and how

solitary all: the family being in London. Then, should we find ourselves

presented to the housekeeper, sitting, in hushed state, at needlework, in

a bay-window looking out upon a mighty grim red-brick quadrangle, guarded

by stone lions disrespectfully throwing somersaults over the escutcheons

of the noble family. Then, our services accepted and we insinuated with

a candle into the stable-turret, we should find it to be a mere question

of pendulum, but one that would hold us until dark. Then, should we fall

to work, with a general impression of Ghosts being about, and of pictures

indoors that of a certainty came out of their frames and ‘walked,’ if the

family would only own it. Then, should we work and work, until the day

gradually turned to dusk, and even until the dusk gradually turned to

dark. Our task at length accomplished, we should be taken into an

enormous servants’ hall, and there regaled with beef and bread, and

powerful ale. Then, paid freely, we should be at liberty to go, and

should be told by a pointing helper to keep round over yinder by the

blasted ash, and so straight through the woods, till we should see the

town-lights right afore us. Then, feeling lonesome, should we desire

upon the whole, that the ash had not been blasted, or that the helper had

had the manners not to mention it. However, we should keep on, all

right, till suddenly the stable bell would strike ten in the dolefullest

way, quite chilling our blood, though we had so lately taught him how to

acquit himself. Then, as we went on, should we recall old stories, and

dimly consider what it would be most advisable to do, in the event of a

tall figure, all in white, with saucer eyes, coming up and saying, ‘I

want you to come to a churchyard and mend a church clock. Follow me!’

Then, should we make a burst to get clear of the trees, and should soon

find ourselves in the open, with the town-lights bright ahead of us. So

should we lie that night at the ancient sign of the Crispin and

Crispanus, and rise early next morning to be betimes on tramp again.

Bricklayers often tramp, in twos and threes, lying by night at their

‘lodges,’ which are scattered all over the country. Bricklaying is

another of the occupations that can by no means be transacted in rural

parts, without the assistance of spectators—of as many as can be

convened. In thinly-peopled spots, I have known brick-layers on tramp,

coming up with bricklayers at work, to be so sensible of the

indispensability of lookers-on, that they themselves have sat up in that

capacity, and have been unable to subside into the acceptance of a

proffered share in the job, for two or three days together. Sometimes,

the ‘navvy,’ on tramp, with an extra pair of half-boots over his

shoulder, a bag, a bottle, and a can, will take a similar part in a job

of excavation, and will look at it without engaging in it, until all his

money is gone. The current of my uncommercial pursuits caused me only

last summer to want a little body of workmen for a certain spell of work

in a pleasant part of the country; and I was at one time honoured with

the attendance of as many as seven-and-twenty, who were looking at six.

Who can be familiar with any rustic highway in summer-time, without

storing up knowledge of the many tramps who go from one oasis of town or

village to another, to sell a stock in trade, apparently not worth a

shilling when sold? Shrimps are a favourite commodity for this kind of

speculation, and so are cakes of a soft and spongy character, coupled

with Spanish nuts and brandy balls. The stock is carried on the head in

a basket, and, between the head and the basket, are the trestles on which

the stock is displayed at trading times. Fleet of foot, but a careworn

class of tramp this, mostly; with a certain stiffness of neck, occasioned

by much anxious balancing of baskets; and also with a long, Chinese sort

of eye, which an overweighted forehead would seem to have squeezed into

that form.

On the hot dusty roads near seaport towns and great rivers, behold the

tramping Soldier. And if you should happen never to have asked yourself

whether his uniform is suited to his work, perhaps the poor fellow’s

appearance as he comes distressfully towards you, with his absurdly tight

jacket unbuttoned, his neck-gear in his hand, and his legs well chafed by

his trousers of baize, may suggest the personal inquiry, how you think

_you_ would like it. Much better the tramping Sailor, although his cloth

is somewhat too thick for land service. But, why the tramping

merchant-mate should put on a black velvet waistcoat, for a chalky

country in the dog-days, is one of the great secrets of nature that will

never be discovered.

I have my eye upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either side by a

wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a

skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot,

and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away to

the ocean, like a man’s life. To gain the milestone here, which the

moss, primroses, violets, blue-bells, and wild roses, would soon render

illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their

sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all

the tramps with carts or caravans—the Gipsy-tramp, the Show-tramp, the

Cheap Jack—find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place, and

all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot. Bless

the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its

grass! What tramp children do I see here, attired in a handful of rags,

making a gymnasium of the shafts of the cart, making a feather-bed of the

flints and brambles, making a toy of the hobbled old horse who is not

much more like a horse than any cheap toy would be! Here, do I encounter

the cart of mats and brooms and baskets—with all thoughts of business

given to the evening wind—with the stew made and being served out—with

Cheap Jack and Dear Jill striking soft music out of the plates that are

rattled like warlike cymbals when put up for auction at fairs and

markets—their minds so influenced (no doubt) by the melody of the

nightingales as they begin to sing in the woods behind them, that if I

were to propose to deal, they would sell me anything at cost price. On

this hallowed ground has it been my happy privilege (let me whisper it),

to behold the White-haired Lady with the pink eyes, eating meat-pie with

the Giant: while, by the hedge-side, on the box of blankets which I knew

contained the snakes, were set forth the cups and saucers and the teapot.

It was on an evening in August, that I chanced upon this ravishing

spectacle, and I noticed that, whereas the Giant reclined half concealed

beneath the overhanging boughs and seemed indifferent to Nature, the

white hair of the gracious Lady streamed free in the breath of evening,

and her pink eyes found pleasure in the landscape. I heard only a single

sentence of her uttering, yet it bespoke a talent for modest repartee.

The ill-mannered Giant—accursed be his evil race!—had interrupted the

Lady in some remark, and, as I passed that enchanted corner of the wood,

she gently reproved him, with the words, ‘Now, Cobby;’—Cobby! so short a

name!—‘ain’t one fool enough to talk at a time?’

Within appropriate distance of this magic ground, though not so near it

as that the song trolled from tap or bench at door, can invade its

woodland silence, is a little hostelry which no man possessed of a penny

was ever known to pass in warm weather. Before its entrance, are certain

pleasant, trimmed limes; likewise, a cool well, with so musical a

bucket-handle that its fall upon the bucket rim will make a horse prick

up his ears and neigh, upon the droughty road half a mile off. This is a

house of great resort for haymaking tramps and harvest tramps, insomuch

that as they sit within, drinking their mugs of beer, their relinquished

scythes and reaping-hooks glare out of the open windows, as if the whole

establishment were a family war-coach of Ancient Britons. Later in the

season, the whole country-side, for miles and miles, will swarm with

hopping tramps. They come in families, men, women, and children, every

family provided with a bundle of bedding, an iron pot, a number of

babies, and too often with some poor sick creature quite unfit for the

rough life, for whom they suppose the smell of the fresh hop to be a

sovereign remedy. Many of these hoppers are Irish, but many come from

London. They crowd all the roads, and camp under all the hedges and on

all the scraps of common-land, and live among and upon the hops until

they are all picked, and the hop-gardens, so beautiful through the

summer, look as if they had been laid waste by an invading army. Then,

there is a vast exodus of tramps out of the country; and if you ride or

drive round any turn of any road, at more than a foot pace, you will be

bewildered to find that you have charged into the bosom of fifty

families, and that there are splashing up all around you, in the utmost

prodigality of confusion, bundles of bedding, babies, iron pots, and a

good-humoured multitude of both sexes and all ages, equally divided

between perspiration and intoxication.

XII

DULLBOROUGH TOWN

IT lately happened that I found myself rambling about the scenes among

which my earliest days were passed; scenes from which I departed when I

was a child, and which I did not revisit until I was a man. This is no

uncommon chance, but one that befalls some of us any day; perhaps it may

not be quite uninteresting to compare notes with the reader respecting an

experience so familiar and a journey so uncommercial.

I call my boyhood’s home (and I feel like a Tenor in an English Opera

when I mention it) Dullborough. Most of us come from Dullborough who

come from a country town.

As I left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in the

land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that have since

passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was

packed—like game—and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys,

Wood-street, Cheapside, London? There was no other inside passenger, and

I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard

all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.

With this tender remembrance upon me, I was cavalierly shunted back into

Dullborough the other day, by train. My ticket had been previously

collected, like my taxes, and my shining new portmanteau had had a great

plaster stuck upon it, and I had been defied by Act of Parliament to

offer an objection to anything that was done to it, or me, under a

penalty of not less than forty shillings or more than five pounds,

compoundable for a term of imprisonment. When I had sent my disfigured

property on to the hotel, I began to look about me; and the first

discovery I made, was, that the Station had swallowed up the

playing-field.

It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the turf, and

all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of

jolting roads: while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark monster of a

tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous

for more destruction. The coach that had carried me away, was

melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at

the coach-office up-street; the locomotive engine that had brought me

back, was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was

spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.

When I had been let out at the platform-door, like a prisoner whom his

turnkey grudgingly released, I looked in again over the low wall, at the

scene of departed glories. Here, in the haymaking time, had I been

delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an immense pile (of

haycock), by my own countrymen, the victorious British (boy next door and

his two cousins), and had been recognised with ecstasy by my affianced

one (Miss Green), who had come all the way from England (second house in

the terrace) to ransom me, and marry me. Here, had I first heard in

confidence, from one whose father was greatly connected, being under

Government, of the existence of a terrible banditti, called ‘The

Radicals,’ whose principles were, that the Prince Regent wore stays, and

that nobody had a right to any salary, and that the army and navy ought

to be put down—horrors at which I trembled in my bed, after supplicating

that the Radicals might be speedily taken and hanged. Here, too, had we,

the small boys of Boles’s, had that cricket match against the small boys

of Coles’s, when Boles and Coles had actually met upon the ground, and

when, instead of instantly hitting out at one another with the utmost

fury, as we had all hoped and expected, those sneaks had said

respectively, ‘I hope Mrs. Boles is well,’ and ‘I hope Mrs. Coles and the

baby are doing charmingly.’ Could it be that, after all this, and much

more, the Playing-field was a Station, and No. 97 expectorated boiling

water and redhot cinders on it, and the whole belonged by Act of

Parliament to S.E.R.?

As it could be, and was, I left the place with a heavy heart for a walk

all over the town. And first of Timpson’s up-street. When I departed

from Dullborough in the strawy arms of Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid,

Timpson’s was a moderate-sized coach-office (in fact, a little

coach-office), with an oval transparency in the window, which looked

beautiful by night, representing one of Timpson’s coaches in the act of

passing a milestone on the London road with great velocity, completely

full inside and out, and all the passengers dressed in the first style of

fashion, and enjoying themselves tremendously. I found no such place as

Timpson’s now—no such bricks and rafters, not to mention the name—no such

edifice on the teeming earth. Pickford had come and knocked Timpson’s

down. Pickford had not only knocked Timpson’s down, but had knocked two

or three houses down on each side of Timpson’s, and then had knocked the

whole into one great establishment with a pair of big gates, in and out

of which, his (Pickford’s) waggons are, in these days, always rattling,

with their drivers sitting up so high, that they look in at the

second-floor windows of the old-fashioned houses in the High-street as

they shake the town. I have not the honour of Pickford’s acquaintance,

but I felt that he had done me an injury, not to say committed an act of

boyslaughter, in running over my Childhood in this rough manner; and if

ever I meet Pickford driving one of his own monsters, and smoking a pipe

the while (which is the custom of his men), he shall know by the

expression of my eye, if it catches his, that there is something wrong

between us.

Moreover, I felt that Pickford had no right to come rushing into

Dullborough and deprive the town of a public picture. He is not Napoleon

Bonaparte. When he took down the transparent stage-coach, he ought to

have given the town a transparent van. With a gloomy conviction that

Pickford is wholly utilitarian and unimaginative, I proceeded on my way.

It is a mercy I have not a red and green lamp and a night-bell at my

door, for in my very young days I was taken to so many lyings-in that I

wonder I escaped becoming a professional martyr to them in after-life. I

suppose I had a very sympathetic nurse, with a large circle of married

acquaintance. However that was, as I continued my walk through

Dullborough, I found many houses to be solely associated in my mind with

this particular interest. At one little greengrocer’s shop, down certain

steps from the street, I remember to have waited on a lady who had had

four children (I am afraid to write five, though I fully believe it was

five) at a birth. This meritorious woman held quite a reception in her

room on the morning when I was introduced there, and the sight of the

house brought vividly to my mind how the four (five) deceased young

people lay, side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers;

reminding me by a homely association, which I suspect their complexion to

have assisted, of pigs’ feet as they are usually displayed at a neat

tripe-shop. Hot candle was handed round on the occasion, and I further

remembered as I stood contemplating the greengrocer’s, that a

subscription was entered into among the company, which became extremely

alarming to my consciousness of having pocket-money on my person. This

fact being known to my conductress, whoever she was, I was earnestly

exhorted to contribute, but resolutely declined: therein disgusting the

company, who gave me to understand that I must dismiss all expectations

of going to Heaven.

How does it happen that when all else is change wherever one goes, there

yet seem, in every place, to be some few people who never alter? As the

sight of the greengrocer’s house recalled these trivial incidents of long

ago, the identical greengrocer appeared on the steps, with his hands in

his pockets, and leaning his shoulder against the door-post, as my

childish eyes had seen him many a time; indeed, there was his old mark on

the door-post yet, as if his shadow had become a fixture there. It was

he himself; he might formerly have been an old-looking young man, or he

might now be a young-looking old man, but there he was. In walking along

the street, I had as yet looked in vain for a familiar face, or even a

transmitted face; here was the very greengrocer who had been weighing and

handling baskets on the morning of the reception. As he brought with him

a dawning remembrance that he had had no proprietary interest in those

babies, I crossed the road, and accosted him on the subject. He was not

in the least excited or gratified, or in any way roused, by the accuracy

of my recollection, but said, Yes, summut out of the common—he didn’t

remember how many it was (as if half-a-dozen babes either way made no

difference)—had happened to a Mrs. What’s-her-name, as once lodged

there—but he didn’t call it to mind, particular. Nettled by this

phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left the town when I was a

child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened, and not without a sarcastic

kind of complacency, _Had_ I? Ah! And did I find it had got on

tolerably well without me? Such is the difference (I thought, when I had

left him a few hundred yards behind, and was by so much in a better

temper) between going away from a place and remaining in it. I had no

right, I reflected, to be angry with the greengrocer for his want of

interest, I was nothing to him: whereas he was the town, the cathedral,

the bridge, the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to me.

Of course the town had shrunk fearfully, since I was a child there. I

had entertained the impression that the High-street was at least as wide

as Regent-street, London, or the Italian Boulevard at Paris. I found it

little better than a lane. There was a public clock in it, which I had

supposed to be the finest clock in the world: whereas it now turned out

to be as inexpressive, moon-faced, and weak a clock as ever I saw. It

belonged to a Town Hall, where I had seen an Indian (who I now suppose

wasn’t an Indian) swallow a sword (which I now suppose he didn’t). The

edifice had appeared to me in those days so glorious a structure, that I

had set it up in my mind as the model on which the Genie of the Lamp

built the palace for Aladdin. A mean little brick heap, like a demented

chapel, with a few yawning persons in leather gaiters, and in the last

extremity for something to do, lounging at the door with their hands in

their pockets, and calling themselves a Corn Exchange!

The Theatre was in existence, I found, on asking the fishmonger, who had

a compact show of stock in his window, consisting of a sole and a quart

of shrimps—and I resolved to comfort my mind by going to look at it.

Richard the Third, in a very uncomfortable cloak, had first appeared to

me there, and had made my heart leap with terror by backing up against

the stage-box in which I was posted, while struggling for life against

the virtuous Richmond. It was within those walls that I had learnt as

from a page of English history, how that wicked King slept in war-time on

a sofa much too short for him, and how fearfully his conscience troubled

his boots. There, too, had I first seen the funny countryman, but

countryman of noble principles, in a flowered waistcoat, crunch up his

little hat and throw it on the ground, and pull off his coat, saying,

‘Dom thee, squire, coom on with thy fistes then!’ At which the lovely

young woman who kept company with him (and who went out gleaning, in a

narrow white muslin apron with five beautiful bars of five

different-coloured ribbons across it) was so frightened for his sake,

that she fainted away. Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I come to the

knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least terrific were,

that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and

other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan

couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and

calling himself somebody else. To the Theatre, therefore, I repaired for

consolation. But I found very little, for it was in a bad and declining

way. A dealer in wine and bottled beer had already squeezed his trade

into the box-office, and the theatrical money was taken—when it came—in a

kind of meat-safe in the passage. The dealer in wine and bottled beer

must have insinuated himself under the stage too; for he announced that

he had various descriptions of alcoholic drinks ‘in the wood,’ and there

was no possible stowage for the wood anywhere else. Evidently, he was by

degrees eating the establishment away to the core, and would soon have

sole possession of it. It was To Let, and hopelessly so, for its old

purposes; and there had been no entertainment within its walls for a long

time except a Panorama; and even that had been announced as ‘pleasingly

instructive,’ and I know too well the fatal meaning and the leaden import

of those terrible expressions. No, there was no comfort in the Theatre.

It was mysteriously gone, like my own youth. Unlike my own youth, it

might be coming back some day; but there was little promise of it.

As the town was placarded with references to the Dullborough Mechanics’

Institution, I thought I would go and look at that establishment next.

There had been no such thing in the town, in my young day, and it

occurred to me that its extreme prosperity might have brought adversity

upon the Drama. I found the Institution with some difficulty, and should

scarcely have known that I had found it if I had judged from its external

appearance only; but this was attributable to its never having been

finished, and having no front: consequently, it led a modest and retired

existence up a stable-yard. It was (as I learnt, on inquiry) a most

flourishing Institution, and of the highest benefit to the town: two

triumphs which I was glad to understand were not at all impaired by the

seeming drawbacks that no mechanics belonged to it, and that it was

steeped in debt to the chimney-pots. It had a large room, which was

approached by an infirm step-ladder: the builder having declined to

construct the intended staircase, without a present payment in cash,

which Dullborough (though profoundly appreciative of the Institution)

seemed unaccountably bashful about subscribing. The large room had

cost—or would, when paid for—five hundred pounds; and it had more mortar

in it and more echoes, than one might have expected to get for the money.

It was fitted up with a platform, and the usual lecturing tools,

including a large black board of a menacing appearance. On referring to

lists of the courses of lectures that had been given in this thriving

Hall, I fancied I detected a shyness in admitting that human nature when

at leisure has any desire whatever to be relieved and diverted; and a

furtive sliding in of any poor make-weight piece of amusement,

shame-facedly and edgewise. Thus, I observed that it was necessary for

the members to be knocked on the head with Gas, Air, Water, Food, the

Solar System, the Geological periods, Criticism on Milton, the

Steam-engine, John Bunyan, and Arrow-Headed Inscriptions, before they

might be tickled by those unaccountable choristers, the negro singers in

the court costume of the reign of George the Second. Likewise, that they

must be stunned by a weighty inquiry whether there was internal evidence

in Shakespeare’s works, to prove that his uncle by the mother’s side

lived for some years at Stoke Newington, before they were brought-to by a

Miscellaneous Concert. But, indeed, the masking of entertainment, and

pretending it was something else—as people mask bedsteads when they are

obliged to have them in sitting-rooms, and make believe that they are

book-cases, sofas, chests of drawers, anything rather than bedsteads—was

manifest even in the pretence of dreariness that the unfortunate

entertainers themselves felt obliged in decency to put forth when they

came here. One very agreeable professional singer, who travelled with

two professional ladies, knew better than to introduce either of those

ladies to sing the ballad ‘Comin’ through the Rye’ without prefacing it

himself, with some general remarks on wheat and clover; and even then, he

dared not for his life call the song, a song, but disguised it in the

bill as an ‘Illustration.’ In the library, also—fitted with shelves for

three thousand books, and containing upwards of one hundred and seventy

(presented copies mostly), seething their edges in damp plaster—there was

such a painfully apologetic return of 62 offenders who had read Travels,

Popular Biography, and mere Fiction descriptive of the aspirations of the

hearts and souls of mere human creatures like themselves; and such an

elaborate parade of 2 bright examples who had had down Euclid after the

day’s occupation and confinement; and 3 who had had down Metaphysics

after ditto; and I who had had down Theology after ditto; and 4 who had

worried Grammar, Political Economy, Botany, and Logarithms all at once

after ditto; that I suspected the boasted class to be one man, who had

been hired to do it.

Emerging from the Mechanics’ Institution and continuing my walk about the

town, I still noticed everywhere the prevalence, to an extraordinary

degree, of this custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of

sight, as some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was

swept away. And yet it was ministered to, in a dull and abortive manner,

by all who made this feint. Looking in at what is called in Dullborough

‘the serious bookseller’s,’ where, in my childhood, I had studied the

faces of numbers of gentlemen depicted in rostrums with a gaslight on

each side of them, and casting my eyes over the open pages of certain

printed discourses there, I found a vast deal of aiming at jocosity and

dramatic effect, even in them—yes, verily, even on the part of one very

wrathful expounder who bitterly anathematised a poor little Circus.

Similarly, in the reading provided for the young people enrolled in the

Lasso of Love, and other excellent unions, I found the writers generally

under a distressing sense that they must start (at all events) like

story-tellers, and delude the young persons into the belief that they

were going to be interesting. As I looked in at this window for twenty

minutes by the clock, I am in a position to offer a friendly

remonstrance—not bearing on this particular point—to the designers and

engravers of the pictures in those publications. Have they considered

the awful consequences likely to flow from their representations of

Virtue? Have they asked themselves the question, whether the terrific

prospect of acquiring that fearful chubbiness of head, unwieldiness of

arm, feeble dislocation of leg, crispiness of hair, and enormity of

shirt-collar, which they represent as inseparable from Goodness, may not

tend to confirm sensitive waverers, in Evil? A most impressive example

(if I had believed it) of what a Dustman and a Sailor may come to, when

they mend their ways, was presented to me in this same shop-window. When

they were leaning (they were intimate friends) against a post, drunk and

reckless, with surpassingly bad hats on, and their hair over their

foreheads, they were rather picturesque, and looked as if they might be

agreeable men, if they would not be beasts. But, when they had got over

their bad propensities, and when, as a consequence, their heads had

swelled alarmingly, their hair had got so curly that it lifted their

blown-out cheeks up, their coat-cuffs were so long that they never could

do any work, and their eyes were so wide open that they never could do

any sleep, they presented a spectacle calculated to plunge a timid nature

into the depths of Infamy.

But, the clock that had so degenerated since I saw it last, admonished me

that I had stayed here long enough; and I resumed my walk.

I had not gone fifty paces along the street when I was suddenly brought

up by the sight of a man who got out of a little phaeton at the doctor’s

door, and went into the doctor’s house. Immediately, the air was filled

with the scent of trodden grass, and the perspective of years opened, and

at the end of it was a little likeness of this man keeping a wicket, and

I said, ‘God bless my soul! Joe Specks!’

Through many changes and much work, I had preserved a tenderness for the

memory of Joe, forasmuch as we had made the acquaintance of Roderick

Random together, and had believed him to be no ruffian, but an ingenuous

and engaging hero. Scorning to ask the boy left in the phaeton whether

it was really Joe, and scorning even to read the brass plate on the

door—so sure was I—I rang the bell and informed the servant maid that a

stranger sought audience of Mr. Specks. Into a room, half surgery, half

study, I was shown to await his coming, and I found it, by a series of

elaborate accidents, bestrewn with testimonies to Joe. Portrait of Mr.

Specks, bust of Mr. Specks, silver cup from grateful patient to Mr.

Specks, presentation sermon from local clergyman, dedication poem from

local poet, dinner-card from local nobleman, tract on balance of power

from local refugee, inscribed _Hommage de l’auteur à Specks_.

When my old schoolfellow came in, and I informed him with a smile that I

was not a patient, he seemed rather at a loss to perceive any reason for

smiling in connexion with that fact, and inquired to what was he to

attribute the honour? I asked him with another smile, could he remember

me at all? He had not (he said) that pleasure. I was beginning to have

but a poor opinion of Mr. Specks, when he said reflectively, ‘And yet

there’s a something too.’ Upon that, I saw a boyish light in his eyes

that looked well, and I asked him if he could inform me, as a stranger

who desired to know and had not the means of reference at hand, what the

name of the young lady was, who married Mr. Random? Upon that, he said

‘Narcissa,’ and, after staring for a moment, called me by my name, shook

me by the hand, and melted into a roar of laughter. ‘Why, of course,

you’ll remember Lucy Green,’ he said, after we had talked a little. ‘Of

course,’ said I. ‘Whom do you think she married?’ said he. ‘You?’ I

hazarded. ‘Me,’ said Specks, ‘and you shall see her.’ So I saw her, and

she was fat, and if all the hay in the world had been heaped upon her, it

could scarcely have altered her face more than Time had altered it from

my remembrance of the face that had once looked down upon me into the

fragrant dungeons of Seringapatam. But when her youngest child came in

after dinner (for I dined with them, and we had no other company than

Specks, Junior, Barrister-at-law, who went away as soon as the cloth was

removed, to look after the young lady to whom he was going to be married

next week), I saw again, in that little daughter, the little face of the

hayfield, unchanged, and it quite touched my foolish heart. We talked

immensely, Specks and Mrs. Specks, and I, and we spoke of our old selves

as though our old selves were dead and gone, and indeed, indeed they

were—dead and gone as the playing-field that had become a wilderness of

rusty iron, and the property of S.E.R.

Specks, however, illuminated Dullborough with the rays of interest that I

wanted and should otherwise have missed in it, and linked its present to

its past, with a highly agreeable chain. And in Specks’s society I had

new occasion to observe what I had before noticed in similar

communications among other men. All the schoolfellows and others of old,

whom I inquired about, had either done superlatively well or

superlatively ill—had either become uncertificated bankrupts, or been

felonious and got themselves transported; or had made great hits in life,

and done wonders. And this is so commonly the case, that I never can

imagine what becomes of all the mediocre people of people’s

youth—especially considering that we find no lack of the species in our

maturity. But, I did not propound this difficulty to Specks, for no

pause in the conversation gave me an occasion. Nor, could I discover one

single flaw in the good doctor—when he reads this, he will receive in a

friendly spirit the pleasantly meant record—except that he had forgotten

his Roderick Random, and that he confounded Strap with Lieutenant

Hatchway; who never knew Random, howsoever intimate with Pickle.

When I went alone to the Railway to catch my train at night (Specks had

meant to go with me, but was inopportunely called out), I was in a more

charitable mood with Dullborough than I had been all day; and yet in my

heart I had loved it all day too. Ah! who was I that I should quarrel

with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so

changed, to it! All my early readings and early imaginations dated from

this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and

guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the

wiser and so much the worse!

XIII

NIGHT WALKS

SOME years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a

distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night,

for a series of several nights. The disorder might have taken a long

time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it

was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after

lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.

In the course of those nights, I finished my education in a fair amateur

experience of houselessness. My principal object being to get through

the night, the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic relations with

people who have no other object every night in the year.

The month was March, and the weather damp, cloudy, and cold. The sun not

rising before half-past five, the night perspective looked sufficiently

long at half-past twelve: which was about my time for confronting it.

The restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and

tosses before it can get to sleep, formed one of the first entertainments

offered to the contemplation of us houseless people. It lasted about two

hours. We lost a great deal of companionship when the late public-houses

turned their lamps out, and when the potmen thrust the last brawling

drunkards into the street; but stray vehicles and stray people were left

us, after that. If we were very lucky, a policeman’s rattle sprang and a

fray turned up; but, in general, surprisingly little of this diversion

was provided. Except in the Haymarket, which is the worst kept part of

London, and about Kent-street in the Borough, and along a portion of the

line of the Old Kent-road, the peace was seldom violently broken. But,

it was always the case that London, as if in imitation of individual

citizens belonging to it, had expiring fits and starts of restlessness.

After all seemed quiet, if one cab rattled by, half-a-dozen would surely

follow; and Houselessness even observed that intoxicated people appeared

to be magnetically attracted towards each other; so that we knew when we

saw one drunken object staggering against the shutters of a shop, that

another drunken object would stagger up before five minutes were out, to

fraternise or fight with it. When we made a divergence from the regular

species of drunkard, the thin-armed, puff-faced, leaden-lipped

gin-drinker, and encountered a rarer specimen of a more decent

appearance, fifty to one but that specimen was dressed in soiled

mourning. As the street experience in the night, so the street

experience in the day; the common folk who come unexpectedly into a

little property, come unexpectedly into a deal of liquor.

At length these flickering sparks would die away, worn out—the last

veritable sparks of waking life trailed from some late pieman or

hot-potato man—and London would sink to rest. And then the yearning of

the houseless mind would be for any sign of company, any lighted place,

any movement, anything suggestive of any one being up—nay, even so much

as awake, for the houseless eye looked out for lights in windows.

Walking the streets under the pattering rain, Houselessness would walk

and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of streets,

save at a corner, here and there, two policemen in conversation, or the

sergeant or inspector looking after his men. Now and then in the

night—but rarely—Houselessness would become aware of a furtive head

peering out of a doorway a few yards before him, and, coming up with the

head, would find a man standing bolt upright to keep within the doorway’s

shadow, and evidently intent upon no particular service to society.

Under a kind of fascination, and in a ghostly silence suitable to the

time, Houselessness and this gentleman would eye one another from head to

foot, and so, without exchange of speech, part, mutually suspicious.

Drip, drip, drip, from ledge and coping, splash from pipes and

water-spouts, and by-and-by the houseless shadow would fall upon the

stones that pave the way to Waterloo-bridge; it being in the houseless

mind to have a halfpenny worth of excuse for saying ‘Good-night’ to the

toll-keeper, and catching a glimpse of his fire. A good fire and a good

great-coat and a good woollen neck-shawl, were comfortable things to see

in conjunction with the toll-keeper; also his brisk wakefulness was

excellent company when he rattled the change of halfpence down upon that

metal table of his, like a man who defied the night, with all its

sorrowful thoughts, and didn’t care for the coming of dawn. There was

need of encouragement on the threshold of the bridge, for the bridge was

dreary. The chopped-up murdered man, had not been lowered with a rope

over the parapet when those nights were; he was alive, and slept then

quietly enough most likely, and undisturbed by any dream of where he was

to come. But the river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks

were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to

originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding

them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds were as

restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of

the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the river.

Between the bridge and the two great theatres, there was but the distance

of a few hundred paces, so the theatres came next. Grim and black

within, at night, those great dry Wells, and lonesome to imagine, with

the rows of faces faded out, the lights extinguished, and the seats all

empty. One would think that nothing in them knew itself at such a time

but Yorick’s skull. In one of my night walks, as the church steeples

were shaking the March winds and rain with the strokes of Four, I passed

the outer boundary of one of these great deserts, and entered it. With a

dim lantern in my hand, I groped my well-known way to the stage and

looked over the orchestra—which was like a great grave dug for a time of

pestilence—into the void beyond. A dismal cavern of an immense aspect,

with the chandelier gone dead like everything else, and nothing visible

through mist and fog and space, but tiers of winding-sheets. The ground

at my feet where, when last there, I had seen the peasantry of Naples

dancing among the vines, reckless of the burning mountain which

threatened to overwhelm them, was now in possession of a strong serpent

of engine-hose, watchfully lying in wait for the serpent Fire, and ready

to fly at it if it showed its forked tongue. A ghost of a watchman,

carrying a faint corpse candle, haunted the distant upper gallery and

flitted away. Retiring within the proscenium, and holding my light above

my head towards the rolled-up curtain—green no more, but black as

ebony—my sight lost itself in a gloomy vault, showing faint indications

in it of a shipwreck of canvas and cordage. Methought I felt much as a

diver might, at the bottom of the sea.

In those small hours when there was no movement in the streets, it

afforded matter for reflection to take Newgate in the way, and, touching

its rough stone, to think of the prisoners in their sleep, and then to

glance in at the lodge over the spiked wicket, and see the fire and light

of the watching turnkeys, on the white wall. Not an inappropriate time

either, to linger by that wicked little Debtors’ Door—shutting tighter

than any other door one ever saw—which has been Death’s Door to so many.

In the days of the uttering of forged one-pound notes by people tempted

up from the country, how many hundreds of wretched creatures of both

sexes—many quite innocent—swung out of a pitiless and inconsistent world,

with the tower of yonder Christian church of Saint Sepulchre monstrously

before their eyes! Is there any haunting of the Bank Parlour, by the

remorseful souls of old directors, in the nights of these later days, I

wonder, or is it as quiet as this degenerate Aceldama of an Old Bailey?

To walk on to the Bank, lamenting the good old times and bemoaning the

present evil period, would be an easy next step, so I would take it, and

would make my houseless circuit of the Bank, and give a thought to the

treasure within; likewise to the guard of soldiers passing the night

there, and nodding over the fire. Next, I went to Billingsgate, in some

hope of market-people, but it proving as yet too early, crossed

London-bridge and got down by the water-side on the Surrey shore among

the buildings of the great brewery. There was plenty going on at the

brewery; and the reek, and the smell of grains, and the rattling of the

plump dray horses at their mangers, were capital company. Quite

refreshed by having mingled with this good society, I made a new start

with a new heart, setting the old King’s Bench prison before me for my

next object, and resolving, when I should come to the wall, to think of

poor Horace Kinch, and the Dry Rot in men.

A very curious disease the Dry Rot in men, and difficult to detect the

beginning of. It had carried Horace Kinch inside the wall of the old

King’s Bench prison, and it had carried him out with his feet foremost.

He was a likely man to look at, in the prime of life, well to do, as

clever as he needed to be, and popular among many friends. He was

suitably married, and had healthy and pretty children. But, like some

fair-looking houses or fair-looking ships, he took the Dry Rot. The

first strong external revelation of the Dry Rot in men, is a tendency to

lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason; to

be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any;

to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety

of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after. When this manifestation

of the disease is observed, the observer will usually connect it with a

vague impression once formed or received, that the patient was living a

little too hard. He will scarcely have had leisure to turn it over in

his mind and form the terrible suspicion ‘Dry Rot,’ when he will notice a

change for the worse in the patient’s appearance: a certain slovenliness

and deterioration, which is not poverty, nor dirt, nor intoxication, nor

ill-health, but simply Dry Rot. To this, succeeds a smell as of strong

waters, in the morning; to that, a looseness respecting money; to that, a

stronger smell as of strong waters, at all times; to that, a looseness

respecting everything; to that, a trembling of the limbs, somnolency,

misery, and crumbling to pieces. As it is in wood, so it is in men. Dry

Rot advances at a compound usury quite incalculable. A plank is found

infected with it, and the whole structure is devoted. Thus it had been

with the unhappy Horace Kinch, lately buried by a small subscription.

Those who knew him had not nigh done saying, ‘So well off, so comfortably

established, with such hope before him—and yet, it is feared, with a

slight touch of Dry Rot!’ when lo! the man was all Dry Rot and dust.

From the dead wall associated on those houseless nights with this too

common story, I chose next to wander by Bethlehem Hospital; partly,

because it lay on my road round to Westminster; partly, because I had a

night fancy in my head which could be best pursued within sight of its

walls and dome. And the fancy was this: Are not the sane and the insane

equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside

this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside

it, every night of our lives? Are we not nightly persuaded, as they

daily are, that we associate preposterously with kings and queens,

emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all sorts? Do we not nightly

jumble events and personages and times and places, as these do daily?

Are we not sometimes troubled by our own sleeping inconsistencies, and do

we not vexedly try to account for them or excuse them, just as these do

sometimes in respect of their waking delusions? Said an afflicted man to

me, when I was last in a hospital like this, ‘Sir, I can frequently fly.’

I was half ashamed to reflect that so could I—by night. Said a woman to

me on the same occasion, ‘Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with

me, and her Majesty and I dine off peaches and maccaroni in our

night-gowns, and his Royal Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour

to make a third on horseback in a Field-Marshal’s uniform.’ Could I

refrain from reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing

royal parties I myself had given (at night), the unaccountable viands I

had put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conducting myself on

those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master who knew

everything, when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not

call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.

By this time I had left the Hospital behind me, and was again setting

towards the river; and in a short breathing space I was on

Westminster-bridge, regaling my houseless eyes with the external walls of

the British Parliament—the perfection of a stupendous institution, I

know, and the admiration of all surrounding nations and succeeding ages,

I do not doubt, but perhaps a little the better now and then for being

pricked up to its work. Turning off into Old Palace-yard, the Courts of

Law kept me company for a quarter of an hour; hinting in low whispers

what numbers of people they were keeping awake, and how intensely

wretched and horrible they were rendering the small hours to unfortunate

suitors. Westminster Abbey was fine gloomy society for another quarter

of an hour; suggesting a wonderful procession of its dead among the dark

arches and pillars, each century more amazed by the century following it

than by all the centuries going before. And indeed in those houseless

night walks—which even included cemeteries where watchmen went round

among the graves at stated times, and moved the tell-tale handle of an

index which recorded that they had touched it at such an hour—it was a

solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great

city, and how, if they were raised while the living slept, there would

not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the

living to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead

would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch

away all round it, God knows how far.

When a church clock strikes, on houseless ears in the dead of the night,

it may be at first mistaken for company and hailed as such. But, as the

spreading circles of vibration, which you may perceive at such a time

with great clearness, go opening out, for ever and ever afterwards

widening perhaps (as the philosopher has suggested) in eternal space, the

mistake is rectified and the sense of loneliness is profounder. Once—it

was after leaving the Abbey and turning my face north—I came to the great

steps of St. Martin’s church as the clock was striking Three. Suddenly,

a thing that in a moment more I should have trodden upon without seeing,

rose up at my feet with a cry of loneliness and houselessness, struck out

of it by the bell, the like of which I never heard. We then stood face

to face looking at one another, frightened by one another. The creature

was like a beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty, and it had a loose

bundle of rags on, which it held together with one of its hands. It

shivered from head to foot, and its teeth chattered, and as it stared at

me—persecutor, devil, ghost, whatever it thought me—it made with its

whining mouth as if it were snapping at me, like a worried dog.

Intending to give this ugly object money, I put out my hand to stay

it—for it recoiled as it whined and snapped—and laid my hand upon its

shoulder. Instantly, it twisted out of its garment, like the young man

in the New Testament, and left me standing alone with its rags in my

hands.

Covent-garden Market, when it was market morning, was wonderful company.

The great waggons of cabbages, with growers’ men and boys lying asleep

under them, and with sharp dogs from market-garden neighbourhoods looking

after the whole, were as good as a party. But one of the worst night

sights I know in London, is to be found in the children who prowl about

this place; who sleep in the baskets, fight for the offal, dart at any

object they think they can lay their thieving hands on, dive under the

carts and barrows, dodge the constables, and are perpetually making a

blunt pattering on the pavement of the Piazza with the rain of their

naked feet. A painful and unnatural result comes of the comparison one

is forced to institute between the growth of corruption as displayed in

the so much improved and cared for fruits of the earth, and the growth of

corruption as displayed in these all uncared for (except inasmuch as

ever-hunted) savages.

There was early coffee to be got about Covent-garden Market, and that was

more company—warm company, too, which was better. Toast of a very

substantial quality, was likewise procurable: though the towzled-headed

man who made it, in an inner chamber within the coffee-room, hadn’t got

his coat on yet, and was so heavy with sleep that in every interval of

toast and coffee he went off anew behind the partition into complicated

cross-roads of choke and snore, and lost his way directly. Into one of

these establishments (among the earliest) near Bow-street, there came one

morning as I sat over my houseless cup, pondering where to go next, a man

in a high and long snuff-coloured coat, and shoes, and, to the best of my

belief, nothing else but a hat, who took out of his hat a large cold meat

pudding; a meat pudding so large that it was a very tight fit, and

brought the lining of the hat out with it. This mysterious man was known

by his pudding, for on his entering, the man of sleep brought him a pint

of hot tea, a small loaf, and a large knife and fork and plate. Left to

himself in his box, he stood the pudding on the bare table, and, instead

of cutting it, stabbed it, overhand, with the knife, like a mortal enemy;

then took the knife out, wiped it on his sleeve, tore the pudding asunder

with his fingers, and ate it all up. The remembrance of this man with

the pudding remains with me as the remembrance of the most spectral

person my houselessness encountered. Twice only was I in that

establishment, and twice I saw him stalk in (as I should say, just out of

bed, and presently going back to bed), take out his pudding, stab his

pudding, wipe the dagger, and eat his pudding all up. He was a man whose

figure promised cadaverousness, but who had an excessively red face,

though shaped like a horse’s. On the second occasion of my seeing him,

he said huskily to the man of sleep, ‘Am I red to-night?’ ‘You are,’ he

uncompromisingly answered. ‘My mother,’ said the spectre, ‘was a

red-faced woman that liked drink, and I looked at her hard when she laid

in her coffin, and I took the complexion.’ Somehow, the pudding seemed

an unwholesome pudding after that, and I put myself in its way no more.

When there was no market, or when I wanted variety, a railway terminus

with the morning mails coming in, was remunerative company. But like

most of the company to be had in this world, it lasted only a very short

time. The station lamps would burst out ablaze, the porters would emerge

from places of concealment, the cabs and trucks would rattle to their

places (the post-office carts were already in theirs), and, finally, the

bell would strike up, and the train would come banging in. But there

were few passengers and little luggage, and everything scuttled away with

the greatest expedition. The locomotive post-offices, with their great

nets—as if they had been dragging the country for bodies—would fly open

as to their doors, and would disgorge a smell of lamp, an exhausted

clerk, a guard in a red coat, and their bags of letters; the engine would

blow and heave and perspire, like an engine wiping its forehead and

saying what a run it had had; and within ten minutes the lamps were out,

and I was houseless and alone again.

But now, there were driven cattle on the high road near, wanting (as

cattle always do) to turn into the midst of stone walls, and squeeze

themselves through six inches’ width of iron railing, and getting their

heads down (also as cattle always do) for tossing-purchase at quite

imaginary dogs, and giving themselves and every devoted creature

associated with them a most extraordinary amount of unnecessary trouble.

Now, too, the conscious gas began to grow pale with the knowledge that

daylight was coming, and straggling workpeople were already in the

streets, and, as waking life had become extinguished with the last

pieman’s sparks, so it began to be rekindled with the fires of the first

street-corner breakfast-sellers. And so by faster and faster degrees,

until the last degrees were very fast, the day came, and I was tired and

could sleep. And it is not, as I used to think, going home at such

times, the least wonderful thing in London, that in the real desert

region of the night, the houseless wanderer is alone there. I knew well

enough where to find Vice and Misfortune of all kinds, if I had chosen;

but they were put out of sight, and my houselessness had many miles upon

miles of streets in which it could, and did, have its own solitary way.

XIV

CHAMBERS

HAVING occasion to transact some business with a solicitor who occupies a

highly suicidal set of chambers in Gray’s Inn, I afterwards took a turn

in the large square of that stronghold of Melancholy, reviewing, with

congenial surroundings, my experiences of Chambers.

I began, as was natural, with the Chambers I had just left. They were an

upper set on a rotten staircase, with a mysterious bunk or bulkhead on

the landing outside them, of a rather nautical and Screw Collier-like

appearance than otherwise, and painted an intense black. Many dusty

years have passed since the appropriation of this Davy Jones’s locker to

any purpose, and during the whole period within the memory of living man,

it has been hasped and padlocked. I cannot quite satisfy my mind whether

it was originally meant for the reception of coals, or bodies, or as a

place of temporary security for the plunder ‘looted’ by laundresses; but

I incline to the last opinion. It is about breast high, and usually

serves as a bulk for defendants in reduced circumstances to lean against

and ponder at, when they come on the hopeful errand of trying to make an

arrangement without money—under which auspicious circumstances it mostly

happens that the legal gentleman they want to see, is much engaged, and

they pervade the staircase for a considerable period. Against this

opposing bulk, in the absurdest manner, the tomb-like outer door of the

solicitor’s chambers (which is also of an intense black) stands in dark

ambush, half open, and half shut, all day. The solicitor’s apartments

are three in number; consisting of a slice, a cell, and a wedge. The

slice is assigned to the two clerks, the cell is occupied by the

principal, and the wedge is devoted to stray papers, old game baskets

from the country, a washing-stand, and a model of a patent Ship’s Caboose

which was exhibited in Chancery at the commencement of the present

century on an application for an injunction to restrain infringement. At

about half-past nine on every week-day morning, the younger of the two

clerks (who, I have reason to believe, leads the fashion at Pentonville

in the articles of pipes and shirts) may be found knocking the dust out

of his official door-key on the bunk or locker before mentioned; and so

exceedingly subject to dust is his key, and so very retentive of that

superfluity, that in exceptional summer weather when a ray of sunlight

has fallen on the locker in my presence, I have noticed its inexpressive

countenance to be deeply marked by a kind of Bramah erysipelas or

small-pox.

This set of chambers (as I have gradually discovered, when I have had

restless occasion to make inquiries or leave messages, after office

hours) is under the charge of a lady named Sweeney, in figure extremely

like an old family-umbrella: whose dwelling confronts a dead wall in a

court off Gray’s Inn-lane, and who is usually fetched into the passage of

that bower, when wanted, from some neighbouring home of industry, which

has the curious property of imparting an inflammatory appearance to her

visage. Mrs. Sweeney is one of the race of professed laundresses, and is

the compiler of a remarkable manuscript volume entitled ‘Mrs. Sweeney’s

Book,’ from which much curious statistical information may be gathered

respecting the high prices and small uses of soda, soap, sand, firewood,

and other such articles. I have created a legend in my mind—and

consequently I believe it with the utmost pertinacity—that the late Mr.

Sweeney was a ticket-porter under the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn,

and that, in consideration of his long and valuable services, Mrs.

Sweeney was appointed to her present post. For, though devoid of

personal charms, I have observed this lady to exercise a fascination over

the elderly ticker-porter mind (particularly under the gateway, and in

corners and entries), which I can only refer to her being one of the

fraternity, yet not competing with it. All that need be said concerning

this set of chambers, is said, when I have added that it is in a large

double house in Gray’s Inn-square, very much out of repair, and that the

outer portal is ornamented in a hideous manner with certain stone

remains, which have the appearance of the dismembered bust, torso, and

limbs of a petrified bencher.

Indeed, I look upon Gray’s Inn generally as one of the most depressing

institutions in brick and mortar, known to the children of men. Can

anything be more dreary than its arid Square, Sahara Desert of the law,

with the ugly old tiled-topped tenements, the dirty windows, the bills To

Let, To Let, the door-posts inscribed like gravestones, the crazy gateway

giving upon the filthy Lane, the scowling, iron-barred prison-like

passage into Verulam-buildings, the mouldy red-nosed ticket-porters with

little coffin plates, and why with aprons, the dry, hard, atomy-like

appearance of the whole dust-heap? When my uncommercial travels tend to

this dismal spot, my comfort is its rickety state. Imagination gloats

over the fulness of time when the staircases shall have quite tumbled

down—they are daily wearing into an ill-savoured powder, but have not

quite tumbled down yet—when the last old prolix bencher all of the olden

time, shall have been got out of an upper window by means of a Fire

Ladder, and carried off to the Holborn Union; when the last clerk shall

have engrossed the last parchment behind the last splash on the last of

the mud-stained windows, which, all through the miry year, are pilloried

out of recognition in Gray’s Inn-lane. Then, shall a squalid little

trench, with rank grass and a pump in it, lying between the coffee-house

and South-square, be wholly given up to cats and rats, and not, as now,

have its empire divided between those animals and a few briefless

bipeds—surely called to the Bar by voices of deceiving spirits, seeing

that they are wanted there by no mortal—who glance down, with eyes better

glazed than their casements, from their dreary and lacklustre rooms.

Then shall the way Nor’ Westward, now lying under a short grim colonnade

where in summer-time pounce flies from law-stationering windows into the

eyes of laymen, be choked with rubbish and happily become impassable.

Then shall the gardens where turf, trees, and gravel wear a legal livery

of black, run rank, and pilgrims go to Gorhambury to see Bacon’s effigy

as he sat, and not come here (which in truth they seldom do) to see where

he walked. Then, in a word, shall the old-established vendor of

periodicals sit alone in his little crib of a shop behind the Holborn

Gate, like that lumbering Marius among the ruins of Carthage, who has sat

heavy on a thousand million of similes.

At one period of my uncommercial career I much frequented another set of

chambers in Gray’s Inn-square. They were what is familiarly called ‘a

top set,’ and all the eatables and drinkables introduced into them

acquired a flavour of Cockloft. I have known an unopened Strasbourg pâté

fresh from Fortnum and Mason’s, to draw in this cockloft tone through its

crockery dish, and become penetrated with cockloft to the core of its

inmost truffle in three-quarters of an hour. This, however, was not the

most curious feature of those chambers; that, consisted in the profound

conviction entertained by my esteemed friend Parkle (their tenant) that

they were clean. Whether it was an inborn hallucination, or whether it

was imparted to him by Mrs. Miggot the laundress, I never could

ascertain. But, I believe he would have gone to the stake upon the

question. Now, they were so dirty that I could take off the distinctest

impression of my figure on any article of furniture by merely lounging

upon it for a few moments; and it used to be a private amusement of mine

to print myself off—if I may use the expression—all over the rooms. It

was the first large circulation I had. At other times I have

accidentally shaken a window curtain while in animated conversation with

Parkle, and struggling insects which were certainly red, and were

certainly not ladybirds, have dropped on the back of my hand. Yet Parkle

lived in that top set years, bound body and soul to the superstition that

they were clean. He used to say, when congratulated upon them, ‘Well,

they are not like chambers in one respect, you know; they are clean.’

Concurrently, he had an idea which he could never explain, that Mrs.

Miggot was in some way connected with the Church. When he was in

particularly good spirits, he used to believe that a deceased uncle of

hers had been a Dean; when he was poorly and low, he believed that her

brother had been a Curate. I and Mrs. Miggot (she was a genteel woman)

were on confidential terms, but I never knew her to commit herself to any

distinct assertion on the subject; she merely claimed a proprietorship in

the Church, by looking when it was mentioned, as if the reference

awakened the slumbering Past, and were personal. It may have been his

amiable confidence in Mrs. Miggot’s better days that inspired my friend

with his delusion respecting the chambers, but he never wavered in his

fidelity to it for a moment, though he wallowed in dirt seven years.

Two of the windows of these chambers looked down into the garden; and we

have sat up there together many a summer evening, saying how pleasant it

was, and talking of many things. To my intimacy with that top set, I am

indebted for three of my liveliest personal impressions of the loneliness

of life in chambers. They shall follow here, in order; first, second,

and third.

First. My Gray’s Inn friend, on a time, hurt one of his legs, and it

became seriously inflamed. Not knowing of his indisposition, I was on my

way to visit him as usual, one summer evening, when I was much surprised

by meeting a lively leech in Field-court, Gray’s Inn, seemingly on his

way to the West End of London. As the leech was alone, and was of course

unable to explain his position, even if he had been inclined to do so

(which he had not the appearance of being), I passed him and went on.

Turning the corner of Gray’s Inn-square, I was beyond expression amazed

by meeting another leech—also entirely alone, and also proceeding in a

westerly direction, though with less decision of purpose. Ruminating on

this extraordinary circumstance, and endeavouring to remember whether I

had ever read, in the Philosophical Transactions or any work on Natural

History, of a migration of Leeches, I ascended to the top set, past the

dreary series of closed outer doors of offices and an empty set or two,

which intervened between that lofty region and the surface. Entering my

friend’s rooms, I found him stretched upon his back, like Prometheus

Bound, with a perfectly demented ticket-porter in attendance on him

instead of the Vulture: which helpless individual, who was feeble and

frightened, and had (my friend explained to me, in great choler) been

endeavouring for some hours to apply leeches to his leg, and as yet had

only got on two out of twenty. To this Unfortunate’s distraction between

a damp cloth on which he had placed the leeches to freshen them, and the

wrathful adjurations of my friend to ‘Stick ’em on, sir!’ I referred the

phenomenon I had encountered: the rather as two fine specimens were at

that moment going out at the door, while a general insurrection of the

rest was in progress on the table. After a while our united efforts

prevailed, and, when the leeches came off and had recovered their

spirits, we carefully tied them up in a decanter. But I never heard more

of them than that they were all gone next morning, and that the

Out-of-door young man of Bickle, Bush and Bodger, on the ground floor,

had been bitten and blooded by some creature not identified. They never

‘took’ on Mrs. Miggot, the laundress; but, I have always preserved fresh,

the belief that she unconsciously carried several about her, until they

gradually found openings in life.

Second. On the same staircase with my friend Parkle, and on the same

floor, there lived a man of law who pursued his business elsewhere, and

used those chambers as his place of residence. For three or four years,

Parkle rather knew of him than knew him, but after that—for

Englishmen—short pause of consideration, they began to speak. Parkle

exchanged words with him in his private character only, and knew nothing

of his business ways, or means. He was a man a good deal about town, but

always alone. We used to remark to one another, that although we often

encountered him in theatres, concert-rooms, and similar public places, he

was always alone. Yet he was not a gloomy man, and was of a decidedly

conversational turn; insomuch that he would sometimes of an evening

lounge with a cigar in his mouth, half in and half out of Parkle’s rooms,

and discuss the topics of the day by the hour. He used to hint on these

occasions that he had four faults to find with life; firstly, that it

obliged a man to be always winding up his watch; secondly, that London

was too small; thirdly, that it therefore wanted variety; fourthly, that

there was too much dust in it. There was so much dust in his own faded

chambers, certainly, that they reminded me of a sepulchre, furnished in

prophetic anticipation of the present time, which had newly been brought

to light, after having remained buried a few thousand years. One dry,

hot autumn evening at twilight, this man, being then five years turned of

fifty, looked in upon Parkle in his usual lounging way, with his cigar in

his mouth as usual, and said, ‘I am going out of town.’ As he never went

out of town, Parkle said, ‘Oh indeed! At last?’ ‘Yes,’ says he, ‘at

last. For what is a man to do? London is so small! If you go West, you

come to Hounslow. If you go East, you come to Bow. If you go South,

there’s Brixton or Norwood. If you go North, you can’t get rid of

Barnet. Then, the monotony of all the streets, streets, streets—and of

all the roads, roads, roads—and the dust, dust, dust!’ When he had said

this, he wished Parkle a good evening, but came back again and said, with

his watch in his hand, ‘Oh, I really cannot go on winding up this watch

over and over again; I wish you would take care of it.’ So, Parkle

laughed and consented, and the man went out of town. The man remained

out of town so long, that his letter-box became choked, and no more

letters could be got into it, and they began to be left at the lodge and

to accumulate there. At last the head-porter decided, on conference with

the steward, to use his master-key and look into the chambers, and give

them the benefit of a whiff of air. Then, it was found that he had

hanged himself to his bedstead, and had left this written memorandum: ‘I

should prefer to be cut down by my neighbour and friend (if he will allow

me to call him so), H. Parkle, Esq.’ This was an end of Parkle’s

occupancy of chambers. He went into lodgings immediately.

Third. While Parkle lived in Gray’s Inn, and I myself was uncommercially

preparing for the Bar—which is done, as everybody knows, by having a

frayed old gown put on in a pantry by an old woman in a chronic state of

Saint Anthony’s fire and dropsy, and, so decorated, bolting a bad dinner

in a party of four, whereof each individual mistrusts the other three—I

say, while these things were, there was a certain elderly gentleman who

lived in a court of the Temple, and was a great judge and lover of port

wine. Every day he dined at his club and drank his bottle or two of port

wine, and every night came home to the Temple and went to bed in his

lonely chambers. This had gone on many years without variation, when one

night he had a fit on coming home, and fell and cut his head deep, but

partly recovered and groped about in the dark to find the door. When he

was afterwards discovered, dead, it was clearly established by the marks

of his hands about the room that he must have done so. Now, this chanced

on the night of Christmas Eve, and over him lived a young fellow who had

sisters and young country friends, and who gave them a little party that

night, in the course of which they played at Blindman’s Buff. They

played that game, for their greater sport, by the light of the fire only;

and once, when they were all quietly rustling and stealing about, and the

blindman was trying to pick out the prettiest sister (for which I am far

from blaming him), somebody cried, Hark! The man below must be playing

Blindman’s Buff by himself to-night! They listened, and they heard

sounds of some one falling about and stumbling against furniture, and

they all laughed at the conceit, and went on with their play, more

light-hearted and merry than ever. Thus, those two so different games of

life and death were played out together, blindfolded, in the two sets of

chambers.

Such are the occurrences, which, coming to my knowledge, imbued me long

ago with a strong sense of the loneliness of chambers. There was a

fantastic illustration to much the same purpose implicitly believed by a

strange sort of man now dead, whom I knew when I had not quite arrived at

legal years of discretion, though I was already in the uncommercial line.

This was a man who, though not more than thirty, had seen the world in

divers irreconcilable capacities—had been an officer in a South American

regiment among other odd things—but had not achieved much in any way of

life, and was in debt, and in hiding. He occupied chambers of the

dreariest nature in Lyons Inn; his name, however, was not up on the door,

or door-post, but in lieu of it stood the name of a friend who had died

in the chambers, and had given him the furniture. The story arose out of

the furniture, and was to this effect:—Let the former holder of the

chambers, whose name was still upon the door and door-post, be Mr.

Testator.

Mr. Testator took a set of chambers in Lyons Inn when he had but very

scanty furniture for his bedroom, and none for his sitting-room. He had

lived some wintry months in this condition, and had found it very bare

and cold. One night, past midnight, when he sat writing and still had

writing to do that must be done before he went to bed, he found himself

out of coals. He had coals down-stairs, but had never been to his

cellar; however the cellar-key was on his mantelshelf, and if he went

down and opened the cellar it fitted, he might fairly assume the coals in

that cellar to be his. As to his laundress, she lived among the

coal-waggons and Thames watermen—for there were Thames watermen at that

time—in some unknown rat-hole by the river, down lanes and alleys on the

other side of the Strand. As to any other person to meet him or obstruct

him, Lyons Inn was dreaming, drunk, maudlin, moody, betting, brooding

over bill-discounting or renewing—asleep or awake, minding its own

affairs. Mr. Testator took his coal-scuttle in one hand, his candle and

key in the other, and descended to the dismallest underground dens of

Lyons Inn, where the late vehicles in the streets became thunderous, and

all the water-pipes in the neighbourhood seemed to have Macbeth’s Amen

sticking in their throats, and to be trying to get it out. After groping

here and there among low doors to no purpose, Mr. Testator at length came

to a door with a rusty padlock which his key fitted. Getting the door

open with much trouble, and looking in, he found, no coals, but a

confused pile of furniture. Alarmed by this intrusion on another man’s

property, he locked the door again, found his own cellar, filled his

scuttle, and returned up-stairs.

But the furniture he had seen, ran on castors across and across Mr.

Testator’s mind incessantly, when, in the chill hour of five in the

morning, he got to bed. He particularly wanted a table to write at, and

a table expressly made to be written at, had been the piece of furniture

in the foreground of the heap. When his laundress emerged from her

burrow in the morning to make his kettle boil, he artfully led up to the

subject of cellars and furniture; but the two ideas had evidently no

connexion in her mind. When she left him, and he sat at his breakfast,

thinking about the furniture, he recalled the rusty state of the padlock,

and inferred that the furniture must have been stored in the cellars for

a long time—was perhaps forgotten—owner dead, perhaps? After thinking it

over, a few days, in the course of which he could pump nothing out of

Lyons Inn about the furniture, he became desperate, and resolved to

borrow that table. He did so, that night. He had not had the table

long, when he determined to borrow an easy-chair; he had not had that

long, when he made up his mind to borrow a bookcase; then, a couch; then,

a carpet and rug. By that time, he felt he was ‘in furniture stepped in

so far,’ as that it could be no worse to borrow it all. Consequently, he

borrowed it all, and locked up the cellar for good. He had always locked

it, after every visit. He had carried up every separate article in the

dead of the night, and, at the best, had felt as wicked as a Resurrection

Man. Every article was blue and furry when brought into his rooms, and

he had had, in a murderous and guilty sort of way, to polish it up while

London slept.

Mr. Testator lived in his furnished chambers two or three years, or more,

and gradually lulled himself into the opinion that the furniture was his

own. This was his convenient state of mind when, late one night, a step

came up the stairs, and a hand passed over his door feeling for his

knocker, and then one deep and solemn rap was rapped that might have been

a spring in Mr. Testator’s easy-chair to shoot him out of it; so promptly

was it attended with that effect.

With a candle in his hand, Mr. Testator went to the door, and found

there, a very pale and very tall man; a man who stooped; a man with very

high shoulders, a very narrow chest, and a very red nose; a

shabby-genteel man. He was wrapped in a long thread-bare black coat,

fastened up the front with more pins than buttons, and under his arm he

squeezed an umbrella without a handle, as if he were playing bagpipes.

He said, ‘I ask your pardon, but can you tell me—’ and stopped; his eyes

resting on some object within the chambers.

‘Can I tell you what?’ asked Mr. Testator, noting his stoppage with quick

alarm.

‘I ask your pardon,’ said the stranger, ‘but—this is not the inquiry I

was going to make—_do_ I see in there, any small article of property

belonging to _me_?’

Mr. Testator was beginning to stammer that he was not aware—when the

visitor slipped past him, into the chambers. There, in a goblin way

which froze Mr. Testator to the marrow, he examined, first, the

writing-table, and said, ‘Mine;’ then, the easy-chair, and said, ‘Mine;’

then, the bookcase, and said, ‘Mine;’ then, turned up a corner of the

carpet, and said, ‘Mine!’ in a word, inspected every item of furniture

from the cellar, in succession, and said, ‘Mine!’ Towards the end of

this investigation, Mr. Testator perceived that he was sodden with

liquor, and that the liquor was gin. He was not unsteady with gin,

either in his speech or carriage; but he was stiff with gin in both

particulars.

Mr. Testator was in a dreadful state, for (according to his making out of

the story) the possible consequences of what he had done in recklessness

and hardihood, flashed upon him in their fulness for the first time.

When they had stood gazing at one another for a little while, he

tremulously began:

‘Sir, I am conscious that the fullest explanation, compensation, and

restitution, are your due. They shall be yours. Allow me to entreat

that, without temper, without even natural irritation on your part, we

may have a little—’

‘Drop of something to drink,’ interposed the stranger. ‘I am agreeable.’

Mr. Testator had intended to say, ‘a little quiet conversation,’ but with

great relief of mind adopted the amendment. He produced a decanter of

gin, and was bustling about for hot water and sugar, when he found that

his visitor had already drunk half of the decanter’s contents. With hot

water and sugar the visitor drank the remainder before he had been an

hour in the chambers by the chimes of the church of St. Mary in the

Strand; and during the process he frequently whispered to himself,

‘Mine!’

The gin gone, and Mr. Testator wondering what was to follow it, the

visitor rose and said, with increased stiffness, ‘At what hour of the

morning, sir, will it be convenient?’ Mr. Testator hazarded, ‘At ten?’

‘Sir,’ said the visitor, ‘at ten, to the moment, I shall be here.’ He

then contemplated Mr. Testator somewhat at leisure, and said, ‘God bless

you! How is your wife?’ Mr. Testator (who never had a wife) replied

with much feeling, ‘Deeply anxious, poor soul, but otherwise well.’ The

visitor thereupon turned and went away, and fell twice in going

down-stairs. From that hour he was never heard of. Whether he was a

ghost, or a spectral illusion of conscience, or a drunken man who had no

business there, or the drunken rightful owner of the furniture, with a

transitory gleam of memory; whether he got safe home, or had no time to

get to; whether he died of liquor on the way, or lived in liquor ever

afterwards; he never was heard of more. This was the story, received

with the furniture and held to be as substantial, by its second possessor

in an upper set of chambers in grim Lyons Inn.

It is to be remarked of chambers in general, that they must have been

built for chambers, to have the right kind of loneliness. You may make a

great dwelling-house very lonely, by isolating suites of rooms and

calling them chambers, but you cannot make the true kind of loneliness.

In dwelling-houses, there have been family festivals; children have grown

in them, girls have bloomed into women in them, courtships and marriages

have taken place in them. True chambers never were young, childish,

maidenly; never had dolls in them, or rocking-horses, or christenings, or

betrothals, or little coffins. Let Gray’s Inn identify the child who

first touched hands and hearts with Robinson Crusoe, in any one of its

many ‘sets,’ and that child’s little statue, in white marble with a

golden inscription, shall be at its service, at my cost and charge, as a

drinking fountain for the spirit, to freshen its thirsty square. Let

Lincoln’s produce from all its houses, a twentieth of the procession

derivable from any dwelling-house one-twentieth of its age, of fair young

brides who married for love and hope, not settlements, and all the

Vice-Chancellors shall thenceforward be kept in nosegays for nothing, on

application to the writer hereof. It is not denied that on the terrace

of the Adelphi, or in any of the streets of that

subterranean-stable-haunted spot, or about Bedford-row, or James-street

of that ilk (a grewsome place), or anywhere among the neighbourhoods that

have done flowering and have run to seed, you may find Chambers replete

with the accommodations of Solitude, Closeness, and Darkness, where you

may be as low-spirited as in the genuine article, and might be as easily

murdered, with the placid reputation of having merely gone down to the

sea-side. But, the many waters of life did run musical in those dry

channels once;—among the Inns, never. The only popular legend known in

relation to any one of the dull family of Inns, is a dark Old Bailey

whisper concerning Clement’s, and importing how the black creature who

holds the sun-dial there, was a negro who slew his master and built the

dismal pile out of the contents of his strong box—for which architectural

offence alone he ought to have been condemned to live in it. But, what

populace would waste fancy upon such a place, or on New Inn, Staple Inn,

Barnard’s Inn, or any of the shabby crew?

The genuine laundress, too, is an institution not to be had in its

entirety out of and away from the genuine Chambers. Again, it is not

denied that you may be robbed elsewhere. Elsewhere you may have—for

money—dishonesty, drunkenness, dirt, laziness, and profound incapacity.

But the veritable shining-red-faced shameless laundress; the true Mrs.

Sweeney—in figure, colour, texture, and smell, like the old damp family

umbrella; the tip-top complicated abomination of stockings, spirits,

bonnet, limpness, looseness, and larceny; is only to be drawn at the

fountain-head. Mrs. Sweeney is beyond the reach of individual art. It

requires the united efforts of several men to ensure that great result,

and it is only developed in perfection under an Honourable Society and in

an Inn of Court.

XV

NURSE’S STORIES

THERE are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit when I

am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never been. For, my

acquaintance with those spots is of such long standing, and has ripened

into an intimacy of so affectionate a nature, that I take a particular

interest in assuring myself that they are unchanged.

I never was in Robinson Crusoe’s Island, yet I frequently return there.

The colony he established on it soon faded away, and it is uninhabited by

any descendants of the grave and courteous Spaniards, or of Will Atkins

and the other mutineers, and has relapsed into its original condition.

Not a twig of its wicker houses remains, its goats have long run wild

again, its screaming parrots would darken the sun with a cloud of many

flaming colours if a gun were fired there, no face is ever reflected in

the waters of the little creek which Friday swam across when pursued by

his two brother cannibals with sharpened stomachs. After comparing notes

with other travellers who have similarly revisited the Island and

conscientiously inspected it, I have satisfied myself that it contains no

vestige of Mr. Atkins’s domesticity or theology, though his track on the

memorable evening of his landing to set his captain ashore, when he was

decoyed about and round about until it was dark, and his boat was stove,

and his strength and spirits failed him, is yet plainly to be traced. So

is the hill-top on which Robinson was struck dumb with joy when the

reinstated captain pointed to the ship, riding within half a mile of the

shore, that was to bear him away, in the nine-and-twentieth year of his

seclusion in that lonely place. So is the sandy beach on which the

memorable footstep was impressed, and where the savages hauled up their

canoes when they came ashore for those dreadful public dinners, which led

to a dancing worse than speech-making. So is the cave where the flaring

eyes of the old goat made such a goblin appearance in the dark. So is

the site of the hut where Robinson lived with the dog and the parrot and

the cat, and where he endured those first agonies of solitude,

which—strange to say—never involved any ghostly fancies; a circumstance

so very remarkable, that perhaps he left out something in writing his

record? Round hundreds of such objects, hidden in the dense tropical

foliage, the tropical sea breaks evermore; and over them the tropical

sky, saving in the short rainy season, shines bright and cloudless.

Neither, was I ever belated among wolves, on the borders of France and

Spain; nor, did I ever, when night was closing in and the ground was

covered with snow, draw up my little company among some felled trees

which served as a breastwork, and there fire a train of gunpowder so

dexterously that suddenly we had three or four score blazing wolves

illuminating the darkness around us. Nevertheless, I occasionally go

back to that dismal region and perform the feat again; when indeed to

smell the singeing and the frying of the wolves afire, and to see them

setting one another alight as they rush and tumble, and to behold them

rolling in the snow vainly attempting to put themselves out, and to hear

their howlings taken up by all the echoes as well as by all the unseen

wolves within the woods, makes me tremble.

I was never in the robbers’ cave, where Gil Blas lived, but I often go

back there and find the trap-door just as heavy to raise as it used to

be, while that wicked old disabled Black lies everlastingly cursing in

bed. I was never in Don Quixote’s study, where he read his books of

chivalry until he rose and hacked at imaginary giants, and then refreshed

himself with great draughts of water, yet you couldn’t move a book in it

without my knowledge, or with my consent. I was never (thank Heaven) in

company with the little old woman who hobbled out of the chest and told

the merchant Abudah to go in search of the Talisman of Oromanes, yet I

make it my business to know that she is well preserved and as intolerable

as ever. I was never at the school where the boy Horatio Nelson got out

of bed to steal the pears: not because he wanted any, but because every

other boy was afraid: yet I have several times been back to this Academy,

to see him let down out of window with a sheet. So with Damascus, and

Bagdad, and Brobingnag (which has the curious fate of being usually

misspelt when written), and Lilliput, and Laputa, and the Nile, and

Abyssinia, and the Ganges, and the North Pole, and many hundreds of

places—I was never at them, yet it is an affair of my life to keep them

intact, and I am always going back to them.

But, when I was in Dullborough one day, revisiting the associations of my

childhood as recorded in previous pages of these notes, my experience in

this wise was made quite inconsiderable and of no account, by the

quantity of places and people—utterly impossible places and people, but

none the less alarmingly real—that I found I had been introduced to by my

nurse before I was six years old, and used to be forced to go back to at

night without at all wanting to go. If we all knew our own minds (in a

more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase), I

suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark

corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.

The first diabolical character who intruded himself on my peaceful youth

(as I called to mind that day at Dullborough), was a certain Captain

Murderer. This wretch must have been an off-shoot of the Blue Beard

family, but I had no suspicion of the consanguinity in those times. His

warning name would seem to have awakened no general prejudice against

him, for he was admitted into the best society and possessed immense

wealth. Captain Murderer’s mission was matrimony, and the gratification

of a cannibal appetite with tender brides. On his marriage morning, he

always caused both sides of the way to church to be planted with curious

flowers; and when his bride said, ‘Dear Captain Murderer, I ever saw

flowers like these before: what are they called?’ he answered, ‘They are

called Garnish for house-lamb,’ and laughed at his ferocious practical

joke in a horrid manner, disquieting the minds of the noble bridal

company, with a very sharp show of teeth, then displayed for the first

time. He made love in a coach and six, and married in a coach and

twelve, and all his horses were milk-white horses with one red spot on

the back which he caused to be hidden by the harness. For, the spot

_would_ come there, though every horse was milk-white when Captain

Murderer bought him. And the spot was young bride’s blood. (To this

terrific point I am indebted for my first personal experience of a

shudder and cold beads on the forehead.) When Captain Murderer had made

an end of feasting and revelry, and had dismissed the noble guests, and

was alone with his wife on the day month after their marriage, it was his

whimsical custom to produce a golden rolling-pin and a silver pie-board.

Now, there was this special feature in the Captain’s courtships, that he

always asked if the young lady could make pie-crust; and if she couldn’t

by nature or education, she was taught. Well. When the bride saw

Captain Murderer produce the golden rolling-pin and silver pie-board, she

remembered this, and turned up her laced-silk sleeves to make a pie. The

Captain brought out a silver pie-dish of immense capacity, and the

Captain brought out flour and butter and eggs and all things needful,

except the inside of the pie; of materials for the staple of the pie

itself, the Captain brought out none. Then said the lovely bride, ‘Dear

Captain Murderer, what pie is this to be?’ He replied, ‘A meat pie.’

Then said the lovely bride, ‘Dear Captain Murderer, I see no meat.’ The

Captain humorously retorted, ‘Look in the glass.’ She looked in the

glass, but still she saw no meat, and then the Captain roared with

laughter, and suddenly frowning and drawing his sword, bade her roll out

the crust. So she rolled out the crust, dropping large tears upon it all

the time because he was so cross, and when she had lined the dish with

crust and had cut the crust all ready to fit the top, the Captain called

out, ‘I see the meat in the glass!’ And the bride looked up at the

glass, just in time to see the Captain cutting her head off; and he

chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in

the pie, and sent it to the baker’s, and ate it all, and picked the

bones.

Captain Murderer went on in this way, prospering exceedingly, until he

came to choose a bride from two twin sisters, and at first didn’t know

which to choose. For, though one was fair and the other dark, they were

both equally beautiful. But the fair twin loved him, and the dark twin

hated him, so he chose the fair one. The dark twin would have prevented

the marriage if she could, but she couldn’t; however, on the night before

it, much suspecting Captain Murderer, she stole out and climbed his

garden wall, and looked in at his window through a chink in the shutter,

and saw him having his teeth filed sharp. Next day she listened all day,

and heard him make his joke about the house-lamb. And that day month, he

had the paste rolled out, and cut the fair twin’s head off, and chopped

her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie,

and sent it to the baker’s, and ate it all, and picked the bones.

Now, the dark twin had had her suspicions much increased by the filing of

the Captain’s teeth, and again by the house-lamb joke. Putting all

things together when he gave out that her sister was dead, she divined

the truth, and determined to be revenged. So, she went up to Captain

Murderer’s house, and knocked at the knocker and pulled at the bell, and

when the Captain came to the door, said: ‘Dear Captain Murderer, marry me

next, for I always loved you and was jealous of my sister.’ The Captain

took it as a compliment, and made a polite answer, and the marriage was

quickly arranged. On the night before it, the bride again climbed to his

window, and again saw him having his teeth filed sharp. At this sight

she laughed such a terrible laugh at the chink in the shutter, that the

Captain’s blood curdled, and he said: ‘I hope nothing has disagreed with

me!’ At that, she laughed again, a still more terrible laugh, and the

shutter was opened and search made, but she was nimbly gone, and there

was no one. Next day they went to church in a coach and twelve, and were

married. And that day month, she rolled the pie-crust out, and Captain

Murderer cut her head off, and chopped her in pieces, and peppered her,

and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker’s, and

ate it all, and picked the bones.

But before she began to roll out the paste she had taken a deadly poison

of a most awful character, distilled from toads’ eyes and spiders’ knees;

and Captain Murderer had hardly picked her last bone, when he began to

swell, and to turn blue, and to be all over spots, and to scream. And he

went on swelling and turning bluer, and being more all over spots and

screaming, until he reached from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall;

and then, at one o’clock in the morning, he blew up with a loud

explosion. At the sound of it, all the milk-white horses in the stables

broke their halters and went mad, and then they galloped over everybody

in Captain Murderer’s house (beginning with the family blacksmith who had

filed his teeth) until the whole were dead, and then they galloped away.

Hundreds of times did I hear this legend of Captain Murderer, in my early

youth, and added hundreds of times was there a mental compulsion upon me

in bed, to peep in at his window as the dark twin peeped, and to revisit

his horrible house, and look at him in his blue and spotty and screaming

stage, as he reached from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. The

young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a

fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember—as a sort

of introductory overture—by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering

a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in

combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I

thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again

just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it, and indeed commanded

the awful chalice to my lips as the only preservative known to science

against ‘The Black Cat’—a weird and glaring-eyed supernatural Tom, who

was reputed to prowl about the world by night, sucking the breath of

infancy, and who was endowed with a special thirst (as I was given to

understand) for mine.

This female bard—may she have been repaid my debt of obligation to her in

the matter of nightmares and perspirations!—reappears in my memory as the

daughter of a shipwright. Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.

There was something of a shipbuilding flavour in the following story. As

it always recurs to me in a vague association with calomel pills, I

believe it to have been reserved for dull nights when I was low with

medicine.

There was once a shipwright, and he wrought in a Government Yard, and his

name was Chips. And his father’s name before him was Chips, and _his_

father’s name before _him_ was Chips, and they were all Chipses. And

Chips the father had sold himself to the Devil for an iron pot and a

bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could

speak; and Chips the grandfather had sold himself to the Devil for an

iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of copper and a

rat that could speak; and Chips the great-grandfather had disposed of

himself in the same direction on the same terms; and the bargain had run

in the family for a long, long time. So, one day, when young Chips was

at work in the Dock Slip all alone, down in the dark hold of an old

Seventy-four that was haled up for repairs, the Devil presented himself,

and remarked:

‘A Lemon has pips,

And a Yard has ships,

And _I_’ll have Chips!’

(I don’t know why, but this fact of the Devil’s expressing himself in

rhyme was peculiarly trying to me.) Chips looked up when he heard the

words, and there he saw the Devil with saucer eyes that squinted on a

terrible great scale, and that struck out sparks of blue fire

continually. And whenever he winked his eyes, showers of blue sparks

came out, and his eyelashes made a clattering like flints and steels

striking lights. And hanging over one of his arms by the handle was an

iron pot, and under that arm was a bushel of tenpenny nails, and under

his other arm was half a ton of copper, and sitting on one of his

shoulders was a rat that could speak. So, the Devil said again:

‘A Lemon has pips,

And a Yard has ships,

And _I_’ll have Chips!’