(The invariable effect of this alarming tautology on the part of the Evil

Spirit was to deprive me of my senses for some moments.) So, Chips

answered never a word, but went on with his work. ‘What are you doing,

Chips?’ said the rat that could speak. ‘I am putting in new planks where

you and your gang have eaten old away,’ said Chips. ‘But we’ll eat them

too,’ said the rat that could speak; ‘and we’ll let in the water and

drown the crew, and we’ll eat them too.’ Chips, being only a shipwright,

and not a Man-of-war’s man, said, ‘You are welcome to it.’ But he

couldn’t keep his eyes off the half a ton of copper or the bushel of

tenpenny nails; for nails and copper are a shipwright’s sweethearts, and

shipwrights will run away with them whenever they can. So, the Devil

said, ‘I see what you are looking at, Chips. You had better strike the

bargain. You know the terms. Your father before you was well acquainted

with them, and so were your grandfather and great-grandfather before

him.’ Says Chips, ‘I like the copper, and I like the nails, and I don’t

mind the pot, but I don’t like the rat.’ Says the Devil, fiercely, ‘You

can’t have the metal without him—and _he’s_ a curiosity. I’m going.’

Chips, afraid of losing the half a ton of copper and the bushel of nails,

then said, ‘Give us hold!’ So, he got the copper and the nails and the

pot and the rat that could speak, and the Devil vanished. Chips sold the

copper, and he sold the nails, and he would have sold the pot; but

whenever he offered it for sale, the rat was in it, and the dealers

dropped it, and would have nothing to say to the bargain. So, Chips

resolved to kill the rat, and, being at work in the Yard one day with a

great kettle of hot pitch on one side of him and the iron pot with the

rat in it on the other, he turned the scalding pitch into the pot, and

filled it full. Then, he kept his eye upon it till it cooled and

hardened, and then he let it stand for twenty days, and then he heated

the pitch again and turned it back into the kettle, and then he sank the

pot in water for twenty days more, and then he got the smelters to put it

in the furnace for twenty days more, and then they gave it him out, red

hot, and looking like red-hot glass instead of iron-yet there was the rat

in it, just the same as ever! And the moment it caught his eye, it said

with a jeer:

‘A Lemon has pips,

And a Yard has ships,

And _I_’ll have Chips!’

(For this Refrain I had waited since its last appearance, with

inexpressible horror, which now culminated.) Chips now felt certain in

his own mind that the rat would stick to him; the rat, answering his

thought, said, ‘I will—like pitch!’

Now, as the rat leaped out of the pot when it had spoken, and made off,

Chips began to hope that it wouldn’t keep its word. But, a terrible

thing happened next day. For, when dinner-time came, and the Dock-bell

rang to strike work, he put his rule into the long pocket at the side of

his trousers, and there he found a rat—not that rat, but another rat.

And in his hat, he found another; and in his pocket-handkerchief,

another; and in the sleeves of his coat, when he pulled it on to go to

dinner, two more. And from that time he found himself so frightfully

intimate with all the rats in the Yard, that they climbed up his legs

when he was at work, and sat on his tools while he used them. And they

could all speak to one another, and he understood what they said. And

they got into his lodging, and into his bed, and into his teapot, and

into his beer, and into his boots. And he was going to be married to a

corn-chandler’s daughter; and when he gave her a workbox he had himself

made for her, a rat jumped out of it; and when he put his arm round her

waist, a rat clung about her; so the marriage was broken off, though the

banns were already twice put up—which the parish clerk well remembers,

for, as he handed the book to the clergyman for the second time of

asking, a large fat rat ran over the leaf. (By this time a special

cascade of rats was rolling down my back, and the whole of my small

listening person was overrun with them. At intervals ever since, I have

been morbidly afraid of my own pocket, lest my exploring hand should find

a specimen or two of those vermin in it.)

You may believe that all this was very terrible to Chips; but even all

this was not the worst. He knew besides, what the rats were doing,

wherever they were. So, sometimes he would cry aloud, when he was at his

club at night, ‘Oh! Keep the rats out of the convicts’ burying-ground!

Don’t let them do that!’ Or, ‘There’s one of them at the cheese

down-stairs!’ Or, ‘There’s two of them smelling at the baby in the

garret!’ Or, other things of that sort. At last, he was voted mad, and

lost his work in the Yard, and could get no other work. But, King George

wanted men, so before very long he got pressed for a sailor. And so he

was taken off in a boat one evening to his ship, lying at Spithead, ready

to sail. And so the first thing he made out in her as he got near her,

was the figure-head of the old Seventy-four, where he had seen the Devil.

She was called the Argonaut, and they rowed right under the bowsprit

where the figure-head of the Argonaut, with a sheepskin in his hand and a

blue gown on, was looking out to sea; and sitting staring on his forehead

was the rat who could speak, and his exact words were these: ‘Chips ahoy!

Old boy! We’ve pretty well eat them too, and we’ll drown the crew, and

will eat them too!’ (Here I always became exceedingly faint, and would

have asked for water, but that I was speechless.)

The ship was bound for the Indies; and if you don’t know where that is,

you ought to it, and angels will never love you. (Here I felt myself an

outcast from a future state.) The ship set sail that very night, and she

sailed, and sailed, and sailed. Chips’s feelings were dreadful. Nothing

ever equalled his terrors. No wonder. At last, one day he asked leave

to speak to the Admiral. The Admiral giv’ leave. Chips went down on his

knees in the Great State Cabin. ‘Your Honour, unless your Honour,

without a moment’s loss of time, makes sail for the nearest shore, this

is a doomed ship, and her name is the Coffin!’ ‘Young man, your words

are a madman’s words.’ ‘Your Honour no; they are nibbling us away.’

‘They?’ ‘Your Honour, them dreadful rats. Dust and hollowness where

solid oak ought to be! Rats nibbling a grave for every man on board!

Oh! Does your Honour love your Lady and your pretty children?’ ‘Yes, my

man, to be sure.’ ‘Then, for God’s sake, make for the nearest shore, for

at this present moment the rats are all stopping in their work, and are

all looking straight towards you with bare teeth, and are all saying to

one another that you shall never, never, never, never, see your Lady and

your children more.’ ‘My poor fellow, you are a case for the doctor.

Sentry, take care of this man!’

So, he was bled and he was blistered, and he was this and that, for six

whole days and nights. So, then he again asked leave to speak to the

Admiral. The Admiral giv’ leave. He went down on his knees in the Great

State Cabin. ‘Now, Admiral, you must die! You took no warning; you must

die! The rats are never wrong in their calculations, and they make out

that they’ll be through, at twelve to-night. So, you must die!—With me

and all the rest!’ And so at twelve o’clock there was a great leak

reported in the ship, and a torrent of water rushed in and nothing could

stop it, and they all went down, every living soul. And what the

rats—being water-rats—left of Chips, at last floated to shore, and

sitting on him was an immense overgrown rat, laughing, that dived when

the corpse touched the beach and never came up. And there was a deal of

seaweed on the remains. And if you get thirteen bits of seaweed, and dry

them and burn them in the fire, they will go off like in these thirteen

words as plain as plain can be:

‘A Lemon has pips,

And a Yard has ships,

And _I_’ve got Chips!’

The same female bard—descended, possibly, from those terrible old Scalds

who seem to have existed for the express purpose of addling the brains of

mankind when they begin to investigate languages—made a standing pretence

which greatly assisted in forcing me back to a number of hideous places

that I would by all means have avoided. This pretence was, that all her

ghost stories had occurred to her own relations. Politeness towards a

meritorious family, therefore, forbade my doubting them, and they

acquired an air of authentication that impaired my digestive powers for

life. There was a narrative concerning an unearthly animal foreboding

death, which appeared in the open street to a parlour-maid who ‘went to

fetch the beer’ for supper: first (as I now recall it) assuming the

likeness of a black dog, and gradually rising on its hind-legs and

swelling into the semblance of some quadruped greatly surpassing a

hippopotamus: which apparition—not because I deemed it in the least

improbable, but because I felt it to be really too large to bear—I feebly

endeavoured to explain away. But, on Mercy’s retorting with wounded

dignity that the parlour-maid was her own sister-in-law, I perceived

there was no hope, and resigned myself to this zoological phenomenon as

one of my many pursuers. There was another narrative describing the

apparition of a young woman who came out of a glass-case and haunted

another young woman until the other young woman questioned it and

elicited that its bones (Lord! To think of its being so particular about

its bones!) were buried under the glass-case, whereas she required them

to be interred, with every Undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound

ten, in another particular place. This narrative I considered—I had a

personal interest in disproving, because we had glass-cases at home, and

how, otherwise, was I to be guaranteed from the intrusion of young women

requiring _me_ to bury them up to twenty-four pound ten, when I had only

twopence a week? But my remorseless nurse cut the ground from under my

tender feet, by informing me that She was the other young woman; and I

couldn’t say ‘I don’t believe you;’ it was not possible.

Such are a few of the uncommercial journeys that I was forced to make,

against my will, when I was very young and unreasoning. And really, as

to the latter part of them, it is not so very long ago—now I come to

think of it—that I was asked to undertake them once again, with a steady

countenance.

XVI

ARCADIAN LONDON

BEING in a humour for complete solitude and uninterrupted meditation this

autumn, I have taken a lodging for six weeks in the most unfrequented

part of England—in a word, in London.

The retreat into which I have withdrawn myself, is Bond-street. From

this lonely spot I make pilgrimages into the surrounding wilderness, and

traverse extensive tracts of the Great Desert. The first solemn feeling

of isolation overcome, the first oppressive consciousness of profound

retirement conquered, I enjoy that sense of freedom, and feel reviving

within me that latent wildness of the original savage, which has been

(upon the whole somewhat frequently) noticed by Travellers.

My lodgings are at a hatter’s—my own hatter’s. After exhibiting no

articles in his window for some weeks, but sea-side wide-awakes,

shooting-caps, and a choice of rough waterproof head-gear for the moors

and mountains, he has put upon the heads of his family as much of this

stock as they could carry, and has taken them off to the Isle of Thanet.

His young man alone remains—and remains alone in the shop. The young man

has let out the fire at which the irons are heated, and, saving his

strong sense of duty, I see no reason why he should take the shutters

down.

Happily for himself and for his country the young man is a Volunteer;

most happily for himself, or I think he would become the prey of a

settled melancholy. For, to live surrounded by human hats, and alienated

from human heads to fit them on, is surely a great endurance. But, the

young man, sustained by practising his exercise, and by constantly

furbishing up his regulation plume (it is unnecessary to observe that, as

a hatter, he is in a cock’s-feather corps), is resigned, and

uncomplaining. On a Saturday, when he closes early and gets his

Knickerbockers on, he is even cheerful. I am gratefully particular in

this reference to him, because he is my companion through many peaceful

hours.

My hatter has a desk up certain steps behind his counter, enclosed like

the clerk’s desk at Church. I shut myself into this place of seclusion,

after breakfast, and meditate. At such times, I observe the young man

loading an imaginary rifle with the greatest precision, and maintaining a

most galling and destructive fire upon the national enemy. I thank him

publicly for his companionship and his patriotism.

The simple character of my life, and the calm nature of the scenes by

which I am surrounded, occasion me to rise early. I go forth in my

slippers, and promenade the pavement. It is pastoral to feel the

freshness of the air in the uninhabited town, and to appreciate the

shepherdess character of the few milkwomen who purvey so little milk that

it would be worth nobody’s while to adulterate it, if anybody were left

to undertake the task. On the crowded sea-shore, the great demand for

milk, combined with the strong local temptation of chalk, would betray

itself in the lowered quality of the article. In Arcadian London I

derive it from the cow.

The Arcadian simplicity of the metropolis altogether, and the primitive

ways into which it has fallen in this autumnal Golden Age, make it

entirely new to me. Within a few hundred yards of my retreat, is the

house of a friend who maintains a most sumptuous butler. I never, until

yesterday, saw that butler out of superfine black broadcloth. Until

yesterday, I never saw him off duty, never saw him (he is the best of

butlers) with the appearance of having any mind for anything but the

glory of his master and his master’s friends. Yesterday morning, walking

in my slippers near the house of which he is the prop and ornament—a

house now a waste of shutters—I encountered that butler, also in his

slippers, and in a shooting suit of one colour, and in a low-crowned

straw-hat, smoking an early cigar. He felt that we had formerly met in

another state of existence, and that we were translated into a new

sphere. Wisely and well, he passed me without recognition. Under his

arm he carried the morning paper, and shortly afterwards I saw him

sitting on a rail in the pleasant open landscape of Regent-street,

perusing it at his ease under the ripening sun.

My landlord having taken his whole establishment to be salted down, I am

waited on by an elderly woman labouring under a chronic sniff, who, at

the shadowy hour of half-past nine o’clock of every evening, gives

admittance at the street door to a meagre and mouldy old man whom I have

never yet seen detached from a flat pint of beer in a pewter pot. The

meagre and mouldy old man is her husband, and the pair have a dejected

consciousness that they are not justified in appearing on the surface of

the earth. They come out of some hole when London empties itself, and go

in again when it fills. I saw them arrive on the evening when I myself

took possession, and they arrived with the flat pint of beer, and their

bed in a bundle. The old man is a weak old man, and appeared to me to

get the bed down the kitchen stairs by tumbling down with and upon it.

They make their bed in the lowest and remotest corner of the basement,

and they smell of bed, and have no possession but bed: unless it be

(which I rather infer from an under-current of flavour in them) cheese.

I know their name, through the chance of having called the wife’s

attention, at half-past nine on the second evening of our acquaintance,

to the circumstance of there being some one at the house door; when she

apologetically explained, ‘It’s only Mr. Klem.’ What becomes of Mr. Klem

all day, or when he goes out, or why, is a mystery I cannot penetrate;

but at half-past nine he never fails to turn up on the door-step with the

flat pint of beer. And the pint of beer, flat as it is, is so much more

important than himself, that it always seems to my fancy as if it had

found him drivelling in the street and had humanely brought him home. In

making his way below, Mr. Klem never goes down the middle of the passage,

like another Christian, but shuffles against the wall as if entreating me

to take notice that he is occupying as little space as possible in the

house; and whenever I come upon him face to face, he backs from me in

fascinated confusion. The most extraordinary circumstance I have traced

in connexion with this aged couple, is, that there is a Miss Klem, their

daughter, apparently ten years older than either of them, who has also a

bed and smells of it, and carries it about the earth at dusk and hides it

in deserted houses. I came into this piece of knowledge through Mrs.

Klem’s beseeching me to sanction the sheltering of Miss Klem under that

roof for a single night, ‘between her takin’ care of the upper part in

Pall Mall which the family of his back, and a ’ouse in Serjameses-street,

which the family of leaves towng ter-morrer.’ I gave my gracious consent

(having nothing that I know of to do with it), and in the shadowy hours

Miss Klem became perceptible on the door-step, wrestling with a bed in a

bundle. Where she made it up for the night I cannot positively state,

but, I think, in a sink. I know that with the instinct of a reptile or

an insect, she stowed it and herself away in deep obscurity. In the Klem

family, I have noticed another remarkable gift of nature, and that is a

power they possess of converting everything into flue. Such broken

victuals as they take by stealth, appear (whatever the nature of the

viands) invariably to generate flue; and even the nightly pint of beer,

instead of assimilating naturally, strikes me as breaking out in that

form, equally on the shabby gown of Mrs. Klem, and the threadbare coat of

her husband.

Mrs. Klem has no idea of my name—as to Mr. Klem he has no idea of

anything—and only knows me as her good gentleman. Thus, if doubtful

whether I am in my room or no, Mrs. Klem taps at the door and says, ‘Is

my good gentleman here?’ Or, if a messenger desiring to see me were

consistent with my solitude, she would show him in with ‘Here is my good

gentleman.’ I find this to be a generic custom. For, I meant to have

observed before now, that in its Arcadian time all my part of London is

indistinctly pervaded by the Klem species. They creep about with beds,

and go to bed in miles of deserted houses. They hold no companionship

except that sometimes, after dark, two of them will emerge from opposite

houses, and meet in the middle of the road as on neutral ground, or will

peep from adjoining houses over an interposing barrier of area railings,

and compare a few reserved mistrustful notes respecting their good ladies

or good gentlemen. This I have discovered in the course of various

solitary rambles I have taken Northward from my retirement, along the

awful perspectives of Wimpole-street, Harley-street, and similar frowning

regions. Their effect would be scarcely distinguishable from that of the

primeval forests, but for the Klem stragglers; these may be dimly

observed, when the heavy shadows fall, flitting to and fro, putting up

the door-chain, taking in the pint of beer, lowering like phantoms at the

dark parlour windows, or secretly consorting underground with the

dust-bin and the water-cistern.

In the Burlington Arcade, I observe, with peculiar pleasure, a primitive

state of manners to have superseded the baneful influences of ultra

civilisation. Nothing can surpass the innocence of the ladies’

shoe-shops, the artificial-flower repositories, and the head-dress

depots. They are in strange hands at this time of year—hands of

unaccustomed persons, who are imperfectly acquainted with the prices of

the goods, and contemplate them with unsophisticated delight and wonder.

The children of these virtuous people exchange familiarities in the

Arcade, and temper the asperity of the two tall beadles. Their youthful

prattle blends in an unwonted manner with the harmonious shade of the

scene, and the general effect is, as of the voices of birds in a grove.

In this happy restoration of the golden time, it has been my privilege

even to see the bigger beadle’s wife. She brought him his dinner in a

basin, and he ate it in his arm-chair, and afterwards fell asleep like a

satiated child. At Mr. Truefitt’s, the excellent hairdresser’s, they are

learning French to beguile the time; and even the few solitaries left on

guard at Mr. Atkinson’s, the perfumer’s round the corner (generally the

most inexorable gentleman in London, and the most scornful of

three-and-sixpence), condescend a little, as they drowsily bide or recall

their turn for chasing the ebbing Neptune on the ribbed sea-sand. From

Messrs. Hunt and Roskell’s, the jewellers, all things are absent but the

precious stones, and the gold and silver, and the soldierly pensioner at

the door with his decorated breast. I might stand night and day for a

month to come, in Saville-row, with my tongue out, yet not find a doctor

to look at it for love or money. The dentists’ instruments are rusting

in their drawers, and their horrible cool parlours, where people pretend

to read the Every-Day Book and not to be afraid, are doing penance for

their grimness in white sheets. The light-weight of shrewd appearance,

with one eye always shut up, as if he were eating a sharp gooseberry in

all seasons, who usually stands at the gateway of the livery-stables on

very little legs under a very large waistcoat, has gone to Doncaster. Of

such undesigning aspect is his guileless yard now, with its gravel and

scarlet beans, and the yellow Break housed under a glass roof in a

corner, that I almost believe I could not be taken in there, if I tried.

In the places of business of the great tailors, the cheval-glasses are

dim and dusty for lack of being looked into. Ranges of brown paper coat

and waistcoat bodies look as funereal as if they were the hatchments of

the customers with whose names they are inscribed; the measuring tapes

hang idle on the wall; the order-taker, left on the hopeless chance of

some one looking in, yawns in the last extremity over the book of

patterns, as if he were trying to read that entertaining library. The

hotels in Brook-street have no one in them, and the staffs of servants

stare disconsolately for next season out of all the windows. The very

man who goes about like an erect Turtle, between two boards

recommendatory of the Sixteen Shilling Trousers, is aware of himself as a

hollow mockery, and eats filberts while he leans his hinder shell against

a wall.

Among these tranquillising objects, it is my delight to walk and

meditate. Soothed by the repose around me, I wander insensibly to

considerable distances, and guide myself back by the stars. Thus, I

enjoy the contrast of a few still partially inhabited and busy spots

where all the lights are not fled, where all the garlands are not dead,

whence all but I have not departed. Then, does it appear to me that in

this age three things are clamorously required of Man in the

miscellaneous thoroughfares of the metropolis. Firstly, that he have his

boots cleaned. Secondly, that he eat a penny ice. Thirdly, that he get

himself photographed. Then do I speculate, What have those seam-worn

artists been who stand at the photograph doors in Greek caps, sample in

hand, and mysteriously salute the public—the female public with a

pressing tenderness—to come in and be ‘took’? What did they do with

their greasy blandishments, before the era of cheap photography? Of what

class were their previous victims, and how victimised? And how did they

get, and how did they pay for, that large collection of likenesses, all

purporting to have been taken inside, with the taking of none of which

had that establishment any more to do than with the taking of Delhi?

But, these are small oases, and I am soon back again in metropolitan

Arcadia. It is my impression that much of its serene and peaceful

character is attributable to the absence of customary Talk. How do I

know but there may be subtle influences in Talk, to vex the souls of men

who don’t hear it? How do I know but that Talk, five, ten, twenty miles

off, may get into the air and disagree with me? If I rise from my bed,

vaguely troubled and wearied and sick of my life, in the session of

Parliament, who shall say that my noble friend, my right reverend friend,

my right honourable friend, my honourable friend, my honourable and

learned friend, or my honourable and gallant friend, may not be

responsible for that effect upon my nervous system? Too much Ozone in

the air, I am informed and fully believe (though I have no idea what it

is), would affect me in a marvellously disagreeable way; why may not too

much Talk? I don’t see or hear the Ozone; I don’t see or hear the Talk.

And there is so much Talk; so much too much; such loud cry, and such

scant supply of wool; such a deal of fleecing, and so little fleece!

Hence, in the Arcadian season, I find it a delicious triumph to walk down

to deserted Westminster, and see the Courts shut up; to walk a little

further and see the Two Houses shut up; to stand in the Abbey Yard, like

the New Zealander of the grand English History (concerning which

unfortunate man, a whole rookery of mares’ nests is generally being

discovered), and gloat upon the ruins of Talk. Returning to my primitive

solitude and lying down to sleep, my grateful heart expands with the

consciousness that there is no adjourned Debate, no ministerial

explanation, nobody to give notice of intention to ask the noble Lord at

the head of her Majesty’s Government five-and-twenty bootless questions

in one, no term time with legal argument, no Nisi Prius with eloquent

appeal to British Jury; that the air will to-morrow, and to-morrow, and

to-morrow, remain untroubled by this superabundant generating of Talk.

In a minor degree it is a delicious triumph to me to go into the club,

and see the carpets up, and the Bores and the other dust dispersed to the

four winds. Again, New Zealander-like, I stand on the cold hearth, and

say in the solitude, ‘Here I watched Bore A 1, with voice always

mysteriously low and head always mysteriously drooped, whispering

political secrets into the ears of Adam’s confiding children. Accursed

be his memory for ever and a day!’

But, I have all this time been coming to the point, that the happy nature

of my retirement is most sweetly expressed in its being the abode of

Love. It is, as it were, an inexpensive Agapemone: nobody’s speculation:

everybody’s profit. The one great result of the resumption of primitive

habits, and (convertible terms) the not having much to do, is, the

abounding of Love.

The Klem species are incapable of the softer emotions; probably, in that

low nomadic race, the softer emotions have all degenerated into flue.

But, with this exception, all the sharers of my retreat make love.

I have mentioned Saville-row. We all know the Doctor’s servant. We all

know what a respectable man he is, what a hard dry man, what a firm man,

what a confidential man: how he lets us into the waiting-room, like a man

who knows minutely what is the matter with us, but from whom the rack

should not wring the secret. In the prosaic “season,” he has distinctly

the appearance of a man conscious of money in the savings bank, and

taking his stand on his respectability with both feet. At that time it

is as impossible to associate him with relaxation, or any human weakness,

as it is to meet his eye without feeling guilty of indisposition. In the

blest Arcadian time, how changed! I have seen him, in a pepper-and-salt

jacket—jacket—and drab trousers, with his arm round the waist of a

bootmaker’s housemaid, smiling in open day. I have seen him at the pump

by the Albany, unsolicitedly pumping for two fair young creatures, whose

figures as they bent over their cans, were—if I may be allowed an

original expression—a model for the sculptor. I have seen him trying the

piano in the Doctor’s drawing-room with his forefinger, and have heard

him humming tunes in praise of lovely woman. I have seen him seated on a

fire-engine, and going (obviously in search of excitement) to a fire. I

saw him, one moonlight evening when the peace and purity of our Arcadian

west were at their height, polk with the lovely daughter of a cleaner of

gloves, from the door-steps of his own residence, across Saville-row,

round by Clifford-street and Old Burlington-street, back to

Burlington-gardens. Is this the Golden Age revived, or Iron London?

The Dentist’s servant. Is that man no mystery to us, no type of

invisible power? The tremendous individual knows (who else does?) what

is done with the extracted teeth; he knows what goes on in the little

room where something is always being washed or filed; he knows what warm

spicy infusion is put into the comfortable tumbler from which we rinse

our wounded mouth, with a gap in it that feels a foot wide; he knows

whether the thing we spit into is a fixture communicating with the

Thames, or could be cleared away for a dance; he sees the horrible

parlour where there are no patients in it, and he could reveal, if he

would, what becomes of the Every-Day Book then. The conviction of my

coward conscience when I see that man in a professional light, is, that

he knows all the statistics of my teeth and gums, my double teeth, my

single teeth, my stopped teeth, and my sound. In this Arcadian rest, I

am fearless of him as of a harmless, powerless creature in a Scotch cap,

who adores a young lady in a voluminous crinoline, at a neighbouring

billiard-room, and whose passion would be uninfluenced if every one of

her teeth were false. They may be. He takes them all on trust.

In secluded corners of the place of my seclusion, there are little shops

withdrawn from public curiosity, and never two together, where servants’

perquisites are bought. The cook may dispose of grease at these modest

and convenient marts; the butler, of bottles; the valet and lady’s maid,

of clothes; most servants, indeed, of most things they may happen to lay

hold of. I have been told that in sterner times loving correspondence,

otherwise interdicted, may be maintained by letter through the agency of

some of these useful establishments. In the Arcadian autumn, no such

device is necessary. Everybody loves, and openly and blamelessly loves.

My landlord’s young man loves the whole of one side of the way of Old

Bond-street, and is beloved several doors up New Bond-street besides. I

never look out of window but I see kissing of hands going on all around

me. It is the morning custom to glide from shop to shop and exchange

tender sentiments; it is the evening custom for couples to stand hand in

hand at house doors, or roam, linked in that flowery manner, through the

unpeopled streets. There is nothing else to do but love; and what there

is to do, is done.

In unison with this pursuit, a chaste simplicity obtains in the domestic

habits of Arcadia. Its few scattered people dine early, live moderately,

sup socially, and sleep soundly. It is rumoured that the Beadles of the

Arcade, from being the mortal enemies of boys, have signed with tears an

address to Lord Shaftesbury, and subscribed to a ragged school. No

wonder! For, they might turn their heavy maces into crooks and tend

sheep in the Arcade, to the purling of the water-carts as they give the

thirsty streets much more to drink than they can carry.

A happy Golden Age, and a serene tranquillity. Charming picture, but it

will fade. The iron age will return, London will come back to town, if I

show my tongue then in Saville-row for half a minute I shall be

prescribed for, the Doctor’s man and the Dentist’s man will then pretend

that these days of unprofessional innocence never existed. Where Mr. and

Mrs. Klem and their bed will be at that time, passes human knowledge; but

my hatter hermitage will then know them no more, nor will it then know

me. The desk at which I have written these meditations will

retributively assist at the making out of my account, and the wheels of

gorgeous carriages and the hoofs of high-stepping horses will crush the

silence out of Bond-street—will grind Arcadia away, and give it to the

elements in granite powder.

XVII

THE ITALIAN PRISONER

THE rising of the Italian people from under their unutterable wrongs, and

the tardy burst of day upon them after the long long night of oppression

that has darkened their beautiful country, have naturally caused my mind

to dwell often of late on my own small wanderings in Italy. Connected

with them, is a curious little drama, in which the character I myself

sustained was so very subordinate that I may relate its story without any

fear of being suspected of self-display. It is strictly a true story.

I am newly arrived one summer evening, in a certain small town on the

Mediterranean. I have had my dinner at the inn, and I and the mosquitoes

are coming out into the streets together. It is far from Naples; but a

bright, brown, plump little woman-servant at the inn, is a Neapolitan,

and is so vivaciously expert in panto-mimic action, that in the single

moment of answering my request to have a pair of shoes cleaned which I

have left up-stairs, she plies imaginary brushes, and goes completely

through the motions of polishing the shoes up, and laying them at my

feet. I smile at the brisk little woman in perfect satisfaction with her

briskness; and the brisk little woman, amiably pleased with me because I

am pleased with her, claps her hands and laughs delightfully. We are in

the inn yard. As the little woman’s bright eyes sparkle on the cigarette

I am smoking, I make bold to offer her one; she accepts it none the less

merrily, because I touch a most charming little dimple in her fat cheek,

with its light paper end. Glancing up at the many green lattices to

assure herself that the mistress is not looking on, the little woman then

puts her two little dimple arms a-kimbo, and stands on tiptoe to light

her cigarette at mine. ‘And now, dear little sir,’ says she, puffing out

smoke in a most innocent and cherubic manner, ‘keep quite straight on,

take the first to the right and probably you will see him standing at his

door.’

I gave a commission to ‘him,’ and I have been inquiring about him. I

have carried the commission about Italy several months. Before I left

England, there came to me one night a certain generous and gentle English

nobleman (he is dead in these days when I relate the story, and exiles

have lost their best British friend), with this request: ‘Whenever you

come to such a town, will you seek out one Giovanni Carlavero, who keeps

a little wine-shop there, mention my name to him suddenly, and observe

how it affects him?’ I accepted the trust, and am on my way to discharge

it.

The sirocco has been blowing all day, and it is a hot unwholesome evening

with no cool sea-breeze. Mosquitoes and fire-flies are lively enough,

but most other creatures are faint. The coquettish airs of pretty young

women in the tiniest and wickedest of dolls’ straw hats, who lean out at

opened lattice blinds, are almost the only airs stirring. Very ugly and

haggard old women with distaffs, and with a grey tow upon them that looks

as if they were spinning out their own hair (I suppose they were once

pretty, too, but it is very difficult to believe so), sit on the footway

leaning against house walls. Everybody who has come for water to the

fountain, stays there, and seems incapable of any such energetic idea as

going home. Vespers are over, though not so long but that I can smell

the heavy resinous incense as I pass the church. No man seems to be at

work, save the coppersmith. In an Italian town he is always at work, and

always thumping in the deadliest manner.

I keep straight on, and come in due time to the first on the right: a

narrow dull street, where I see a well-favoured man of good stature and

military bearing, in a great cloak, standing at a door. Drawing nearer

to this threshold, I see it is the threshold of a small wine-shop; and I

can just make out, in the dim light, the inscription that it is kept by

Giovanni Carlavero.

I touch my hat to the figure in the cloak, and pass in, and draw a stool

to a little table. The lamp (just such another as they dig out of

Pompeii) is lighted, but the place is empty. The figure in the cloak has

followed me in, and stands before me.

‘The master?’

‘At your service, sir.’

‘Please to give me a glass of the wine of the country.’

He turns to a little counter, to get it. As his striking face is pale,

and his action is evidently that of an enfeebled man, I remark that I

fear he has been ill. It is not much, he courteously and gravely

answers, though bad while it lasts: the fever.

As he sets the wine on the little table, to his manifest surprise I lay

my hand on the back of his, look him in the face, and say in a low voice:

‘I am an Englishman, and you are acquainted with a friend of mine. Do

you recollect—?’ and I mentioned the name of my generous countryman.

Instantly, he utters a loud cry, bursts into tears, and falls on his

knees at my feet, clasping my legs in both his arms and bowing his head

to the ground.

Some years ago, this man at my feet, whose over-fraught heart is heaving

as if it would burst from his breast, and whose tears are wet upon the

dress I wear, was a galley-slave in the North of Italy. He was a

political offender, having been concerned in the then last rising, and

was sentenced to imprisonment for life. That he would have died in his

chains, is certain, but for the circumstance that the Englishman happened

to visit his prison.

It was one of the vile old prisons of Italy, and a part of it was below

the waters of the harbour. The place of his confinement was an arched

under-ground and under-water gallery, with a grill-gate at the entrance,

through which it received such light and air as it got. Its condition

was insufferably foul, and a stranger could hardly breathe in it, or see

in it with the aid of a torch. At the upper end of this dungeon, and

consequently in the worst position, as being the furthest removed from

light and air, the Englishman first beheld him, sitting on an iron

bedstead to which he was chained by a heavy chain. His countenance

impressed the Englishmen as having nothing in common with the faces of

the malefactors with whom he was associated, and he talked with him, and

learnt how he came to be there.

When the Englishman emerged from the dreadful den into the light of day,

he asked his conductor, the governor of the jail, why Giovanni Carlavero

was put into the worst place?

‘Because he is particularly recommended,’ was the stringent answer.

‘Recommended, that is to say, for death?’

‘Excuse me; particularly recommended,’ was again the answer.

‘He has a bad tumour in his neck, no doubt occasioned by the hardship of

his miserable life. If he continues to be neglected, and he remains

where he is, it will kill him.’

‘Excuse me, I can do nothing. He is particularly recommended.’ The

Englishman was staying in that town, and he went to his home there; but

the figure of this man chained to the bedstead made it no home, and

destroyed his rest and peace. He was an Englishman of an extraordinarily

tender heart, and he could not bear the picture. He went back to the

prison grate; went back again and again, and talked to the man and

cheered him. He used his utmost influence to get the man unchained from

the bedstead, were it only for ever so short a time in the day, and

permitted to come to the grate. It look a long time, but the

Englishman’s station, personal character, and steadiness of purpose, wore

out opposition so far, and that grace was at last accorded. Through the

bars, when he could thus get light upon the tumour, the Englishman lanced

it, and it did well, and healed. His strong interest in the prisoner had

greatly increased by this time, and he formed the desperate resolution

that he would exert his utmost self-devotion and use his utmost efforts,

to get Carlavero pardoned.

If the prisoner had been a brigand and a murderer, if he had committed

every non-political crime in the Newgate Calendar and out of it, nothing

would have been easier than for a man of any court or priestly influence

to obtain his release. As it was, nothing could have been more

difficult. Italian authorities, and English authorities who had interest

with them, alike assured the Englishman that his object was hopeless. He

met with nothing but evasion, refusal, and ridicule. His political

prisoner became a joke in the place. It was especially observable that

English Circumlocution, and English Society on its travels, were as

humorous on the subject as Circumlocution and Society may be on any

subject without loss of caste. But, the Englishman possessed (and proved

it well in his life) a courage very uncommon among us: he had not the

least fear of being considered a bore, in a good humane cause. So he

went on persistently trying, and trying, and trying, to get Giovanni

Carlavero out. That prisoner had been rigorously re-chained, after the

tumour operation, and it was not likely that his miserable life could

last very long.

One day, when all the town knew about the Englishman and his political

prisoner, there came to the Englishman, a certain sprightly Italian

Advocate of whom he had some knowledge; and he made this strange

proposal. ‘Give me a hundred pounds to obtain Carlavero’s release. I

think I can get him a pardon, with that money. But I cannot tell you

what I am going to do with the money, nor must you ever ask me the

question if I succeed, nor must you ever ask me for an account of the

money if I fail.’ The Englishman decided to hazard the hundred pounds.

He did so, and heard not another word of the matter. For half a year and

more, the Advocate made no sign, and never once ‘took on’ in any way, to

have the subject on his mind. The Englishman was then obliged to change

his residence to another and more famous town in the North of Italy. He

parted from the poor prisoner with a sorrowful heart, as from a doomed

man for whom there was no release but Death.

The Englishman lived in his new place of abode another half-year and

more, and had no tidings of the wretched prisoner. At length, one day,

he received from the Advocate a cool, concise, mysterious note, to this

effect. ‘If you still wish to bestow that benefit upon the man in whom

you were once interested, send me fifty pounds more, and I think it can

be ensured.’ Now, the Englishman had long settled in his mind that the

Advocate was a heartless sharper, who had preyed upon his credulity and

his interest in an unfortunate sufferer. So, he sat down and wrote a dry

answer, giving the Advocate to understand that he was wiser now than he

had been formerly, and that no more money was extractable from his

pocket.

He lived outside the city gates, some mile or two from the post-office,

and was accustomed to walk into the city with his letters and post them

himself. On a lovely spring day, when the sky was exquisitely blue, and

the sea Divinely beautiful, he took his usual walk, carrying this letter

to the Advocate in his pocket. As he went along, his gentle heart was

much moved by the loveliness of the prospect, and by the thought of the

slowly dying prisoner chained to the bedstead, for whom the universe had

no delights. As he drew nearer and nearer to the city where he was to

post the letter, he became very uneasy in his mind. He debated with

himself, was it remotely possible, after all, that this sum of fifty

pounds could restore the fellow-creature whom he pitied so much, and for

whom he had striven so hard, to liberty? He was not a conventionally

rich Englishman—very far from that—but, he had a spare fifty pounds at

the banker’s. He resolved to risk it. Without doubt, GOD has

recompensed him for the resolution.

He went to the banker’s, and got a bill for the amount, and enclosed it

in a letter to the Advocate that I wish I could have seen. He simply

told the Advocate that he was quite a poor man, and that he was sensible

it might be a great weakness in him to part with so much money on the

faith of so vague a communication; but, that there it was, and that he

prayed the Advocate to make a good use of it. If he did otherwise no

good could ever come of it, and it would lie heavy on his soul one day.

Within a week, the Englishman was sitting at his breakfast, when he heard

some suppressed sounds of agitation on the staircase, and Giovanni

Carlavero leaped into the room and fell upon his breast, a free man!

Conscious of having wronged the Advocate in his own thoughts, the

Englishman wrote him an earnest and grateful letter, avowing the fact,

and entreating him to confide by what means and through what agency he

had succeeded so well. The Advocate returned for answer through the

post, ‘There are many things, as you know, in this Italy of ours, that

are safest and best not even spoken of—far less written of. We may meet

some day, and then I may tell you what you want to know; not here, and

now.’ But, the two never did meet again. The Advocate was dead when the

Englishman gave me my trust; and how the man had been set free, remained

as great a mystery to the Englishman, and to the man himself, as it was

to me.

But, I knew this:—here was the man, this sultry night, on his knees at my

feet, because I was the Englishman’s friend; here were his tears upon my

dress; here were his sobs choking his utterance; here were his kisses on

my hands, because they had touched the hands that had worked out his

release. He had no need to tell me it would be happiness to him to die

for his benefactor; I doubt if I ever saw real, sterling, fervent

gratitude of soul, before or since.

He was much watched and suspected, he said, and had had enough to do to

keep himself out of trouble. This, and his not having prospered in his

worldly affairs, had led to his having failed in his usual communications

to the Englishman for—as I now remember the period—some two or three

years. But, his prospects were brighter, and his wife who had been very

ill had recovered, and his fever had left him, and he had bought a little

vineyard, and would I carry to his benefactor the first of its wine? Ay,

that I would (I told him with enthusiasm), and not a drop of it should be

spilled or lost!

He had cautiously closed the door before speaking of himself, and had

talked with such excess of emotion, and in a provincial Italian so

difficult to understand, that I had more than once been obliged to stop

him, and beg him to have compassion on me and be slower and calmer. By

degrees he became so, and tranquilly walked back with me to the hotel.

There, I sat down before I went to bed and wrote a faithful account of

him to the Englishman: which I concluded by saying that I would bring the

wine home, against any difficulties, every drop.

Early next morning, when I came out at the hotel door to pursue my

journey, I found my friend waiting with one of those immense bottles in

which the Italian peasants store their wine—a bottle holding some

half-dozen gallons—bound round with basket-work for greater safety on the

journey. I see him now, in the bright sunshine, tears of gratitude in

his eyes, proudly inviting my attention to this corpulent bottle. (At

the street-comer hard by, two high-flavoured, able-bodied

monks—pretending to talk together, but keeping their four evil eyes upon

us.)

How the bottle had been got there, did not appear; but the difficulty of

getting it into the ramshackle vetturino carriage in which I was

departing, was so great, and it took up so much room when it was got in,

that I elected to sit outside. The last I saw of Giovanni Carlavero was

his running through the town by the side of the jingling wheels, clasping

my hand as I stretched it down from the box, charging me with a thousand

last loving and dutiful messages to his dear patron, and finally looking

in at the bottle as it reposed inside, with an admiration of its

honourable way of travelling that was beyond measure delightful.

And now, what disquiet of mind this dearly-beloved and highly-treasured

Bottle began to cost me, no man knows. It was my precious charge through

a long tour, and, for hundreds of miles, I never had it off my mind by

day or by night. Over bad roads—and they were many—I clung to it with

affectionate desperation. Up mountains, I looked in at it and saw it

helplessly tilting over on its back, with terror. At innumerable inn

doors when the weather was bad, I was obliged to be put into my vehicle

before the Bottle could be got in, and was obliged to have the Bottle

lifted out before human aid could come near me. The Imp of the same

name, except that his associations were all evil and these associations

were all good, would have been a less troublesome travelling companion.

I might have served Mr. Cruikshank as a subject for a new illustration of

the miseries of the Bottle. The National Temperance Society might have

made a powerful Tract of me.

The suspicions that attached to this innocent Bottle, greatly aggravated

my difficulties. It was like the apple-pie in the child’s book. Parma

pouted at it, Modena mocked it, Tuscany tackled it, Naples nibbled it,

Rome refused it, Austria accused it, Soldiers suspected it, Jesuits

jobbed it. I composed a neat Oration, developing my inoffensive

intentions in connexion with this Bottle, and delivered it in an infinity

of guard-houses, at a multitude of town gates, and on every drawbridge,

angle, and rampart, of a complete system of fortifications. Fifty times

a day, I got down to harangue an infuriated soldiery about the Bottle.

Through the filthy degradation of the abject and vile Roman States, I had

as much difficulty in working my way with the Bottle, as if it had

bottled up a complete system of heretical theology. In the Neapolitan

country, where everybody was a spy, a soldier, a priest, or a lazzarone,

the shameless beggars of all four denominations incessantly pounced on

the Bottle and made it a pretext for extorting money from me.

Quires—quires do I say? Reams—of forms illegibly printed on whity-brown

paper were filled up about the Bottle, and it was the subject of more

stamping and sanding than I had ever seen before. In consequence of

which haze of sand, perhaps, it was always irregular, and always latent

with dismal penalties of going back or not going forward, which were only

to be abated by the silver crossing of a base hand, poked shirtless out

of a ragged uniform sleeve. Under all discouragements, however, I stuck

to my Bottle, and held firm to my resolution that every drop of its

contents should reach the Bottle’s destination.

The latter refinement cost me a separate heap of troubles on its own

separate account. What corkscrews did I see the military power bring out

against that Bottle; what gimlets, spikes, divining rods, gauges, and

unknown tests and instruments! At some places, they persisted in

declaring that the wine must not be passed, without being opened and

tasted; I, pleading to the contrary, used then to argue the question

seated on the Bottle lest they should open it in spite of me. In the

southern parts of Italy more violent shrieking, face-making, and

gesticulating, greater vehemence of speech and countenance and action,

went on about that Bottle than would attend fifty murders in a northern

latitude. It raised important functionaries out of their beds, in the

dead of night. I have known half-a-dozen military lanterns to disperse

themselves at all points of a great sleeping Piazza, each lantern

summoning some official creature to get up, put on his cocked-hat

instantly, and come and stop the Bottle. It was characteristic that

while this innocent Bottle had such immense difficulty in getting from

little town to town, Signor Mazzini and the fiery cross were traversing

Italy from end to end.

Still, I stuck to my Bottle, like any fine old English gentleman all of

the olden time. The more the Bottle was interfered with, the stauncher I

became (if possible) in my first determination that my countryman should

have it delivered to him intact, as the man whom he had so nobly restored

to life and liberty had delivered it to me. If ever I had been obstinate

in my days—and I may have been, say, once or twice—I was obstinate about

the Bottle. But, I made it a rule always to keep a pocket full of small

coin at its service, and never to be out of temper in its cause. Thus, I

and the Bottle made our way. Once we had a break-down; rather a bad

break-down, on a steep high place with the sea below us, on a tempestuous

evening when it blew great guns. We were driving four wild horses

abreast, Southern fashion, and there was some little difficulty in

stopping them. I was outside, and not thrown off; but no words can

describe my feelings when I saw the Bottle—travelling inside, as

usual—burst the door open, and roll obesely out into the road. A blessed

Bottle with a charmed existence, he took no hurt, and we repaired damage,

and went on triumphant.

A thousand representations were made to me that the Bottle must be left

at this place, or that, and called for again. I never yielded to one of

them, and never parted from the Bottle, on any pretence, consideration,

threat, or entreaty. I had no faith in any official receipt for the

Bottle, and nothing would induce me to accept one. These unmanageable

politics at last brought me and the Bottle, still triumphant, to Genoa.

There, I took a tender and reluctant leave of him for a few weeks, and

consigned him to a trusty English captain, to be conveyed to the Port of

London by sea.

While the Bottle was on his voyage to England, I read the Shipping

Intelligence as anxiously as if I had been an underwriter. There was

some stormy weather after I myself had got to England by way of

Switzerland and France, and my mind greatly misgave me that the Bottle

might be wrecked. At last to my great joy, I received notice of his safe

arrival, and immediately went down to Saint Katharine’s Docks, and found

him in a state of honourable captivity in the Custom House.

The wine was mere vinegar when I set it down before the generous

Englishman—probably it had been something like vinegar when I took it up

from Giovanni Carlavero—but not a drop of it was spilled or gone. And

the Englishman told me, with much emotion in his face and voice, that he

had never tasted wine that seemed to him so sweet and sound. And long

afterwards, the Bottle graced his table. And the last time I saw him in

this world that misses him, he took me aside in a crowd, to say, with his

amiable smile: ‘We were talking of you only to-day at dinner, and I

wished you had been there, for I had some Claret up in Carlavero’s

Bottle.’

XVIII

THE CALAIS NIGHT MAIL

IT is an unsettled question with me whether I shall leave Calais

something handsome in my will, or whether I shall leave it my

malediction. I hate it so much, and yet I am always so very glad to see

it, that I am in a state of constant indecision on this subject. When I

first made acquaintance with Calais, it was as a maundering young wretch

in a clammy perspiration and dripping saline particles, who was conscious

of no extremities but the one great extremity, sea-sickness—who was a

mere bilious torso, with a mislaid headache somewhere in its stomach—who

had been put into a horrible swing in Dover Harbour, and had tumbled

giddily out of it on the French coast, or the Isle of Man, or anywhere.

Times have changed, and now I enter Calais self-reliant and rational. I

know where it is beforehand, I keep a look out for it, I recognise its

landmarks when I see any of them, I am acquainted with its ways, and I

know—and I can bear—its worst behaviour.

Malignant Calais! Low-lying alligator, evading the eyesight and

discouraging hope! Dodging flat streak, now on this bow, now on that,

now anywhere, now everywhere, now nowhere! In vain Cape Grinez, coming

frankly forth into the sea, exhorts the failing to be stout of heart and

stomach: sneaking Calais, prone behind its bar, invites emetically to

despair. Even when it can no longer quite conceal itself in its muddy

dock, it has an evil way of falling off, has Calais, which is more

hopeless than its invisibility. The pier is all but on the bowsprit, and

you think you are there—roll, roar, wash!—Calais has retired miles

inland, and Dover has burst out to look for it. It has a last dip and

slide in its character, has Calais, to be especially commanded to the

infernal gods. Thrice accursed be that garrison-town, when it dives

under the boat’s keel, and comes up a league or two to the right, with

the packet shivering and spluttering and staring about for it!

Not but what I have my animosities towards Dover. I particularly detest

Dover for the self-complacency with which it goes to bed. It always goes

to bed (when I am going to Calais) with a more brilliant display of lamp

and candle than any other town. Mr. and Mrs. Birmingham, host and

hostess of the Lord Warden Hotel, are my much esteemed friends, but they

are too conceited about the comforts of that establishment when the Night

Mail is starting. I know it is a good house to stay at, and I don’t want

the fact insisted upon in all its warm bright windows at such an hour. I

know the Warden is a stationary edifice that never rolls or pitches, and

I object to its big outline seeming to insist upon that circumstance,

and, as it were, to come over me with it, when I am reeling on the deck

of the boat. Beshrew the Warden likewise, for obstructing that corner,

and making the wind so angry as it rushes round. Shall I not know that

it blows quite soon enough, without the officious Warden’s interference?

As I wait here on board the night packet, for the South-Eastern Train to

come down with the Mail, Dover appears to me to be illuminated for some

intensely aggravating festivity in my personal dishonour. All its noises

smack of taunting praises of the land, and dispraises of the gloomy sea,

and of me for going on it. The drums upon the heights have gone to bed,

or I know they would rattle taunts against me for having my unsteady

footing on this slippery deck. The many gas eyes of the Marine Parade

twinkle in an offensive manner, as if with derision. The distant dogs of

Dover bark at me in my misshapen wrappers, as if I were Richard the

Third.

A screech, a bell, and two red eyes come gliding down the Admiralty Pier

with a smoothness of motion rendered more smooth by the heaving of the

boat. The sea makes noises against the pier, as if several hippopotami

were lapping at it, and were prevented by circumstances over which they

had no control from drinking peaceably. We, the boat, become violently

agitated—rumble, hum, scream, roar, and establish an immense family

washing-day at each paddle-box. Bright patches break out in the train as

the doors of the post-office vans are opened, and instantly stooping

figures with sacks upon their backs begin to be beheld among the piles,

descending as it would seem in ghostly procession to Davy Jones’s Locker.

The passengers come on board; a few shadowy Frenchmen, with hatboxes

shaped like the stoppers of gigantic case-bottles; a few shadowy Germans

in immense fur coats and boots; a few shadowy Englishmen prepared for the

worst and pretending not to expect it. I cannot disguise from my

uncommercial mind the miserable fact that we are a body of outcasts; that

the attendants on us are as scant in number as may serve to get rid of us

with the least possible delay; that there are no night-loungers

interested in us; that the unwilling lamps shiver and shudder at us; that

the sole object is to commit us to the deep and abandon us. Lo, the two

red eyes glaring in increasing distance, and then the very train itself

has gone to bed before we are off!

What is the moral support derived by some sea-going amateurs from an

umbrella? Why do certain voyagers across the Channel always put up that

article, and hold it up with a grim and fierce tenacity? A

fellow-creature near me—whom I only know to _be_ a fellow-creature,

because of his umbrella: without which he might be a dark bit of cliff,

pier, or bulkbead—clutches that instrument with a desperate grasp, that

will not relax until he lands at Calais. Is there any analogy, in

certain constitutions, between keeping an umbrella up, and keeping the

spirits up? A hawser thrown on board with a flop replies ‘Stand by!’

‘Stand by, below!’ ‘Half a turn a head!’ ‘Half a turn a head!’ ‘Half

speed!’ ‘Half speed!’ ‘Port!’ ‘Port!’ ‘Steady!’ ‘Steady!’ ‘Go on!’

‘Go on!’

A stout wooden wedge driven in at my right temple and out at my left, a

floating deposit of lukewarm oil in my throat, and a compression of the

bridge of my nose in a blunt pair of pincers,—these are the personal

sensations by which I know we are off, and by which I shall continue to

know it until I am on the soil of France. My symptoms have scarcely

established themselves comfortably, when two or three skating shadows

that have been trying to walk or stand, get flung together, and other two

or three shadows in tarpaulin slide with them into corners and cover them

up. Then the South Foreland lights begin to hiccup at us in a way that

bodes no good.

It is at about this period that my detestation of Calais knows no bounds.

Inwardly I resolve afresh that I never will forgive that hated town. I

have done so before, many times, but that is past. Let me register a

vow. Implacable animosity to Calais everm— that was an awkward sea, and

the funnel seems of my opinion, for it gives a complaining roar.

The wind blows stiffly from the Nor-East, the sea runs high, we ship a

deal of water, the night is dark and cold, and the shapeless passengers

lie about in melancholy bundles, as if they were sorted out for the

laundress; but for my own uncommercial part I cannot pretend that I am

much inconvenienced by any of these things. A general howling,

whistling, flopping, gurgling, and scooping, I am aware of, and a general

knocking about of Nature; but the impressions I receive are very vague.

In a sweet faint temper, something like the smell of damaged oranges, I

think I should feel languidly benevolent if I had time. I have not time,

because I am under a curious compulsion to occupy myself with the Irish

melodies. ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore,’ is the particular

melody to which I find myself devoted. I sing it to myself in the most

charming manner and with the greatest expression. Now and then, I raise

my head (I am sitting on the hardest of wet seats, in the most

uncomfortable of wet attitudes, but I don’t mind it,) and notice that I

am a whirling shuttlecock between a fiery battledore of a lighthouse on

the French coast and a fiery battledore of a lighthouse on the English

coast; but I don’t notice it particularly, except to feel envenomed in my

hatred of Calais. Then I go on again, ‘Rich and rare were the ge-ems

she-e-e-e wore, And a bright gold ring on her wa-and she bo-ore, But O

her beauty was fa-a-a-a-r beyond’—I am particularly proud of my execution

here, when I become aware of another awkward shock from the sea, and

another protest from the funnel, and a fellow-creature at the paddle-box

more audibly indisposed than I think he need be—‘Her sparkling gems, or

snow-white wand, But O her beauty was fa-a-a-a-a-r beyond’—another

awkward one here, and the fellow-creature with the umbrella down and

picked up—‘Her spa-a-rkling ge-ems, or her Port! port! steady! steady!

snow-white fellow-creature at the paddle-box very selfishly audible,

bump, roar, wash, white wand.’

As my execution of the Irish melodies partakes of my imperfect

perceptions of what is going on around me, so what is going on around me

becomes something else than what it is. The stokers open the furnace

doors below, to feed the fires, and I am again on the box of the old

Exeter Telegraph fast coach, and that is the light of the for ever

extinguished coach-lamps, and the gleam on the hatches and paddle-boxes

is _their_ gleam on cottages and haystacks, and the monotonous noise of

the engines is the steady jingle of the splendid team. Anon, the

intermittent funnel roar of protest at every violent roll, becomes the

regular blast of a high pressure engine, and I recognise the exceedingly

explosive steamer in which I ascended the Mississippi when the American

civil war was not, and when only its causes were. A fragment of mast on

which the light of a lantern falls, an end of rope, and a jerking block

or so, become suggestive of Franconi’s Circus at Paris where I shall be

this very night mayhap (for it must be morning now), and they dance to

the self-same time and tune as the trained steed, Black Raven. What may

be the speciality of these waves as they come rushing on, I cannot desert

the pressing demands made upon me by the gems she wore, to inquire, but

they are charged with something about Robinson Crusoe, and I think it was

in Yarmouth Roads that he first went a seafaring and was near foundering

(what a terrific sound that word had for me when I was a boy!) in his

first gale of wind. Still, through all this, I must ask her (who _was_

she I wonder!) for the fiftieth time, and without ever stopping, Does she

not fear to stray, So lone and lovely through this bleak way, And are

Erin’s sons so good or so cold, As not to be tempted by more

fellow-creatures at the paddle-box or gold? Sir Knight I feel not the

least alarm, No son of Erin will offer me harm, For though they love

fellow-creature with umbrella down again and golden store, Sir Knight

they what a tremendous one love honour and virtue more: For though they

love Stewards with a bull’s eye bright, they’ll trouble you for your

ticket, sir-rough passage to-night!

I freely admit it to be a miserable piece of human weakness and

inconsistency, but I no sooner become conscious of those last words from

the steward than I begin to soften towards Calais. Whereas I have been

vindictively wishing that those Calais burghers who came out of their

town by a short cut into the History of England, with those fatal ropes

round their necks by which they have since been towed into so many

cartoons, had all been hanged on the spot, I now begin to regard them as

highly respectable and virtuous tradesmen. Looking about me, I see the

light of Cape Grinez well astern of the boat on the davits to leeward,

and the light of Calais Harbour undeniably at its old tricks, but still

ahead and shining. Sentiments of forgiveness of Calais, not to say of

attachment to Calais, begin to expand my bosom. I have weak notions that

I will stay there a day or two on my way back. A faded and recumbent

stranger pausing in a profound reverie over the rim of a basin, asks me

what kind of place Calais is? I tell him (Heaven forgive me!) a very

agreeable place indeed—rather hilly than otherwise.

So strangely goes the time, and on the whole so quickly—though still I

seem to have been on board a week—that I am bumped, rolled, gurgled,

washed and pitched into Calais Harbour before her maiden smile has

finally lighted her through the Green Isle, When blest for ever is she

who relied, On entering Calais at the top of the tide. For we have not

to land to-night down among those slimy timbers—covered with green hair

as if it were the mermaids’ favourite combing-place—where one crawls to

the surface of the jetty, like a stranded shrimp, but we go steaming up

the harbour to the Railway Station Quay. And as we go, the sea washes in

and out among piles and planks, with dead heavy beats and in quite a

furious manner (whereof we are proud), and the lamps shake in the wind,

and the bells of Calais striking One seem to send their vibrations

struggling against troubled air, as we have come struggling against

troubled water. And now, in the sudden relief and wiping of faces,

everybody on board seems to have had a prodigious double-tooth out, and

to be this very instant free of the Dentist’s hands. And now we all know

for the first time how wet and cold we are, and how salt we are; and now

I love Calais with my heart of hearts!

‘Hôtel Dessin!’ (but in this one case it is not a vocal cry; it is but a

bright lustre in the eyes of the cheery representative of that best of

inns). ‘Hôtel Meurice!’ ‘Hôtel de France!’ ‘Hôtel de Calais!’ ‘The

Royal Hotel, Sir, Angaishe ouse!’ ‘You going to Parry, Sir?’ ‘Your

baggage, registair froo, Sir?’ Bless ye, my Touters, bless ye, my

commissionaires, bless ye, my hungry-eyed mysteries in caps of a military

form, who are always here, day or night, fair weather or foul, seeking

inscrutable jobs which I never see you get! Bless ye, my Custom House

officers in green and grey; permit me to grasp the welcome hands that

descend into my travelling-bag, one on each side, and meet at the bottom

to give my change of linen a peculiar shake up, as if it were a measure

of chaff or grain! I have nothing to declare, Monsieur le Douanier,

except that when I cease to breathe, Calais will be found written on my

heart. No article liable to local duty have I with me, Monsieur

l’Officier de l’Octroi, unless the overflowing of a breast devoted to

your charming town should be in that wise chargeable. Ah! see at the

gangway by the twinkling lantern, my dearest brother and friend, he once

of the Passport Office, he who collects the names! May he be for ever

changeless in his buttoned black surtout, with his note-book in his hand,

and his tall black hat, surmounting his round, smiling, patient face!

Let us embrace, my dearest brother. I am yours à tout jamais—for the

whole of ever.

Calais up and doing at the railway station, and Calais down and dreaming

in its bed; Calais with something of ‘an ancient and fish-like smell’

about it, and Calais blown and sea-washed pure; Calais represented at the

Buffet by savoury roast fowls, hot coffee, cognac, and Bordeaux; and

Calais represented everywhere by flitting persons with a monomania for

changing money—though I never shall be able to understand in my present

state of existence how they live by it, but I suppose I should, if I

understood the currency question—Calais _en gros_, and Calais _en

détail_, forgive one who has deeply wronged you.—I was not fully aware of

it on the other side, but I meant Dover.

Ding, ding! To the carriages, gentlemen the travellers. Ascend then,

gentlemen the travellers, for Hazebroucke, Lille, Douai, Bruxelles,

Arras, Amiens, and Paris! I, humble representative of the uncommercial

interest, ascend with the rest. The train is light to-night, and I share

my compartment with but two fellow-travellers; one, a compatriot in an

obsolete cravat, who thinks it a quite unaccountable thing that they

don’t keep ‘London time’ on a French railway, and who is made angry by my

modestly suggesting the possibility of Paris time being more in their

way; the other, a young priest, with a very small bird in a very small

cage, who feeds the small bird with a quill, and then puts him up in the

network above his head, where he advances twittering, to his front wires,

and seems to address me in an electioneering manner. The compatriot (who

crossed in the boat, and whom I judge to be some person of distinction,

as he was shut up, like a stately species of rabbit, in a private hutch

on deck) and the young priest (who joined us at Calais) are soon asleep,

and then the bird and I have it all to ourselves.

A stormy night still; a night that sweeps the wires of the electric

telegraph with a wild and fitful hand; a night so very stormy, with the

added storm of the train-progress through it, that when the Guard comes

clambering round to mark the tickets while we are at full speed (a really

horrible performance in an express train, though he holds on to the open

window by his elbows in the most deliberate manner), he stands in such a

whirlwind that I grip him fast by the collar, and feel it next to

manslaughter to let him go. Still, when he is gone, the small, small

bird remains at his front wires feebly twittering to me—twittering and

twittering, until, leaning back in my place and looking at him in drowsy

fascination, I find that he seems to jog my memory as we rush along.

Uncommercial travels (thus the small, small bird) have lain in their idle

thriftless way through all this range of swamp and dyke, as through many

other odd places; and about here, as you very well know, are the queer

old stone farm-houses, approached by drawbridges, and the windmills that

you get at by boats. Here, are the lands where the women hoe and dig,

paddling canoe-wise from field to field, and here are the cabarets and

other peasant-houses where the stone dove-cotes in the littered yards are

as strong as warders’ towers in old castles. Here, are the long

monotonous miles of canal, with the great Dutch-built barges garishly

painted, and the towing girls, sometimes harnessed by the forehead,

sometimes by the girdle and the shoulders, not a pleasant sight to see.

Scattered through this country are mighty works of VAUBAN, whom you know

about, and regiments of such corporals as you heard of once upon a time,

and many a blue-eyed Bebelle. Through these flat districts, in the

shining summer days, walk those long, grotesque files of young novices in

enormous shovel-hats, whom you remember blackening the ground checkered

by the avenues of leafy trees. And now that Hazebroucke slumbers certain

kilometres ahead, recall the summer evening when your dusty feet

strolling up from the station tended hap-hazard to a Fair there, where

the oldest inhabitants were circling round and round a barrel-organ on

hobby-horses, with the greatest gravity, and where the principal show in

the Fair was a Religious Richardson’s—literally, on its own announcement

in great letters, THEATRE RELIGIEUX. In which improving Temple, the

dramatic representation was of ‘all the interesting events in the life of

our Lord, from the Manger to the Tomb;’ the principal female character,

without any reservation or exception, being at the moment of your

arrival, engaged in trimming the external Moderators (as it was growing

dusk), while the next principal female character took the money, and the

Young Saint John disported himself upside down on the platform.

Looking up at this point to confirm the small, small bird in every

particular he has mentioned, I find he has ceased to twitter, and has put

his head under his wing. Therefore, in my different way I follow the

good example.

XIX

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF MORTALITY

I HAD parted from the small bird at somewhere about four o’clock in the

morning, when he had got out at Arras, and had been received by two

shovel-hats in waiting at the station, who presented an appropriately

ornithological and crow-like appearance. My compatriot and I had gone on

to Paris; my compatriot enlightening me occasionally with a long list of

the enormous grievances of French railway travelling: every one of which,

as I am a sinner, was perfectly new to me, though I have as much

experience of French railways as most uncommercials. I had left him at

the terminus (through his conviction, against all explanation and

remonstrance, that his baggage-ticket was his passenger-ticket),

insisting in a very high temper to the functionary on duty, that in his

own personal identity he was four packages weighing so many

kilogrammes—as if he had been Cassim Baba! I had bathed and breakfasted,

and was strolling on the bright quays. The subject of my meditations was

the question whether it is positively in the essence and nature of

things, as a certain school of Britons would seem to think it, that a

Capital must be ensnared and enslaved before it can be made beautiful:

when I lifted up my eyes and found that my feet, straying like my mind,

had brought me to Notre-Dame.

That is to say, Notre-Dame was before me, but there was a large open

space between us. A very little while gone, I had left that space

covered with buildings densely crowded; and now it was cleared for some

new wonder in the way of public Street, Place, Garden, Fountain, or all

four. Only the obscene little Morgue, slinking on the brink of the river

and soon to come down, was left there, looking mortally ashamed of

itself, and supremely wicked. I had but glanced at this old

acquaintance, when I beheld an airy procession coming round in front of

Notre-Dame, past the great hospital. It had something of a Masaniello

look, with fluttering striped curtains in the midst of it, and it came

dancing round the cathedral in the liveliest manner.

I was speculating on a marriage in Blouse-life, or a Christening, or some

other domestic festivity which I would see out, when I found, from the

talk of a quick rush of Blouses past me, that it was a Body coming to the

Morgue. Having never before chanced upon this initiation, I constituted

myself a Blouse likewise, and ran into the Morgue with the rest. It was

a very muddy day, and we took in a quantity of mire with us, and the

procession coming in upon our heels brought a quantity more. The

procession was in the highest spirits, and consisted of idlers who had

come with the curtained litter from its starting-place, and of all the

reinforcements it had picked up by the way. It set the litter down in

the midst of the Morgue, and then two Custodians proclaimed aloud that we

were all ‘invited’ to go out. This invitation was rendered the more

pressing, if not the more flattering, by our being shoved out, and the

folding-gates being barred upon us.

Those who have never seen the Morgue, may see it perfectly, by presenting

to themselves on indifferently paved coach-house accessible from the

street by a pair of folding-gates; on the left of the coach-house,

occupying its width, any large London tailor’s or linendraper’s

plate-glass window reaching to the ground; within the window, on two rows

of inclined plane, what the coach-house has to show; hanging above, like

irregular stalactites from the roof of a cave, a quantity of clothes—the

clothes of the dead and buried shows of the coach-house.

We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custodians pull

off their coats and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the procession came

along. It looked so interestingly like business. Shut out in the muddy

street, we now became quite ravenous to know all about it. Was it river,

pistol, knife, love, gambling, robbery, hatred, how many stabs, how many

bullets, fresh or decomposed, suicide or murder? All wedged together,

and all staring at one another with our heads thrust forward, we

propounded these inquiries and a hundred more such. Imperceptibly, it

came to be known that Monsieur the tall and sallow mason yonder, was

acquainted with the facts. Would Monsieur the tall and sallow mason,

surged at by a new wave of us, have the goodness to impart? It was but a

poor old man, passing along the street under one of the new buildings, on

whom a stone had fallen, and who had tumbled dead. His age? Another

wave surged up against the tall and sallow mason, and our wave swept on

and broke, and he was any age from sixty-five to ninety.

An old man was not much: moreover, we could have wished he had been

killed by human agency—his own, or somebody else’s: the latter,

preferable—but our comfort was, that he had nothing about him to lead to

his identification, and that his people must seek him here. Perhaps they

were waiting dinner for him even now? We liked that. Such of us as had

pocket-handkerchiefs took a slow, intense, protracted wipe at our noses,

and then crammed our handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses.

Others of us who had no handkerchiefs administered a similar relief to

our overwrought minds, by means of prolonged smears or wipes of our

mouths on our sleeves. One man with a gloomy malformation of brow—a

homicidal worker in white-lead, to judge from his blue tone of colour,

and a certain flavour of paralysis pervading him—got his coat-collar

between his teeth, and bit at it with an appetite. Several decent women

arrived upon the outskirts of the crowd, and prepared to launch

themselves into the dismal coach-house when opportunity should come;

among them, a pretty young mother, pretending to bite the forefinger of

her baby-boy, kept it between her rosy lips that it might be handy for

guiding to point at the show. Meantime, all faces were turned towards

the building, and we men waited with a fixed and stern resolution:—for

the most part with folded arms. Surely, it was the only public French

sight these uncommercial eyes had seen, at which the expectant people did

not form _en queue_. But there was no such order of arrangement here;

nothing but a general determination to make a rush for it, and a

disposition to object to some boys who had mounted on the two stone posts

by the hinges of the gates, with the design of swooping in when the

hinges should turn.

Now, they turned, and we rushed! Great pressure, and a scream or two

from the front. Then a laugh or two, some expressions of disappointment,

and a slackening of the pressure and subsidence of the struggle.—Old man

not there.

‘But what would you have?’ the Custodian reasonably argues, as he looks

out at his little door. ‘Patience, patience! We make his toilette,

gentlemen. He will be exposed presently. It is necessary to proceed

according to rule. His toilette is not made all at a blow. He will be

exposed in good time, gentlemen, in good time.’ And so retires, smoking,

with a wave of his sleeveless arm towards the window, importing,

‘Entertain yourselves in the meanwhile with the other curiosities.

Fortunately the Museum is not empty to-day.’

Who would have thought of public fickleness even at the Morgue? But

there it was, on that occasion. Three lately popular articles that had

been attracting greatly when the litter was first descried coming dancing

round the corner by the great cathedral, were so completely deposed now,

that nobody save two little girls (one showing them to a doll) would look

at them. Yet the chief of the three, the article in the front row, had

received jagged injury of the left temple; and the other two in the back

row, the drowned two lying side by side with their heads very slightly

turned towards each other, seemed to be comparing notes about it.

Indeed, those two of the back row were so furtive of appearance, and so

(in their puffed way) assassinatingly knowing as to the one of the front,

that it was hard to think the three had never come together in their

lives, and were only chance companions after death. Whether or no this

was the general, as it was the uncommercial, fancy, it is not to be

disputed that the group had drawn exceedingly within ten minutes. Yet

now, the inconstant public turned its back upon them, and even leaned its

elbows carelessly against the bar outside the window and shook off the

mud from its shoes, and also lent and borrowed fire for pipes.

Custodian re-enters from his door. ‘Again once, gentlemen, you are

invited—’ No further invitation necessary. Ready dash into the street.

Toilette finished. Old man coming out.

This time, the interest was grown too hot to admit of toleration of the

boys on the stone posts. The homicidal white-lead worker made a pounce

upon one boy who was hoisting himself up, and brought him to earth amidst

general commendation. Closely stowed as we were, we yet formed into

groups—groups of conversation, without separation from the mass—to

discuss the old man. Rivals of the tall and sallow mason sprang into

being, and here again was popular inconstancy. These rivals attracted

audiences, and were greedily listened to; and whereas they had derived

their information solely from the tall and sallow one, officious members

of the crowd now sought to enlighten _him_ on their authority. Changed

by this social experience into an iron-visaged and inveterate

misanthrope, the mason glared at mankind, and evidently cherished in his

breast the wish that the whole of the present company could change places

with the deceased old man. And now listeners became inattentive, and

people made a start forward at a slight sound, and an unholy fire kindled

in the public eye, and those next the gates beat at them impatiently, as

if they were of the cannibal species and hungry.

Again the hinges creaked, and we rushed. Disorderly pressure for some

time ensued before the uncommercial unit got figured into the front row

of the sum. It was strange to see so much heat and uproar seething about

one poor spare, white-haired old man, quiet for evermore. He was calm of

feature and undisfigured, as he lay on his back—having been struck upon

the hinder part of his head, and thrown forward—and something like a tear

or two had started from the closed eyes, and lay wet upon the face. The

uncommercial interest, sated at a glance, directed itself upon the

striving crowd on either side and behind: wondering whether one might

have guessed, from the expression of those faces merely, what kind of

sight they were looking at. The differences of expression were not many.

There was a little pity, but not much, and that mostly with a selfish

touch in it—as who would say, ‘Shall I, poor I, look like that, when the

time comes!’ There was more of a secretly brooding contemplation and

curiosity, as ‘That man I don’t like, and have the grudge against; would

such be his appearance, if some one—not to mention names—by any chance

gave him an knock?’ There was a wolfish stare at the object, in which

homicidal white-lead worker shone conspicuous. And there was a much more

general, purposeless, vacant staring at it—like looking at waxwork,

without a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it. But all these

expressions concurred in possessing the one underlying expression of

_looking at something that could not return a look_. The uncommercial

notice had established this as very remarkable, when a new pressure all

at once coming up from the street pinioned him ignominiously, and hurried

him into the arms (now sleeved again) of the Custodian smoking at his

door, and answering questions, between puffs, with a certain placid

meritorious air of not being proud, though high in office. And

mentioning pride, it may be observed, by the way, that one could not well

help investing the original sole occupant of the front row with an air

depreciatory of the legitimate attraction of the poor old man: while the

two in the second row seemed to exult at this superseded popularity.

Pacing presently round the garden of the Tower of St. Jacques de la

Boucherie, and presently again in front of the Hôtel de Ville, I called

to mind a certain desolate open-air Morgue that I happened to light upon

in London, one day in the hard winter of 1861, and which seemed as

strange to me, at the time of seeing it, as if I had found it in China.

Towards that hour of a winter’s afternoon when the lamp-lighters are

beginning to light the lamps in the streets a little before they are

wanted, because the darkness thickens fast and soon, I was walking in

from the country on the northern side of the Regent’s Park—hard frozen

and deserted—when I saw an empty Hansom cab drive up to the lodge at

Gloucester-gate, and the driver with great agitation call to the man

there: who quickly reached a long pole from a tree, and, deftly collared

by the driver, jumped to the step of his little seat, and so the Hansom

rattled out at the gate, galloping over the iron-bound road. I followed

running, though not so fast but that when I came to the right-hand Canal

Bridge, near the cross-path to Chalk Farm, the Hansom was stationary, the

horse was smoking hot, the long pole was idle on the ground, and the

driver and the park-keeper were looking over the bridge parapet. Looking

over too, I saw, lying on the towing-path with her face turned up towards

us, a woman, dead a day or two, and under thirty, as I guessed, poorly

dressed in black. The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the

dark hair, all pushed back from the face, as though that had been the

last action of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground. Dabbled

all about her, was the water and the broken ice that had dropped from her

dress, and had splashed as she was got out. The policeman who had just

got her out, and the passing costermonger who had helped him, were

standing near the body; the latter with that stare at it which I have

likened to being at a waxwork exhibition without a catalogue; the former,

looking over his stock, with professional stiffness and coolness, in the

direction in which the bearers he had sent for were expected. So

dreadfully forlorn, so dreadfully sad, so dreadfully mysterious, this

spectacle of our dear sister here departed! A barge came up, breaking

the floating ice and the silence, and a woman steered it. The man with

the horse that towed it, cared so little for the body, that the stumbling

hoofs had been among the hair, and the tow-rope had caught and turned the

head, before our cry of horror took him to the bridle. At which sound

the steering woman looked up at us on the bridge, with contempt

unutterable, and then looking down at the body with a similar

expression—as if it were made in another likeness from herself, had been

informed with other passions, had been lost by other chances, had had

another nature dragged down to perdition—steered a spurning streak of mud

at it, and passed on.

A better experience, but also of the Morgue kind, in which chance happily

made me useful in a slight degree, arose to my remembrance as I took my

way by the Boulevard de Sébastopol to the brighter scenes of Paris.

The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a modest young

uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. Many suns and winds have

browned me in the line, but those were my pale days. Having newly taken

the lease of a house in a certain distinguished metropolitan parish—a

house which then appeared to me to be a frightfully first-class Family

Mansion, involving awful responsibilities—I became the prey of a Beadle.

I think the Beadle must have seen me going in or coming out, and must

have observed that I tottered under the weight of my grandeur. Or he may

have been in hiding under straw when I bought my first horse (in the

desirable stable-yard attached to the first-class Family Mansion), and

when the vendor remarked to me, in an original manner, on bringing him

for approval, taking his cloth off and smacking him, ‘There, Sir!

_There’s_ a Orse!’ And when I said gallantly, ‘How much do you want for

him?’ and when the vendor said, ‘No more than sixty guineas, from you,’

and when I said smartly, ‘Why not more than sixty from _me_?’ And when

he said crushingly, ‘Because upon my soul and body he’d be considered

cheap at seventy, by one who understood the subject—but you don’t.’—I

say, the Beadle may have been in hiding under straw, when this disgrace

befell me, or he may have noted that I was too raw and young an Atlas to

carry the first-class Family Mansion in a knowing manner. Be this as it

may, the Beadle did what Melancholy did to the youth in Gray’s Elegy—he

marked me for his own. And the way in which the Beadle did it, was this:

he summoned me as a Juryman on his Coroner’s Inquests.

In my first feverish alarm I repaired ‘for safety and for succour’—like

those sagacious Northern shepherds who, having had no previous reason

whatever to believe in young Norval, very prudently did not originate the

hazardous idea of believing in him—to a deep householder. This profound

man informed me that the Beadle counted on my buying him off; on my

bribing him not to summon me; and that if I would attend an Inquest with

a cheerful countenance, and profess alacrity in that branch of my

country’s service, the Beadle would be disheartened, and would give up

the game.

I roused my energies, and the next time the wily Beadle summoned me, I

went. The Beadle was the blankest Beadle I have ever looked on when I

answered to my name; and his discomfiture gave me courage to go through

with it.

We were impanelled to inquire concerning the death of a very little mite

of a child. It was the old miserable story. Whether the mother had

committed the minor offence of concealing the birth, or whether she had

committed the major offence of killing the child, was the question on

which we were wanted. We must commit her on one of the two issues.

The Inquest came off in the parish workhouse, and I have yet a lively

impression that I was unanimously received by my brother Jurymen as a

brother of the utmost conceivable insignificance. Also, that before we

began, a broker who had lately cheated me fearfully in the matter of a

pair of card-tables, was for the utmost rigour of the law. I remember

that we sat in a sort of board-room, on such very large square horse-hair

chairs that I wondered what race of Patagonians they were made for; and

further, that an undertaker gave me his card when we were in the full

moral freshness of having just been sworn, as ‘an inhabitant that was

newly come into the parish, and was likely to have a young family.’ The

case was then stated to us by the Coroner, and then we went

down-stairs—led by the plotting Beadle—to view the body. From that day

to this, the poor little figure, on which that sounding legal appellation

was bestowed, has lain in the same place and with the same surroundings,

to my thinking. In a kind of crypt devoted to the warehousing of the

parochial coffins, and in the midst of a perfect Panorama of coffins of

all sizes, it was stretched on a box; the mother had put it in her

box—this box—almost as soon as it was born, and it had been presently

found there. It had been opened, and neatly sewn up, and regarded from

that point of view, it looked like a stuffed creature. It rested on a

clean white cloth, with a surgical instrument or so at hand, and regarded

from that point of view, it looked as if the cloth were ‘laid,’ and the

Giant were coming to dinner. There was nothing repellent about the poor

piece of innocence, and it demanded a mere form of looking at. So, we

looked at an old pauper who was going about among the coffins with a foot

rule, as if he were a case of Self-Measurement; and we looked at one

another; and we said the place was well whitewashed anyhow; and then our

conversational powers as a British Jury flagged, and the foreman said,

‘All right, gentlemen? Back again, Mr. Beadle!’

The miserable young creature who had given birth to this child within a

very few days, and who had cleaned the cold wet door-steps immediately

afterwards, was brought before us when we resumed our horse-hair chairs,

and was present during the proceedings. She had a horse-hair chair

herself, being very weak and ill; and I remember how she turned to the

unsympathetic nurse who attended her, and who might have been the

figure-head of a pauper-ship, and how she hid her face and sobs and tears

upon that wooden shoulder. I remember, too, how hard her mistress was

upon her (she was a servant-of-all-work), and with what a cruel

pertinacity that piece of Virtue spun her thread of evidence double, by

intertwisting it with the sternest thread of construction. Smitten hard

by the terrible low wail from the utterly friendless orphan girl, which

never ceased during the whole inquiry, I took heart to ask this witness a

question or two, which hopefully admitted of an answer that might give a

favourable turn to the case. She made the turn as little favourable as

it could be, but it did some good, and the Coroner, who was nobly patient

and humane (he was the late Mr. Wakley), cast a look of strong

encouragement in my direction. Then, we had the doctor who had made the

examination, and the usual tests as to whether the child was born alive;

but he was a timid, muddle-headed doctor, and got confused and

contradictory, and wouldn’t say this, and couldn’t answer for that, and

the immaculate broker was too much for him, and our side slid back again.

However, I tried again, and the Coroner backed me again, for which I ever

afterwards felt grateful to him as I do now to his memory; and we got

another favourable turn, out of some other witness, some member of the

family with a strong prepossession against the sinner; and I think we had

the doctor back again; and I know that the Coroner summed up for our

side, and that I and my British brothers turned round to discuss our

verdict, and get ourselves into great difficulties with our large chairs

and the broker. At that stage of the case I tried hard again, being

convinced that I had cause for it; and at last we found for the minor

offence of only concealing the birth; and the poor desolate creature, who

had been taken out during our deliberation, being brought in again to be

told of the verdict, then dropped upon her knees before us, with

protestations that we were right—protestations among the most affecting

that I have ever heard in my life—and was carried away insensible.

(In private conversation after this was all over, the Coroner showed me

his reasons as a trained surgeon, for perceiving it to be impossible that

the child could, under the most favourable circumstances, have drawn many

breaths, in the very doubtful case of its having ever breathed at all;

this, owing to the discovery of some foreign matter in the windpipe,

quite irreconcilable with many moments of life.)

When the agonised girl had made those final protestations, I had seen her

face, and it was in unison with her distracted heartbroken voice, and it

was very moving. It certainly did not impress me by any beauty that it

had, and if I ever see it again in another world I shall only know it by

the help of some new sense or intelligence. But it came to me in my

sleep that night, and I selfishly dismissed it in the most efficient way

I could think of. I caused some extra care to be taken of her in the

prison, and counsel to be retained for her defence when she was tried at

the Old Bailey; and her sentence was lenient, and her history and conduct

proved that it was right. In doing the little I did for her, I remember

to have had the kind help of some gentle-hearted functionary to whom I

addressed myself—but what functionary I have long forgotten—who I suppose

was officially present at the Inquest.

I regard this as a very notable uncommercial experience, because this

good came of a Beadle. And to the best of my knowledge, information, and

belief, it is the only good that ever did come of a Beadle since the

first Beadle put on his cocked-hat.

XX

BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

IT came into my mind that I would recall in these notes a few of the many

hostelries I have rested at in the course of my journeys; and, indeed, I

had taken up my pen for the purpose, when I was baffled by an accidental

circumstance. It was the having to leave off, to wish the owner of a

certain bright face that looked in at my door, ‘many happy returns of the

day.’ Thereupon a new thought came into my mind, driving its predecessor

out, and I began to recall—instead of Inns—the birthdays that I have put

up at, on my way to this present sheet of paper.

I can very well remember being taken out to visit some peach-faced

creature in a blue sash, and shoes to correspond, whose life I supposed

to consist entirely of birthdays. Upon seed-cake, sweet wine, and

shining presents, that glorified young person seemed to me to be

exclusively reared. At so early a stage of my travels did I assist at

the anniversary of her nativity (and become enamoured of her), that I had

not yet acquired the recondite knowledge that a birthday is the common

property of all who are born, but supposed it to be a special gift

bestowed by the favouring Heavens on that one distinguished infant.

There was no other company, and we sat in a shady bower—under a table, as

my better (or worse) knowledge leads me to believe—and were regaled with

saccharine substances and liquids, until it was time to part. A bitter

powder was administered to me next morning, and I was wretched. On the

whole, a pretty accurate foreshadowing of my more mature experiences in

such wise!

Then came the time when, inseparable from one’s own birthday, was a

certain sense of merit, a consciousness of well-earned distinction. When

I regarded my birthday as a graceful achievement of my own, a monument of

my perseverance, independence, and good sense, redounding greatly to my

honour. This was at about the period when Olympia Squires became

involved in the anniversary. Olympia was most beautiful (of course), and

I loved her to that degree, that I used to be obliged to get out of my

little bed in the night, expressly to exclaim to Solitude, ‘O, Olympia

Squires!’ Visions of Olympia, clothed entirely in sage-green, from which

I infer a defectively educated taste on the part of her respected

parents, who were necessarily unacquainted with the South Kensington

Museum, still arise before me. Truth is sacred, and the visions are

crowned by a shining white beaver bonnet, impossibly suggestive of a

little feminine postboy. My memory presents a birthday when Olympia and

I were taken by an unfeeling relative—some cruel uncle, or the like—to a

slow torture called an Orrery. The terrible instrument was set up at the

local Theatre, and I had expressed a profane wish in the morning that it

was a Play: for which a serious aunt had probed my conscience deep, and

my pocket deeper, by reclaiming a bestowed half-crown. It was a

venerable and a shabby Orrery, at least one thousand stars and

twenty-five comets behind the age. Nevertheless, it was awful. When the

low-spirited gentleman with a wand said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ (meaning

particularly Olympia and me), ‘the lights are about to be put out, but

there is not the slightest cause for alarm,’ it was very alarming. Then

the planets and stars began. Sometimes they wouldn’t come on, sometimes

they wouldn’t go off, sometimes they had holes in them, and mostly they

didn’t seem to be good likenesses. All this time the gentleman with the

wand was going on in the dark (tapping away at the heavenly bodies

between whiles, like a wearisome woodpecker), about a sphere revolving on

its own axis eight hundred and ninety-seven thousand millions of times—or

miles—in two hundred and sixty-three thousand five hundred and

twenty-four millions of something elses, until I thought if this was a

birthday it were better never to have been born. Olympia, also, became

much depressed, and we both slumbered and woke cross, and still the

gentleman was going on in the dark—whether up in the stars, or down on

the stage, it would have been hard to make out, if it had been worth

trying—cyphering away about planes of orbits, to such an infamous extent

that Olympia, stung to madness, actually kicked me. A pretty birthday

spectacle, when the lights were turned up again, and all the schools in

the town (including the National, who had come in for nothing, and serve

them right, for they were always throwing stones) were discovered with

exhausted countenances, screwing their knuckles into their eyes, or

clutching their heads of hair. A pretty birthday speech when Dr. Sleek

of the City-Free bobbed up his powdered head in the stage-box, and said

that before this assembly dispersed he really must beg to express his

entire approval of a lecture as improving, as informing, as devoid of

anything that could call a blush into the cheek of youth, as any it had

ever been his lot to hear delivered. A pretty birthday altogether, when

Astronomy couldn’t leave poor Small Olympia Squires and me alone, but

must put an end to our loves! For, we never got over it; the threadbare

Orrery outwore our mutual tenderness; the man with the wand was too much

for the boy with the bow.

When shall I disconnect the combined smells of oranges, brown paper, and

straw, from those other birthdays at school, when the coming hamper casts

its shadow before, and when a week of social harmony—shall I add of

admiring and affectionate popularity—led up to that Institution? What

noble sentiments were expressed to me in the days before the hamper, what

vows of friendship were sworn to me, what exceedingly old knives were

given me, what generous avowals of having been in the wrong emanated from

else obstinate spirits once enrolled among my enemies! The birthday of

the potted game and guava jelly, is still made special to me by the noble

conduct of Bully Globson. Letters from home had mysteriously inquired

whether I should be much surprised and disappointed if among the

treasures in the coming hamper I discovered potted game, and guava jelly

from the Western Indies. I had mentioned those hints in confidence to a

few friends, and had promised to give away, as I now see reason to

believe, a handsome covey of partridges potted, and about a hundredweight

of guava jelly. It was now that Globson, Bully no more, sought me out in

the playground. He was a big fat boy, with a big fat head and a big fat

fist, and at the beginning of that Half had raised such a bump on my

forehead that I couldn’t get my hat of state on, to go to church. He

said that after an interval of cool reflection (four months) he now felt

this blow to have been an error of judgment, and that he wished to

apologise for the same. Not only that, but holding down his big head

between his two big hands in order that I might reach it conveniently, he

requested me, as an act of justice which would appease his awakened

conscience, to raise a retributive bump upon it, in the presence of

witnesses. This handsome proposal I modestly declined, and he then

embraced me, and we walked away conversing. We conversed respecting the

West India Islands, and, in the pursuit of knowledge he asked me with

much interest whether in the course of my reading I had met with any

reliable description of the mode of manufacturing guava jelly; or whether

I had ever happened to taste that conserve, which he had been given to

understand was of rare excellence.

Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty; and then with the waning months

came an ever augmenting sense of the dignity of twenty-one. Heaven knows

I had nothing to ‘come into,’ save the bare birthday, and yet I esteemed

it as a great possession. I now and then paved the way to my state of

dignity, by beginning a proposition with the casual words, ‘say that a

man of twenty-one,’ or by the incidental assumption of a fact that could

not sanely be disputed, as, ‘for when a fellow comes to be a man of

twenty-one.’ I gave a party on the occasion. She was there. It is

unnecessary to name Her, more particularly; She was older than I, and had

pervaded every chink and crevice of my mind for three or four years. I

had held volumes of Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the

subject of our union, and I had written letters more in number than

Horace Walpole’s, to that discreet woman, soliciting her daughter’s hand

in marriage. I had never had the remotest intention of sending any of

those letters; but to write them, and after a few days tear them up, had

been a sublime occupation. Sometimes, I had begun ‘Honoured Madam. I

think that a lady gifted with those powers of observation which I know

you to possess, and endowed with those womanly sympathies with the young

and ardent which it were more than heresy to doubt, can scarcely have

failed to discover that I love your adorable daughter, deeply,

devotedly.’ In less buoyant states of mind I had begun, ‘Bear with me,

Dear Madam, bear with a daring wretch who is about to make a surprising

confession to you, wholly unanticipated by yourself, and which he

beseeches you to commit to the flames as soon as you have become aware to

what a towering height his mad ambition soars.’ At other times—periods

of profound mental depression, when She had gone out to balls where I was

not—the draft took the affecting form of a paper to be left on my table

after my departure to the confines of the globe. As thus: ‘For Mrs.

Onowenever, these lines when the hand that traces them shall be far away.

I could not bear the daily torture of hopelessly loving the dear one whom

I will not name. Broiling on the coast of Africa, or congealing on the

shores of Greenland, I am far far better there than here.’ (In this

sentiment my cooler judgment perceives that the family of the beloved

object would have most completely concurred.) ‘If I ever emerge from

obscurity, and my name is ever heralded by Fame, it will be for her dear

sake. If I ever amass Gold, it will be to pour it at her feet. Should I

on the other hand become the prey of Ravens—’ I doubt if I ever quite

made up my mind what was to be done in that affecting case; I tried ‘then

it is better so;’ but not feeling convinced that it would be better so, I

vacillated between leaving all else blank, which looked expressive and

bleak, or winding up with ‘Farewell!’

This fictitious correspondence of mine is to blame for the foregoing

digression. I was about to pursue the statement that on my twenty-first

birthday I gave a party, and She was there. It was a beautiful party.

There was not a single animate or inanimate object connected with it

(except the company and myself) that I had ever seen before. Everything

was hired, and the mercenaries in attendance were profound strangers to

me. Behind a door, in the crumby part of the night when wine-glasses

were to be found in unexpected spots, I spoke to Her—spoke out to Her.

What passed, I cannot as a man of honour reveal. She was all angelical

gentleness, but a word was mentioned—a short and dreadful word of three

letters, beginning with a B— which, as I remarked at the moment,

‘scorched my brain.’ She went away soon afterwards, and when the hollow

throng (though to be sure it was no fault of theirs) dispersed, I issued

forth, with a dissipated scorner, and, as I mentioned expressly to him,

‘sought oblivion.’ It was found, with a dreadful headache in it, but it

didn’t last; for, in the shaming light of next day’s noon, I raised my

heavy head in bed, looking back to the birthdays behind me, and tracking

the circle by which I had got round, after all, to the bitter powder and

the wretchedness again.

This reactionary powder (taken so largely by the human race I am inclined

to regard it as the Universal Medicine once sought for in Laboratories)

is capable of being made up in another form for birthday use. Anybody’s

long-lost brother will do ill to turn up on a birthday. If I had a

long-lost brother I should know beforehand that he would prove a

tremendous fraternal failure if he appointed to rush into my arms on my

birthday. The first Magic Lantern I ever saw, was secretly and

elaborately planned to be the great effect of a very juvenile birthday;

but it wouldn’t act, and its images were dim. My experience of adult

birthday Magic Lanterns may possibly have been unfortunate, but has

certainly been similar. I have an illustrative birthday in my eye: a

birthday of my friend Flipfield, whose birthdays had long been remarkable

as social successes. There had been nothing set or formal about them;

Flipfield having been accustomed merely to say, two or three days before,

‘Don’t forget to come and dine, old boy, according to custom;’—I don’t

know what he said to the ladies he invited, but I may safely assume it

_not_ to have been ‘old girl.’ Those were delightful gatherings, and

were enjoyed by all participators. In an evil hour, a long-lost brother

of Flipfield’s came to light in foreign parts. Where he had been hidden,

or what he had been doing, I don’t know, for Flipfield vaguely informed

me that he had turned up ‘on the banks of the Ganges’—speaking of him as

if he had been washed ashore. The Long-lost was coming home, and

Flipfield made an unfortunate calculation, based on the well-known

regularity of the P. and O. Steamers, that matters might be so contrived

as that the Long-lost should appear in the nick of time on his

(Flipfield’s) birthday. Delicacy commanded that I should repress the

gloomy anticipations with which my soul became fraught when I heard of

this plan. The fatal day arrived, and we assembled in force. Mrs.

Flipfield senior formed an interesting feature in the group, with a

blue-veined miniature of the late Mr. Flipfield round her neck, in an

oval, resembling a tart from the pastrycook’s: his hair powdered, and the

bright buttons on his coat, evidently very like. She was accompanied by

Miss Flipfield, the eldest of her numerous family, who held her

pocket-handkerchief to her bosom in a majestic manner, and spoke to all

of us (none of us had ever seen her before), in pious and condoning

tones, of all the quarrels that had taken place in the family, from her

infancy—which must have been a long time ago—down to that hour. The

Long-lost did not appear. Dinner, half an hour later than usual, was

announced, and still no Long-lost. We sat down to table. The knife and

fork of the Long-lost made a vacuum in Nature, and when the champagne

came round for the first time, Flipfield gave him up for the day, and had

them removed. It was then that the Long-lost gained the height of his

popularity with the company; for my own part, I felt convinced that I

loved him dearly. Flipfield’s dinners are perfect, and he is the easiest

and best of entertainers. Dinner went on brilliantly, and the more the

Long-lost didn’t come, the more comfortable we grew, and the more highly

we thought of him. Flipfield’s own man (who has a regard for me) was in

the act of struggling with an ignorant stipendiary, to wrest from him the

wooden leg of a Guinea-fowl which he was pressing on my acceptance, and

to substitute a slice of the breast, when a ringing at the door-bell

suspended the strife. I looked round me, and perceived the sudden pallor

which I knew my own visage revealed, reflected in the faces of the

company. Flipfield hurriedly excused himself, went out, was absent for

about a minute or two, and then re-entered with the Long-lost.

I beg to say distinctly that if the stranger had brought Mont Blanc with

him, or had come attended by a retinue of eternal snows, he could not

have chilled the circle to the marrow in a more efficient manner.

Embodied Failure sat enthroned upon the Long-lost’s brow, and pervaded

him to his Long-lost boots. In vain Mrs. Flipfield senior, opening her

arms, exclaimed, ‘My Tom!’ and pressed his nose against the counterfeit

presentment of his other parent. In vain Miss Flipfield, in the first

transports of this re-union, showed him a dint upon her maidenly cheek,

and asked him if he remembered when he did that with the bellows? We,

the bystanders, were overcome, but overcome by the palpable,

undisguisable, utter, and total break-down of the Long-lost. Nothing he

could have done would have set him right with us but his instant return

to the Ganges. In the very same moments it became established that the

feeling was reciprocal, and that the Long-lost detested us. When a

friend of the family (not myself, upon my honour), wishing to set things

going again, asked him, while he partook of soup—asked him with an

amiability of intention beyond all praise, but with a weakness of

execution open to defeat—what kind of river he considered the Ganges, the

Long-lost, scowling at the friend of the family over his spoon, as one of

an abhorrent race, replied, ‘Why, a river of water, I suppose,’ and

spooned his soup into himself with a malignancy of hand and eye that

blighted the amiable questioner. Not an opinion could be elicited from

the Long-lost, in unison with the sentiments of any individual present.

He contradicted Flipfield dead, before he had eaten his salmon. He had

no idea—or affected to have no idea—that it was his brother’s birthday,

and on the communication of that interesting fact to him, merely wanted

to make him out four years older than he was. He was an antipathetical

being, with a peculiar power and gift of treading on everybody’s

tenderest place. They talk in America of a man’s ‘Platform.’ I should

describe the Platform of the Long-lost as a Platform composed of other

people’s corns, on which he had stumped his way, with all his might and

main, to his present position. It is needless to add that Flipfield’s

great birthday went by the board, and that he was a wreck when I

pretended at parting to wish him many happy returns of it.

There is another class of birthdays at which I have so frequently

assisted, that I may assume such birthdays to be pretty well known to the

human race. My friend Mayday’s birthday is an example. The guests have

no knowledge of one another except on that one day in the year, and are

annually terrified for a week by the prospect of meeting one another

again. There is a fiction among us that we have uncommon reasons for

being particularly lively and spirited on the occasion, whereas deep

despondency is no phrase for the expression of our feelings. But the

wonderful feature of the case is, that we are in tacit accordance to

avoid the subject—to keep it as far off as possible, as long as

possible—and to talk about anything else, rather than the joyful event.

I may even go so far as to assert that there is a dumb compact among us

that we will pretend that it is NOT Mayday’s birthday. A mysterious and

gloomy Being, who is said to have gone to school with Mayday, and who is

so lank and lean that he seriously impugns the Dietary of the

establishment at which they were jointly educated, always leads us, as I

may say, to the block, by laying his grisly hand on a decanter and

begging us to fill our glasses. The devices and pretences that I have

seen put in practice to defer the fatal moment, and to interpose between

this man and his purpose, are innumerable. I have known desperate

guests, when they saw the grisly hand approaching the decanter, wildly to

begin, without any antecedent whatsoever, ‘That reminds me—’ and to

plunge into long stories. When at last the hand and the decanter come

together, a shudder, a palpable perceptible shudder, goes round the

table. We receive the reminder that it is Mayday’s birthday, as if it

were the anniversary of some profound disgrace he had undergone, and we

sought to comfort him. And when we have drunk Mayday’s health, and

wished him many happy returns, we are seized for some moments with a

ghastly blitheness, an unnatural levity, as if we were in the first

flushed reaction of having undergone a surgical operation.

Birthdays of this species have a public as well as a private phase. My

‘boyhood’s home,’ Dullborough, presents a case in point. An Immortal

Somebody was wanted in Dullborough, to dimple for a day the stagnant face

of the waters; he was rather wanted by Dullborough generally, and much

wanted by the principal hotel-keeper. The County history was looked up

for a locally Immortal Somebody, but the registered Dullborough worthies

were all Nobodies. In this state of things, it is hardly necessary to

record that Dullborough did what every man does when he wants to write a

book or deliver a lecture, and is provided with all the materials except

a subject. It fell back upon Shakespeare.

No sooner was it resolved to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday in

Dullborough, than the popularity of the immortal bard became surprising.

You might have supposed the first edition of his works to have been

published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to have got half

through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had ever done half that,

but that is a private opinion.) A young gentleman with a sonnet, the

retention of which for two years had enfeebled his mind and undermined

his knees, got the sonnet into the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh.

Portraits of Shakespeare broke out in the bookshop windows, and our

principal artist painted a large original portrait in oils for the

decoration of the dining-room. It was not in the least like any of the

other Portraits, and was exceedingly admired, the head being much

swollen. At the Institution, the Debating Society discussed the new

question, Was there sufficient ground for supposing that the Immortal

Shakespeare ever stole deer? This was indignantly decided by an

overwhelming majority in the negative; indeed, there was but one vote on

the Poaching side, and that was the vote of the orator who had undertaken

to advocate it, and who became quite an obnoxious character—particularly

to the Dullborough ‘roughs,’ who were about as well informed on the

matter as most other people. Distinguished speakers were invited down,

and very nearly came (but not quite). Subscriptions were opened, and

committees sat, and it would have been far from a popular measure in the

height of the excitement, to have told Dullborough that it wasn’t

Stratford-upon-Avon. Yet, after all these preparations, when the great

festivity took place, and the portrait, elevated aloft, surveyed the

company as if it were in danger of springing a mine of intellect and

blowing itself up, it did undoubtedly happen, according to the

inscrutable mysteries of things, that nobody could be induced, not to say

to touch upon Shakespeare, but to come within a mile of him, until the

crack speaker of Dullborough rose to propose the immortal memory. Which

he did with the perplexing and astonishing result that before he had

repeated the great name half-a-dozen times, or had been upon his legs as

many minutes, he was assailed with a general shout of ‘Question.’