Once upon a time, a good many years ago, there was a traveller, and
he set out upon a journey. It was a magic journey, and was to seem
very long when he began it, and very short when he got half way
through.

He travelled along a rather dark path for some little time, without
meeting anything, until at last he came to a beautiful child. So he
said to the child, “What do you do here?” And the child said, “I am
always at play. Come and play with me!”

So, he played with that child, the whole day long, and they were
very merry. The sky was so blue, the sun was so bright, the water
was so sparkling, the leaves were so green, the flowers were so
lovely, and they heard such singing-birds and saw so many butteries,
that everything was beautiful. This was in fine weather. When it
rained, they loved to watch the falling drops, and to smell the
fresh scents. When it blew, it was delightful to listen to the
wind, and fancy what it said, as it came rushing from its home–
where was that, they wondered!–whistling and howling, driving the
clouds before it, bending the trees, rumbling in the chimneys,
shaking the house, and making the sea roar in fury. But, when it
snowed, that was best of all; for, they liked nothing so well as to
look up at the white flakes falling fast and thick, like down from
the breasts of millions of white birds; and to see how smooth and
deep the drift was; and to listen to the hush upon the paths and
roads.

They had plenty of the finest toys in the world, and the most
astonishing picture-books: all about scimitars and slippers and
turbans, and dwarfs and giants and genii and fairies, and blue-
beards and bean-stalks and riches and caverns and forests and
Valentines and Orsons: and all new and all true.

But, one day, of a sudden, the traveller lost the child. He called
to him over and over again, but got no answer. So, he went upon his
road, and went on for a little while without meeting anything, until
at last he came to a handsome boy. So, he said to the boy, “What do
you do here?” And the boy said, “I am always learning. Come and
learn with me.”

So he learned with that boy about Jupiter and Juno, and the Greeks
and the Romans, and I don’t know what, and learned more than I could
tell–or he either, for he soon forgot a great deal of it. But,
they were not always learning; they had the merriest games that ever
were played. They rowed upon the river in summer, and skated on the
ice in winter; they were active afoot, and active on horseback; at
cricket, and all games at ball; at prisoner’s base, hare and hounds,
follow my leader, and more sports than I can think of; nobody could
beat them. They had holidays too, and Twelfth cakes, and parties
where they danced till midnight, and real Theatres where they saw
palaces of real gold and silver rise out of the real earth, and saw
all the wonders of the world at once. As to friends, they had such
dear friends and so many of them, that I want the time to reckon
them up. They were all young, like the handsome boy, and were never
to be strange to one another all their lives through.

Still, one day, in the midst of all these pleasures, the traveller
lost the boy as he had lost the child, and, after calling to him in
vain, went on upon his journey. So he went on for a little while
without seeing anything, until at last he came to a young man. So,
he said to the young man, “What do you do here?” And the young man
said, “I am always in love. Come and love with me.”

So, he went away with that young man, and presently they came to one
of the prettiest girls that ever was seen–just like Fanny in the
corner there–and she had eyes like Fanny, and hair like Fanny, and
dimples like Fanny’s, and she laughed and coloured just as Fanny
does while I am talking about her. So, the young man fell in love
directly–just as Somebody I won’t mention, the first time he came
here, did with Fanny. Well! he was teased sometimes–just as
Somebody used to be by Fanny; and they quarrelled sometimes–just as
Somebody and Fanny used to quarrel; and they made it up, and sat in
the dark, and wrote letters every day, and never were happy asunder,
and were always looking out for one another and pretending not to,
and were engaged at Christmas-time, and sat close to one another by
the fire, and were going to be married very soon–all exactly like
Somebody I won’t mention, and Fanny!

But, the traveller lost them one day, as he had lost the rest of his
friends, and, after calling to them to come back, which they never
did, went on upon his journey. So, he went on for a little while
without seeing anything, until at last he came to a middle-aged
gentleman. So, he said to the gentleman, “What are you doing here?”
And his answer was, “I am always busy. Come and be busy with me!”

So, he began to be very busy with that gentleman, and they went on
through the wood together. The whole journey was through a wood,
only it had been open and green at first, like a wood in spring; and
now began to be thick and dark, like a wood in summer; some of the
little trees that had come out earliest, were even turning brown.
The gentleman was not alone, but had a lady of about the same age
with him, who was his Wife; and they had children, who were with
them too. So, they all went on together through the wood, cutting
down the trees, and making a path through the branches and the
fallen leaves, and carrying burdens, and working hard.

Sometimes, they came to a long green avenue that opened into deeper
woods. Then they would hear a very little, distant voice crying,
“Father, father, I am another child! Stop for me!” And presently
they would see a very little figure, growing larger as it came
along, running to join them. When it came up, they all crowded
round it, and kissed and welcomed it; and then they all went on
together.

Sometimes, they came to several avenues at once, and then they all
stood still, and one of the children said, “Father, I am going to
sea,” and another said, “Father, I am going to India,” and another,
“Father, I am going to seek my fortune where I can,” and another,
“Father, I am going to Heaven!” So, with many tears at parting,
they went, solitary, down those avenues, each child upon its way;
and the child who went to Heaven, rose into the golden air and
vanished.

Whenever these partings happened, the traveller looked at the
gentleman, and saw him glance up at the sky above the trees, where
the day was beginning to decline, and the sunset to come on. He
saw, too, that his hair was turning grey. But, they never could
rest long, for they had their journey to perform, and it was
necessary for them to be always busy.

At last, there had been so many partings that there were no children
left, and only the traveller, the gentleman, and the lady, went upon
their way in company. And now the wood was yellow; and now brown;
and the leaves, even of the forest trees, began to fall.

So, they came to an avenue that was darker than the rest, and were
pressing forward on their journey without looking down it when the
lady stopped.

“My husband,” said the lady. “I am called.”

They listened, and they heard a voice a long way down the avenue,
say, “Mother, mother!”

It was the voice of the first child who had said, “I am going to
Heaven!” and the father said, “I pray not yet. The sunset is very
near. I pray not yet!”

But, the voice cried, “Mother, mother!” without minding him, though
his hair was now quite white, and tears were on his face.

Then, the mother, who was already drawn into the shade of the dark
avenue and moving away with her arms still round his neck, kissed
him, and said, “My dearest, I am summoned, and I go!” And she was
gone. And the traveller and he were left alone together.

And they went on and on together, until they came to very near the
end of the wood: so near, that they could see the sunset shining
red before them through the trees.

Yet, once more, while he broke his way among the branches, the
traveller lost his friend. He called and called, but there was no
reply, and when he passed out of the wood, and saw the peaceful sun
going down upon a wide purple prospect, he came to an old man
sitting on a fallen tree. So, he said to the old man, “What do you
do here?” And the old man said with a calm smile, “I am always
remembering. Come and remember with me!”

So the traveller sat down by the side of that old man, face to face
with the serene sunset; and all his friends came softly back and
stood around him. The beautiful child, the handsome boy, the young
man in love, the father, mother, and children: every one of them
was there, and he had lost nothing. So, he loved them all, and was
kind and forbearing with them all, and was always pleased to watch
them all, and they all honoured and loved him. And I think the
traveller must be yourself, dear Grandfather, because this what you
do to us, and what we do to you.

I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children
assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree
was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high
above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of
little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright
objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green
leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least,
and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable
twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads,
wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic
furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched
among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping;
there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in
appearance than many real men–and no wonder, for their heads took
off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles
and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes,
sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were
trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold
and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there
were guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in
enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were
teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles,
conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially
dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts,
crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me,
delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend,
“There was everything, and more.” This motley collection of odd
objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and flashing back
the bright looks directed towards it from every side–some of the
diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table, and
a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty
mothers, aunts, and nurses–made a lively realisation of the fancies
of childhood; and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and
all the things that come into existence on the earth, have their
wild adornments at that well-remembered time.

Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house
awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not
care to resist, to my own childhood. I begin to consider, what do
we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our
own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.

Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its
growth by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy
tree arises; and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top–
for I observe in this tree the singular property that it appears to
grow downward towards the earth–I look into my youngest Christmas
recollections!

All toys at first, I find. Up yonder, among the green holly and red
berries, is the Tumbler with his hands in his pockets, who wouldn’t
lie down, but whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted in
rolling his fat body about, until he rolled himself still, and
brought those lobster eyes of his to bear upon me–when I affected
to laugh very much, but in my heart of hearts was extremely doubtful
of him. Close beside him is that infernal snuff-box, out of which
there sprang a demoniacal Counsellor in a black gown, with an
obnoxious head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide open, who was
not to be endured on any terms, but could not be put away either;
for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of
Mammoth Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected. Nor is the frog
with cobbler’s wax on his tail, far off; for there was no knowing
where he wouldn’t jump; and when he flew over the candle, and came
upon one’s hand with that spotted back–red on a green ground–he
was horrible. The cardboard lady in a blue-silk skirt, who was
stood up against the candlestick to dance, and whom I see on the
same branch, was milder, and was beautiful; but I can’t say as much
for the larger cardboard man, who used to be hung against the wall
and pulled by a string; there was a sinister expression in that nose
of his; and when he got his legs round his neck (which he very often
did), he was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone with.

When did that dreadful Mask first look at me? Who put it on, and
why was I so frightened that the sight of it is an era in my life?
It is not a hideous visage in itself; it is even meant to be droll,
why then were its stolid features so intolerable? Surely not
because it hid the wearer’s face. An apron would have done as much;
and though I should have preferred even the apron away, it would not
have been absolutely insupportable, like the mask. Was it the
immovability of the mask? The doll’s face was immovable, but I was
not afraid of HER. Perhaps that fixed and set change coming over a
real face, infused into my quickened heart some remote suggestion
and dread of the universal change that is to come on every face, and
make it still? Nothing reconciled me to it. No drummers, from whom
proceeded a melancholy chirping on the turning of a handle; no
regiment of soldiers, with a mute band, taken out of a box, and
fitted, one by one, upon a stiff and lazy little set of lazy-tongs;
no old woman, made of wires and a brown-paper composition, cutting
up a pie for two small children; could give me a permanent comfort,
for a long time. Nor was it any satisfaction to be shown the Mask,
and see that it was made of paper, or to have it locked up and be
assured that no one wore it. The mere recollection of that fixed
face, the mere knowledge of its existence anywhere, was sufficient
to awake me in the night all perspiration and horror, with, “O I
know it’s coming! O the mask!”

I never wondered what the dear old donkey with the panniers–there
he is! was made of, then! His hide was real to the touch, I
recollect. And the great black horse with the round red spots all
over him–the horse that I could even get upon–I never wondered
what had brought him to that strange condition, or thought that such
a horse was not commonly seen at Newmarket. The four horses of no
colour, next to him, that went into the waggon of cheeses, and could
be taken out and stabled under the piano, appear to have bits of
fur-tippet for their tails, and other bits for their manes, and to
stand on pegs instead of legs, but it was not so when they were
brought home for a Christmas present. They were all right, then;
neither was their harness unceremoniously nailed into their chests,
as appears to be the case now. The tinkling works of the music-
cart, I DID find out, to be made of quill tooth-picks and wire; and
I always thought that little tumbler in his shirt sleeves,
perpetually swarming up one side of a wooden frame, and coming down,
head foremost, on the other, rather a weak-minded person–though
good-natured; but the Jacob’s Ladder, next him, made of little
squares of red wood, that went flapping and clattering over one
another, each developing a different picture, and the whole
enlivened by small bells, was a mighty marvel and a great delight.

Ah! The Doll’s house!–of which I was not proprietor, but where I
visited. I don’t admire the Houses of Parliament half so much as
that stone-fronted mansion with real glass windows, and door-steps,
and a real balcony–greener than I ever see now, except at watering
places; and even they afford but a poor imitation. And though it
DID open all at once, the entire house-front (which was a blow, I
admit, as cancelling the fiction of a staircase), it was but to shut
it up again, and I could believe. Even open, there were three
distinct rooms in it: a sitting-room and bed-room, elegantly
furnished, and best of all, a kitchen, with uncommonly soft fire-
irons, a plentiful assortment of diminutive utensils–oh, the
warming-pan!–and a tin man-cook in profile, who was always going to
fry two fish. What Barmecide justice have I done to the noble
feasts wherein the set of wooden platters figured, each with its own
peculiar delicacy, as a ham or turkey, glued tight on to it, and
garnished with something green, which I recollect as moss! Could
all the Temperance Societies of these later days, united, give me
such a tea-drinking as I have had through the means of yonder little
set of blue crockery, which really would hold liquid (it ran out of
the small wooden cask, I recollect, and tasted of matches), and
which made tea, nectar. And if the two legs of the ineffectual
little sugar-tongs did tumble over one another, and want purpose,
like Punch’s hands, what does it matter? And if I did once shriek
out, as a poisoned child, and strike the fashionable company with
consternation, by reason of having drunk a little teaspoon,
inadvertently dissolved in too hot tea, I was never the worse for
it, except by a powder!

Upon the next branches of the tree, lower down, hard by the green
roller and miniature gardening-tools, how thick the books begin to
hang. Thin books, in themselves, at first, but many of them, and
with deliciously smooth covers of bright red or green. What fat
black letters to begin with! “A was an archer, and shot at a frog.”
Of course he was. He was an apple-pie also, and there he is! He
was a good many things in his time, was A, and so were most of his
friends, except X, who had so little versatility, that I never knew
him to get beyond Xerxes or Xantippe–like Y, who was always
confined to a Yacht or a Yew Tree; and Z condemned for ever to be a
Zebra or a Zany. But, now, the very tree itself changes, and
becomes a bean-stalk–the marvellous bean-stalk up which Jack
climbed to the Giant’s house! And now, those dreadfully
interesting, double-headed giants, with their clubs over their
shoulders, begin to stride along the boughs in a perfect throng,
dragging knights and ladies home for dinner by the hair of their
heads. And Jack–how noble, with his sword of sharpness, and his
shoes of swiftness! Again those old meditations come upon me as I
gaze up at him; and I debate within myself whether there was more
than one Jack (which I am loth to believe possible), or only one
genuine original admirable Jack, who achieved all the recorded
exploits.

Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak, in which–
the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her
basket–Little Red Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give
me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf
who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his
appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about
his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have
married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.
But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look out
the Wolf in the Noah’s Ark there, and put him late in the procession
on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded. O the wonderful
Noah’s Ark! It was not found seaworthy when put in a washing-tub,
and the animals were crammed in at the roof, and needed to have
their legs well shaken down before they could be got in, even there-
-and then, ten to one but they began to tumble out at the door,
which was but imperfectly fastened with a wire latch–but what was
THAT against it! Consider the noble fly, a size or two smaller than
the elephant: the lady-bird, the butterfly–all triumphs of art!
Consider the goose, whose feet were so small, and whose balance was
so indifferent, that he usually tumbled forward, and knocked down
all the animal creation. Consider Noah and his family, like idiotic
tobacco-stoppers; and how the leopard stuck to warm little fingers;
and how the tails of the larger animals used gradually to resolve
themselves into frayed bits of string!

Hush! Again a forest, and somebody up in a tree–not Robin Hood,
not Valentine, not the Yellow Dwarf (I have passed him and all
Mother Bunch’s wonders, without mention), but an Eastern King with a
glittering scimitar and turban. By Allah! two Eastern Kings, for I
see another, looking over his shoulder! Down upon the grass, at the
tree’s foot, lies the full length of a coal-black Giant, stretched
asleep, with his head in a lady’s lap; and near them is a glass box,
fastened with four locks of shining steel, in which he keeps the
lady prisoner when he is awake. I see the four keys at his girdle
now. The lady makes signs to the two kings in the tree, who softly
descend. It is the setting-in of the bright Arabian Nights.

Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All
lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots
are full of treasure, with a little earth scattered on the top;
trees are for Ali Baba to hide in; beef-steaks are to throw down
into the Valley of Diamonds, that the precious stones may stick to
them, and be carried by the eagles to their nests, whence the
traders, with loud cries, will scare them. Tarts are made,
according to the recipe of the Vizier’s son of Bussorah, who turned
pastrycook after he was set down in his drawers at the gate of
Damascus; cobblers are all Mustaphas, and in the habit of sewing up
people cut into four pieces, to whom they are taken blind-fold.

Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a cave which only
waits for the magician, and the little fire, and the necromancy,
that will make the earth shake. All the dates imported come from
the same tree as that unlucky date, with whose shell the merchant
knocked out the eye of the genie’s invisible son. All olives are of
the stock of that fresh fruit, concerning which the Commander of the
Faithful overheard the boy conduct the fictitious trial of the
fraudulent olive merchant; all apples are akin to the apple
purchased (with two others) from the Sultan’s gardener for three
sequins, and which the tall black slave stole from the child. All
dogs are associated with the dog, really a transformed man, who
jumped upon the baker’s counter, and put his paw on the piece of bad
money. All rice recalls the rice which the awful lady, who was a
ghoule, could only peck by grains, because of her nightly feasts in
the burial-place. My very rocking-horse,–there he is, with his
nostrils turned completely inside-out, indicative of Blood!–should
have a peg in his neck, by virtue thereof to fly away with me, as
the wooden horse did with the Prince of Persia, in the sight of all
his father’s Court.

Yes, on every object that I recognise among those upper branches of
my Christmas Tree, I see this fairy light! When I wake in bed, at
daybreak, on the cold, dark, winter mornings, the white snow dimly
beheld, outside, through the frost on the window-pane, I hear
Dinarzade. “Sister, sister, if you are yet awake, I pray you finish
the history of the Young King of the Black Islands.” Scheherazade
replies, “If my lord the Sultan will suffer me to live another day,
sister, I will not only finish that, but tell you a more wonderful
story yet.” Then, the gracious Sultan goes out, giving no orders
for the execution, and we all three breathe again.

At this height of my tree I begin to see, cowering among the leaves-
-it may be born of turkey, or of pudding, or mince pie, or of these
many fancies, jumbled with Robinson Crusoe on his desert island,
Philip Quarll among the monkeys, Sandford and Merton with Mr.
Barlow, Mother Bunch, and the Mask–or it may be the result of
indigestion, assisted by imagination and over-doctoring–a
prodigious nightmare. It is so exceedingly indistinct, that I don’t
know why it’s frightful–but I know it is. I can only make out that
it is an immense array of shapeless things, which appear to be
planted on a vast exaggeration of the lazy-tongs that used to bear
the toy soldiers, and to be slowly coming close to my eyes, and
receding to an immeasurable distance. When it comes closest, it is
worse. In connection with it I descry remembrances of winter nights
incredibly long; of being sent early to bed, as a punishment for
some small offence, and waking in two hours, with a sensation of
having been asleep two nights; of the laden hopelessness of morning
ever dawning; and the oppression of a weight of remorse.

And now, I see a wonderful row of little lights rise smoothly out of
the ground, before a vast green curtain. Now, a bell rings–a magic
bell, which still sounds in my ears unlike all other bells–and
music plays, amidst a buzz of voices, and a fragrant smell of
orange-peel and oil. Anon, the magic bell commands the music to
cease, and the great green curtain rolls itself up majestically, and
The Play begins! The devoted dog of Montargis avenges the death of
his master, foully murdered in the Forest of Bondy; and a humorous
Peasant with a red nose and a very little hat, whom I take from this
hour forth to my bosom as a friend (I think he was a Waiter or an
Hostler at a village Inn, but many years have passed since he and I
have met), remarks that the sassigassity of that dog is indeed
surprising; and evermore this jocular conceit will live in my
remembrance fresh and unfading, overtopping all possible jokes, unto
the end of time. Or now, I learn with bitter tears how poor Jane
Shore, dressed all in white, and with her brown hair hanging down,
went starving through the streets; or how George Barnwell killed the
worthiest uncle that ever man had, and was afterwards so sorry for
it that he ought to have been let off. Comes swift to comfort me,
the Pantomime–stupendous Phenomenon!–when clowns are shot from
loaded mortars into the great chandelier, bright constellation that
it is; when Harlequins, covered all over with scales of pure gold,
twist and sparkle, like amazing fish; when Pantaloon (whom I deem it
no irreverence to compare in my own mind to my grandfather) puts
red-hot pokers in his pocket, and cries “Here’s somebody coming!” or
taxes the Clown with petty larceny, by saying, “Now, I sawed you do
it!” when Everything is capable, with the greatest ease, of being
changed into Anything; and “Nothing is, but thinking makes it so.”
Now, too, I perceive my first experience of the dreary sensation–
often to return in after-life–of being unable, next day, to get
back to the dull, settled world; of wanting to live for ever in the
bright atmosphere I have quitted; of doting on the little Fairy,
with the wand like a celestial Barber’s Pole, and pining for a Fairy
immortality along with her. Ah, she comes back, in many shapes, as
my eye wanders down the branches of my Christmas Tree, and goes as
often, and has never yet stayed by me!

Out of this delight springs the toy-theatre,–there it is, with its
familiar proscenium, and ladies in feathers, in the boxes!–and all
its attendant occupation with paste and glue, and gum, and water
colours, in the getting-up of The Miller and his Men, and Elizabeth,
or the Exile of Siberia. In spite of a few besetting accidents and
failures (particularly an unreasonable disposition in the
respectable Kelmar, and some others, to become faint in the legs,
and double up, at exciting points of the drama), a teeming world of
fancies so suggestive and all-embracing, that, far below it on my
Christmas Tree, I see dark, dirty, real Theatres in the day-time,
adorned with these associations as with the freshest garlands of the
rarest flowers, and charming me yet.

But hark! The Waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep!
What images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them
set forth on the Christmas Tree? Known before all the others,
keeping far apart from all the others, they gather round my little
bed. An angel, speaking to a group of shepherds in a field; some
travellers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a baby in a
manger; a child in a spacious temple, talking with grave men; a
solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl
by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a
widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the
opened roof of a chamber where he sits, and letting down a sick
person on a bed, with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the
water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude;
again, with a child upon his knee, and other children round; again,
restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the
deaf, health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the
ignorant; again, dying upon a Cross, watched by armed soldiers, a
thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one
voice heard, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Still, on the lower and maturer branches of the Tree, Christmas
associations cluster thick. School-books shut up; Ovid and Virgil
silenced; the Rule of Three, with its cool impertinent inquiries,
long disposed of; Terence and Plautus acted no more, in an arena of
huddled desks and forms, all chipped, and notched, and inked;
cricket-bats, stumps, and balls, left higher up, with the smell of
trodden grass and the softened noise of shouts in the evening air;
the tree is still fresh, still gay. If I no more come home at
Christmas-time, there will be boys and girls (thank Heaven! ) while
the World lasts; and they do! Yonder they dance and play upon the
branches of my Tree, God bless them, merrily, and my heart dances
and plays too!

And I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We
all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday–the
longer, the better–from the great boarding-school, where we are for
ever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest.
As to going a visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have
we not been, when we would; starting our fancy from our Christmas
Tree!

Away into the winter prospect. There are many such upon the tree!
On, by low-lying, misty grounds, through fens and fogs, up long
hills, winding dark as caverns between thick plantations, almost
shutting out the sparkling stars; so, out on broad heights, until we
stop at last, with sudden silence, at an avenue. The gate-bell has
a deep, half-awful sound in the frosty air; the gate swings open on
its hinges; and, as we drive up to a great house, the glancing
lights grow larger in the windows, and the opposing rows of trees
seem to fall solemnly back on either side, to give us place. At
intervals, all day, a frightened hare has shot across this whitened
turf; or the distant clatter of a herd of deer trampling the hard
frost, has, for the minute, crushed the silence too. Their watchful
eyes beneath the fern may be shining now, if we could see them, like
the icy dewdrops on the leaves; but they are still, and all is
still. And so, the lights growing larger, and the trees falling
back before us, and closing up again behind us, as if to forbid
retreat, we come to the house.

There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good
comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories–
Ghost Stories, or more shame for us–round the Christmas fire; and
we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it. But,
no matter for that. We came to the house, and it is an old house,
full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the
hearth, and grim portraits (some of them with grim legends, too)
lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of the walls. We are a
middle-aged nobleman, and we make a generous supper with our host
and hostess and their guests–it being Christmas-time, and the old
house full of company–and then we go to bed. Our room is a very
old room. It is hung with tapestry. We don’t like the portrait of
a cavalier in green, over the fireplace. There are great black
beams in the ceiling, and there is a great black bedstead, supported
at the foot by two great black figures, who seem to have come off a
couple of tombs in the old baronial church in the park, for our
particular accommodation. But, we are not a superstitious nobleman,
and we don’t mind. Well! we dismiss our servant, lock the door, and
sit before the fire in our dressing-gown, musing about a great many
things. At length we go to bed. Well! we can’t sleep. We toss and
tumble, and can’t sleep. The embers on the hearth burn fitfully and
make the room look ghostly. We can’t help peeping out over the
counterpane, at the two black figures and the cavalier–that wicked-
looking cavalier–in green. In the flickering light they seem to
advance and retire: which, though we are not by any means a
superstitious nobleman, is not agreeable. Well! we get nervous–
more and more nervous. We say “This is very foolish, but we can’t
stand this; we’ll pretend to be ill, and knock up somebody.” Well!
we are just going to do it, when the locked door opens, and there
comes in a young woman, deadly pale, and with long fair hair, who
glides to the fire, and sits down in the chair we have left there,
wringing her hands. Then, we notice that her clothes are wet. Our
tongue cleaves to the roof of our mouth, and we can’t speak; but, we
observe her accurately. Her clothes are wet; her long hair is
dabbled with moist mud; she is dressed in the fashion of two hundred
years ago; and she has at her girdle a bunch of rusty keys. Well!
there she sits, and we can’t even faint, we are in such a state
about it. Presently she gets up, and tries all the locks in the
room with the rusty keys, which won’t fit one of them; then, she
fixes her eyes on the portrait of the cavalier in green, and says,
in a low, terrible voice, “The stags know it!” After that, she
wrings her hands again, passes the bedside, and goes out at the
door. We hurry on our dressing-gown, seize our pistols (we always
travel with pistols), and are following, when we find the door
locked. We turn the key, look out into the dark gallery; no one
there. We wander away, and try to find our servant. Can’t be done.
We pace the gallery till daybreak; then return to our deserted room,
fall asleep, and are awakened by our servant (nothing ever haunts
him) and the shining sun. Well! we make a wretched breakfast, and
all the company say we look queer. After breakfast, we go over the
house with our host, and then we take him to the portrait of the
cavalier in green, and then it all comes out. He was false to a
young housekeeper once attached to that family, and famous for her
beauty, who drowned herself in a pond, and whose body was
discovered, after a long time, because the stags refused to drink of
the water. Since which, it has been whispered that she traverses
the house at midnight (but goes especially to that room where the
cavalier in green was wont to sleep), trying the old locks with the
rusty keys. Well! we tell our host of what we have seen, and a
shade comes over his features, and he begs it may be hushed up; and
so it is. But, it’s all true; and we said so, before we died (we
are dead now) to many responsible people.

There is no end to the old houses, with resounding galleries, and
dismal state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years,
through which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back,
and encounter any number of ghosts, but (it is worthy of remark
perhaps) reducible to a very few general types and classes; for,
ghosts have little originality, and “walk” in a beaten track. Thus,
it comes to pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a
certain bad lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has
certain planks in the floor from which the blood WILL NOT be taken
out. You may scrape and scrape, as the present owner has done, or
plane and plane, as his father did, or scrub and scrub, as his
grandfather did, or burn and burn with strong acids, as his great-
grandfather did, but, there the blood will still be–no redder and
no paler–no more and no less–always just the same. Thus, in such
another house there is a haunted door, that never will keep open; or
another door that never will keep shut, or a haunted sound of a
spinning-wheel, or a hammer, or a footstep, or a cry, or a sigh, or
a horse’s tramp, or the rattling of a chain. Or else, there is a
turret-clock, which, at the midnight hour, strikes thirteen when the
head of the family is going to die; or a shadowy, immovable black
carriage which at such a time is always seen by somebody, waiting
near the great gates in the stable-yard. Or thus, it came to pass
how Lady Mary went to pay a visit at a large wild house in the
Scottish Highlands, and, being fatigued with her long journey,
retired to bed early, and innocently said, next morning, at the
breakfast-table, “How odd, to have so late a party last night, in
this remote place, and not to tell me of it, before I went to bed!”
Then, every one asked Lady Mary what she meant? Then, Lady Mary
replied, “Why, all night long, the carriages were driving round and
round the terrace, underneath my window!” Then, the owner of the
house turned pale, and so did his Lady, and Charles Macdoodle of
Macdoodle signed to Lady Mary to say no more, and every one was
silent. After breakfast, Charles Macdoodle told Lady Mary that it
was a tradition in the family that those rumbling carriages on the
terrace betokened death. And so it proved, for, two months
afterwards, the Lady of the mansion died. And Lady Mary, who was a
Maid of Honour at Court, often told this story to the old Queen
Charlotte; by this token that the old King always said, “Eh, eh?
What, what? Ghosts, ghosts? No such thing, no such thing!” And
never left off saying so, until he went to bed.

Or, a friend of somebody’s whom most of us know, when he was a young
man at college, had a particular friend, with whom he made the
compact that, if it were possible for the Spirit to return to this
earth after its separation from the body, he of the twain who first
died, should reappear to the other. In course of time, this compact
was forgotten by our friend; the two young men having progressed in
life, and taken diverging paths that were wide asunder. But, one
night, many years afterwards, our friend being in the North of
England, and staying for the night in an inn, on the Yorkshire
Moors, happened to look out of bed; and there, in the moonlight,
leaning on a bureau near the window, steadfastly regarding him, saw
his old college friend! The appearance being solemnly addressed,
replied, in a kind of whisper, but very audibly, “Do not come near
me. I am dead. I am here to redeem my promise. I come from
another world, but may not disclose its secrets!” Then, the whole
form becoming paler, melted, as it were, into the moonlight, and
faded away.

Or, there was the daughter of the first occupier of the picturesque
Elizabethan house, so famous in our neighbourhood. You have heard
about her? No! Why, SHE went out one summer evening at twilight,
when she was a beautiful girl, just seventeen years of age, to
gather flowers in the garden; and presently came running, terrified,
into the hall to her father, saying, “Oh, dear father, I have met
myself!” He took her in his arms, and told her it was fancy, but
she said, “Oh no! I met myself in the broad walk, and I was pale
and gathering withered flowers, and I turned my head, and held them
up!” And, that night, she died; and a picture of her story was
begun, though never finished, and they say it is somewhere in the
house to this day, with its face to the wall.

Or, the uncle of my brother’s wife was riding home on horseback, one
mellow evening at sunset, when, in a green lane close to his own
house, he saw a man standing before him, in the very centre of a
narrow way. “Why does that man in the cloak stand there!” he
thought. “Does he want me to ride over him?” But the figure never
moved. He felt a strange sensation at seeing it so still, but
slackened his trot and rode forward. When he was so close to it, as
almost to touch it with his stirrup, his horse shied, and the figure
glided up the bank, in a curious, unearthly manner–backward, and
without seeming to use its feet–and was gone. The uncle of my
brother’s wife, exclaiming, “Good Heaven! It’s my cousin Harry,
from Bombay!” put spurs to his horse, which was suddenly in a
profuse sweat, and, wondering at such strange behaviour, dashed
round to the front of his house. There, he saw the same figure,
just passing in at the long French window of the drawing-room,
opening on the ground. He threw his bridle to a servant, and
hastened in after it. His sister was sitting there, alone. “Alice,
where’s my cousin Harry?” “Your cousin Harry, John?” “Yes. From
Bombay. I met him in the lane just now, and saw him enter here,
this instant.” Not a creature had been seen by any one; and in that
hour and minute, as it afterwards appeared, this cousin died in
India.

Or, it was a certain sensible old maiden lady, who died at ninety-
nine, and retained her faculties to the last, who really did see the
Orphan Boy; a story which has often been incorrectly told, but, of
which the real truth is this–because it is, in fact, a story
belonging to our family–and she was a connexion of our family.
When she was about forty years of age, and still an uncommonly fine
woman (her lover died young, which was the reason why she never
married, though she had many offers), she went to stay at a place in
Kent, which her brother, an Indian-Merchant, had newly bought.
There was a story that this place had once been held in trust by the
guardian of a young boy; who was himself the next heir, and who
killed the young boy by harsh and cruel treatment. She knew nothing
of that. It has been said that there was a Cage in her bedroom in
which the guardian used to put the boy. There was no such thing.
There was only a closet. She went to bed, made no alarm whatever in
the night, and in the morning said composedly to her maid when she
came in, “Who is the pretty forlorn-looking child who has been
peeping out of that closet all night?” The maid replied by giving a
loud scream, and instantly decamping. She was surprised; but she
was a woman of remarkable strength of mind, and she dressed herself
and went downstairs, and closeted herself with her brother. “Now,
Walter,” she said, “I have been disturbed all night by a pretty,
forlorn-looking boy, who has been constantly peeping out of that
closet in my room, which I can’t open. This is some trick.” “I am
afraid not, Charlotte,” said he, “for it is the legend of the house.
It is the Orphan Boy. What did he do?” “He opened the door
softly,” said she, “and peeped out. Sometimes, he came a step or
two into the room. Then, I called to him, to encourage him, and he
shrunk, and shuddered, and crept in again, and shut the door.” “The
closet has no communication, Charlotte,” said her brother, “with any
other part of the house, and it’s nailed up.” This was undeniably
true, and it took two carpenters a whole forenoon to get it open,
for examination. Then, she was satisfied that she had seen the
Orphan Boy. But, the wild and terrible part of the story is, that
he was also seen by three of her brother’s sons, in succession, who
all died young. On the occasion of each child being taken ill, he
came home in a heat, twelve hours before, and said, Oh, Mamma, he
had been playing under a particular oak-tree, in a certain meadow,
with a strange boy–a pretty, forlorn-looking boy, who was very
timid, and made signs! From fatal experience, the parents came to
know that this was the Orphan Boy, and that the course of that child
whom he chose for his little playmate was surely run.

Legion is the name of the German castles, where we sit up alone to
wait for the Spectre–where we are shown into a room, made
comparatively cheerful for our reception–where we glance round at
the shadows, thrown on the blank walls by the crackling fire–where
we feel very lonely when the village innkeeper and his pretty
daughter have retired, after laying down a fresh store of wood upon
the hearth, and setting forth on the small table such supper-cheer
as a cold roast capon, bread, grapes, and a flask of old Rhine wine-
-where the reverberating doors close on their retreat, one after
another, like so many peals of sullen thunder–and where, about the
small hours of the night, we come into the knowledge of divers
supernatural mysteries. Legion is the name of the haunted German
students, in whose society we draw yet nearer to the fire, while the
schoolboy in the corner opens his eyes wide and round, and flies off
the footstool he has chosen for his seat, when the door accidentally
blows open. Vast is the crop of such fruit, shining on our
Christmas Tree; in blossom, almost at the very top; ripening all
down the boughs!

Among the later toys and fancies hanging there–as idle often and
less pure–be the images once associated with the sweet old Waits,
the softened music in the night, ever unalterable! Encircled by the
social thoughts of Christmas-time, still let the benignant figure of
my childhood stand unchanged! In every cheerful image and
suggestion that the season brings, may the bright star that rested
above the poor roof, be the star of all the Christian World! A
moment’s pause, O vanishing tree, of which the lower boughs are dark
to me as yet, and let me look once more! I know there are blank
spaces on thy branches, where eyes that I have loved have shone and
smiled; from which they are departed. But, far above, I see the
raiser of the dead girl, and the Widow’s Son; and God is good! If
Age be hiding for me in the unseen portion of thy downward growth, O
may I, with a grey head, turn a child’s heart to that figure yet,
and a child’s trustfulness and confidence!

Now, the tree is decorated with bright merriment, and song, and
dance, and cheerfulness. And they are welcome. Innocent and
welcome be they ever held, beneath the branches of the Christmas
Tree, which cast no gloomy shadow! But, as it sinks into the
ground, I hear a whisper going through the leaves. “This, in
commemoration of the law of love and kindness, mercy and compassion.
This, in remembrance of Me!”

I am a Cheap Jack, and my own father’s name was Willum Marigold. It
was in his lifetime supposed by some that his name was William, but
my own father always consistently said, No, it was Willum. On which
point I content myself with looking at the argument this way: If a
man is not allowed to know his own name in a free country, how much
is he allowed to know in a land of slavery? As to looking at the
argument through the medium of the Register, Willum Marigold come
into the world before Registers come up much,–and went out of it
too. They wouldn’t have been greatly in his line neither, if they
had chanced to come up before him.

I was born on the Queen’s highway, but it was the King’s at that
time. A doctor was fetched to my own mother by my own father, when
it took place on a common; and in consequence of his being a very
kind gentleman, and accepting no fee but a tea-tray, I was named
Doctor, out of gratitude and compliment to him. There you have me.
Doctor Marigold.

I am at present a middle-aged man of a broadish build, in cords,
leggings, and a sleeved waistcoat the strings of which is always
gone behind. Repair them how you will, they go like fiddle-strings.
You have been to the theatre, and you have seen one of the wiolin-
players screw up his wiolin, after listening to it as if it had been
whispering the secret to him that it feared it was out of order, and
then you have heard it snap. That’s as exactly similar to my
waistcoat as a waistcoat and a wiolin can be like one another.

I am partial to a white hat, and I like a shawl round my neck wore
loose and easy. Sitting down is my favourite posture. If I have a
taste in point of personal jewelry, it is mother-of-pearl buttons.
There you have me again, as large as life.

The doctor having accepted a tea-tray, you’ll guess that my father
was a Cheap Jack before me. You are right. He was. It was a
pretty tray. It represented a large lady going along a serpentining
up-hill gravel-walk, to attend a little church. Two swans had
likewise come astray with the same intentions. When I call her a
large lady, I don’t mean in point of breadth, for there she fell
below my views, but she more than made it up in heighth; her heighth
and slimness was–in short the heighth of both.

I often saw that tray, after I was the innocently smiling cause (or
more likely screeching one) of the doctor’s standing it up on a
table against the wall in his consulting-room. Whenever my own
father and mother were in that part of the country, I used to put my
head (I have heard my own mother say it was flaxen curls at that
time, though you wouldn’t know an old hearth-broom from it now till
you come to the handle, and found it wasn’t me) in at the doctor’s
door, and the doctor was always glad to see me, and said, “Aha, my
brother practitioner! Come in, little M.D. How are your
inclinations as to sixpence?”

You can’t go on for ever, you’ll find, nor yet could my father nor
yet my mother. If you don’t go off as a whole when you are about
due, you’re liable to go off in part, and two to one your head’s the
part. Gradually my father went off his, and my mother went off
hers. It was in a harmless way, but it put out the family where I
boarded them. The old couple, though retired, got to be wholly and
solely devoted to the Cheap Jack business, and were always selling
the family off. Whenever the cloth was laid for dinner, my father
began rattling the plates and dishes, as we do in our line when we
put up crockery for a bid, only he had lost the trick of it, and
mostly let ‘em drop and broke ‘em. As the old lady had been used to
sit in the cart, and hand the articles out one by one to the old
gentleman on the footboard to sell, just in the same way she handed
him every item of the family’s property, and they disposed of it in
their own imaginations from morning to night. At last the old
gentleman, lying bedridden in the same room with the old lady, cries
out in the old patter, fluent, after having been silent for two days
and nights: “Now here, my jolly companions every one,–which the
Nightingale club in a village was held, At the sign of the Cabbage
and Shears, Where the singers no doubt would have greatly excelled,
But for want of taste, voices and ears,–now, here, my jolly
companions, every one, is a working model of a used-up old Cheap
Jack, without a tooth in his head, and with a pain in every bone:
so like life that it would be just as good if it wasn’t better, just
as bad if it wasn’t worse, and just as new if it wasn’t worn out.
Bid for the working model of the old Cheap Jack, who has drunk more
gunpowder-tea with the ladies in his time than would blow the lid
off a washerwoman’s copper, and carry it as many thousands of miles
higher than the moon as naught nix naught, divided by the national
debt, carry nothing to the poor-rates, three under, and two over.
Now, my hearts of oak and men of straw, what do you say for the lot?
Two shillings, a shilling, tenpence, eightpence, sixpence,
fourpence. Twopence? Who said twopence? The gentleman in the
scarecrow’s hat? I am ashamed of the gentleman in the scarecrow’s
hat. I really am ashamed of him for his want of public spirit. Now
I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. Come! I’ll throw you in a
working model of a old woman that was married to the old Cheap Jack
so long ago that upon my word and honour it took place in Noah’s
Ark, before the Unicorn could get in to forbid the banns by blowing
a tune upon his horn. There now! Come! What do you say for both?
I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. I don’t bear you malice for
being so backward. Here! If you make me a bid that’ll only reflect
a little credit on your town, I’ll throw you in a warming-pan for
nothing, and lend you a toasting-fork for life. Now come; what do
you say after that splendid offer? Say two pound, say thirty
shillings, say a pound, say ten shillings, say five, say two and
six. You don’t say even two and six? You say two and three? No.
You shan’t have the lot for two and three. I’d sooner give it to
you, if you was good-looking enough. Here! Missis! Chuck the old
man and woman into the cart, put the horse to, and drive ‘em away
and bury ‘em!” Such were the last words of Willum Marigold, my own
father, and they were carried out, by him and by his wife, my own
mother, on one and the same day, as I ought to know, having followed
as mourner.

My father had been a lovely one in his time at the Cheap Jack work,
as his dying observations went to prove. But I top him. I don’t
say it because it’s myself, but because it has been universally
acknowledged by all that has had the means of comparison. I have
worked at it. I have measured myself against other public
speakers,–Members of Parliament, Platforms, Pulpits, Counsel
learned in the law,–and where I have found ‘em good, I have took a
bit of imagination from ‘em, and where I have found ‘em bad, I have
let ‘em alone. Now I’ll tell you what. I mean to go down into my
grave declaring that of all the callings ill used in Great Britain,
the Cheap Jack calling is the worst used. Why ain’t we a
profession? Why ain’t we endowed with privileges? Why are we
forced to take out a hawker’s license, when no such thing is
expected of the political hawkers? Where’s the difference betwixt
us? Except that we are Cheap Jacks and they are Dear Jacks, I don’t
see any difference but what’s in our favour.

For look here! Say it’s election time. I am on the footboard of my
cart in the market-place, on a Saturday night. I put up a general
miscellaneous lot. I say: “Now here, my free and independent
woters, I’m a going to give you such a chance as you never had in
all your born days, nor yet the days preceding. Now I’ll show you
what I am a going to do with you. Here’s a pair of razors that’ll
shave you closer than the Board of Guardians; here’s a flat-iron
worth its weight in gold; here’s a frying-pan artificially flavoured
with essence of beefsteaks to that degree that you’ve only got for
the rest of your lives to fry bread and dripping in it and there you
are replete with animal food; here’s a genuine chronometer watch in
such a solid silver case that you may knock at the door with it when
you come home late from a social meeting, and rouse your wife and
family, and save up your knocker for the postman; and here’s half-a-
dozen dinner plates that you may play the cymbals with to charm baby
when it’s fractious. Stop! I’ll throw in another article, and I’ll
give you that, and it’s a rolling-pin; and if the baby can only get
it well into its mouth when its teeth is coming and rub the gums
once with it, they’ll come through double, in a fit of laughter
equal to being tickled. Stop again! I’ll throw you in another
article, because I don’t like the looks of you, for you haven’t the
appearance of buyers unless I lose by you, and because I’d rather
lose than not take money to-night, and that’s a looking-glass in
which you may see how ugly you look when you don’t bid. What do you
say now? Come! Do you say a pound? Not you, for you haven’t got
it. Do you say ten shillings? Not you, for you owe more to the
tallyman. Well then, I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. I’ll
heap ‘em all on the footboard of the cart,–there they are! razors,
flat watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and away for four shillings,
and I’ll give you sixpence for your trouble!” This is me, the Cheap
Jack. But on the Monday morning, in the same market-place, comes
the Dear Jack on the hustings–his cart–and, what does he say?
“Now my free and independent woters, I am a going to give you such a
chance” (he begins just like me) “as you never had in all your born
days, and that’s the chance of sending Myself to Parliament. Now
I’ll tell you what I am a going to do for you. Here’s the interests
of this magnificent town promoted above all the rest of the
civilised and uncivilised earth. Here’s your railways carried, and
your neighbours’ railways jockeyed. Here’s all your sons in the
Post-office. Here’s Britannia smiling on you. Here’s the eyes of
Europe on you. Here’s uniwersal prosperity for you, repletion of
animal food, golden cornfields, gladsome homesteads, and rounds of
applause from your own hearts, all in one lot, and that’s myself.
Will you take me as I stand? You won’t? Well, then, I’ll tell you
what I’ll do with you. Come now! I’ll throw you in anything you
ask for. There! Church-rates, abolition of more malt tax, no malt
tax, universal education to the highest mark, or uniwersal ignorance
to the lowest, total abolition of flogging in the army or a dozen
for every private once a month all round, Wrongs of Men or Rights of
Women–only say which it shall be, take ‘em or leave ‘em, and I’m of
your opinion altogether, and the lot’s your own on your own terms.
There! You won’t take it yet! Well, then, I’ll tell you what I’ll
do with you. Come! You are such free and independent woters, and I
am so proud of you,–you are such a noble and enlightened
constituency, and I am so ambitious of the honour and dignity of
being your member, which is by far the highest level to which the
wings of the human mind can soar,–that I’ll tell you what I’ll do
with you. I’ll throw you in all the public-houses in your
magnificent town for nothing. Will that content you? It won’t?
You won’t take the lot yet? Well, then, before I put the horse in
and drive away, and make the offer to the next most magnificent town
that can be discovered, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Take the lot,
and I’ll drop two thousand pound in the streets of your magnificent
town for them to pick up that can. Not enough? Now look here.
This is the very furthest that I’m a going to. I’ll make it two
thousand five hundred. And still you won’t? Here, missis! Put the
horse–no, stop half a moment, I shouldn’t like to turn my back upon
you neither for a trifle, I’ll make it two thousand seven hundred
and fifty pound. There! Take the lot on your own terms, and I’ll
count out two thousand seven hundred and fifty pound on the foot-
board of the cart, to be dropped in the streets of your magnificent
town for them to pick up that can. What do you say? Come now! You
won’t do better, and you may do worse. You take it? Hooray! Sold
again, and got the seat!”

These Dear Jacks soap the people shameful, but we Cheap Jacks don’t.
We tell ‘em the truth about themselves to their faces, and scorn to
court ‘em. As to wenturesomeness in the way of puffing up the lots,
the Dear Jacks beat us hollow. It is considered in the Cheap Jack
calling, that better patter can be made out of a gun than any
article we put up from the cart, except a pair of spectacles. I
often hold forth about a gun for a quarter of an hour, and feel as
if I need never leave off. But when I tell ‘em what the gun can do,
and what the gun has brought down, I never go half so far as the
Dear Jacks do when they make speeches in praise of their guns–their
great guns that set ‘em on to do it. Besides, I’m in business for
myself: I ain’t sent down into the market-place to order, as they
are. Besides, again, my guns don’t know what I say in their
laudation, and their guns do, and the whole concern of ‘em have
reason to be sick and ashamed all round. These are some of my
arguments for declaring that the Cheap Jack calling is treated ill
in Great Britain, and for turning warm when I think of the other
Jacks in question setting themselves up to pretend to look down upon
it.

I courted my wife from the footboard of the cart. I did indeed.
She was a Suffolk young woman, and it was in Ipswich marketplace
right opposite the corn-chandler’s shop. I had noticed her up at a
window last Saturday that was, appreciating highly. I had took to
her, and I had said to myself, “If not already disposed of, I’ll
have that lot.” Next Saturday that come, I pitched the cart on the
same pitch, and I was in very high feather indeed, keeping ‘em
laughing the whole of the time, and getting off the goods briskly.
At last I took out of my waistcoat-pocket a small lot wrapped in
soft paper, and I put it this way (looking up at the window where
she was). “Now here, my blooming English maidens, is an article,
the last article of the present evening’s sale, which I offer to
only you, the lovely Suffolk Dumplings biling over with beauty, and
I won’t take a bid of a thousand pounds for from any man alive. Now
what is it? Why, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s made of fine gold,
and it’s not broke, though there’s a hole in the middle of it, and
it’s stronger than any fetter that ever was forged, though it’s
smaller than any finger in my set of ten. Why ten? Because, when
my parents made over my property to me, I tell you true, there was
twelve sheets, twelve towels, twelve table-cloths, twelve knives,
twelve forks, twelve tablespoons, and twelve teaspoons, but my set
of fingers was two short of a dozen, and could never since be
matched. Now what else is it? Come, I’ll tell you. It’s a hoop of
solid gold, wrapped in a silver curl-paper, that I myself took off
the shining locks of the ever beautiful old lady in Threadneedle
Street, London city; I wouldn’t tell you so if I hadn’t the paper to
show, or you mightn’t believe it even of me. Now what else is it?
It’s a man-trap and a handcuff, the parish stocks and a leg-lock,
all in gold and all in one. Now what else is it? It’s a wedding-
ring. Now I’ll tell you what I’m a going to do with it. I’m not a
going to offer this lot for money; but I mean to give it to the next
of you beauties that laughs, and I’ll pay her a visit to-morrow
morning at exactly half after nine o’clock as the chimes go, and
I’ll take her out for a walk to put up the banns.” She laughed, and
got the ring handed up to her. When I called in the morning, she
says, “O dear! It’s never you, and you never mean it?” “It’s ever
me,” says I, “and I am ever yours, and I ever mean it.” So we got
married, after being put up three times–which, by the bye, is quite
in the Cheap Jack way again, and shows once more how the Cheap Jack
customs pervade society.

She wasn’t a bad wife, but she had a temper. If she could have
parted with that one article at a sacrifice, I wouldn’t have swopped
her away in exchange for any other woman in England. Not that I
ever did swop her away, for we lived together till she died, and
that was thirteen year. Now, my lords and ladies and gentlefolks
all, I’ll let you into a secret, though you won’t believe it.
Thirteen year of temper in a Palace would try the worst of you, but
thirteen year of temper in a Cart would try the best of you. You
are kept so very close to it in a cart, you see. There’s thousands
of couples among you getting on like sweet ile upon a whetstone in
houses five and six pairs of stairs high, that would go to the
Divorce Court in a cart. Whether the jolting makes it worse, I
don’t undertake to decide; but in a cart it does come home to you,
and stick to you. Wiolence in a cart is so wiolent, and aggrawation
in a cart is so aggrawating.

We might have had such a pleasant life! A roomy cart, with the
large goods hung outside, and the bed slung underneath it when on
the road, an iron pot and a kettle, a fireplace for the cold
weather, a chimney for the smoke, a hanging-shelf and a cupboard, a
dog and a horse. What more do you want? You draw off upon a bit of
turf in a green lane or by the roadside, you hobble your old horse
and turn him grazing, you light your fire upon the ashes of the last
visitors, you cook your stew, and you wouldn’t call the Emperor of
France your father. But have a temper in the cart, flinging
language and the hardest goods in stock at you, and where are you
then? Put a name to your feelings.

My dog knew as well when she was on the turn as I did. Before she
broke out, he would give a howl, and bolt. How he knew it, was a
mystery to me; but the sure and certain knowledge of it would wake
him up out of his soundest sleep, and he would give a howl, and
bolt. At such times I wished I was him.

The worst of it was, we had a daughter born to us, and I love
children with all my heart. When she was in her furies she beat the
child. This got to be so shocking, as the child got to be four or
five year old, that I have many a time gone on with my whip over my
shoulder, at the old horse’s head, sobbing and crying worse than
ever little Sophy did. For how could I prevent it? Such a thing is
not to be tried with such a temper–in a cart–without coming to a
fight. It’s in the natural size and formation of a cart to bring it
to a fight. And then the poor child got worse terrified than
before, as well as worse hurt generally, and her mother made
complaints to the next people we lighted on, and the word went
round, “Here’s a wretch of a Cheap Jack been a beating his wife.”

Little Sophy was such a brave child! She grew to be quite devoted
to her poor father, though he could do so little to help her. She
had a wonderful quantity of shining dark hair, all curling natural
about her. It is quite astonishing to me now, that I didn’t go
tearing mad when I used to see her run from her mother before the
cart, and her mother catch her by this hair, and pull her down by
it, and beat her.

Such a brave child I said she was! Ah! with reason.

“Don’t you mind next time, father dear,” she would whisper to me,
with her little face still flushed, and her bright eyes still wet;
“if I don’t cry out, you may know I am not much hurt. And even if I
do cry out, it will only be to get mother to let go and leave off.”
What I have seen the little spirit bear–for me–without crying out!

Yet in other respects her mother took great care of her. Her
clothes were always clean and neat, and her mother was never tired
of working at ‘em. Such is the inconsistency in things. Our being
down in the marsh country in unhealthy weather, I consider the cause
of Sophy’s taking bad low fever; but however she took it, once she
got it she turned away from her mother for evermore, and nothing
would persuade her to be touched by her mother’s hand. She would
shiver and say, “No, no, no,” when it was offered at, and would hide
her face on my shoulder, and hold me tighter round the neck.

The Cheap Jack business had been worse than ever I had known it,
what with one thing and what with another (and not least with
railroads, which will cut it all to pieces, I expect, at last), and
I was run dry of money. For which reason, one night at that period
of little Sophy’s being so bad, either we must have come to a dead-
lock for victuals and drink, or I must have pitched the cart as I
did.

I couldn’t get the dear child to lie down or leave go of me, and
indeed I hadn’t the heart to try, so I stepped out on the footboard
with her holding round my neck. They all set up a laugh when they
see us, and one chuckle-headed Joskin (that I hated for it) made the
bidding, “Tuppence for her!”

“Now, you country boobies,” says I, feeling as if my heart was a
heavy weight at the end of a broken sashline, “I give you notice
that I am a going to charm the money out of your pockets, and to
give you so much more than your money’s worth that you’ll only
persuade yourselves to draw your Saturday night’s wages ever again
arterwards by the hopes of meeting me to lay ‘em out with, which you
never will, and why not? Because I’ve made my fortunes by selling
my goods on a large scale for seventy-five per cent. less than I
give for ‘em, and I am consequently to be elevated to the House of
Peers next week, by the title of the Duke of Cheap and Markis
Jackaloorul. Now let’s know what you want to-night, and you shall
have it. But first of all, shall I tell you why I have got this
little girl round my neck? You don’t want to know? Then you shall.
She belongs to the Fairies. She’s a fortune-teller. She can tell
me all about you in a whisper, and can put me up to whether you’re
going to buy a lot or leave it. Now do you want a saw? No, she
says you don’t, because you’re too clumsy to use one. Else here’s a
saw which would be a lifelong blessing to a handy man, at four
shillings, at three and six, at three, at two and six, at two, at
eighteen-pence. But none of you shall have it at any price, on
account of your well-known awkwardness, which would make it
manslaughter. The same objection applies to this set of three
planes which I won’t let you have neither, so don’t bid for ‘em.
Now I am a going to ask her what you do want.” (Then I whispered,
“Your head burns so, that I am afraid it hurts you bad, my pet,” and
she answered, without opening her heavy eyes, “Just a little,
father.”) “O! This little fortune-teller says it’s a memorandum-
book you want. Then why didn’t you mention it? Here it is. Look
at it. Two hundred superfine hot-pressed wire-wove pages–if you
don’t believe me, count ‘em–ready ruled for your expenses, an
everlastingly pointed pencil to put ‘em down with, a double-bladed
penknife to scratch ‘em out with, a book of printed tables to
calculate your income with, and a camp-stool to sit down upon while
you give your mind to it! Stop! And an umbrella to keep the moon
off when you give your mind to it on a pitch-dark night. Now I
won’t ask you how much for the lot, but how little? How little are
you thinking of? Don’t be ashamed to mention it, because my
fortune-teller knows already.” (Then making believe to whisper, I
kissed her,–and she kissed me.) “Why, she says you are thinking of
as little as three and threepence! I couldn’t have believed it,
even of you, unless she told me. Three and threepence! And a set
of printed tables in the lot that’ll calculate your income up to
forty thousand a year! With an income of forty thousand a year, you
grudge three and sixpence. Well then, I’ll tell you my opinion. I
so despise the threepence, that I’d sooner take three shillings.
There. For three shillings, three shillings, three shillings!
Gone. Hand ‘em over to the lucky man.”

As there had been no bid at all, everybody looked about and grinned
at everybody, while I touched little Sophy’s face and asked her if
she felt faint, or giddy. “Not very, father. It will soon be
over.” Then turning from the pretty patient eyes, which were opened
now, and seeing nothing but grins across my lighted grease-pot, I
went on again in my Cheap Jack style. “Where’s the butcher?” (My
sorrowful eye had just caught sight of a fat young butcher on the
outside of the crowd.) “She says the good luck is the butcher’s.
Where is he?” Everybody handed on the blushing butcher to the
front, and there was a roar, and the butcher felt himself obliged to
put his hand in his pocket, and take the lot. The party so picked
out, in general, does feel obliged to take the lot–good four times
out of six. Then we had another lot, the counterpart of that one,
and sold it sixpence cheaper, which is always wery much enjoyed.
Then we had the spectacles. It ain’t a special profitable lot, but
I put ‘em on, and I see what the Chancellor of the Exchequer is
going to take off the taxes, and I see what the sweetheart of the
young woman in the shawl is doing at home, and I see what the
Bishops has got for dinner, and a deal more that seldom fails to
fetch em ‘up in their spirits; and the better their spirits, the
better their bids. Then we had the ladies’ lot–the teapot, tea-
caddy, glass sugar-basin, half-a-dozen spoons, and caudle-cup–and
all the time I was making similar excuses to give a look or two and
say a word or two to my poor child. It was while the second ladies’
lot was holding ‘em enchained that I felt her lift herself a little
on my shoulder, to look across the dark street. “What troubles you,
darling?” “Nothing troubles me, father. I am not at all troubled.
But don’t I see a pretty churchyard over there?” “Yes, my dear.”
“Kiss me twice, dear father, and lay me down to rest upon that
churchyard grass so soft and green.” I staggered back into the cart
with her head dropped on my shoulder, and I says to her mother,
“Quick. Shut the door! Don’t let those laughing people see!”
“What’s the matter?” she cries. “O woman, woman,” I tells her,
“you’ll never catch my little Sophy by her hair again, for she has
flown away from you!”

Maybe those were harder words than I meant ‘em; but from that time
forth my wife took to brooding, and would sit in the cart or walk
beside it, hours at a stretch, with her arms crossed, and her eyes
looking on the ground. When her furies took her (which was rather
seldomer than before) they took her in a new way, and she banged
herself about to that extent that I was forced to hold her. She got
none the better for a little drink now and then, and through some
years I used to wonder, as I plodded along at the old horse’s head,
whether there was many carts upon the road that held so much
dreariness as mine, for all my being looked up to as the King of the
Cheap Jacks. So sad our lives went on till one summer evening,
when, as we were coming into Exeter, out of the farther West of
England, we saw a woman beating a child in a cruel manner, who
screamed, “Don’t beat me! O mother, mother, mother!” Then my wife
stopped her ears, and ran away like a wild thing, and next day she
was found in the river.

Me and my dog were all the company left in the cart now; and the dog
learned to give a short bark when they wouldn’t bid, and to give
another and a nod of his head when I asked him, “Who said half a
crown? Are you the gentleman, sir, that offered half a crown?” He
attained to an immense height of popularity, and I shall always
believe taught himself entirely out of his own head to growl at any
person in the crowd that bid as low as sixpence. But he got to be
well on in years, and one night when I was conwulsing York with the
spectacles, he took a conwulsion on his own account upon the very
footboard by me, and it finished him.

Being naturally of a tender turn, I had dreadful lonely feelings on
me arter this. I conquered ‘em at selling times, having a
reputation to keep (not to mention keeping myself), but they got me
down in private, and rolled upon me. That’s often the way with us
public characters. See us on the footboard, and you’d give pretty
well anything you possess to be us. See us off the footboard, and
you’d add a trifle to be off your bargain. It was under those
circumstances that I come acquainted with a giant. I might have
been too high to fall into conversation with him, had it not been
for my lonely feelings. For the general rule is, going round the
country, to draw the line at dressing up. When a man can’t trust
his getting a living to his undisguised abilities, you consider him
below your sort. And this giant when on view figured as a Roman.

He was a languid young man, which I attribute to the distance
betwixt his extremities. He had a little head and less in it, he
had weak eyes and weak knees, and altogether you couldn’t look at
him without feeling that there was greatly too much of him both for
his joints and his mind. But he was an amiable though timid young
man (his mother let him out, and spent the money), and we come
acquainted when he was walking to ease the horse betwixt two fairs.
He was called Rinaldo di Velasco, his name being Pickleson.

This giant, otherwise Pickleson, mentioned to me under the seal of
confidence that, beyond his being a burden to himself, his life was
made a burden to him by the cruelty of his master towards a step-
daughter who was deaf and dumb. Her mother was dead, and she had no
living soul to take her part, and was used most hard. She travelled
with his master’s caravan only because there was nowhere to leave
her, and this giant, otherwise Pickleson, did go so far as to
believe that his master often tried to lose her. He was such a very
languid young man, that I don’t know how long it didn’t take him to
get this story out, but it passed through his defective circulation
to his top extremity in course of time.

When I heard this account from the giant, otherwise Pickleson, and
likewise that the poor girl had beautiful long dark hair, and was
often pulled down by it and beaten, I couldn’t see the giant through
what stood in my eyes. Having wiped ‘em, I give him sixpence (for
he was kept as short as he was long), and he laid it out in two
three-penn’orths of gin-and-water, which so brisked him up, that he
sang the Favourite Comic of Shivery Shakey, ain’t it cold?–a
popular effect which his master had tried every other means to get
out of him as a Roman wholly in vain.

His master’s name was Mim, a wery hoarse man, and I knew him to
speak to. I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart
outside the town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the
performing was going on, and at last, sitting dozing against a muddy
cart-wheel, I come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the
first look I might almost have judged that she had escaped from the
Wild Beast Show; but at the second I thought better of her, and
thought that if she was more cared for and more kindly used she
would be like my child. She was just the same age that my own
daughter would have been, if her pretty head had not fell down upon
my shoulder that unfortunate night.

To cut it short, I spoke confidential to Mim while he was beating
the gong outside betwixt two lots of Pickleson’s publics, and I put
it to him, “She lies heavy on your own hands; what’ll you take for
her?” Mim was a most ferocious swearer. Suppressing that part of
his reply which was much the longest part, his reply was, “A pair of
braces.” “Now I’ll tell you,” says I, “what I’m a going to do with
you. I’m a going to fetch you half-a-dozen pair of the primest
braces in the cart, and then to take her away with me.” Says Mim
(again ferocious), “I’ll believe it when I’ve got the goods, and no
sooner.” I made all the haste I could, lest he should think twice
of it, and the bargain was completed, which Pickleson he was thereby
so relieved in his mind that he come out at his little back door,
longways like a serpent, and give us Shivery Shakey in a whisper
among the wheels at parting.

It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel
in the cart. I at once give her the name of Sophy, to put her ever
towards me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to
begin to understand one another, through the goodness of the
Heavens, when she knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a
very little time she was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea
what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have
been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have
mentioned as having once got the better of me.

You’d have laughed–or the rewerse–it’s according to your
disposition–if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At
first I was helped–you’d never guess by what–milestones. I got
some large alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of
bone, and saying we was going to Windsor, I give her those letters
in that order, and then at every milestone I showed her those same
letters in that same order again, and pointed towards the abode of
royalty. Another time I give her cart, and then chalked the same
upon the cart. Another time I give her Doctor Marigold, and hung a
corresponding inscription outside my waistcoat. People that met us
might stare a bit and laugh, but what did I care, if she caught the
idea? She caught it after long patience and trouble, and then we
did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe you! At first she was a
little given to consider me the cart, and the cart the abode of
royalty, but that soon wore off.

We had our signs, too, and they was hundreds in number. Sometimes
she would sit looking at me and considering hard how to communicate
with me about something fresh,–how to ask me what she wanted
explained,–and then she was (or I thought she was; what does it
signify?) so like my child with those years added to her, that I
half-believed it was herself, trying to tell me where she had been
to up in the skies, and what she had seen since that unhappy night
when she flied away. She had a pretty face, and now that there was
no one to drag at her bright dark hair, and it was all in order,
there was a something touching in her looks that made the cart most
peaceful and most quiet, though not at all melancholy. [N.B. In
the Cheap Jack patter, we generally sound it lemonjolly, and it gets
a laugh.]

The way she learnt to understand any look of mine was truly
surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart
unseen by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes
when I looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or
articles I wanted. And then she would clap her hands, and laugh for
joy. And as for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she
was when I first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged,
leaning asleep against the muddy cart-wheel, it give me such heart
that I gained a greater heighth of reputation than ever, and I put
Pickleson down (by the name of Mim’s Travelling Giant otherwise
Pickleson) for a fypunnote in my will.

This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen year old.
By which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole
duty by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching
than I could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I
commenced explaining my views to her; but what’s right is right, and
you can’t neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.

So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf
and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to
speak to us, I says to him: “Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do with
you, sir. I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have
laid by for a rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter
(adopted), and you can’t produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her
the most that can be taught her in the shortest separation that can
be named,–state the figure for it,–and I am game to put the money
down. I won’t bate you a single farthing, sir, but I’ll put down
the money here and now, and I’ll thankfully throw you in a pound to
take it. There!” The gentleman smiled, and then, “Well, well,”
says he, “I must first know what she has learned already. How do
you communicate with her?” Then I showed him, and she wrote in
printed writing many names of things and so forth; and we held some
sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a little story in a book
which the gentleman showed her, and which she was able to read.
“This is most extraordinary,” says the gentleman; “is it possible
that you have been her only teacher?” “I have been her only
teacher, sir,” I says, “besides herself.” “Then,” says the
gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, “you’re
a clever fellow, and a good fellow.” This he makes known to Sophy,
who kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.

We saw the gentleman four times in all, and when he took down my
name and asked how in the world it ever chanced to be Doctor, it
come out that he was own nephew by the sister’s side, if you’ll
believe me, to the very Doctor that I was called after. This made
our footing still easier, and he says to me:

“Now, Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter
to know?”

“I want her, sir, to be cut off from the world as little as can be,
considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read
whatever is wrote with perfect ease and pleasure.”

“My good fellow,” urges the gentleman, opening his eyes wide, “why I
can’t do that myself!”

I took his joke, and gave him a laugh (knowing by experience how
flat you fall without it), and I mended my words accordingly.

“What do you mean to do with her afterwards?” asks the gentleman,
with a sort of a doubtful eye. “To take her about the country?”

“In the cart, sir, but only in the cart. She will live a private
life, you understand, in the cart. I should never think of bringing
her infirmities before the public. I wouldn’t make a show of her
for any money.”

The gentleman nodded, and seemed to approve.

“Well,” says he, “can you part with her for two years?”

“To do her that good,–yes, sir.”

“There’s another question,” says the gentleman, looking towards
her,–”can she part with you for two years?”

I don’t know that it was a harder matter of itself (for the other
was hard enough to me), but it was harder to get over. However, she
was pacified to it at last, and the separation betwixt us was
settled. How it cut up both of us when it took place, and when I
left her at the door in the dark of an evening, I don’t tell. But I
know this; remembering that night, I shall never pass that same
establishment without a heartache and a swelling in the throat; and
I couldn’t put you up the best of lots in sight of it with my usual
spirit,–no, not even the gun, nor the pair of spectacles,–for five
hundred pound reward from the Secretary of State for the Home
Department, and throw in the honour of putting my legs under his
mahogany arterwards.

Still, the loneliness that followed in the cart was not the old
loneliness, because there was a term put to it, however long to look
forward to; and because I could think, when I was anyways down, that
she belonged to me and I belonged to her. Always planning for her
coming back, I bought in a few months’ time another cart, and what
do you think I planned to do with it? I’ll tell you. I planned to
fit it up with shelves and books for her reading, and to have a seat
in it where I could sit and see her read, and think that I had been
her first teacher. Not hurrying over the job, I had the fittings
knocked together in contriving ways under my own inspection, and
here was her bed in a berth with curtains, and there was her
reading-table, and here was her writing-desk, and elsewhere was her
books in rows upon rows, picters and no picters, bindings and no
bindings, gilt-edged and plain, just as I could pick ‘em up for her
in lots up and down the country, North and South and West and East,
Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone
astray, Over the hills and far away. And when I had got together
pretty well as many books as the cart would neatly hold, a new
scheme come into my head, which, as it turned out, kept my time and
attention a good deal employed, and helped me over the two years’
stile.

Without being of an awaricious temper, I like to be the owner of
things. I shouldn’t wish, for instance, to go partners with
yourself in the Cheap Jack cart. It’s not that I mistrust you, but
that I’d rather know it was mine. Similarly, very likely you’d
rather know it was yours. Well! A kind of a jealousy began to
creep into my mind when I reflected that all those books would have
been read by other people long before they was read by her. It
seemed to take away from her being the owner of ‘em like. In this
way, the question got into my head: Couldn’t I have a book new-made
express for her, which she should be the first to read?

It pleased me, that thought did; and as I never was a man to let a
thought sleep (you must wake up all the whole family of thoughts
you’ve got and burn their nightcaps, or you won’t do in the Cheap
Jack line), I set to work at it. Considering that I was in the
habit of changing so much about the country, and that I should have
to find out a literary character here to make a deal with, and
another literary character there to make a deal with, as
opportunities presented, I hit on the plan that this same book
should be a general miscellaneous lot,–like the razors, flat-iron,
chronometer watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and looking-glass,–
and shouldn’t be offered as a single indiwidual article, like the
spectacles or the gun. When I had come to that conclusion, I come
to another, which shall likewise be yours.

Often had I regretted that she never had heard me on the footboard,
and that she never could hear me. It ain’t that I am vain, but that
you don’t like to put your own light under a bushel. What’s the
worth of your reputation, if you can’t convey the reason for it to
the person you most wish to value it? Now I’ll put it to you. Is
it worth sixpence, fippence, fourpence, threepence, twopence, a
penny, a halfpenny, a farthing? No, it ain’t. Not worth a
farthing. Very well, then. My conclusion was that I would begin
her book with some account of myself. So that, through reading a
specimen or two of me on the footboard, she might form an idea of my
merits there. I was aware that I couldn’t do myself justice. A man
can’t write his eye (at least I don’t know how to), nor yet can a
man write his voice, nor the rate of his talk, nor the quickness of
his action, nor his general spicy way. But he can write his turns
of speech, when he is a public speaker,–and indeed I have heard
that he very often does, before he speaks ‘em.

Well! Having formed that resolution, then come the question of a
name. How did I hammer that hot iron into shape? This way. The
most difficult explanation I had ever had with her was, how I come
to be called Doctor, and yet was no Doctor. After all, I felt that
I had failed of getting it correctly into her mind, with my utmost
pains. But trusting to her improvement in the two years, I thought
that I might trust to her understanding it when she should come to
read it as put down by my own hand. Then I thought I would try a
joke with her and watch how it took, by which of itself I might
fully judge of her understanding it. We had first discovered the
mistake we had dropped into, through her having asked me to
prescribe for her when she had supposed me to be a Doctor in a
medical point of view; so thinks I, “Now, if I give this book the
name of my Prescriptions, and if she catches the idea that my only
Prescriptions are for her amusement and interest,–to make her laugh
in a pleasant way, or to make her cry in a pleasant way,–it will be
a delightful proof to both of us that we have got over our
difficulty.” It fell out to absolute perfection. For when she saw
the book, as I had it got up,–the printed and pressed book,–lying
on her desk in her cart, and saw the title, Doctor Marigold’s
Prescriptions, she looked at me for a moment with astonishment, then
fluttered the leaves, then broke out a laughing in the charmingest
way, then felt her pulse and shook her head, then turned the pages
pretending to read them most attentive, then kissed the book to me,
and put it to her bosom with both her hands. I never was better
pleased in all my life!

But let me not anticipate. (I take that expression out of a lot of
romances I bought for her. I never opened a single one of ‘em–and
I have opened many–but I found the romancer saying “let me not
anticipate.” Which being so, I wonder why he did anticipate, or who
asked him to it.) Let me not, I say, anticipate. This same book
took up all my spare time. It was no play to get the other articles
together in the general miscellaneous lot, but when it come to my
own article! There! I couldn’t have believed the blotting, nor yet
the buckling to at it, nor the patience over it. Which again is
like the footboard. The public have no idea.

At last it was done, and the two years’ time was gone after all the
other time before it, and where it’s all gone to, who knows? The
new cart was finished,–yellow outside, relieved with wermilion and
brass fittings,–the old horse was put in it, a new ‘un and a boy
being laid on for the Cheap Jack cart,–and I cleaned myself up to
go and fetch her. Bright cold weather it was, cart-chimneys
smoking, carts pitched private on a piece of waste ground over at
Wandsworth, where you may see ‘em from the Sou’western Railway when
not upon the road. (Look out of the right-hand window going down.)

“Marigold,” says the gentleman, giving his hand hearty, “I am very
glad to see you.”

“Yet I have my doubts, sir,” says I, “if you can be half as glad to
see me as I am to see you.”

“The time has appeared so long,–has it, Marigold?”

“I won’t say that, sir, considering its real length; but–”

“What a start, my good fellow!”

Ah! I should think it was! Grown such a woman, so pretty, so
intelligent, so expressive! I knew then that she must be really
like my child, or I could never have known her, standing quiet by
the door.

“You are affected,” says the gentleman in a kindly manner.

“I feel, sir,” says I, “that I am but a rough chap in a sleeved
waistcoat.”

“ I feel,” says the gentleman, “that it was you who raised her from
misery and degradation, and brought her into communication with her
kind. But why do we converse alone together, when we can converse
so well with her? Address her in your own way.”

“I am such a rough chap in a sleeved waistcoat, sir,” says I, “and
she is such a graceful woman, and she stands so quiet at the door!”

“Try if she moves at the old sign,” says the gentleman.

They had got it up together o’ purpose to please me! For when I
give her the old sign, she rushed to my feet, and dropped upon her
knees, holding up her hands to me with pouring tears of love and
joy; and when I took her hands and lifted her, she clasped me round
the neck, and lay there; and I don’t know what a fool I didn’t make
of myself, until we all three settled down into talking without
sound, as if there was a something soft and pleasant spread over the
whole world for us.

[A portion is here omitted from the text, having reference to the
sketches contributed by other writers; but the reader will be
pleased to have what follows retained in a note:

"Now I'll tell you what I am a-going to do with you. I am a-going
to offer you the general miscellaneous lot, her own book, never read
by anybody else but me, added to and completed by me after her first
reading of it, eight-and-forty printed pages, six-and-ninety
columns, Whiting's own work, Beaufort House to wit, thrown off by
the steam-ingine, best of paper, beautiful green wrapper, folded
like clean linen come home from the clear-starcher's, and so
exquisitely stitched that, regarded as a piece of needlework alone,
it's better than the sampler of a seamstress undergoing a
Competitive examination for Starvation before the Civil Service
Commissioners--and I offer the lot for what? For eight pound? Not
so much. For six pound? Less. For four pound. Why, I hardly
expect you to believe me, but that's the sum. Four pound! The
stitching alone cost half as much again. Here's forty-eight
original pages, ninety-six original columns, for four pound. You
want more for the money? Take it. Three whole pages of
advertisements of thrilling interest thrown in for nothing. Read
'em and believe 'em. More? My best of wishes for your merry
Christmases and your happy New Years, your long lives and your true
prosperities. Worth twenty pound good if they are delivered as I
send them. Remember! Here's a final prescription added, "To be
taken for life," which will tell you how the cart broke down, and
where the journey ended. You think Four Pound too much? And still
you think so? Come! I'll tell you what then. Say Four Pence, and
keep the secret."]

So every item of my plan was crowned with success. Our reunited
life was more than all that we had looked forward to. Content and
joy went with us as the wheels of the two carts went round, and the
same stopped with us when the two carts stopped. I was as pleased
and as proud as a Pug-Dog with his muzzle black-leaded for a evening
party, and his tail extra curled by machinery.

But I had left something out of my calculations. Now, what had I
left out? To help you to guess I’ll say, a figure. Come. Make a
guess and guess right. Nought? No. Nine? No. Eight? No.
Seven? No. Six? No. Five? No. Four? No. Three? No. Two?
No. One? No. Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. I’ll say
it’s another sort of figure altogether. There. Why then, says you,
it’s a mortal figure. No, nor yet a mortal figure. By such means
you got yourself penned into a corner, and you can’t help guessing a
immortal figure. That’s about it. Why didn’t you say so sooner?

Yes. It was a immortal figure that I had altogether left out of my
Calculations. Neither man’s, nor woman’s, but a child’s. Girl’s or
boy’s? Boy’s. “I, says the sparrow with my bow and arrow.” Now
you have got it.

We were down at Lancaster, and I had done two nights more than fair
average business (though I cannot in honour recommend them as a
quick audience) in the open square there, near the end of the street
where Mr. Sly’s King’s Arms and Royal Hotel stands. Mim’s
travelling giant, otherwise Pickleson, happened at the self-same
time to be trying it on in the town. The genteel lay was adopted
with him. No hint of a van. Green baize alcove leading up to
Pickleson in a Auction Room. Printed poster, “Free list suspended,
with the exception of that proud boast of an enlightened country, a
free press. Schools admitted by private arrangement. Nothing to
raise a blush in the cheek of youth or shock the most fastidious.”
Mim swearing most horrible and terrific, in a pink calico pay-place,
at the slackness of the public. Serious handbill in the shops,
importing that it was all but impossible to come to a right
understanding of the history of David without seeing Pickleson.

I went to the Auction Room in question, and I found it entirely
empty of everything but echoes and mouldiness, with the single
exception of Pickleson on a piece of red drugget. This suited my
purpose, as I wanted a private and confidential word with him, which
was: “Pickleson. Owing much happiness to you, I put you in my will
for a fypunnote; but, to save trouble, here’s fourpunten down, which
may equally suit your views, and let us so conclude the
transaction.” Pickleson, who up to that remark had had the dejected
appearance of a long Roman rushlight that couldn’t anyhow get
lighted, brightened up at his top extremity, and made his
acknowledgments in a way which (for him) was parliamentary
eloquence. He likewise did add, that, having ceased to draw as a
Roman, Mim had made proposals for his going in as a conwerted Indian
Giant worked upon by The Dairyman’s Daughter. This, Pickleson,
having no acquaintance with the tract named after that young woman,
and not being willing to couple gag with his serious views, had
declined to do, thereby leading to words and the total stoppage of
the unfortunate young man’s beer. All of which, during the whole of
the interview, was confirmed by the ferocious growling of Mim down
below in the pay-place, which shook the giant like a leaf.

But what was to the present point in the remarks of the travelling
giant, otherwise Pickleson, was this: “Doctor Marigold,”–I give
his words without a hope of conweying their feebleness,–”who is the
strange young man that hangs about your carts?”–”The strange young
man?” I gives him back, thinking that he meant her, and his languid
circulation had dropped a syllable. “Doctor,” he returns, with a
pathos calculated to draw a tear from even a manly eye, “I am weak,
but not so weak yet as that I don’t know my words. I repeat them,
Doctor. The strange young man.” It then appeared that Pickleson,
being forced to stretch his legs (not that they wanted it) only at
times when he couldn’t be seen for nothing, to wit in the dead of
the night and towards daybreak, had twice seen hanging about my
carts, in that same town of Lancaster where I had been only two
nights, this same unknown young man.

It put me rather out of sorts. What it meant as to particulars I no
more foreboded then than you forebode now, but it put me rather out
of sorts. Howsoever, I made light of it to Pickleson, and I took
leave of Pickleson, advising him to spend his legacy in getting up
his stamina, and to continue to stand by his religion. Towards
morning I kept a look out for the strange young man, and–what was
more–I saw the strange young man. He was well dressed and well
looking. He loitered very nigh my carts, watching them like as if
he was taking care of them, and soon after daybreak turned and went
away. I sent a hail after him, but he never started or looked
round, or took the smallest notice.

We left Lancaster within an hour or two, on our way towards
Carlisle. Next morning, at daybreak, I looked out again for the
strange young man. I did not see him. But next morning I looked
out again, and there he was once more. I sent another hail after
him, but as before he gave not the slightest sign of being anyways
disturbed. This put a thought into my head. Acting on it I watched
him in different manners and at different times not necessary to
enter into, till I found that this strange young man was deaf and
dumb.

The discovery turned me over, because I knew that a part of that
establishment where she had been was allotted to young men (some of
them well off), and I thought to myself, “If she favours him, where
am I? and where is all that I have worked and planned for?” Hoping-
-I must confess to the selfishness–that she might not favour him, I
set myself to find out. At last I was by accident present at a
meeting between them in the open air, looking on leaning behind a
fir-tree without their knowing of it. It was a moving meeting for
all the three parties concerned. I knew every syllable that passed
between them as well as they did. I listened with my eyes, which
had come to be as quick and true with deaf and dumb conversation as
my ears with the talk of people that can speak. He was a-going out
to China as clerk in a merchant’s house, which his father had been
before him. He was in circumstances to keep a wife, and he wanted
her to marry him and go along with him. She persisted, no. He
asked if she didn’t love him. Yes, she loved him dearly, dearly;
but she could never disappoint her beloved, good, noble, generous,
and I-don’t-know-what-all father (meaning me, the Cheap Jack in the
sleeved waistcoat) and she would stay with him, Heaven bless him!
though it was to break her heart. Then she cried most bitterly, and
that made up my mind.

While my mind had been in an unsettled state about her favouring
this young man, I had felt that unreasonable towards Pickleson, that
it was well for him he had got his legacy down. For I often
thought, “If it hadn’t been for this same weak-minded giant, I might
never have come to trouble my head and wex my soul about the young
man.” But, once that I knew she loved him,–once that I had seen
her weep for him,–it was a different thing. I made it right in my
mind with Pickleson on the spot, and I shook myself together to do
what was right by all.

She had left the young man by that time (for it took a few minutes
to get me thoroughly well shook together), and the young man was
leaning against another of the fir-trees,–of which there was a
cluster, -with his face upon his arm. I touched him on the back.
Looking up and seeing me, he says, in our deaf-and-dumb talk, “Do
not be angry.”

“I am not angry, good boy. I am your friend. Come with me.”

I left him at the foot of the steps of the Library Cart, and I went
up alone. She was drying her eyes.

“You have been crying, my dear.”

“Yes, father.”

“Why?”

“A headache.”

“Not a heartache?”

“I said a headache, father.”

“Doctor Marigold must prescribe for that headache.”

She took up the book of my Prescriptions, and held it up with a
forced smile; but seeing me keep still and look earnest, she softly
laid it down again, and her eyes were very attentive.

“The Prescription is not there, Sophy.”

“Where is it?”

“Here, my dear.”

I brought her young husband in, and I put her hand in his, and my
only farther words to both of them were these: “Doctor Marigold’s
last Prescription. To be taken for life.” After which I bolted.

When the wedding come off, I mounted a coat (blue, and bright
buttons), for the first and last time in all my days, and I give
Sophy away with my own hand. There were only us three and the
gentleman who had had charge of her for those two years. I give the
wedding dinner of four in the Library Cart. Pigeon-pie, a leg of
pickled pork, a pair of fowls, and suitable garden stuff. The best
of drinks. I give them a speech, and the gentleman give us a
speech, and all our jokes told, and the whole went off like a sky-
rocket. In the course of the entertainment I explained to Sophy
that I should keep the Library Cart as my living-cart when not upon
the road, and that I should keep all her books for her just as they
stood, till she come back to claim them. So she went to China with
her young husband, and it was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I
got the boy I had another service; and so as of old, when my child
and wife were gone, I went plodding along alone, with my whip over
my shoulder, at the old horse’s head.

Sophy wrote me many letters, and I wrote her many letters. About
the end of the first year she sent me one in an unsteady hand:
“Dearest father, not a week ago I had a darling little daughter, but
I am so well that they let me write these words to you. Dearest and
best father, I hope my child may not be deaf and dumb, but I do not
yet know.” When I wrote back, I hinted the question; but as Sophy
never answered that question, I felt it to be a sad one, and I never
repeated it. For a long time our letters were regular, but then
they got irregular, through Sophy’s husband being moved to another
station, and through my being always on the move. But we were in
one another’s thoughts, I was equally sure, letters or no letters.

Five years, odd months, had gone since Sophy went away. I was still
the King of the Cheap Jacks, and at a greater height of popularity
than ever. I had had a first-rate autumn of it, and on the twenty-
third of December, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four, I
found myself at Uxbridge, Middlesex, clean sold out. So I jogged up
to London with the old horse, light and easy, to have my Christmas-
eve and Christmas-day alone by the fire in the Library Cart, and
then to buy a regular new stock of goods all round, to sell ‘em
again and get the money.

I am a neat hand at cookery, and I’ll tell you what I knocked up for
my Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a
beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a
couple of mushrooms thrown in. It’s a pudding to put a man in good
humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his
waistcoat. Having relished that pudding and cleared away, I turned
the lamp low, and sat down by the light of the fire, watching it as
it shone upon the backs of Sophy’s books

At one period of its reverses, the House fell into the occupation of
a Showman. He was found registered as its occupier, on the parish
books of the time when he rented the House, and there was therefore
no need of any clue to his name. But, he himself was less easy to
be found; for, he had led a wandering life, and settled people had
lost sight of him, and people who plumed themselves on being
respectable were shy of admitting that they had ever known anything
of him. At last, among the marsh lands near the river’s level, that
lie about Deptford and the neighbouring market-gardens, a Grizzled
Personage in velveteen, with a face so cut up by varieties of
weather that he looked as if he had been tattooed, was found smoking
a pipe at the door of a wooden house on wheels. The wooden house
was laid up in ordinary for the winter, near the mouth of a muddy
creek; and everything near it, the foggy river, the misty marshes,
and the steaming market-gardens, smoked in company with the grizzled
man. In the midst of this smoking party, the funnel-chimney of the
wooden house on wheels was not remiss, but took its pipe with the
rest in a companionable manner.

On being asked if it were he who had once rented the House to Let,
Grizzled Velveteen looked surprised, and said yes. Then his name
was Magsman? That was it, Toby Magsman–which lawfully christened
Robert; but called in the line, from a infant, Toby. There was
nothing agin Toby Magsman, he believed? If there was suspicion of
such–mention it!

There was no suspicion of such, he might rest assured. But, some
inquiries were making about that House, and would he object to say
why he left it?

Not at all; why should he? He left it, along of a Dwarf.

Along of a Dwarf?

Mr. Magsman repeated, deliberately and emphatically, Along of a
Dwarf.

Might it be compatible with Mr. Magsman’s inclination and
convenience to enter, as a favour, into a few particulars?

Mr. Magsman entered into the following particulars.

It was a long time ago, to begin with;–afore lotteries and a deal
more was done away with. Mr. Magsman was looking about for a good
pitch, and he see that house, and he says to himself, “I’ll have
you, if you’re to be had. If money’ll get you, I’ll have you.”

The neighbours cut up rough, and made complaints; but Mr. Magsman
don’t know what they WOULD have had. It was a lovely thing. First
of all, there was the canvass, representin the picter of the Giant,
in Spanish trunks and a ruff, who was himself half the heighth of
the house, and was run up with a line and pulley to a pole on the
roof, so that his Ed was coeval with the parapet. Then, there was
the canvass, representin the picter of the Albina lady, showing her
white air to the Army and Navy in correct uniform. Then, there was
the canvass, representin the picter of the Wild Indian a scalpin a
member of some foreign nation. Then, there was the canvass,
representin the picter of a child of a British Planter, seized by
two Boa Constrictors–not that WE never had no child, nor no
Constrictors neither. Similarly, there was the canvass, representin
the picter of the Wild Ass of the Prairies–not that WE never had no
wild asses, nor wouldn’t have had ‘em at a gift. Last, there was
the canvass, representin the picter of the Dwarf, and like him too
(considerin), with George the Fourth in such a state of astonishment
at him as His Majesty couldn’t with his utmost politeness and
stoutness express. The front of the House was so covered with
canvasses, that there wasn’t a spark of daylight ever visible on
that side. “MAGSMAN’S AMUSEMENTS,” fifteen foot long by two foot
high, ran over the front door and parlour winders. The passage was
a Arbour of green baize and gardenstuff. A barrel-organ performed
there unceasing. And as to respectability,–if threepence ain’t
respectable, what is?

But, the Dwarf is the principal article at present, and he was worth
the money. He was wrote up as MAJOR TPSCHOFFKI, OF THE IMPERIAL
BULGRADERIAN BRIGADE. Nobody couldn’t pronounce the name, and it
never was intended anybody should. The public always turned it, as
a regular rule, into Chopski. In the line he was called Chops;
partly on that account, and partly because his real name, if he ever
had any real name (which was very dubious), was Stakes.

He was a un-common small man, he really was. Certainly not so small
as he was made out to be, but where IS your Dwarf as is? He was a
most uncommon small man, with a most uncommon large Ed; and what he
had inside that Ed, nobody ever knowed but himself: even supposin
himself to have ever took stock of it, which it would have been a
stiff job for even him to do.

The kindest little man as never growed! Spirited, but not proud.
When he travelled with the Spotted Baby–though he knowed himself to
be a nat’ral Dwarf, and knowed the Baby’s spots to be put upon him
artificial, he nursed that Baby like a mother. You never heerd him
give a ill-name to a Giant. He DID allow himself to break out into
strong language respectin the Fat Lady from Norfolk; but that was an
affair of the ‘art; and when a man’s ‘art has been trifled with by a
lady, and the preference giv to a Indian, he ain’t master of his
actions.

He was always in love, of course; every human nat’ral phenomenon is.
And he was always in love with a large woman; I never knowed the
Dwarf as could be got to love a small one. Which helps to keep ‘em
the Curiosities they are.

One sing’ler idea he had in that Ed of his, which must have meant
something, or it wouldn’t have been there. It was always his
opinion that he was entitled to property. He never would put his
name to anything. He had been taught to write, by the young man
without arms, who got his living with his toes (quite a writing
master HE was, and taught scores in the line), but Chops would have
starved to death, afore he’d have gained a bit of bread by putting
his hand to a paper. This is the more curious to bear in mind,
because HE had no property, nor hope of property, except his house
and a sarser. When I say his house, I mean the box, painted and got
up outside like a reg’lar six-roomer, that he used to creep into,
with a diamond ring (or quite as good to look at) on his forefinger,
and ring a little bell out of what the Public believed to be the
Drawing-room winder. And when I say a sarser, I mean a Chaney
sarser in which he made a collection for himself at the end of every
Entertainment. His cue for that, he took from me: “Ladies and
gentlemen, the little man will now walk three times round the
Cairawan, and retire behind the curtain.” When he said anything
important, in private life, he mostly wound it up with this form of
words, and they was generally the last thing he said to me at night
afore he went to bed.

He had what I consider a fine mind–a poetic mind. His ideas
respectin his property never come upon him so strong as when he sat
upon a barrel-organ and had the handle turned. Arter the wibration
had run through him a little time, he would screech out, “Toby, I
feel my property coming–grind away! I’m counting my guineas by
thousands, Toby–grind away! Toby, I shall be a man of fortun! I
feel the Mint a jingling in me, Toby, and I’m swelling out into the
Bank of England!” Such is the influence of music on a poetic mind.
Not that he was partial to any other music but a barrel-organ; on
the contrary, hated it.

He had a kind of a everlasting grudge agin the Public: which is a
thing you may notice in many phenomenons that get their living out
of it. What riled him most in the nater of his occupation was, that
it kep him out of Society. He was continiwally saying, “Toby, my
ambition is, to go into Society. The curse of my position towards
the Public is, that it keeps me hout of Society. This don’t signify
to a low beast of a Indian; he an’t formed for Society. This don’t
signify to a Spotted Baby; HE an’t formed for Society.–I am.”

Nobody never could make out what Chops done with his money. He had
a good salary, down on the drum every Saturday as the day came
round, besides having the run of his teeth–and he was a Woodpecker
to eat–but all Dwarfs are. The sarser was a little income,
bringing him in so many halfpence that he’d carry ‘em for a week
together, tied up in a pocket-handkercher. And yet he never had
money. And it couldn’t be the Fat Lady from Norfolk, as was once
supposed; because it stands to reason that when you have a animosity
towards a Indian, which makes you grind your teeth at him to his
face, and which can hardly hold you from Goosing him audible when
he’s going through his War-Dance–it stands to reason you wouldn’t
under them circumstances deprive yourself, to support that Indian in
the lap of luxury.

Most unexpected, the mystery come out one day at Egham Races. The
Public was shy of bein pulled in, and Chops was ringin his little
bell out of his drawing-room winder, and was snarlin to me over his
shoulder as he kneeled down with his legs out at the back-door–for
he couldn’t be shoved into his house without kneeling down, and the
premises wouldn’t accommodate his legs–was snarlin, “Here’s a
precious Public for you; why the Devil don’t they tumble up?” when a
man in the crowd holds up a carrier-pigeon, and cries out, “If
there’s any person here as has got a ticket, the Lottery’s just
drawed, and the number as has come up for the great prize is three,
seven, forty-two! Three, seven, forty-two!” I was givin the man to
the Furies myself, for calling off the Public’s attention–for the
Public will turn away, at any time, to look at anything in
preference to the thing showed ‘em; and if you doubt it, get ‘em
together for any indiwidual purpose on the face of the earth, and
send only two people in late, and see if the whole company an’t far
more interested in takin particular notice of them two than of you–
I say, I wasn’t best pleased with the man for callin out, and wasn’t
blessin him in my own mind, when I see Chops’s little bell fly out
of winder at a old lady, and he gets up and kicks his box over,
exposin the whole secret, and he catches hold of the calves of my
legs and he says to me, “Carry me into the wan, Toby, and throw a
pail of water over me or I’m a dead man, for I’ve come into my
property!”

Twelve thousand odd hundred pound, was Chops’s winnins. He had
bought a half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand prize, and it had
come up. The first use he made of his property, was, to offer to
fight the Wild Indian for five hundred pound a side, him with a
poisoned darnin-needle and the Indian with a club; but the Indian
being in want of backers to that amount, it went no further.

Arter he had been mad for a week–in a state of mind, in short, in
which, if I had let him sit on the organ for only two minutes, I
believe he would have bust–but we kep the organ from him–Mr. Chops
come round, and behaved liberal and beautiful to all. He then sent
for a young man he knowed, as had a wery genteel appearance and was
a Bonnet at a gaming-booth (most respectable brought up, father
havin been imminent in the livery stable line but unfort’nate in a
commercial crisis, through paintin a old gray, ginger-bay, and
sellin him with a Pedigree), and Mr. Chops said to this Bonnet, who
said his name was Normandy, which it wasn’t:

“Normandy, I’m a goin into Society. Will you go with me?”

Says Normandy: “Do I understand you, Mr. Chops, to hintimate that
the ‘ole of the expenses of that move will be borne by yourself?”

“Correct,” says Mr. Chops. “And you shall have a Princely allowance
too.”

The Bonnet lifted Mr. Chops upon a chair, to shake hands with him,
and replied in poetry, with his eyes seemingly full of tears:

“My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea,
And I do not ask for more,
But I’ll Go:- along with thee.”

They went into Society, in a chay and four grays with silk jackets.
They took lodgings in Pall Mall, London, and they blazed away.

In consequence of a note that was brought to Bartlemy Fair in the
autumn of next year by a servant, most wonderful got up in milk-
white cords and tops, I cleaned myself and went to Pall Mall, one
evening appinted. The gentlemen was at their wine arter dinner, and
Mr. Chops’s eyes was more fixed in that Ed of his than I thought
good for him. There was three of ‘em (in company, I mean), and I
knowed the third well. When last met, he had on a white Roman
shirt, and a bishop’s mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played
the clarionet all wrong, in a band at a Wild Beast Show.

This gent took on not to know me, and Mr. Chops said: “Gentlemen,
this is a old friend of former days:” and Normandy looked at me
through a eye-glass, and said, “Magsman, glad to see you!”–which
I’ll take my oath he wasn’t. Mr. Chops, to git him convenient to
the table, had his chair on a throne (much of the form of George the
Fourth’s in the canvass), but he hardly appeared to me to be King
there in any other pint of view, for his two gentlemen ordered about
like Emperors. They was all dressed like May-Day–gorgeous!–And as
to Wine, they swam in all sorts.

I made the round of the bottles, first separate (to say I had done
it), and then mixed ‘em all together (to say I had done it), and
then tried two of ‘em as half-and-half, and then t’other two.
Altogether, I passed a pleasin evenin, but with a tendency to feel
muddled, until I considered it good manners to get up and say, “Mr.
Chops, the best of friends must part, I thank you for the wariety of
foreign drains you have stood so ‘ansome, I looks towards you in red
wine, and I takes my leave.” Mr. Chops replied, “If you’ll just
hitch me out of this over your right arm, Magsman, and carry me
down-stairs, I’ll see you out.” I said I couldn’t think of such a
thing, but he would have it, so I lifted him off his throne. He
smelt strong of Maideary, and I couldn’t help thinking as I carried
him down that it was like carrying a large bottle full of wine, with
a rayther ugly stopper, a good deal out of proportion.

When I set him on the door-mat in the hall, he kep me close to him
by holding on to my coat-collar, and he whispers:

“I ain’t ‘appy, Magsman.”

“What’s on your mind, Mr. Chops?”

“They don’t use me well. They an’t grateful to me. They puts me on
the mantel-piece when I won’t have in more Champagne-wine, and they
locks me in the sideboard when I won’t give up my property.”

“Get rid of ‘em, Mr. Chops.”

“I can’t. We’re in Society together, and what would Society say?”

“Come out of Society!” says I.

“I can’t. You don’t know what you’re talking about. When you have
once gone into Society, you mustn’t come out of it.”

“Then if you’ll excuse the freedom, Mr. Chops,” were my remark,
shaking my head grave, “I think it’s a pity you ever went in.”

Mr. Chops shook that deep Ed of his, to a surprisin extent, and
slapped it half a dozen times with his hand, and with more Wice than
I thought were in him. Then, he says, “You’re a good fellow, but
you don’t understand. Good-night, go along. Magsman, the little
man will now walk three times round the Cairawan, and retire behind
the curtain.” The last I see of him on that occasion was his tryin,
on the extremest werge of insensibility, to climb up the stairs, one
by one, with his hands and knees. They’d have been much too steep
for him, if he had been sober; but he wouldn’t be helped.

It warn’t long after that, that I read in the newspaper of Mr.
Chops’s being presented at court. It was printed, “It will be
recollected”–and I’ve noticed in my life, that it is sure to be
printed that it WILL be recollected, whenever it won’t–”that Mr.
Chops is the individual of small stature, whose brilliant success in
the last State Lottery attracted so much attention.” Well, I says
to myself, Such is Life! He has been and done it in earnest at
last. He has astonished George the Fourth!

(On account of which, I had that canvass new-painted, him with a bag
of money in his hand, a presentin it to George the Fourth, and a
lady in Ostrich Feathers fallin in love with him in a bag-wig,
sword, and buckles correct.)

I took the House as is the subject of present inquiries–though not
the honour of bein acquainted–and I run Magsman’s Amusements in it
thirteen months–sometimes one thing, sometimes another, sometimes
nothin particular, but always all the canvasses outside. One night,
when we had played the last company out, which was a shy company,
through its raining Heavens hard, I was takin a pipe in the one pair
back along with the young man with the toes, which I had taken on
for a month (though he never drawed–except on paper), and I heard a
kickin at the street door. “Halloa!” I says to the young man,
“what’s up!” He rubs his eyebrows with his toes, and he says, “I
can’t imagine, Mr. Magsman”–which he never could imagine nothin,
and was monotonous company.

The noise not leavin off, I laid down my pipe, and I took up a
candle, and I went down and opened the door. I looked out into the
street; but nothin could I see, and nothin was I aware of, until I
turned round quick, because some creetur run between my legs into
the passage. There was Mr. Chops!

“Magsman,” he says, “take me, on the old terms, and you’ve got me;
if it’s done, say done!”

I was all of a maze, but I said, “Done, sir.”

“Done to your done, and double done!” says he. “Have you got a bit
of supper in the house?”

Bearin in mind them sparklin warieties of foreign drains as we’d
guzzled away at in Pall Mall, I was ashamed to offer him cold
sassages and gin-and-water; but he took ‘em both and took ‘em free;
havin a chair for his table, and sittin down at it on a stool, like
hold times. I, all of a maze all the while.

It was arter he had made a clean sweep of the sassages (beef, and to
the best of my calculations two pound and a quarter), that the
wisdom as was in that little man began to come out of him like
prespiration.

“Magsman,” he says, “look upon me! You see afore you, One as has
both gone into Society and come out.”

“O! You ARE out of it, Mr. Chops? How did you get out, sir?”

“SOLD OUT!” says he. You never saw the like of the wisdom as his Ed
expressed, when he made use of them two words.

“My friend Magsman, I’ll impart to you a discovery I’ve made. It’s
wallable; it’s cost twelve thousand five hundred pound; it may do
you good in life–The secret of this matter is, that it ain’t so
much that a person goes into Society, as that Society goes into a
person.”

Not exactly keepin up with his meanin, I shook my head, put on a
deep look, and said, “You’re right there, Mr. Chops.”

“Magsman,” he says, twitchin me by the leg, “Society has gone into
me, to the tune of every penny of my property.”

I felt that I went pale, and though nat’rally a bold speaker, I
couldn’t hardly say, “Where’s Normandy?”

“Bolted. With the plate,” said Mr. Chops.

“And t’other one?” meaning him as formerly wore the bishop’s mitre.

“Bolted. With the jewels,” said Mr. Chops.

I sat down and looked at him, and he stood up and looked at me.

“Magsman,” he says, and he seemed to myself to get wiser as he got
hoarser; “Society, taken in the lump, is all dwarfs. At the court
of St. James’s, they was all a doing my old business–all a goin
three times round the Cairawan, in the hold court-suits and
properties. Elsewheres, they was most of ‘em ringin their little
bells out of make-believes. Everywheres, the sarser was a goin
round. Magsman, the sarser is the uniwersal Institution!”

I perceived, you understand, that he was soured by his misfortunes,
and I felt for Mr. Chops.

“As to Fat Ladies,” he says, giving his head a tremendious one agin
the wall, “there’s lots of THEM in Society, and worse than the
original. HERS was a outrage upon Taste–simply a outrage upon
Taste–awakenin contempt–carryin its own punishment in the form of
a Indian.” Here he giv himself another tremendious one. “But
THEIRS, Magsman, THEIRS is mercenary outrages. Lay in Cashmeer
shawls, buy bracelets, strew ‘em and a lot of ‘andsome fans and
things about your rooms, let it be known that you give away like
water to all as come to admire, and the Fat Ladies that don’t
exhibit for so much down upon the drum, will come from all the pints
of the compass to flock about you, whatever you are. They’ll drill
holes in your ‘art, Magsman, like a Cullender. And when you’ve no
more left to give, they’ll laugh at you to your face, and leave you
to have your bones picked dry by Wulturs, like the dead Wild Ass of
the Prairies that you deserve to be!” Here he giv himself the most
tremendious one of all, and dropped.

I thought he was gone. His Ed was so heavy, and he knocked it so
hard, and he fell so stoney, and the sassagerial disturbance in him
must have been so immense, that I thought he was gone. But, he soon
come round with care, and he sat up on the floor, and he said to me,
with wisdom comin out of his eyes, if ever it come:

“Magsman! The most material difference between the two states of
existence through which your unhappy friend has passed;” he reached
out his poor little hand, and his tears dropped down on the
moustachio which it was a credit to him to have done his best to
grow, but it is not in mortals to command success,–”the difference
this. When I was out of Society, I was paid light for being seen.
When I went into Society, I paid heavy for being seen. I prefer the
former, even if I wasn’t forced upon it. Give me out through the
trumpet, in the hold way, to-morrow.”

Arter that, he slid into the line again as easy as if he had been
iled all over. But the organ was kep from him, and no allusions was
ever made, when a company was in, to his property. He got wiser
every day; his views of Society and the Public was luminous,
bewilderin, awful; and his Ed got bigger and bigger as his Wisdom
expanded it.

He took well, and pulled ‘em in most excellent for nine weeks. At
the expiration of that period, when his Ed was a sight, he expressed
one evenin, the last Company havin been turned out, and the door
shut, a wish to have a little music.

“Mr. Chops,” I said (I never dropped the “Mr.” with him; the world
might do it, but not me); “Mr. Chops, are you sure as you are in a
state of mind and body to sit upon the organ?”

His answer was this: “Toby, when next met with on the tramp, I
forgive her and the Indian. And I am.”

It was with fear and trembling that I began to turn the handle; but
he sat like a lamb. I will be my belief to my dying day, that I see
his Ed expand as he sat; you may therefore judge how great his
thoughts was. He sat out all the changes, and then he come off.

“Toby,” he says, with a quiet smile, “the little man will now walk
three times round the Cairawan, and retire behind the curtain.”

When we called him in the morning, we found him gone into a much
better Society than mine or Pall Mall’s. I giv Mr. Chops as
comfortable a funeral as lay in my power, followed myself as Chief,
and had the George the Fourth canvass carried first, in the form of
a banner. But, the House was so dismal arterwards, that I giv it
up, and took to the Wan again.

“I don’t triumph,” said Jarber, folding up the second manuscript,
and looking hard at Trottle. “I don’t triumph over this worthy
creature. I merely ask him if he is satisfied now?”

“How can he be anything else?” I said, answering for Trottle, who
sat obstinately silent. “This time, Jarber, you have not only read
us a delightfully amusing story, but you have also answered the
question about the House. Of course it stands empty now. Who would
think of taking it after it had been turned into a caravan?” I
looked at Trottle, as I said those last words, and Jarber waved his
hand indulgently in the same direction.

“Let this excellent person speak,” said Jarber. “You were about to
say, my good man?” -

“I only wished to ask, sir,” said Trottle doggedly, “if you could
kindly oblige me with a date or two in connection with that last
story?”

“A date!” repeated Jarber. “What does the man want with dates!”

“I should be glad to know, with great respect,” persisted Trottle,
“if the person named Magsman was the last tenant who lived in the
House. It’s my opinion–if I may be excused for giving it–that he
most decidedly was not.”

With those words, Trottle made a low bow, and quietly left the room.

There is no denying that Jarber, when we were left together, looked
sadly discomposed. He had evidently forgotten to inquire about
dates; and, in spite of his magnificent talk about his series of
discoveries, it was quite as plain that the two stories he had just
read, had really and truly exhausted his present stock. I thought
myself bound, in common gratitude, to help him out of his
embarrassment by a timely suggestion. So I proposed that he should
come to tea again, on the next Monday evening, the thirteenth, and
should make such inquiries in the meantime, as might enable him to
dispose triumphantly of Trottle’s objection.

He gallantly kissed my hand, made a neat little speech of
acknowledgment, and took his leave. For the rest of the week I
would not encourage Trottle by allowing him to refer to the House at
all. I suspected he was making his own inquiries about dates, but I
put no questions to him.

On Monday evening, the thirteenth, that dear unfortunate Jarber
came, punctual to the appointed time. He looked so terribly
harassed, that he was really quite a spectacle of feebleness and
fatigue. I saw, at a glance, that the question of dates had gone
against him, that Mr. Magsman had not been the last tenant of the
House, and that the reason of its emptiness was still to seek.

“What I have gone through,” said Jarber, “words are not eloquent
enough to tell. O Sophonisba, I have begun another series of
discoveries! Accept the last two as stories laid on your shrine;
and wait to blame me for leaving your curiosity unappeased, until
you have heard Number Three.”

Number Three looked like a very short manuscript, and I said as
much. Jarber explained to me that we were to have some poetry this
time. In the course of his investigations he had stepped into the
Circulating Library, to seek for information on the one important
subject. All the Library-people knew about the House was, that a
female relative of the last tenant, as they believed, had, just
after that tenant left, sent a little manuscript poem to them which
she described as referring to events that had actually passed in the
House; and which she wanted the proprietor of the Library to
publish. She had written no address on her letter; and the
proprietor had kept the manuscript ready to be given back to her
(the publishing of poems not being in his line) when she might call
for it. She had never called for it; and the poem had been lent to
Jarber, at his express request, to read to me.

Before he began, I rang the bell for Trottle; being determined to
have him present at the new reading, as a wholesome check on his
obstinacy. To my surprise Peggy answered the bell, and told me,
that Trottle had stepped out without saying where. I instantly felt
the strongest possible conviction that he was at his old tricks:
and that his stepping out in the evening, without leave, meant–
Philandering.

Controlling myself on my visitor’s account, I dismissed Peggy,
stifled my indignation, and prepared, as politely as might be, to
listen to Jarber.

CHAPTER I–THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE

Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by
none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make
acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas
piece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was
no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted
circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect. More than that:
I had come to it direct from a railway station: it was not more
than a mile distant from the railway station; and, as I stood
outside the house, looking back upon the way I had come, I could see
the goods train running smoothly along the embankment in the valley.
I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace, because I
doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly commonplace people-
-and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it on myself to say
that anybody might see the house as I saw it, any fine autumn
morning.

The manner of my lighting on it was this.

I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to stop
by the way, to look at the house. My health required a temporary
residence in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and
who had happened to drive past the house, had written to me to
suggest it as a likely place. I had got into the train at midnight,
and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had sat looking out of
window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the sky, and had fallen
asleep again, and had woke up again to find the night gone, with the
usual discontented conviction on me that I hadn’t been to sleep at
all;–upon which question, in the first imbecility of that
condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager by
battle with the man who sat opposite me. That opposite man had had,
through the night–as that opposite man always has–several legs too
many, and all of them too long. In addition to this unreasonable
conduct (which was only to be expected of him), he had had a pencil
and a pocket-book, and had been perpetually listening and taking
notes. It had appeared to me that these aggravating notes related
to the jolts and bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned
myself to his taking them, under a general supposition that he was
in the civil-engineering way of life, if he had not sat staring
straight over my head whenever he listened. He was a goggle-eyed
gentleman of a perplexed aspect, and his demeanour became
unbearable.

It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I
had out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country,
and the curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the
stars and between me and the day, I turned to my fellow-traveller
and said:

“I BEG your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in
me”? For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my
travelling-cap or my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.

The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if
the back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said, with a
lofty look of compassion for my insignificance:

“In you, sir?–B.”

“B, sir?” said I, growing warm.

“I have nothing to do with you, sir,” returned the gentleman; “pray
let me listen–O.”

He enunciated this vowel after a pause, and noted it down.

At first I was alarmed, for an Express lunatic and no communication
with the guard, is a serious position. The thought came to my
relief that the gentleman might be what is popularly called a
Rapper: one of a sect for (some of) whom I have the highest
respect, but whom I don’t believe in. I was going to ask him the
question, when he took the bread out of my mouth.

“You will excuse me,” said the gentleman contemptuously, “if I am
too much in advance of common humanity to trouble myself at all
about it. I have passed the night–as indeed I pass the whole of my
time now–in spiritual intercourse.”

“O!” said I, somewhat snappishly.

“The conferences of the night began,” continued the gentleman,
turning several leaves of his note-book, “with this message: ‘Evil
communications corrupt good manners.’”

“Sound,” said I; “but, absolutely new?”

“New from spirits,” returned the gentleman.

I could only repeat my rather snappish “O!” and ask if I might be
favoured with the last communication.

“‘A bird in the hand,’” said the gentleman, reading his last entry
with great solemnity, “‘is worth two in the Bosh.’”

“Truly I am of the same opinion,” said I; “but shouldn’t it be
Bush?”

“It came to me, Bosh,” returned the gentleman.

The gentleman then informed me that the spirit of Socrates had
delivered this special revelation in the course of the night. “My
friend, I hope you are pretty well. There are two in this railway
carriage. How do you do? There are seventeen thousand four hundred
and seventy-nine spirits here, but you cannot see them. Pythagoras
is here. He is not at liberty to mention it, but hopes you like
travelling.” Galileo likewise had dropped in, with this scientific
intelligence. “I am glad to see you, AMICO. COME STA? Water will
freeze when it is cold enough. ADDIO!” In the course of the night,
also, the following phenomena had occurred. Bishop Butler had
insisted on spelling his name, “Bubler,” for which offence against
orthography and good manners he had been dismissed as out of temper.
John Milton (suspected of wilful mystification) had repudiated the
authorship of Paradise Lost, and had introduced, as joint authors of
that poem, two Unknown gentlemen, respectively named Grungers and
Scadgingtone. And Prince Arthur, nephew of King John of England,
had described himself as tolerably comfortable in the seventh
circle, where he was learning to paint on velvet, under the
direction of Mrs. Trimmer and Mary Queen of Scots.

If this should meet the eye of the gentleman who favoured me with
these disclosures, I trust he will excuse my confessing that the
sight of the rising sun, and the contemplation of the magnificent
Order of the vast Universe, made me impatient of them. In a word, I
was so impatient of them, that I was mightily glad to get out at the
next station, and to exchange these clouds and vapours for the free
air of Heaven.

By that time it was a beautiful morning. As I walked away among
such leaves as had already fallen from the golden, brown, and russet
trees; and as I looked around me on the wonders of Creation, and
thought of the steady, unchanging, and harmonious laws by which they
are sustained; the gentleman’s spiritual intercourse seemed to me as
poor a piece of journey-work as ever this world saw. In which
heathen state of mind, I came within view of the house, and stopped
to examine it attentively.

It was a solitary house, standing in a sadly neglected garden: a
pretty even square of some two acres. It was a house of about the
time of George the Second; as stiff, as cold, as formal, and in as
bad taste, as could possibly be desired by the most loyal admirer of
the whole quartet of Georges. It was uninhabited, but had, within a
year or two, been cheaply repaired to render it habitable; I say
cheaply, because the work had been done in a surface manner, and was
already decaying as to the paint and plaster, though the colours
were fresh. A lop-sided board drooped over the garden wall,
announcing that it was “to let on very reasonable terms, well
furnished.” It was much too closely and heavily shadowed by trees,
and, in particular, there were six tall poplars before the front
windows, which were excessively melancholy, and the site of which
had been extremely ill chosen.

It was easy to see that it was an avoided house–a house that was
shunned by the village, to which my eye was guided by a church spire
some half a mile off–a house that nobody would take. And the
natural inference was, that it had the reputation of being a haunted
house.

No period within the four-and-twenty hours of day and night is so
solemn to me, as the early morning. In the summer-time, I often
rise very early, and repair to my room to do a day’s work before
breakfast, and I am always on those occasions deeply impressed by
the stillness and solitude around me. Besides that there is
something awful in the being surrounded by familiar faces asleep–in
the knowledge that those who are dearest to us and to whom we are
dearest, are profoundly unconscious of us, in an impassive state,
anticipative of that mysterious condition to which we are all
tending–the stopped life, the broken threads of yesterday, the
deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished but abandoned
occupation, all are images of Death. The tranquillity of the hour
is the tranquillity of Death. The colour and the chill have the
same association. Even a certain air that familiar household
objects take upon them when they first emerge from the shadows of
the night into the morning, of being newer, and as they used to be
long ago, has its counterpart in the subsidence of the worn face of
maturity or age, in death, into the old youthful look. Moreover, I
once saw the apparition of my father, at this hour. He was alive
and well, and nothing ever came of it, but I saw him in the
daylight, sitting with his back towards me, on a seat that stood
beside my bed. His head was resting on his hand, and whether he was
slumbering or grieving, I could not discern. Amazed to see him
there, I sat up, moved my position, leaned out of bed, and watched
him. As he did not move, I spoke to him more than once. As he did
not move then, I became alarmed and laid my hand upon his shoulder,
as I thought–and there was no such thing.

For all these reasons, and for others less easily and briefly
statable, I find the early morning to be my most ghostly time. Any
house would be more or less haunted, to me, in the early morning;
and a haunted house could scarcely address me to greater advantage
than then.

I walked on into the village, with the desertion of this house upon
my mind, and I found the landlord of the little inn, sanding his
door-step. I bespoke breakfast, and broached the subject of the
house.

“Is it haunted?” I asked.

The landlord looked at me, shook his head, and answered, “I say
nothing.”

“Then it IS haunted?”

“Well!” cried the landlord, in an outburst of frankness that had the
appearance of desperation–”I wouldn’t sleep in it.”

“Why not?”

“If I wanted to have all the bells in a house ring, with nobody to
ring ‘em; and all the doors in a house bang, with nobody to bang
‘em; and all sorts of feet treading about, with no feet there; why,
then,” said the landlord, “I’d sleep in that house.”

“Is anything seen there?”

The landlord looked at me again, and then, with his former
appearance of desperation, called down his stable-yard for “Ikey!”

The call produced a high-shouldered young fellow, with a round red
face, a short crop of sandy hair, a very broad humorous mouth, a
turned-up nose, and a great sleeved waistcoat of purple bars, with
mother-of-pearl buttons, that seemed to be growing upon him, and to
be in a fair way–if it were not pruned–of covering his head and
overunning his boots.

“This gentleman wants to know,” said the landlord, “if anything’s
seen at the Poplars.”

“‘Ooded woman with a howl,” said Ikey, in a state of great
freshness.

“Do you mean a cry?”

“I mean a bird, sir.”

“A hooded woman with an owl. Dear me! Did you ever see her?”

“I seen the howl.”

“Never the woman?”

“Not so plain as the howl, but they always keeps together.”

“Has anybody ever seen the woman as plainly as the owl?”

“Lord bless you, sir! Lots.”

“Who?”

“Lord bless you, sir! Lots.”

“The general-dealer opposite, for instance, who is opening his
shop?”

“Perkins? Bless you, Perkins wouldn’t go a-nigh the place. No!”
observed the young man, with considerable feeling; “he an’t
overwise, an’t Perkins, but he an’t such a fool as THAT.”

(Here, the landlord murmured his confidence in Perkins’s knowing
better.)

“Who is–or who was–the hooded woman with the owl? Do you know?”

“Well!” said Ikey, holding up his cap with one hand while he
scratched his head with the other, “they say, in general, that she
was murdered, and the howl he ‘ooted the while.”

This very concise summary of the facts was all I could learn, except
that a young man, as hearty and likely a young man as ever I see,
had been took with fits and held down in ‘em, after seeing the
hooded woman. Also, that a personage, dimly described as “a hold
chap, a sort of one-eyed tramp, answering to the name of Joby,
unless you challenged him as Greenwood, and then he said, ‘Why not?
and even if so, mind your own business,’” had encountered the hooded
woman, a matter of five or six times. But, I was not materially
assisted by these witnesses: inasmuch as the first was in
California, and the last was, as Ikey said (and he was confirmed by
the landlord), Anywheres.

Now, although I regard with a hushed and solemn fear, the mysteries,
between which and this state of existence is interposed the barrier
of the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live;
and although I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything
of them; I can no more reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing
of bells, creaking of boards, and such-like insignificances, with
the majestic beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules
that I am permitted to understand, than I had been able, a little
while before, to yoke the spiritual intercourse of my fellow-
traveller to the chariot of the rising sun. Moreover, I had lived
in two haunted houses–both abroad. In one of these, an old Italian
palace, which bore the reputation of being very badly haunted
indeed, and which had recently been twice abandoned on that account,
I lived eight months, most tranquilly and pleasantly:
notwithstanding that the house had a score of mysterious bedrooms,
which were never used, and possessed, in one large room in which I
sat reading, times out of number at all hours, and next to which I
slept, a haunted chamber of the first pretensions. I gently hinted
these considerations to the landlord. And as to this particular
house having a bad name, I reasoned with him, Why, how many things
had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names,
and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper
in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the
neighbourhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time
to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was
perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to confess, and
was as dead a failure as ever I made in my life.

To cut this part of the story short, I was piqued about the haunted
house, and was already half resolved to take it. So, after
breakfast, I got the keys from Perkins’s brother-in-law (a whip and
harness maker, who keeps the Post Office, and is under submission to
a most rigorous wife of the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel
persuasion), and went up to the house, attended by my landlord and
by Ikey.

Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal. The
slowly changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were
doleful in the last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built,
ill-planned, and ill-fitted. It was damp, it was not free from dry
rot, there was a flavour of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim
of that indescribable decay which settles on all the work of man’s
hands whenever it’s not turned to man’s account. The kitchens and
offices were too large, and too remote from each other. Above
stairs and below, waste tracts of passage intervened between patches
of fertility represented by rooms; and there was a mouldy old well
with a green growth upon it, hiding like a murderous trap, near the
bottom of the back-stairs, under the double row of bells. One of
these bells was labelled, on a black ground in faded white letters,
MASTER B. This, they told me, was the bell that rang the most.

“Who was Master B.?” I asked. “Is it known what he did while the
owl hooted?”

“Rang the bell,” said Ikey.

I was rather struck by the prompt dexterity with which this young
man pitched his fur cap at the bell, and rang it himself. It was a
loud, unpleasant bell, and made a very disagreeable sound. The
other bells were inscribed according to the names of the rooms to
which their wires were conducted: as “Picture Room,” “Double Room,”
“Clock Room,” and the like. Following Master B.’s bell to its
source I found that young gentleman to have had but indifferent
third-class accommodation in a triangular cabin under the cock-loft,
with a corner fireplace which Master B. must have been exceedingly
small if he were ever able to warm himself at, and a corner chimney-
piece like a pyramidal staircase to the ceiling for Tom Thumb. The
papering of one side of the room had dropped down bodily, with
fragments of plaster adhering to it, and almost blocked up the door.
It appeared that Master B., in his spiritual condition, always made
a point of pulling the paper down. Neither the landlord nor Ikey
could suggest why he made such a fool of himself.

Except that the house had an immensely large rambling loft at top, I
made no other discoveries. It was moderately well furnished, but
sparely. Some of the furniture–say, a third–was as old as the
house; the rest was of various periods within the last half-century.
I was referred to a corn-chandler in the market-place of the county
town to treat for the house. I went that day, and I took it for six
months.

It was just the middle of October when I moved in with my maiden
sister (I venture to call her eight-and-thirty, she is so very
handsome, sensible, and engaging). We took with us, a deaf stable-
man, my bloodhound Turk, two women servants, and a young person
called an Odd Girl. I have reason to record of the attendant last
enumerated, who was one of the Saint Lawrence’s Union Female
Orphans, that she was a fatal mistake and a disastrous engagement.

The year was dying early, the leaves were falling fast, it was a raw
cold day when we took possession, and the gloom of the house was
most depressing. The cook (an amiable woman, but of a weak turn of
intellect) burst into tears on beholding the kitchen, and requested
that her silver watch might be delivered over to her sister (2
Tuppintock’s Gardens, Liggs’s Walk, Clapham Rise), in the event of
anything happening to her from the damp. Streaker, the housemaid,
feigned cheerfulness, but was the greater martyr. The Odd Girl, who
had never been in the country, alone was pleased, and made
arrangements for sowing an acorn in the garden outside the scullery
window, and rearing an oak.

We went, before dark, through all the natural–as opposed to
supernatural–miseries incidental to our state. Dispiriting reports
ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and
descended from the upper rooms. There was no rolling-pin, there was
no salamander (which failed to surprise me, for I don’t know what it
is), there was nothing in the house, what there was, was broken, the
last people must have lived like pigs, what could the meaning of the
landlord be? Through these distresses, the Odd Girl was cheerful
and exemplary. But within four hours after dark we had got into a
supernatural groove, and the Odd Girl had seen “Eyes,” and was in
hysterics.

My sister and I had agreed to keep the haunting strictly to
ourselves, and my impression was, and still is, that I had not left
Ikey, when he helped to unload the cart, alone with the women, or
any one of them, for one minute. Nevertheless, as I say, the Odd
Girl had “seen Eyes” (no other explanation could ever be drawn from
her), before nine, and by ten o’clock had had as much vinegar
applied to her as would pickle a handsome salmon.

I leave a discerning public to judge of my feelings, when, under
these untoward circumstances, at about half-past ten o’clock Master
B.’s bell began to ring in a most infuriated manner, and Turk howled
until the house resounded with his lamentations!

I hope I may never again be in a state of mind so unchristian as the
mental frame in which I lived for some weeks, respecting the memory
of Master B. Whether his bell was rung by rats, or mice, or bats,
or wind, or what other accidental vibration, or sometimes by one
cause, sometimes another, and sometimes by collusion, I don’t know;
but, certain it is, that it did ring two nights out of three, until
I conceived the happy idea of twisting Master B.’s neck–in other
words, breaking his bell short off–and silencing that young
gentleman, as to my experience and belief, for ever.

But, by that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers
of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very
inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed
with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address
the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had
painted Master B.’s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.’s
bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose that
that confounded boy had lived and died, to clothe himself with no
better behaviour than would most unquestionably have brought him and
the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in
the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a
mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible
means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the disembodied
spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?–I say I would become
emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in such an
address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd
Girl’s suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and glaring among
us like a parochial petrifaction.

Streaker, the housemaid, too, had an attribute of a most
discomfiting nature. I am unable to say whether she was of an
usually lymphatic temperament, or what else was the matter with her,
but this young woman became a mere Distillery for the production of
the largest and most transparent tears I ever met with. Combined
with these characteristics, was a peculiar tenacity of hold in those
specimens, so that they didn’t fall, but hung upon her face and
nose. In this condition, and mildly and deplorably shaking her
head, her silence would throw me more heavily than the Admirable
Crichton could have done in a verbal disputation for a purse of
money. Cook, likewise, always covered me with confusion as with a
garment, by neatly winding up the session with the protest that the
Ouse was wearing her out, and by meekly repeating her last wishes
regarding her silver watch.

As to our nightly life, the contagion of suspicion and fear was
among us, and there is no such contagion under the sky. Hooded
woman? According to the accounts, we were in a perfect Convent of
hooded women. Noises? With that contagion downstairs, I myself
have sat in the dismal parlour, listening, until I have heard so
many and such strange noises, that they would have chilled my blood
if I had not warmed it by dashing out to make discoveries. Try this
in bed, in the dead of the night: try this at your own comfortable
fire-side, in the life of the night. You can fill any house with
noises, if you will, until you have a noise for every nerve in your
nervous system.

I repeat; the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us, and
there is no such contagion under the sky. The women (their noses in
a chronic state of excoriation from smelling-salts) were always
primed and loaded for a swoon, and ready to go off with hair-
triggers. The two elder detached the Odd Girl on all expeditions
that were considered doubly hazardous, and she always established
the reputation of such adventures by coming back cataleptic. If
Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark, we knew we should
presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took place so
constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go
about the house, administering a touch of his art which I believe is
called The Auctioneer, to every domestic he met with.

It was in vain to do anything. It was in vain to be frightened, for
the moment in one’s own person, by a real owl, and then to show the
owl. It was in vain to discover, by striking an accidental discord
on the piano, that Turk always howled at particular notes and
combinations. It was in vain to be a Rhadamanthus with the bells,
and if an unfortunate bell rang without leave, to have it down
inexorably and silence it. It was in vain to fire up chimneys, let
torches down the well, charge furiously into suspected rooms and
recesses. We changed servants, and it was no better. The new set
ran away, and a third set came, and it was no better. At last, our
comfortable housekeeping got to be so disorganised and wretched,
that I one night dejectedly said to my sister: “Patty, I begin to
despair of our getting people to go on with us here, and I think we
must give this up.”

My sister, who is a woman of immense spirit, replied, “No, John,
don’t give it up. Don’t be beaten, John. There is another way.”

“And what is that?” said I.

“John,” returned my sister, “if we are not to be driven out of this
house, and that for no reason whatever, that is apparent to you or
me, we must help ourselves and take the house wholly and solely into
our own hands.”

“But, the servants,” said I.

“Have no servants,” said my sister, boldly.

Like most people in my grade of life, I had never thought of the
possibility of going on without those faithful obstructions. The
notion was so new to me when suggested, that I looked very doubtful.
“We know they come here to be frightened and infect one another, and
we know they are frightened and do infect one another,” said my
sister.

“With the exception of Bottles,” I observed, in a meditative tone.

(The deaf stable-man. I kept him in my service, and still keep him,
as a phenomenon of moroseness not to be matched in England.)

“To be sure, John,” assented my sister; “except Bottles. And what
does that go to prove? Bottles talks to nobody, and hears nobody
unless he is absolutely roared at, and what alarm has Bottles ever
given, or taken! None.”

This was perfectly true; the individual in question having retired,
every night at ten o’clock, to his bed over the coach-house, with no
other company than a pitchfork and a pail of water. That the pail
of water would have been over me, and the pitchfork through me, if I
had put myself without announcement in Bottles’s way after that
minute, I had deposited in my own mind as a fact worth remembering.
Neither had Bottles ever taken the least notice of any of our many
uproars. An imperturbable and speechless man, he had sat at his
supper, with Streaker present in a swoon, and the Odd Girl marble,
and had only put another potato in his cheek, or profited by the
general misery to help himself to beefsteak pie.

“And so,” continued my sister, “I exempt Bottles. And considering,
John, that the house is too large, and perhaps too lonely, to be
kept well in hand by Bottles, you, and me, I propose that we cast
about among our friends for a certain selected number of the most
reliable and willing–form a Society here for three months–wait
upon ourselves and one another–live cheerfully and socially–and
see what happens.”

I was so charmed with my sister, that I embraced her on the spot,
and went into her plan with the greatest ardour.

We were then in the third week of November; but, we took our
measures so vigorously, and were so well seconded by the friends in
whom we confided, that there was still a week of the month
unexpired, when our party all came down together merrily, and
mustered in the haunted house.

I will mention, in this place, two small changes that I made while
my sister and I were yet alone. It occurring to me as not
improbable that Turk howled in the house at night, partly because he
wanted to get out of it, I stationed him in his kennel outside, but
unchained; and I seriously warned the village that any man who came
in his way must not expect to leave him without a rip in his own
throat. I then casually asked Ikey if he were a judge of a gun? On
his saying, “Yes, sir, I knows a good gun when I sees her,” I begged
the favour of his stepping up to the house and looking at mine.

“SHE’S a true one, sir,” said Ikey, after inspecting a double-
barrelled rifle that I bought in New York a few years ago. “No
mistake about HER, sir.”

“Ikey,” said I, “don’t mention it; I have seen something in this
house.”

“No, sir?” he whispered, greedily opening his eyes. “‘Ooded lady,
sir?”

“Don’t be frightened,” said I. “It was a figure rather like you.”

“Lord, sir?”

“Ikey!” said I, shaking hands with him warmly: I may say
affectionately; “if there is any truth in these ghost-stories, the
greatest service I can do you, is, to fire at that figure. And I
promise you, by Heaven and earth, I will do it with this gun if I
see it again!”

The young man thanked me, and took his leave with some little
precipitation, after declining a glass of liquor. I imparted my
secret to him, because I had never quite forgotten his throwing his
cap at the bell; because I had, on another occasion, noticed
something very like a fur cap, lying not far from the bell, one
night when it had burst out ringing; and because I had remarked that
we were at our ghostliest whenever he came up in the evening to
comfort the servants. Let me do Ikey no injustice. He was afraid
of the house, and believed in its being haunted; and yet he would
play false on the haunting side, so surely as he got an opportunity.
The Odd Girl’s case was exactly similar. She went about the house
in a state of real terror, and yet lied monstrously and wilfully,
and invented many of the alarms she spread, and made many of the
sounds we heard. I had had my eye on the two, and I know it. It is
not necessary for me, here, to account for this preposterous state
of mind; I content myself with remarking that it is familiarly known
to every intelligent man who has had fair medical, legal, or other
watchful experience; that it is as well established and as common a
state of mind as any with which observers are acquainted; and that
it is one of the first elements, above all others, rationally to be
suspected in, and strictly looked for, and separated from, any
question of this kind.

To return to our party. The first thing we did when we were all
assembled, was, to draw lots for bedrooms. That done, and every
bedroom, and, indeed, the whole house, having been minutely examined
by the whole body, we allotted the various household duties, as if
we had been on a gipsy party, or a yachting party, or a hunting
party, or were shipwrecked. I then recounted the floating rumours
concerning the hooded lady, the owl, and Master B.: with others,
still more filmy, which had floated about during our occupation,
relative to some ridiculous old ghost of the female gender who went
up and down, carrying the ghost of a round table; and also to an
impalpable Jackass, whom nobody was ever able to catch. Some of
these ideas I really believe our people below had communicated to
one another in some diseased way, without conveying them in words.
We then gravely called one another to witness, that we were not
there to be deceived, or to deceive–which we considered pretty much
the same thing–and that, with a serious sense of responsibility, we
would be strictly true to one another, and would strictly follow out
the truth. The understanding was established, that any one who
heard unusual noises in the night, and who wished to trace them,
should knock at my door; lastly, that on Twelfth Night, the last
night of holy Christmas, all our individual experiences since that
then present hour of our coming together in the haunted house,
should be brought to light for the good of all; and that we would
hold our peace on the subject till then, unless on some remarkable
provocation to break silence.

We were, in number and in character, as follows:

First–to get my sister and myself out of the way–there were we
two. In the drawing of lots, my sister drew her own room, and I
drew Master B.’s. Next, there was our first cousin John Herschel,
so called after the great astronomer: than whom I suppose a better
man at a telescope does not breathe. With him, was his wife: a
charming creature to whom he had been married in the previous
spring. I thought it (under the circumstances) rather imprudent to
bring her, because there is no knowing what even a false alarm may
do at such a time; but I suppose he knew his own business best, and
I must say that if she had been MY wife, I never could have left her
endearing and bright face behind. They drew the Clock Room. Alfred
Starling, an uncommonly agreeable young fellow of eight-and-twenty
for whom I have the greatest liking, was in the Double Room; mine,
usually, and designated by that name from having a dressing-room
within it, with two large and cumbersome windows, which no wedges I
was ever able to make, would keep from shaking, in any weather, wind
or no wind. Alfred is a young fellow who pretends to be “fast”
(another word for loose, as I understand the term), but who is much
too good and sensible for that nonsense, and who would have
distinguished himself before now, if his father had not
unfortunately left him a small independence of two hundred a year,
on the strength of which his only occupation in life has been to
spend six. I am in hopes, however, that his Banker may break, or
that he may enter into some speculation guaranteed to pay twenty per
cent.; for, I am convinced that if he could only be ruined, his
fortune is made. Belinda Bates, bosom friend of my sister, and a
most intellectual, amiable, and delightful girl, got the Picture
Room. She has a fine genius for poetry, combined with real business
earnestness, and “goes in”–to use an expression of Alfred’s–for
Woman’s mission, Woman’s rights, Woman’s wrongs, and everything that
is woman’s with a capital W, or is not and ought to be, or is and
ought not to be. “Most praiseworthy, my dear, and Heaven prosper
you!” I whispered to her on the first night of my taking leave of
her at the Picture-Room door, “but don’t overdo it. And in respect
of the great necessity there is, my darling, for more employments
being within the reach of Woman than our civilisation has as yet
assigned to her, don’t fly at the unfortunate men, even those men
who are at first sight in your way, as if they were the natural
oppressors of your sex; for, trust me, Belinda, they do sometimes
spend their wages among wives and daughters, sisters, mothers,
aunts, and grandmothers; and the play is, really, not ALL Wolf and
Red Riding-Hood, but has other parts in it.” However, I digress.

Belinda, as I have mentioned, occupied the Picture Room. We had but
three other chambers: the Corner Room, the Cupboard Room, and the
Garden Room. My old friend, Jack Governor, “slung his hammock,” as
he called it, in the Corner Room. I have always regarded Jack as
the finest-looking sailor that ever sailed. He is gray now, but as
handsome as he was a quarter of a century ago–nay, handsomer. A
portly, cheery, well-built figure of a broad-shouldered man, with a
frank smile, a brilliant dark eye, and a rich dark eyebrow. I
remember those under darker hair, and they look all the better for
their silver setting. He has been wherever his Union namesake
flies, has Jack, and I have met old shipmates of his, away in the
Mediterranean and on the other side of the Atlantic, who have beamed
and brightened at the casual mention of his name, and have cried,
“You know Jack Governor? Then you know a prince of men!” That he
is! And so unmistakably a naval officer, that if you were to meet
him coming out of an Esquimaux snow-hut in seal’s skin, you would be
vaguely persuaded he was in full naval uniform.

Jack once had that bright clear eye of his on my sister; but, it
fell out that he married another lady and took her to South America,
where she died. This was a dozen years ago or more. He brought
down with him to our haunted house a little cask of salt beef; for,
he is always convinced that all salt beef not of his own pickling,
is mere carrion, and invariably, when he goes to London, packs a
piece in his portmanteau. He had also volunteered to bring with him
one “Nat Beaver,” an old comrade of his, captain of a merchantman.
Mr. Beaver, with a thick-set wooden face and figure, and apparently
as hard as a block all over, proved to be an intelligent man, with a
world of watery experiences in him, and great practical knowledge.
At times, there was a curious nervousness about him, apparently the
lingering result of some old illness; but, it seldom lasted many
minutes. He got the Cupboard Room, and lay there next to Mr.
Undery, my friend and solicitor: who came down, in an amateur
capacity, “to go through with it,” as he said, and who plays whist
better than the whole Law List, from the red cover at the beginning
to the red cover at the end.

I never was happier in my life, and I believe it was the universal
feeling among us. Jack Governor, always a man of wonderful
resources, was Chief Cook, and made some of the best dishes I ever
ate, including unapproachable curries. My sister was pastrycook and
confectioner. Starling and I were Cook’s Mate, turn and turn about,
and on special occasions the chief cook “pressed” Mr. Beaver. We
had a great deal of out-door sport and exercise, but nothing was
neglected within, and there was no ill-humour or misunderstanding
among us, and our evenings were so delightful that we had at least
one good reason for being reluctant to go to bed.

We had a few night alarms in the beginning. On the first night, I
was knocked up by Jack with a most wonderful ship’s lantern in his
hand, like the gills of some monster of the deep, who informed me
that he “was going aloft to the main truck,” to have the weathercock
down. It was a stormy night and I remonstrated; but Jack called my
attention to its making a sound like a cry of despair, and said
somebody would be “hailing a ghost” presently, if it wasn’t done.
So, up to the top of the house, where I could hardly stand for the
wind, we went, accompanied by Mr. Beaver; and there Jack, lantern
and all, with Mr. Beaver after him, swarmed up to the top of a
cupola, some two dozen feet above the chimneys, and stood upon
nothing particular, coolly knocking the weathercock off, until they
both got into such good spirits with the wind and the height, that I
thought they would never come down. Another night, they turned out
again, and had a chimney-cowl off. Another night, they cut a
sobbing and gulping water-pipe away. Another night, they found out
something else. On several occasions, they both, in the coolest
manner, simultaneously dropped out of their respective bedroom
windows, hand over hand by their counterpanes, to “overhaul”
something mysterious in the garden.

The engagement among us was faithfully kept, and nobody revealed
anything. All we knew was, if any one’s room were haunted, no one
looked the worse for it.

CHAPTER II–THE GHOST IN MASTER B.’S ROOM

When I established myself in the triangular garret which had gained
so distinguished a reputation, my thoughts naturally turned to
Master B. My speculations about him were uneasy and manifold.
Whether his Christian name was Benjamin, Bissextile (from his having
been born in Leap Year), Bartholomew, or Bill. Whether the initial
letter belonged to his family name, and that was Baxter, Black,
Brown, Barker, Buggins, Baker, or Bird. Whether he was a foundling,
and had been baptized B. Whether he was a lion-hearted boy, and B.
was short for Briton, or for Bull. Whether he could possibly have
been kith and kin to an illustrious lady who brightened my own
childhood, and had come of the blood of the brilliant Mother Bunch?

With these profitless meditations I tormented myself much. I also
carried the mysterious letter into the appearance and pursuits of
the deceased; wondering whether he dressed in Blue, wore Boots (he
couldn’t have been Bald), was a boy of Brains, liked Books, was good
at Bowling, had any skill as a Boxer, even in his Buoyant Boyhood
Bathed from a Bathing-machine at Bognor, Bangor, Bournemouth,
Brighton, or Broadstairs, like a Bounding Billiard Ball?

So, from the first, I was haunted by the letter B.

It was not long before I remarked that I never by any hazard had a
dream of Master B., or of anything belonging to him. But, the
instant I awoke from sleep, at whatever hour of the night, my
thoughts took him up, and roamed away, trying to attach his initial
letter to something that would fit it and keep it quiet.

For six nights, I had been worried this in Master B.’s room, when I
began to perceive that things were going wrong.

The first appearance that presented itself was early in the morning
when it was but just daylight and no more. I was standing shaving
at my glass, when I suddenly discovered, to my consternation and
amazement, that I was shaving–not myself–I am fifty–but a boy.
Apparently Master B.!

I trembled and looked over my shoulder; nothing there. I looked
again in the glass, and distinctly saw the features and expression
of a boy, who was shaving, not to get rid of a beard, but to get
one. Extremely troubled in my mind, I took a few turns in the room,
and went back to the looking-glass, resolved to steady my hand and
complete the operation in which I had been disturbed. Opening my
eyes, which I had shut while recovering my firmness, I now met in
the glass, looking straight at me, the eyes of a young man of four
or five and twenty. Terrified by this new ghost, I closed my eyes,
and made a strong effort to recover myself. Opening them again, I
saw, shaving his cheek in the glass, my father, who has long been
dead. Nay, I even saw my grandfather too, whom I never did see in
my life.

Although naturally much affected by these remarkable visitations, I
determined to keep my secret, until the time agreed upon for the
present general disclosure. Agitated by a multitude of curious
thoughts, I retired to my room, that night, prepared to encounter
some new experience of a spectral character. Nor was my preparation
needless, for, waking from an uneasy sleep at exactly two o’clock in
the morning, what were my feelings to find that I was sharing my bed
with the skeleton of Master B.!

I sprang up, and the skeleton sprang up also. I then heard a
plaintive voice saying, “Where am I? What is become of me?” and,
looking hard in that direction, perceived the ghost of Master B.

The young spectre was dressed in an obsolete fashion: or rather,
was not so much dressed as put into a case of inferior pepper-and-
salt cloth, made horrible by means of shining buttons. I observed
that these buttons went, in a double row, over each shoulder of the
young ghost, and appeared to descend his back. He wore a frill
round his neck. His right hand (which I distinctly noticed to be
inky) was laid upon his stomach; connecting this action with some
feeble pimples on his countenance, and his general air of nausea, I
concluded this ghost to be the ghost of a boy who had habitually
taken a great deal too much medicine.

“Where am I?” said the little spectre, in a pathetic voice. “And
why was I born in the Calomel days, and why did I have all that
Calomel given me?”

I replied, with sincere earnestness, that upon my soul I couldn’t
tell him.

“Where is my little sister,” said the ghost, “and where my angelic
little wife, and where is the boy I went to school with?”

I entreated the phantom to be comforted, and above all things to
take heart respecting the loss of the boy he went to school with. I
represented to him that probably that boy never did, within human
experience, come out well, when discovered. I urged that I myself
had, in later life, turned up several boys whom I went to school
with, and none of them had at all answered. I expressed my humble
belief that that boy never did answer. I represented that he was a
mythic character, a delusion, and a snare. I recounted how, the
last time I found him, I found him at a dinner party behind a wall
of white cravat, with an inconclusive opinion on every possible
subject, and a power of silent boredom absolutely Titanic. I
related how, on the strength of our having been together at “Old
Doylance’s,” he had asked himself to breakfast with me (a social
offence of the largest magnitude); how, fanning my weak embers of
belief in Doylance’s boys, I had let him in; and how, he had proved
to be a fearful wanderer about the earth, pursuing the race of Adam
with inexplicable notions concerning the currency, and with a
proposition that the Bank of England should, on pain of being
abolished, instantly strike off and circulate, God knows how many
thousand millions of ten-and-sixpenny notes.

The ghost heard me in silence, and with a fixed stare. “Barber!” it
apostrophised me when I had finished.

“Barber?” I repeated–for I am not of that profession.

“Condemned,” said the ghost, “to shave a constant change of
customers–now, me–now, a young man–now, thyself as thou art–now,
thy father–now, thy grandfather; condemned, too, to lie down with a
skeleton every night, and to rise with it every morning–”

(I shuddered on hearing this dismal announcement.)

“Barber! Pursue me!”

I had felt, even before the words were uttered, that I was under a
spell to pursue the phantom. I immediately did so, and was in
Master B.’s room no longer.

Most people know what long and fatiguing night journeys had been
forced upon the witches who used to confess, and who, no doubt, told
the exact truth–particularly as they were always assisted with
leading questions, and the Torture was always ready. I asseverate
that, during my occupation of Master B.’s room, I was taken by the
ghost that haunted it, on expeditions fully as long and wild as any
of those. Assuredly, I was presented to no shabby old man with a
goat’s horns and tail (something between Pan and an old clothesman),
holding conventional receptions, as stupid as those of real life and
less decent; but, I came upon other things which appeared to me to
have more meaning.

Confident that I speak the truth and shall be believed, I declare
without hesitation that I followed the ghost, in the first instance
on a broom-stick, and afterwards on a rocking-horse. The very smell
of the animal’s paint–especially when I brought it out, by making
him warm–I am ready to swear to. I followed the ghost, afterwards,
in a hackney coach; an institution with the peculiar smell of which,
the present generation is unacquainted, but to which I am again
ready to swear as a combination of stable, dog with the mange, and
very old bellows. (In this, I appeal to previous generations to
confirm or refute me.) I pursued the phantom, on a headless donkey:
at least, upon a donkey who was so interested in the state of his
stomach that his head was always down there, investigating it; on
ponies, expressly born to kick up behind; on roundabouts and swings,
from fairs; in the first cab–another forgotten institution where
the fare regularly got into bed, and was tucked up with the driver.

Not to trouble you with a detailed account of all my travels in
pursuit of the ghost of Master B., which were longer and more
wonderful than those of Sinbad the Sailor, I will confine myself to
one experience from which you may judge of many.

I was marvellously changed. I was myself, yet not myself. I was
conscious of something within me, which has been the same all
through my life, and which I have always recognised under all its
phases and varieties as never altering, and yet I was not the I who
had gone to bed in Master B.’s room. I had the smoothest of faces
and the shortest of legs, and I had taken another creature like
myself, also with the smoothest of faces and the shortest of legs,
behind a door, and was confiding to him a proposition of the most
astounding nature.

This proposition was, that we should have a Seraglio.

The other creature assented warmly. He had no notion of
respectability, neither had I. It was the custom of the East, it
was the way of the good Caliph Haroun Alraschid (let me have the
corrupted name again for once, it is so scented with sweet
memories!), the usage was highly laudable, and most worthy of
imitation. “O, yes! Let us,” said the other creature with a jump,
“have a Seraglio.”

It was not because we entertained the faintest doubts of the
meritorious character of the Oriental establishment we proposed to
import, that we perceived it must be kept a secret from Miss
Griffin. It was because we knew Miss Griffin to be bereft of human
sympathies, and incapable of appreciating the greatness of the great
Haroun. Mystery impenetrably shrouded from Miss Griffin then, let
us entrust it to Miss Bule.

We were ten in Miss Griffin’s establishment by Hampstead Ponds;
eight ladies and two gentlemen. Miss Bule, whom I judge to have
attained the ripe age of eight or nine, took the lead in society. I
opened the subject to her in the course of the day, and proposed
that she should become the Favourite.

Miss Bule, after struggling with the diffidence so natural to, and
charming in, her adorable sex, expressed herself as flattered by the
idea, but wished to know how it was proposed to provide for Miss
Pipson? Miss Bule–who was understood to have vowed towards that
young lady, a friendship, halves, and no secrets, until death, on
the Church Service and Lessons complete in two volumes with case and
lock–Miss Bule said she could not, as the friend of Pipson,
disguise from herself, or me, that Pipson was not one of the common.

Now, Miss Pipson, having curly hair and blue eyes (which was my idea
of anything mortal and feminine that was called Fair), I promptly
replied that I regarded Miss Pipson in the light of a Fair
Circassian.

“And what then?” Miss Bule pensively asked.

I replied that she must be inveigled by a Merchant, brought to me
veiled, and purchased as a slave.

[The other creature had already fallen into the second male place in
the State, and was set apart for Grand Vizier. He afterwards
resisted this disposal of events, but had his hair pulled until he
yielded.]

“Shall I not be jealous?” Miss Bule inquired, casting down her eyes.

“Zobeide, no,” I replied; “you will ever be the favourite Sultana;
the first place in my heart, and on my throne, will be ever yours.”

Miss Bule, upon that assurance, consented to propound the idea to
her seven beautiful companions. It occurring to me, in the course
of the same day, that we knew we could trust a grinning and good-
natured soul called Tabby, who was the serving drudge of the house,
and had no more figure than one of the beds, and upon whose face
there was always more or less black-lead, I slipped into Miss Bule’s
hand after supper, a little note to that effect; dwelling on the
black-lead as being in a manner deposited by the finger of
Providence, pointing Tabby out for Mesrour, the celebrated chief of
the Blacks of the Hareem.

There were difficulties in the formation of the desired institution,
as there are in all combinations. The other creature showed himself
of a low character, and, when defeated in aspiring to the throne,
pretended to have conscientious scruples about prostrating himself
before the Caliph; wouldn’t call him Commander of the Faithful;
spoke of him slightingly and inconsistently as a mere “chap;” said
he, the other creature, “wouldn’t play”–Play!–and was otherwise
coarse and offensive. This meanness of disposition was, however,
put down by the general indignation of an united Seraglio, and I
became blessed in the smiles of eight of the fairest of the
daughters of men.

The smiles could only be bestowed when Miss Griffin was looking
another way, and only then in a very wary manner, for there was a
legend among the followers of the Prophet that she saw with a little
round ornament in the middle of the pattern on the back of her
shawl. But every day after dinner, for an hour, we were all
together, and then the Favourite and the rest of the Royal Hareem
competed who should most beguile the leisure of the Serene Haroun
reposing from the cares of State–which were generally, as in most
affairs of State, of an arithmetical character, the Commander of the
Faithful being a fearful boggler at a sum.

On these occasions, the devoted Mesrour, chief of the Blacks of the
Hareem, was always in attendance (Miss Griffin usually ringing for
that officer, at the same time, with great vehemence), but never
acquitted himself in a manner worthy of his historical reputation.
In the first place, his bringing a broom into the Divan of the
Caliph, even when Haroun wore on his shoulders the red robe of anger
(Miss Pipson’s pelisse), though it might be got over for the moment,
was never to be quite satisfactorily accounted for. In the second
place, his breaking out into grinning exclamations of “Lork you
pretties!” was neither Eastern nor respectful. In the third place,
when specially instructed to say “Bismillah!” he always said
“Hallelujah!” This officer, unlike his class, was too good-humoured
altogether, kept his mouth open far too wide, expressed approbation
to an incongruous extent, and even once–it was on the occasion of
the purchase of the Fair Circassian for five hundred thousand purses
of gold, and cheap, too–embraced the Slave, the Favourite, and the
Caliph, all round. (Parenthetically let me say God bless Mesrour,
and may there have been sons and daughters on that tender bosom,
softening many a hard day since!)

Miss Griffin was a model of propriety, and I am at a loss to imagine
what the feelings of the virtuous woman would have been, if she had
known, when she paraded us down the Hampstead Road two and two, that
she was walking with a stately step at the head of Polygamy and
Mahomedanism. I believe that a mysterious and terrible joy with
which the contemplation of Miss Griffin, in this unconscious state,
inspired us, and a grim sense prevalent among us that there was a
dreadful power in our knowledge of what Miss Griffin (who knew all
things that could be learnt out of book) didn’t know, were the main-
spring of the preservation of our secret. It was wonderfully kept,
but was once upon the verge of self-betrayal. The danger and escape
occurred upon a Sunday. We were all ten ranged in a conspicuous
part of the gallery at church, with Miss Griffin at our head–as we
were every Sunday–advertising the establishment in an unsecular
sort of way–when the description of Solomon in his domestic glory
happened to be read. The moment that monarch was thus referred to,
conscience whispered me, “Thou, too, Haroun!” The officiating
minister had a cast in his eye, and it assisted conscience by giving
him the appearance of reading personally at me. A crimson blush,
attended by a fearful perspiration, suffused my features. The Grand
Vizier became more dead than alive, and the whole Seraglio reddened
as if the sunset of Bagdad shone direct upon their lovely faces. At
this portentous time the awful Griffin rose, and balefully surveyed
the children of Islam. My own impression was, that Church and State
had entered into a conspiracy with Miss Griffin to expose us, and
that we should all be put into white sheets, and exhibited in the
centre aisle. But, so Westerly–if I may be allowed the expression
as opposite to Eastern associations–was Miss Griffin’s sense of
rectitude, that she merely suspected Apples, and we were saved.

I have called the Seraglio, united. Upon the question, solely,
whether the Commander of the Faithful durst exercise a right of
kissing in that sanctuary of the palace, were its peerless inmates
divided. Zobeide asserted a counter-right in the Favourite to
scratch, and the fair Circassian put her face, for refuge, into a
green baize bag, originally designed for books. On the other hand,
a young antelope of transcendent beauty from the fruitful plains of
Camden Town (whence she had been brought, by traders, in the half-
yearly caravan that crossed the intermediate desert after the
holidays), held more liberal opinions, but stipulated for limiting
the benefit of them to that dog, and son of a dog, the Grand Vizier-
-who had no rights, and was not in question. At length, the
difficulty was compromised by the installation of a very youthful
slave as Deputy. She, raised upon a stool, officially received upon
her cheeks the salutes intended by the gracious Haroun for other
Sultanas, and was privately rewarded from the coffers of the Ladies
of the Hareem.

And now it was, at the full height of enjoyment of my bliss, that I
became heavily troubled. I began to think of my mother, and what
she would say to my taking home at Midsummer eight of the most
beautiful of the daughters of men, but all unexpected. I thought of
the number of beds we made up at our house, of my father’s income,
and of the baker, and my despondency redoubled. The Seraglio and
malicious Vizier, divining the cause of their Lord’s unhappiness,
did their utmost to augment it. They professed unbounded fidelity,
and declared that they would live and die with him. Reduced to the
utmost wretchedness by these protestations of attachment, I lay
awake, for hours at a time, ruminating on my frightful lot. In my
despair, I think I might have taken an early opportunity of falling
on my knees before Miss Griffin, avowing my resemblance to Solomon,
and praying to be dealt with according to the outraged laws of my
country, if an unthought-of means of escape had not opened before
me.

One day, we were out walking, two and two–on which occasion the
Vizier had his usual instructions to take note of the boy at the
turn-pike, and if he profanely gazed (which he always did) at the
beauties of the Hareem, to have him bowstrung in the course of the
night–and it happened that our hearts were veiled in gloom. An
unaccountable action on the part of the antelope had plunged the
State into disgrace. That charmer, on the representation that the
previous day was her birthday, and that vast treasures had been sent
in a hamper for its celebration (both baseless assertions), had
secretly but most pressingly invited thirty-five neighbouring
princes and princesses to a ball and supper: with a special
stipulation that they were “not to be fetched till twelve.” This
wandering of the antelope’s fancy, led to the surprising arrival at
Miss Griffin’s door, in divers equipages and under various escorts,
of a great company in full dress, who were depo

He lived on the bank of a mighty river, broad and deep, which was
always silently rolling on to a vast undiscovered ocean. It had
rolled on, ever since the world began. It had changed its course
sometimes, and turned into new channels, leaving its old ways dry
and barren; but it had ever been upon the flow, and ever was to flow
until Time should be no more. Against its strong, unfathomable
stream, nothing made head. No living creature, no flower, no leaf,
no particle of animate or inanimate existence, ever strayed back
from the undiscovered ocean. The tide of the river set resistlessly
towards it; and the tide never stopped, any more than the earth
stops in its circling round the sun.

He lived in a busy place, and he worked very hard to live. He had
no hope of ever being rich enough to live a month without hard work,
but he was quite content, GOD knows, to labour with a cheerful will.
He was one of an immense family, all of whose sons and daughters
gained their daily bread by daily work, prolonged from their rising
up betimes until their lying down at night. Beyond this destiny he
had no prospect, and he sought none.

There was over-much drumming, trumpeting, and speech-making, in the
neighbourhood where he dwelt; but he had nothing to do with that.
Such clash and uproar came from the Bigwig family, at the
unaccountable proceedings of which race, he marvelled much. They
set up the strangest statues, in iron, marble, bronze, and brass,
before his door; and darkened his house with the legs and tails of
uncouth images of horses. He wondered what it all meant, smiled in
a rough good-humoured way he had, and kept at his hard work.

The Bigwig family (composed of all the stateliest people
thereabouts, and all the noisiest) had undertaken to save him the
trouble of thinking for himself, and to manage him and his affairs.
“Why truly,” said he, “I have little time upon my hands; and if you
will be so good as to take care of me, in return for the money I pay
over”–for the Bigwig family were not above his money–”I shall be
relieved and much obliged, considering that you know best.” Hence
the drumming, trumpeting, and speech-making, and the ugly images of
horses which he was expected to fall down and worship.

“I don’t understand all this,” said he, rubbing his furrowed brow
confusedly. “But it HAS a meaning, maybe, if I could find it out.”

“It means,” returned the Bigwig family, suspecting something of what
he said, “honour and glory in the highest, to the highest merit.”

“Oh!” said he. And he was glad to hear that.

But, when he looked among the images in iron, marble, bronze, and
brass, he failed to find a rather meritorious countryman of his,
once the son of a Warwickshire wool-dealer, or any single countryman
whomsoever of that kind. He could find none of the men whose
knowledge had rescued him and his children from terrific and
disfiguring disease, whose boldness had raised his forefathers from
the condition of serfs, whose wise fancy had opened a new and high
existence to the humblest, whose skill had filled the working man’s
world with accumulated wonders. Whereas, he did find others whom he
knew no good of, and even others whom he knew much ill of.

“Humph!” said he. “I don’t quite understand it.”

So, he went home, and sat down by his fireside to get it out of his
mind.

Now, his fireside was a bare one, all hemmed in by blackened
streets; but it was a precious place to him. The hands of his wife
were hardened with toil, and she was old before her time; but she
was dear to him. His children, stunted in their growth, bore traces
of unwholesome nurture; but they had beauty in his sight. Above all
other things, it was an earnest desire of this man’s soul that his
children should be taught. “If I am sometimes misled,” said he,
“for want of knowledge, at least let them know better, and avoid my
mistakes. If it is hard to me to reap the harvest of pleasure and
instruction that is stored in books, let it be easier to them.”

But, the Bigwig family broke out into violent family quarrels
concerning what it was lawful to teach to this man’s children. Some
of the family insisted on such a thing being primary and
indispensable above all other things; and others of the family
insisted on such another thing being primary and indispensable above
all other things; and the Bigwig family, rent into factions, wrote
pamphlets, held convocations, delivered charges, orations, and all
varieties of discourses; impounded one another in courts Lay and
courts Ecclesiastical; threw dirt, exchanged pummelings, and fell
together by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this
man, in his short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon
Ignorance arise there, and take his children to itself. He saw his
daughter perverted into a heavy, slatternly drudge; he saw his son
go moping down the ways of low sensuality, to brutality and crime;
he saw the dawning light of intelligence in the eyes of his babies
so changing into cunning and suspicion, that he could have rather
wished them idiots.

“I don’t understand this any the better,” said he; “but I think it
cannot be right. Nay, by the clouded Heaven above me, I protest
against this as my wrong!”

Becoming peaceable again (for his passion was usually short-lived,
and his nature kind), he looked about him on his Sundays and
holidays, and he saw how much monotony and weariness there was, and
thence how drunkenness arose with all its train of ruin. Then he
appealed to the Bigwig family, and said, “We are a labouring people,
and I have a glimmering suspicion in me that labouring people of
whatever condition were made–by a higher intelligence than yours,
as I poorly understand it–to be in need of mental refreshment and
recreation. See what we fall into, when we rest without it. Come!
Amuse me harmlessly, show me something, give me an escape!”

But, here the Bigwig family fell into a state of uproar absolutely
deafening. When some few voices were faintly heard, proposing to
show him the wonders of the world, the greatness of creation, the
mighty changes of time, the workings of nature and the beauties of
art–to show him these things, that is to say, at any period of his
life when he could look upon them–there arose among the Bigwigs
such roaring and raving, such pulpiting and petitioning, such
maundering and memorialising, such name-calling and dirt-throwing,
such a shrill wind of parliamentary questioning and feeble replying-
-where “I dare not” waited on “I would”–that the poor fellow stood
aghast, staring wildly around.

“Have I provoked all this,” said he, with his hands to his
affrighted ears, “by what was meant to be an innocent request,
plainly arising out of my familiar experience, and the common
knowledge of all men who choose to open their eyes? I don’t
understand, and I am not understood. What is to come of such a
state of things!”

He was bending over his work, often asking himself the question,
when the news began to spread that a pestilence had appeared among
the labourers, and was slaying them by thousands. Going forth to
look about him, he soon found this to be true. The dying and the
dead were mingled in the close and tainted houses among which his
life was passed. New poison was distilled into the always murky,
always sickening air. The robust and the weak, old age and infancy,
the father and the mother, all were stricken down alike.

What means of flight had he? He remained there, where he was, and
saw those who were dearest to him die. A kind preacher came to him,
and would have said some prayers to soften his heart in his gloom,
but he replied:

“O what avails it, missionary, to come to me, a man condemned to
residence in this foetid place, where every sense bestowed upon me
for my delight becomes a torment, and where every minute of my
numbered days is new mire added to the heap under which I lie
oppressed! But, give me my first glimpse of Heaven, through a
little of its light and air; give me pure water; help me to be
clean; lighten this heavy atmosphere and heavy life, in which our
spirits sink, and we become the indifferent and callous creatures
you too often see us; gently and kindly take the bodies of those who
die among us, out of the small room where we grow to be so familiar
with the awful change that even its sanctity is lost to us; and,
Teacher, then I will hear–none know better than you, how willingly-
-of Him whose thoughts were so much with the poor, and who had
compassion for all human sorrow!”

He was at work again, solitary and sad, when his Master came and
stood near to him dressed in black. He, also, had suffered heavily.
His young wife, his beautiful and good young wife, was dead; so,
too, his only child.

“Master, ’tis hard to bear–I know it–but be comforted. I would
give you comfort, if I could.”

The Master thanked him from his heart, but, said he, “O you
labouring men! The calamity began among you. If you had but lived
more healthily and decently, I should not be the widowed and bereft
mourner that I am this day.”

“Master,” returned the other, shaking his head, “I have begun to
understand a little that most calamities will come from us, as this
one did, and that none will stop at our poor doors, until we are
united with that great squabbling family yonder, to do the things
that are right. We cannot live healthily and decently, unless they
who undertook to manage us provide the means. We cannot be
instructed unless they will teach us; we cannot be rationally
amused, unless they will amuse us; we cannot but have some false
gods of our own, while they set up so many of theirs in all the
public places. The evil consequences of imperfect instruction, the
evil consequences of pernicious neglect, the evil consequences of
unnatural restraint and the denial of humanising enjoyments, will
all come from us, and none of them will stop with us. They will
spread far and wide. They always do; they always have done–just
like the pestilence. I understand so much, I think, at last.”

But the Master said again, “O you labouring men! How seldom do we
ever hear of you, except in connection with some trouble!”

“Master,” he replied, “I am Nobody, and little likely to be heard of
(nor yet much wanted to be heard of, perhaps), except when there is
some trouble. But it never begins with me, and it never can end
with me. As sure as Death, it comes down to me, and it goes up from
me.”

There was so much reason in what he said, that the Bigwig family,
getting wind of it, and being horribly frightened by the late
desolation, resolved to unite with him to do the things that were
right–at all events, so far as the said things were associated with
the direct prevention, humanly speaking, of another pestilence.
But, as their fear wore off, which it soon began to do, they resumed
their falling out among themselves, and did nothing. Consequently
the scourge appeared again–low down as before–and spread
avengingly upward as before, and carried off vast numbers of the
brawlers. But not a man among them ever admitted, if in the least
degree he ever perceived, that he had anything to do with it.

So Nobody lived and died in the old, old, old way; and this, in the
main, is the whole of Nobody’s story.

Had he no name, you ask? Perhaps it was Legion. It matters little
what his name was. Let us call him Legion.

If you were ever in the Belgian villages near the field of Waterloo,
you will have seen, in some quiet little church, a monument erected
by faithful companions in arms to the memory of Colonel A, Major B,
Captains C, D and E, Lieutenants F and G, Ensigns H, I and J, seven
non-commissioned officers, and one hundred and thirty rank and file,
who fell in the discharge of their duty on the memorable day. The
story of Nobody is the story of the rank and file of the earth.
They bear their share of the battle; they have their part in the
victory; they fall; they leave no name but in the mass. The march
of the proudest of us, leads to the dusty way by which they go. O!
Let us think of them this year at the Christmas fire, and not forget
them when it is burnt out.

He was very reluctant to take precedence of so many respected
members of the family, by beginning the round of stories they were
to relate as they sat in a goodly circle by the Christmas fire; and
he modestly suggested that it would be more correct if “John our
esteemed host” (whose health he begged to drink) would have the
kindness to begin. For as to himself, he said, he was so little
used to lead the way that really– But as they all cried out here,
that he must begin, and agreed with one voice that he might, could,
would, and should begin, he left off rubbing his hands, and took his
legs out from under his armchair, and did begin.

I have no doubt (said the poor relation) that I shall surprise the
assembled members of our family, and particularly John our esteemed
host to whom we are so much indebted for the great hospitality with
which he has this day entertained us, by the confession I am going
to make. But, if you do me the honour to be surprised at anything
that falls from a person so unimportant in the family as I am, I can
only say that I shall be scrupulously accurate in all I relate.

I am not what I am supposed to be. I am quite another thing.
Perhaps before I go further, I had better glance at what I AM
supposed to be.

It is supposed, unless I mistake–the assembled members of our
family will correct me if I do, which is very likely (here the poor
relation looked mildly about him for contradiction); that I am
nobody’s enemy but my own. That I never met with any particular
success in anything. That I failed in business because I was
unbusiness-like and credulous–in not being prepared for the
interested designs of my partner. That I failed in love, because I
was ridiculously trustful–in thinking it impossible that Christiana
could deceive me. That I failed in my expectations from my uncle
Chill, on account of not being as sharp as he could have wished in
worldly matters. That, through life, I have been rather put upon
and disappointed in a general way. That I am at present a bachelor
of between fifty-nine and sixty years of age, living on a limited
income in the form of a quarterly allowance, to which I see that
John our esteemed host wishes me to make no further allusion.

The supposition as to my present pursuits and habits is to the
following effect.

I live in a lodging in the Clapham Road–a very clean back room, in
a very respectable house–where I am expected not to be at home in
the day-time, unless poorly; and which I usually leave in the
morning at nine o’clock, on pretence of going to business. I take
my breakfast–my roll and butter, and my half-pint of coffee–at the
old-established coffee-shop near Westminster Bridge; and then I go
into the City–I don’t know why–and sit in Garraway’s Coffee House,
and on ‘Change, and walk about, and look into a few offices and
counting-houses where some of my relations or acquaintance are so
good as to tolerate me, and where I stand by the fire if the weather
happens to be cold. I get through the day in this way until five
o’clock, and then I dine: at a cost, on the average, of one and
threepence. Having still a little money to spend on my evening’s
entertainment, I look into the old-established coffee-shop as I go
home, and take my cup of tea, and perhaps my bit of toast. So, as
the large hand of the clock makes its way round to the morning hour
again, I make my way round to the Clapham Road again, and go to bed
when I get to my lodging–fire being expensive, and being objected
to by the family on account of its giving trouble and making a dirt.

Sometimes, one of my relations or acquaintances is so obliging as to
ask me to dinner. Those are holiday occasions, and then I generally
walk in the Park. I am a solitary man, and seldom walk with
anybody. Not that I am avoided because I am shabby; for I am not at
all shabby, having always a very good suit of black on (or rather
Oxford mixture, which has the appearance of black and wears much
better); but I have got into a habit of speaking low, and being
rather silent, and my spirits are not high, and I am sensible that I
am not an attractive companion.

The only exception to this general rule is the child of my first
cousin, Little Frank. I have a particular affection for that child,
and he takes very kindly to me. He is a diffident boy by nature;
and in a crowd he is soon run over, as I may say, and forgotten. He
and I, however, get on exceedingly well. I have a fancy that the
poor child will in time succeed to my peculiar position in the
family. We talk but little; still, we understand each other. We
walk about, hand in hand; and without much speaking he knows what I
mean, and I know what he means. When he was very little indeed, I
used to take him to the windows of the toy-shops, and show him the
toys inside. It is surprising how soon he found out that I would
have made him a great many presents if I had been in circumstances
to do it.

Little Frank and I go and look at the outside of the Monument–he is
very fond of the Monument–and at the Bridges, and at all the sights
that are free. On two of my birthdays, we have dined on e-la-mode
beef, and gone at half-price to the play, and been deeply
interested. I was once walking with him in Lombard Street, which we
often visit on account of my having mentioned to him that there are
great riches there–he is very fond of Lombard Street–when a
gentleman said to me as he passed by, “Sir, your little son has
dropped his glove.” I assure you, if you will excuse my remarking
on so trivial a circumstance, this accidental mention of the child
as mine, quite touched my heart and brought the foolish tears into
my eyes.

When Little Frank is sent to school in the country, I shall be very
much at a loss what to do with myself, but I have the intention of
walking down there once a month and seeing him on a half holiday. I
am told he will then be at play upon the Heath; and if my visits
should be objected to, as unsettling the child, I can see him from a
distance without his seeing me, and walk back again. His mother
comes of a highly genteel family, and rather disapproves, I am
aware, of our being too much together. I know that I am not
calculated to improve his retiring disposition; but I think he would
miss me beyond the feeling of the moment if we were wholly
separated.

When I die in the Clapham Road, I shall not leave much more in this
world than I shall take out of it; but, I happen to have a miniature
of a bright-faced boy, with a curling head, and an open shirt-frill
waving down his bosom (my mother had it taken for me, but I can’t
believe that it was ever like), which will be worth nothing to sell,
and which I shall beg may he given to Frank. I have written my dear
boy a little letter with it, in which I have told him that I felt
very sorry to part from him, though bound to confess that I knew no
reason why I should remain here. I have given him some short
advice, the best in my power, to take warning of the consequences of
being nobody’s enemy but his own; and I have endeavoured to comfort
him for what I fear he will consider a bereavement, by pointing out
to him, that I was only a superfluous something to every one but
him; and that having by some means failed to find a place in this
great assembly, I am better out of it.

Such (said the poor relation, clearing his throat and beginning to
speak a little louder) is the general impression about me. Now, it
is a remarkable circumstance which forms the aim and purpose of my
story, that this is all wrong. This is not my life, and these are
not my habits. I do not even live in the Clapham Road.
Comparatively speaking, I am very seldom there. I reside, mostly,
in a–I am almost ashamed to say the word, it sounds so full of
pretension–in a Castle. I do not mean that it is an old baronial
habitation, but still it is a building always known to every one by
the name of a Castle. In it, I preserve the particulars of my
history; they run thus:

It was when I first took John Spatter (who had been my clerk) into
partnership, and when I was still a young man of not more than five-
and-twenty, residing in the house of my uncle Chill, from whom I had
considerable expectations, that I ventured to propose to Christiana.
I had loved Christiana a long time. She was very beautiful, and
very winning in all respects. I rather mistrusted her widowed
mother, who I feared was of a plotting and mercenary turn of mind;
but, I thought as well of her as I could, for Christiana’s sake. I
never had loved any one but Christiana, and she had been all the
world, and O far more than all the world, to me, from our childhood!

Christiana accepted me with her mother’s consent, and I was rendered
very happy indeed. My life at my uncle Chill’s was of a spare dull
kind, and my garret chamber was as dull, and bare, and cold, as an
upper prison room in some stern northern fortress. But, having
Christiana’s love, I wanted nothing upon earth. I would not have
changed my lot with any human being.

Avarice was, unhappily, my uncle Chill’s master-vice. Though he was
rich, he pinched, and scraped, and clutched, and lived miserably.
As Christiana had no fortune, I was for some time a little fearful
of confessing our engagement to him; but, at length I wrote him a
letter, saying how it all truly was. I put it into his hand one
night, on going to bed.

As I came down-stairs next morning, shivering in the cold December
air; colder in my uncle’s unwarmed house than in the street, where
the winter sun did sometimes shine, and which was at all events
enlivened by cheerful faces and voices passing along; I carried a
heavy heart towards the long, low breakfast-room in which my uncle
sat. It was a large room with a small fire, and there was a great
bay window in it which the rain had marked in the night as if with
the tears of houseless people. It stared upon a raw yard, with a
cracked stone pavement, and some rusted iron railings half uprooted,
whence an ugly out-building that had once been a dissecting-room (in
the time of the great surgeon who had mortgaged the house to my
uncle), stared at it.

We rose so early always, that at that time of the year we
breakfasted by candle-light. When I went into the room, my uncle
was so contracted by the cold, and so huddled together in his chair
behind the one dim candle, that I did not see him until I was close
to the table.

As I held out my hand to him, he caught up his stick (being infirm,
he always walked about the house with a stick), and made a blow at
me, and said, “You fool!”

“Uncle,” I returned, “I didn’t expect you to be so angry as this.”
Nor had I expected it, though he was a hard and angry old man.

“You didn’t expect!” said he; “when did you ever expect? When did
you ever calculate, or look forward, you contemptible dog?”

“These are hard words, uncle!”

“Hard words? Feathers, to pelt such an idiot as you with,” said he.
“Here! Betsy Snap! Look at him!”

Betsy Snap was a withered, hard-favoured, yellow old woman–our only
domestic–always employed, at this time of the morning, in rubbing
my uncle’s legs. As my uncle adjured her to look at me, he put his
lean grip on the crown of her head, she kneeling beside him, and
turned her face towards me. An involuntary thought connecting them
both with the Dissecting Room, as it must often have been in the
surgeon’s time, passed across my mind in the midst of my anxiety.

“Look at the snivelling milksop!” said my uncle. “Look at the baby!
This is the gentleman who, people say, is nobody’s enemy but his
own. This is the gentleman who can’t say no. This is the gentleman
who was making such large profits in his business that he must needs
take a partner, t’other day. This is the gentleman who is going to
marry a wife without a penny, and who falls into the hands of
Jezabels who are speculating on my death!”

I knew, now, how great my uncle’s rage was; for nothing short of his
being almost beside himself would have induced him to utter that
concluding word, which he held in such repugnance that it was never
spoken or hinted at before him on any account.

“On my death,” he repeated, as if he were defying me by defying his
own abhorrence of the word. “On my death–death–Death! But I’ll
spoil the speculation. Eat your last under this roof, you feeble
wretch, and may it choke you!”

You may suppose that I had not much appetite for the breakfast to
which I was bidden in these terms; but, I took my accustomed seat.
I saw that I was repudiated henceforth by my uncle; still I could
bear that very well, possessing Christiana’s heart.

He emptied his basin of bread and milk as usual, only that he took
it on his knees with his chair turned away from the table where I
sat. When he had done, he carefully snuffed out the candle; and the
cold, slate-coloured, miserable day looked in upon us.

“Now, Mr. Michael,” said he, “before we part, I should like to have
a word with these ladies in your presence.”

“As you will, sir,” I returned; “but you deceive yourself, and wrong
us, cruelly, if you suppose that there is any feeling at stake in
this contract but pure, disinterested, faithful love.”

To this, he only replied, “You lie!” and not one other word.

We went, through half-thawed snow and half-frozen rain, to the house
where Christiana and her mother lived. My uncle knew them very
well. They were sitting at their breakfast, and were surprised to
see us at that hour.

“Your servant, ma’am,” said my uncle to the mother. “You divine the
purpose of my visit, I dare say, ma’am. I understand there is a
world of pure, disinterested, faithful love cooped up here. I am
happy to bring it all it wants, to make it complete. I bring you
your son-in-law, ma’am–and you, your husband, miss. The gentleman
is a perfect stranger to me, but I wish him joy of his wise
bargain.”

He snarled at me as he went out, and I never saw him again.

It is altogether a mistake (continued the poor relation) to suppose
that my dear Christiana, over-persuaded and influenced by her
mother, married a rich man, the dirt from whose carriage wheels is
often, in these changed times, thrown upon me as she rides by. No,
no. She married me.

The way we came to be married rather sooner than we intended, was
this. I took a frugal lodging and was saving and planning for her
sake, when, one day, she spoke to me with great earnestness, and
said:

“My dear Michael, I have given you my heart. I have said that I
loved you, and I have pledged myself to be your wife. I am as much
yours through all changes of good and evil as if we had been married
on the day when such words passed between us. I know you well, and
know that if we should be separated and our union broken off, your
whole life would be shadowed, and all that might, even now, be
stronger in your character for the conflict with the world would
then be weakened to the shadow of what it is!”

“God help me, Christiana!” said I. “You speak the truth.”

“Michael!” said she, putting her hand in mine, in all maidenly
devotion, “let us keep apart no longer. It is but for me to say
that I can live contented upon such means as you have, and I well
know you are happy. I say so from my heart. Strive no more alone;
let us strive together. My dear Michael, it is not right that I
should keep secret from you what you do not suspect, but what
distresses my whole life. My mother: without considering that what
you have lost, you have lost for me, and on the assurance of my
faith: sets her heart on riches, and urges another suit upon me, to
my misery. I cannot bear this, for to bear it is to be untrue to
you. I would rather share your struggles than look on. I want no
better home than you can give me. I know that you will aspire and
labour with a higher courage if I am wholly yours, and let it be so
when you will!”

I was blest indeed, that day, and a new world opened to me. We were
married in a very little while, and I took my wife to our happy
home. That was the beginning of the residence I have spoken of; the
Castle we have ever since inhabited together, dates from that time.
All our children have been born in it. Our first child–now
married–was a little girl, whom we called Christiana. Her son is
so like Little Frank, that I hardly know which is which.

The current impression as to my partner’s dealings with me is also
quite erroneous. He did not begin to treat me coldly, as a poor
simpleton, when my uncle and I so fatally quarrelled; nor did he
afterwards gradually possess himself of our business and edge me
out. On the contrary, he behaved to me with the utmost good faith
and honour.

Matters between us took this turn:- On the day of my separation from
my uncle, and even before the arrival at our counting-house of my
trunks (which he sent after me, NOT carriage paid), I went down to
our room of business, on our little wharf, overlooking the river;
and there I told John Spatter what had happened. John did not say,
in reply, that rich old relatives were palpable facts, and that love
and sentiment were moonshine and fiction. He addressed me thus:

“Michael,” said John, “we were at school together, and I generally
had the knack of getting on better than you, and making a higher
reputation.”

“You had, John,” I returned.

“Although” said John, “I borrowed your books and lost them; borrowed
your pocket-money, and never repaid it; got you to buy my damaged
knives at a higher price than I had given for them new; and to own
to the windows that I had broken.”

“All not worth mentioning, John Spatter,” said I, “but certainly
true.”

“When you were first established in this infant business, which
promises to thrive so well,” pursued John, “I came to you, in my
search for almost any employment, and you made me your clerk.”

“Still not worth mentioning, my dear John Spatter,” said I; “still,
equally true.”

“And finding that I had a good head for business, and that I was
really useful TO the business, you did not like to retain me in that
capacity, and thought it an act of justice soon to make me your
partner.”

“Still less worth mentioning than any of those other little
circumstances you have recalled, John Spatter,” said I; “for I was,
and am, sensible of your merits and my deficiencies.”

“Now, my good friend,” said John, drawing my arm through his, as he
had had a habit of doing at school; while two vessels outside the
windows of our counting-house–which were shaped like the stern
windows of a ship–went lightly down the river with the tide, as
John and I might then be sailing away in company, and in trust and
confidence, on our voyage of life; “let there, under these friendly
circumstances, be a right understanding between us. You are too
easy, Michael. You are nobody’s enemy but your own. If I were to
give you that damaging character among our connexion, with a shrug,
and a shake of the head, and a sigh; and if I were further to abuse
the trust you place in me–”

“But you never will abuse it at all, John,” I observed.

“Never!” said he; “but I am putting a case–I say, and if I were
further to abuse that trust by keeping this piece of our common
affairs in the dark, and this other piece in the light, and again
this other piece in the twilight, and so on, I should strengthen my
strength, and weaken your weakness, day by day, until at last I
found myself on the high road to fortune, and you left behind on
some bare common, a hopeless number of miles out of the way.”

“Exactly so,” said I.

“To prevent this, Michael,” said John Spatter, “or the remotest
chance of this, there must be perfect openness between us. Nothing
must be concealed, and we must have but one interest.”

“My dear John Spatter,” I assured him, “that is precisely what I
mean.”

“And when you are too easy,” pursued John, his face glowing with
friendship, “you must allow me to prevent that imperfection in your
nature from being taken advantage of, by any one; you must not
expect me to humour it–”

“My dear John Spatter,” I interrupted, “I DON’T expect you to humour
it. I want to correct it.”

“And I, too,” said John.

“Exactly so!” cried I. “We both have the same end in view; and,
honourably seeking it, and fully trusting one another, and having
but one interest, ours will be a prosperous and happy partnership.”

“I am sure of it!” returned John Spatter. And we shook hands most
affectionately.

I took John home to my Castle, and we had a very happy day. Our
partnership throve well. My friend and partner supplied what I
wanted, as I had foreseen that he would, and by improving both the
business and myself, amply acknowledged any little rise in life to
which I had helped him.

I am not (said the poor relation, looking at the fire as he slowly
rubbed his hands) very rich, for I never cared to be that; but I
have enough, and am above all moderate wants and anxieties. My
Castle is not a splendid place, but it is very comfortable, and it
has a warm and cheerful air, and is quite a picture of Home.

Our eldest girl, who is very like her mother, married John Spatter’s
eldest son. Our two families are closely united in other ties of
attachment. It is very pleasant of an evening, when we are all
assembled together–which frequently happens–and when John and I
talk over old times, and the one interest there has always been
between us.

I really do not know, in my Castle, what loneliness is. Some of our
children or grandchildren are always about it, and the young voices
of my descendants are delightful–O, how delightful!–to me to hear.
My dearest and most devoted wife, ever faithful, ever loving, ever
helpful and sustaining and consoling, is the priceless blessing of
my house; from whom all its other blessings spring. We are rather a
musical family, and when Christiana sees me, at any time, a little
weary or depressed, she steals to the piano and sings a gentle air
she used to sing when we were first betrothed. So weak a man am I,
that I cannot bear to hear it from any other source. They played it
once, at the Theatre, when I was there with Little Frank; and the
child said wondering, “Cousin Michael, whose hot tears are these
that have fallen on my hand!”

Such is my Castle, and such are the real particulars of my life
therein preserved. I often take Little Frank home there. He is
very welcome to my grandchildren, and they play together. At this
time of the year–the Christmas and New Year time–I am seldom out
of my Castle. For, the associations of the season seem to hold me
there, and the precepts of the season seem to teach me that it is
well to be there.

“And the Castle is–” observed a grave, kind voice among the
company.

“Yes. My Castle,” said the poor relation, shaking his head as he
still looked at the fire, “is in the Air. John our esteemed host
suggests its situation accurately. My Castle is in the Air! I have
done. Will you be so good as to pass the story?”

Being rather young at present–I am getting on in years, but still I
am rather young–I have no particular adventures of my own to fall
back upon. It wouldn’t much interest anybody here, I suppose, to
know what a screw the Reverend is, or what a griffin SHE is, or how
they do stick it into parents–particularly hair-cutting, and
medical attendance. One of our fellows was charged in his half’s
account twelve and sixpence for two pills–tolerably profitable at
six and threepence a-piece, I should think–and he never took them
either, but put them up the sleeve of his jacket.

As to the beef, it’s shameful. It’s NOT beef. Regular beef isn’t
veins. You can chew regular beef. Besides which, there’s gravy to
regular beef, and you never see a drop to ours. Another of our
fellows went home ill, and heard the family doctor tell his father
that he couldn’t account for his complaint unless it was the beer.
Of course it was the beer, and well it might be!

However, beef and Old Cheeseman are two different things. So is
beer. It was Old Cheeseman I meant to tell about; not the manner in
which our fellows get their constitutions destroyed for the sake of
profit.

Why, look at the pie-crust alone. There’s no flakiness in it. It’s
solid–like damp lead. Then our fellows get nightmares, and are
bolstered for calling out and waking other fellows. Who can wonder!

Old Cheeseman one night walked in his sleep, put his hat on over his
night-cap, got hold of a fishing-rod and a cricket-bat, and went
down into the parlour, where they naturally thought from his
appearance he was a Ghost. Why, he never would have done that if
his meals had been wholesome. When we all begin to walk in our
sleeps, I suppose they’ll be sorry for it.

Old Cheeseman wasn’t second Latin Master then; he was a fellow
himself. He was first brought there, very small, in a post-chaise,
by a woman who was always taking snuff and shaking him–and that was
the most he remembered about it. He never went home for the
holidays. His accounts (he never learnt any extras) were sent to a
Bank, and the Bank paid them; and he had a brown suit twice a-year,
and went into boots at twelve. They were always too big for him,
too.

In the Midsummer holidays, some of our fellows who lived within
walking distance, used to come back and climb the trees outside the
playground wall, on purpose to look at Old Cheeseman reading there
by himself. He was always as mild as the tea–and THAT’S pretty
mild, I should hope!–so when they whistled to him, he looked up and
nodded; and when they said, “Halloa, Old Cheeseman, what have you
had for dinner?” he said, “Boiled mutton;” and when they said, “An’t
it solitary, Old Cheeseman?” he said, “It is a little dull
sometimes:” and then they said, “Well good-bye, Old Cheeseman!” and
climbed down again. Of course it was imposing on Old Cheeseman to
give him nothing but boiled mutton through a whole Vacation, but
that was just like the system. When they didn’t give him boiled
mutton, they gave him rice pudding, pretending it was a treat. And
saved the butcher.

So Old Cheeseman went on. The holidays brought him into other
trouble besides the loneliness; because when the fellows began to
come back, not wanting to, he was always glad to see them; which was
aggravating when they were not at all glad to see him, and so he got
his head knocked against walls, and that was the way his nose bled.
But he was a favourite in general. Once a subscription was raised
for him; and, to keep up his spirits, he was presented before the
holidays with two white mice, a rabbit, a pigeon, and a beautiful
puppy. Old Cheeseman cried about it–especially soon afterwards,
when they all ate one another.

Of course Old Cheeseman used to be called by the names of all sorts
of cheeses–Double Glo’sterman, Family Cheshireman, Dutchman, North
Wiltshireman, and all that. But he never minded it. And I don’t
mean to say he was old in point of years–because he wasn’t–only he
was called from the first, Old Cheeseman.

At last, Old Cheeseman was made second Latin Master. He was brought
in one morning at the beginning of a new half, and presented to the
school in that capacity as “Mr. Cheeseman.” Then our fellows all
agreed that Old Cheeseman was a spy, and a deserter, who had gone
over to the enemy’s camp, and sold himself for gold. It was no
excuse for him that he had sold himself for very little gold–two
pound ten a quarter and his washing, as was reported. It was
decided by a Parliament which sat about it, that Old Cheeseman’s
mercenary motives could alone be taken into account, and that he had
“coined our blood for drachmas.” The Parliament took the expression
out of the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius.

When it was settled in this strong way that Old Cheeseman was a
tremendous traitor, who had wormed himself into our fellows’ secrets
on purpose to get himself into favour by giving up everything he
knew, all courageous fellows were invited to come forward and enrol
themselves in a Society for making a set against him. The President
of the Society was First boy, named Bob Tarter. His father was in
the West Indies, and he owned, himself, that his father was worth
Millions. He had great power among our fellows, and he wrote a
parody, beginning -

“Who made believe to be so meek
That we could hardly hear him speak,
Yet turned out an Informing Sneak?
Old Cheeseman.”

- and on in that way through more than a dozen verses, which he used
to go and sing, every morning, close by the new master’s desk. He
trained one of the low boys, too, a rosy-cheeked little Brass who
didn’t care what he did, to go up to him with his Latin Grammar one
morning, and say it so: NOMINATIVUS PRONOMINUM–Old Cheeseman, RARO
EXPRIMITUR–was never suspected, NISI DISTINCTIONIS–of being an
informer, AUT EMPHASIS GRATiA–until he proved one. UT–for
instance, VOS DAMNASTIS–when he sold the boys. QUASI–as though,
DICAT–he should say, PRETAEREA NEMO–I’m a Judas! All this
produced a great effect on Old Cheeseman. He had never had much
hair; but what he had, began to get thinner and thinner every day.
He grew paler and more worn; and sometimes of an evening he was seen
sitting at his desk with a precious long snuff to his candle, and
his hands before his face, crying. But no member of the Society
could pity him, even if he felt inclined, because the President said
it was Old Cheeseman’s conscience.

So Old Cheeseman went on, and didn’t he lead a miserable life! Of
course the Reverend turned up his nose at him, and of course SHE
did–because both of them always do that at all the masters–but he
suffered from the fellows most, and he suffered from them
constantly. He never told about it, that the Society could find
out; but he got no credit for that, because the President said it
was Old Cheeseman’s cowardice.

He had only one friend in the world, and that one was almost as
powerless as he was, for it was only Jane. Jane was a sort of
wardrobe woman to our fellows, and took care of the boxes. She had
come at first, I believe, as a kind of apprentice–some of our
fellows say from a Charity, but I don’t know–and after her time was
out, had stopped at so much a year. So little a year, perhaps I
ought to say, for it is far more likely. However, she had put some
pounds in the Savings’ Bank, and she was a very nice young woman.
She was not quite pretty; but she had a very frank, honest, bright
face, and all our fellows were fond of her. She was uncommonly neat
and cheerful, and uncommonly comfortable and kind. And if anything
was the matter with a fellow’s mother, he always went and showed the
letter to Jane.

Jane was Old Cheeseman’s friend. The more the Society went against
him, the more Jane stood by him. She used to give him a good-
humoured look out of her still-room window, sometimes, that seemed
to set him up for the day. She used to pass out of the orchard and
the kitchen garden (always kept locked, I believe you!) through the
playground, when she might have gone the other way, only to give a
turn of her head, as much as to say “Keep up your spirits!” to Old
Cheeseman. His slip of a room was so fresh and orderly that it was
well known who looked after it while he was at his desk; and when
our fellows saw a smoking hot dumpling on his plate at dinner, they
knew with indignation who had sent it up.

Under these circumstances, the Society resolved, after a quantity of
meeting and debating, that Jane should be requested to cut Old
Cheeseman dead; and that if she refused, she must be sent to
Coventry herself. So a deputation, headed by the President, was
appointed to wait on Jane, and inform her of the vote the Society
had been under the painful necessity of passing. She was very much
respected for all her good qualities, and there was a story about
her having once waylaid the Reverend in his own study, and got a
fellow off from severe punishment, of her own kind comfortable
heart. So the deputation didn’t much like the job. However, they
went up, and the President told Jane all about it. Upon which Jane
turned very red, burst into tears, informed the President and the
deputation, in a way not at all like her usual way, that they were a
parcel of malicious young savages, and turned the whole respected
body out of the room. Consequently it was entered in the Society’s
book (kept in astronomical cypher for fear of detection), that all
communication with Jane was interdicted: and the President
addressed the members on this convincing instance of Old Cheeseman’s
undermining.

But Jane was as true to Old Cheeseman as Old Cheeseman was false to
our fellows–in their opinion, at all events–and steadily continued
to be his only friend. It was a great exasperation to the Society,
because Jane was as much a loss to them as she was a gain to him;
and being more inveterate against him than ever, they treated him
worse than ever. At last, one morning, his desk stood empty, his
room was peeped into, and found to be vacant, and a whisper went
about among the pale faces of our fellows that Old Cheeseman, unable
to bear it any longer, had got up early and drowned himself.

The mysterious looks of the other masters after breakfast, and the
evident fact that old Cheeseman was not expected, confirmed the
Society in this opinion. Some began to discuss whether the
President was liable to hanging or only transportation for life, and
the President’s face showed a great anxiety to know which. However,
he said that a jury of his country should find him game; and that in
his address he should put it to them to lay their hands upon their
hearts and say whether they as Britons approved of informers, and
how they thought they would like it themselves. Some of the Society
considered that he had better run away until he found a forest where
he might change clothes with a wood-cutter, and stain his face with
blackberries; but the majority believed that if he stood his ground,
his father–belonging as he did to the West Indies, and being worth
millions–could buy him off.

All our fellows’ hearts beat fast when the Reverend came in, and
made a sort of a Roman, or a Field Marshal, of himself with the
ruler; as he always did before delivering an address. But their
fears were nothing to their astonishment when he came out with the
story that Old Cheeseman, “so long our respected friend and fellow-
pilgrim in the pleasant plains of knowledge,” he called him–O yes!
I dare say! Much of that!–was the orphan child of a disinherited
young lady who had married against her father’s wish, and whose
young husband had died, and who had died of sorrow herself, and
whose unfortunate baby (Old Cheeseman) had been brought up at the
cost of a grandfather who would never consent to see it, baby, boy,
or man: which grandfather was now dead, and serve him right–that’s
my putting in–and which grandfather’s large property, there being
no will, was now, and all of a sudden and for ever, Old Cheeseman’s!
Our so long respected friend and fellow-pilgrim in the pleasant
plains of knowledge, the Reverend wound up a lot of bothering
quotations by saying, would “come among us once more” that day
fortnight, when he desired to take leave of us himself, in a more
particular manner. With these words, he stared severely round at
our fellows, and went solemnly out.

There was precious consternation among the members of the Society,
now. Lots of them wanted to resign, and lots more began to try to
make out that they had never belonged to it. However, the President
stuck up, and said that they must stand or fall together, and that
if a breach was made it should be over his body–which was meant to
encourage the Society: but it didn’t. The President further said,
he would consider the position in which they stood, and would give
them his best opinion and advice in a few days. This was eagerly
looked for, as he knew a good deal of the world on account of his
father’s being in the West Indies.

After days and days of hard thinking, and drawing armies all over
his slate, the President called our fellows together, and made the
matter clear. He said it was plain that when Old Cheeseman came on
the appointed day, his first revenge would be to impeach the
Society, and have it flogged all round. After witnessing with joy
the torture of his enemies, and gloating over the cries which agony
would extort from them, the probability was that he would invite the
Reverend, on pretence of conversation, into a private room–say the
parlour into which Parents were shown, where the two great globes
were which were never used–and would there reproach him with the
various frauds and oppressions he had endured at his hands. At the
close of his observations he would make a signal to a Prizefighter
concealed in the passage, who would then appear and pitch into the
Reverend, till he was left insensible. Old Cheeseman would then
make Jane a present of from five to ten pounds, and would leave the
establishment in fiendish triumph.

The President explained that against the parlour part, or the Jane
part, of these arrangements he had nothing to say; but, on the part
of the Society, he counselled deadly resistance. With this view he
recommended that all available desks should be filled with stones,
and that the first word of the complaint should be the signal to
every fellow to let fly at Old Cheeseman. The bold advice put the
Society in better spirits, and was unanimously taken. A post about
Old Cheeseman’s size was put up in the playground, and all our
fellows practised at it till it was dinted all over.

When the day came, and Places were called, every fellow sat down in
a tremble. There had been much discussing and disputing as to how
Old Cheeseman would come; but it was the general opinion that he
would appear in a sort of triumphal car drawn by four horses, with
two livery servants in front, and the Prizefighter in disguise up
behind. So, all our fellows sat listening for the sound of wheels.
But no wheels were heard, for Old Cheeseman walked after all, and
came into the school without any preparation. Pretty much as he
used to be, only dressed in black.

“Gentlemen,” said the Reverend, presenting him, “our so long
respected friend and fellow-pilgrim in the pleasant plains of
knowledge, is desirous to offer a word or two. Attention,
gentlemen, one and all!”

Every fellow stole his hand into his desk and looked at the
President. The President was all ready, and taking aim at old
Cheeseman with his eyes.

What did Old Cheeseman then, but walk up to his old desk, look round
him with a queer smile as if there was a tear in his eye, and begin
in a quavering, mild voice, “My dear companions and old friends!”

Every fellow’s hand came out of his desk, and the President suddenly
began to cry.

“My dear companions and old friends,” said Old Cheeseman, “you have
heard of my good fortune. I have passed so many years under this
roof–my entire life so far, I may say–that I hope you have been
glad to hear of it for my sake. I could never enjoy it without
exchanging congratulations with you. If we have ever misunderstood
one another at all, pray, my dear boys, let us forgive and forget.
I have a great tenderness for you, and I am sure you return it. I
want in the fulness of a grateful heart to shake hands with you
every one. I have come back to do it, if you please, my dear boys.”

Since the President had begun to cry, several other fellows had
broken out here and there: but now, when Old Cheeseman began with
him as first boy, laid his left hand affectionately on his shoulder
and gave him his right; and when the President said “Indeed, I don’t
deserve it, sir; upon my honour I don’t;” there was sobbing and
crying all over the school. Every other fellow said he didn’t
deserve it, much in the same way; but Old Cheeseman, not minding
that a bit, went cheerfully round to every boy, and wound up with
every master–finishing off the Reverend last.

Then a snivelling little chap in a corner, who was always under some
punishment or other, set up a shrill cry of “Success to Old
Cheeseman! Hooray!” The Reverend glared upon him, and said, “MR.
Cheeseman, sir.” But, Old Cheeseman protesting that he liked his
old name a great deal better than his new one, all our fellows took
up the cry; and, for I don’t know how many minutes, there was such a
thundering of feet and hands, and such a roaring of Old Cheeseman,
as never was heard.

After that, there was a spread in the dining-room of the most
magnificent kind. Fowls, tongues, preserves, fruits,
confectionaries, jellies, neguses, barley-sugar temples, trifles,
crackers–eat all you can and pocket what you like–all at Old
Cheeseman’s expense. After that, speeches, whole holiday, double
and treble sets of all manners of things for all manners of games,
donkeys, pony-chaises and drive yourself, dinner for all the masters
at the Seven Bells (twenty pounds a-head our fellows estimated it
at), an annual holiday and feast fixed for that day every year, and
another on Old Cheeseman’s birthday–Reverend bound down before the
fellows to allow it, so that he could never back out–all at Old
Cheeseman’s expense.

And didn’t our fellows go down in a body and cheer outside the Seven
Bells? O no!

But there’s something else besides. Don’t look at the next story-
teller, for there’s more yet. Next day, it was resolved that the
Society should make it up with Jane, and then be dissolved. What do
you think of Jane being gone, though! “What? Gone for ever?” said
our fellows, with long faces. “Yes, to be sure,” was all the answer
they could get. None of the people about the house would say
anything more. At length, the first boy took upon himself to ask
the Reverend whether our old friend Jane was really gone? The
Reverend (he has got a daughter at home–turn-up nose, and red)
replied severely, “Yes, sir, Miss Pitt is gone.” The idea of
calling Jane, Miss Pitt! Some said she had been sent away in
disgrace for taking money from Old Cheeseman; others said she had
gone into Old Cheeseman’s service at a rise of ten pounds a year.
All that our fellows knew, was, she was gone.

It was two or three months afterwards, when, one afternoon, an open
carriage stopped at the cricket field, just outside bounds, with a
lady and gentleman in it, who looked at the game a long time and
stood up to see it played. Nobody thought much about them, until
the same little snivelling chap came in, against all rules, from the
post where he was Scout, and said, “It’s Jane!” Both Elevens forgot
the game directly, and ran crowding round the carriage. It WAS
Jane! In such a bonnet! And if you’ll believe me, Jane was married
to Old Cheeseman.

It soon became quite a regular thing when our fellows were hard at
it in the playground, to see a carriage at the low part of the wall
where it joins the high part, and a lady and gentleman standing up
in it, looking over. The gentleman was always Old Cheeseman, and
the lady was always Jane.

The first time I ever saw them, I saw them in that way. There had
been a good many changes among our fellows then, and it had turned
out that Bob Tarter’s father wasn’t worth Millions! He wasn’t worth
anything. Bob had gone for a soldier, and Old Cheeseman had
purchased his discharge. But that’s not the carriage. The carriage
stopped, and all our fellows stopped as soon as it was seen.

“So you have never sent me to Coventry after all!” said the lady,
laughing, as our fellows swarmed up the wall to shake hands with
her. “Are you never going to do it?”

“Never! never! never!” on all sides.

I didn’t understand what she meant then, but of course I do now. I
was very much pleased with her face though, and with her good way,
and I couldn’t help looking at her–and at him too–with all our
fellows clustering so joyfully about them.

They soon took notice of me as a new boy, so I thought I might as
well swarm up the wall myself, and shake hands with them as the rest
did. I was quite as glad to see them as the rest were, and was
quite as familiar with them in a moment.

“Only a fortnight now,” said Old Cheeseman, “to the holidays. Who
stops? Anybody?”

A good many fingers pointed at me, and a good many voices cried “He
does!” For it was the year when you were all away; and rather low I
was about it, I can tell you.

“Oh!” said Old Cheeseman. “But it’s solitary here in the holiday
time. He had better come to us.”

So I went to their delightful house, and was as happy as I could
possibly be. They understand how to conduct themselves towards
boys, THEY do. When they take a boy to the play, for instance, they
DO take him. They don’t go in after it’s begun, or come out before
it’s over. They know how to bring a boy up, too. Look at their
own! Though he is very little as yet, what a capital boy he is!
Why, my next favourite to Mrs. Cheeseman and Old Cheeseman, is young
Cheeseman.

So, now I have told you all I know about Old Cheeseman. And it’s
not much after all, I am afraid. Is it?

“Halloa! Below there!”

When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the
door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short
pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground,
that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but
instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep
cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked
down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of
doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know
it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his
figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and
mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset,
that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.

“Halloa! Below!”

From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and,
raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him.

“Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?”

He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him
without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question.
Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly
changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused
me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such
vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me, and
was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw
him refurling the flag he had shown while the train went by.

I repeated my inquiry. After a pause, during which he seemed to
regard me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag
towards a point on my level, some two or three hundred yards
distant. I called down to him, “All right!” and made for that
point. There, by dint of looking closely about me, I found a rough
zigzag descending path notched out, which I followed.

The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was
made through a clammy stone, that became oozier and wetter as I went
down. For these reasons, I found the way long enough to give me
time to recall a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which
he had pointed out the path.

When I came down low enough upon the zigzag descent to see him
again, I saw that he was standing between the rails on the way by
which the train had lately passed, in an attitude as if he were
waiting for me to appear. He had his left hand at his chin, and
that left elbow rested on his right hand, crossed over his breast.
His attitude was one of such expectation and watchfulness that I
stopped a moment, wondering at it.

I resumed my downward way, and stepping out upon the level of the
railroad, and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark sallow
man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in
as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a
dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of
sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this
great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction
terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a
black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous,
depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its
way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much
cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had
left the natural world.

Before he stirred, I was near enough to him to have touched him.
Not even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step,
and lifted his hand.

This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my
attention when I looked down from up yonder. A visitor was a
rarity, I should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped? In me,
he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all
his life, and who, being at last set free, had a newly-awakened
interest in these great works. To such purpose I spoke to him; but
I am far from sure of the terms I used; for, besides that I am not
happy in opening any conversation, there was something in the man
that daunted me.

He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the
tunnel’s mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were
missing from it, and then looked it me.

That light was part of his charge? Was it not?

He answered in a low voice,–”Don’t you know it is?”

The monstrous thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes
and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have
speculated since, whether there may have been infection in his mind.

In my turn, I stepped back. But in making the action, I detected in
his eyes some latent fear of me. This put the monstrous thought to
flight.

“You look at me,” I said, forcing a smile, “as if you had a dread of
me.”

“I was doubtful,” he returned, “whether I had seen you before.”

“Where?”

He pointed to the red light he had looked at.

“There?” I said.

Intently watchful of me, he replied (but without sound), “Yes.”

“My good fellow, what should I do there? However, be that as it
may, I never was there, you may swear.”

“I think I may,” he rejoined. “Yes; I am sure I may.”

His manner cleared, like my own. He replied to my remarks with
readiness, and in well-chosen words. Had he much to do there? Yes;
that was to say, he had enough responsibility to bear; but exactness
and watchfulness were what was required of him, and of actual work–
manual labour–he had next to none. To change that signal, to trim
those lights, and to turn this iron handle now and then, was all he
had to do under that head. Regarding those many long and lonely
hours of which I seemed to make so much, he could only say that the
routine of his life had shaped itself into that form, and he had
grown used to it. He had taught himself a language down here,–if
only to know it by sight, and to have formed his own crude ideas of
its pronunciation, could be called learning it. He had also worked
at fractions and decimals, and tried a little algebra; but he was,
and had been as a boy, a poor hand at figures. Was it necessary for
him when on duty always to remain in that channel of damp air, and
could he never rise into the sunshine from between those high stone
walls? Why, that depended upon times and circumstances. Under some
conditions there would be less upon the Line than under others, and
the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night. In
bright weather, he did choose occasions for getting a little above
these lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by
his electric bell, and at such times listening for it with redoubled
anxiety, the relief was less than I would suppose.

He took me into his box, where there was a fire, a desk for an
official book in which he had to make certain entries, a telegraphic
instrument with its dial, face, and needles, and the little bell of
which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark
that he had been well educated, and (I hoped I might say without
offence) perhaps educated above that station, he observed that
instances of slight incongruity in such wise would rarely be found
wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in
workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate
resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any
great railway staff. He had been, when young (if I could believe
it, sitting in that hut,–he scarcely could), a student of natural
philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused
his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no
complaint to offer about that. He had made his bed, and he lay upon
it. It was far too late to make another.

All that I have here condensed he said in a quiet manner, with his
grave dark regards divided between me and the fire. He threw in the
word, “Sir,” from time to time, and especially when he referred to
his youth,–as though to request me to understand that he claimed to
be nothing but what I found him. He was several times interrupted
by the little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies.
Once he had to stand without the door, and display a flag as a train
passed, and make some verbal communication to the driver. In the
discharge of his duties, I observed him to be remarkably exact and
vigilant, breaking off his discourse at a syllable, and remaining
silent until what he had to do was done.

In a word, I should have set this man down as one of the safest of
men to be employed in that capacity, but for the circumstance that
while he was speaking to me he twice broke off with a fallen colour,
turned his face towards the little bell when it did NOT ring, opened
the door of the hut (which was kept shut to exclude the unhealthy
damp), and looked out towards the red light near the mouth of the
tunnel. On both of those occasions, he came back to the fire with
the inexplicable air upon him which I had remarked, without being
able to define, when we were so far asunder.

Said I, when I rose to leave him, “You almost make me think that I
have met with a contented man.”

(I am afraid I must acknowledge that I said it to lead him on.)

“I believe I used to be so,” he rejoined, in the low voice in which
he had first spoken; “but I am troubled, sir, I am troubled.”

He would have recalled the words if he could. He had said them,
however, and I took them up quickly.

“With what? What is your trouble?”

“It is very difficult to impart, sir. It is very, very difficult to
speak of. If ever you make me another visit, I will try to tell
you.”

“But I expressly intend to make you another visit. Say, when shall
it be?”

“I go off early in the morning, and I shall be on again at ten to-
morrow night, sir.”

“I will come at eleven.”

He thanked me, and went out at the door with me. “I’ll show my
white light, sir,” he said, in his peculiar low voice, “till you
have found the way up. When you have found it, don’t call out! And
when you are at the top, don’t call out!”

His manner seemed to make the place strike colder to me, but I said
no more than, “Very well.”

“And when you come down to-morrow night, don’t call out! Let me ask
you a parting question. What made you cry, ‘Halloa! Below there!’
to-night?”

“Heaven knows,” said I. “I cried something to that effect–”

“Not to that effect, sir. Those were the very words. I know them
well.”

“Admit those were the very words. I said them, no doubt, because I
saw you below.”

“For no other reason?”

“What other reason could I possibly have?”

“You had no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any
supernatural way?”

“No.”

He wished me good-night, and held up his light. I walked by the
side of the down Line of rails (with a very disagreeable sensation
of a train coming behind me) until I found the path. It was easier
to mount than to descend, and I got back to my inn without any
adventure.

Punctual to my appointment, I placed my foot on the first notch of
the zigzag next night, as the distant clocks were striking eleven.
He was waiting for me at the bottom, with his white light on. “I
have not called out,” I said, when we came close together; “may I
speak now?” “By all means, sir.” “Good-night, then, and here’s my
hand.” “Good-night, sir, and here’s mine.” With that we walked
side by side to his box, entered it, closed the door, and sat down
by the fire.

“I have made up my mind, sir,” he began, bending forward as soon as
we were seated, and speaking in a tone but a little above a whisper,
“that you shall not have to ask me twice what troubles me. I took
you for some one else yesterday evening. That troubles me.”

“That mistake?”

“No. That some one else.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Like me?”

“I don’t know. I never saw the face. The left arm is across the
face, and the right arm is waved,–violently waved. This way.”

I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm
gesticulating, with the utmost passion and vehemence, “For God’s
sake, clear the way!”

“One moonlight night,” said the man, “I was sitting here, when I
heard a voice cry, ‘Halloa! Below there!’ I started up, looked
from that door, and saw this Some one else standing by the red light
near the tunnel, waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed
hoarse with shouting, and it cried, ‘Look out! Look out!’ And then
attain, ‘Halloa! Below there! Look out!’ I caught up my lamp,
turned it on red, and ran towards the figure, calling, ‘What’s
wrong? What has happened? Where?’ It stood just outside the
blackness of the tunnel. I advanced so close upon it that I
wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes. I ran right up
at it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away, when
it was gone.”

“Into the tunnel?” said I.

“No. I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped, and
held my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured
distance, and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and
trickling through the arch. I ran out again faster than I had run
in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and I
looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up
the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again,
and ran back here. I telegraphed both ways, ‘An alarm has been
given. Is anything wrong?’ The answer came back, both ways, ‘All
well.’”

Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I
showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of
sight; and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate
nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have
often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the
nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments
upon themselves. “As to an imaginary cry,” said I, “do but listen
for a moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so
low, and to the wild harp it makes of the telegraph wires.”

That was all very well, he returned, after we had sat listening for
a while, and he ought to know something of the wind and the wires,–
he who so often passed long winter nights there, alone and watching.
But he would beg to remark that he had not finished.

I asked his pardon, and he slowly added these words, touching my
arm, -

“Within six hours after the Appearance, the memorable accident on
this Line happened, and within ten hours the dead and wounded were
brought along through the tunnel over the spot where the figure had
stood.”

A disagreeable shudder crept over me, but I did my best against it.
It was not to be denied, I rejoined, that this was a remarkable
coincidence, calculated deeply to impress his mind. But it was
unquestionable that remarkable coincidences did continually occur,
and they must be taken into account in dealing with such a subject.
Though to be sure I must admit, I added (for I thought I saw that he
was going to bring the objection to bear upon me), men of common
sense did not allow much for coincidences in making the ordinary
calculations of life.

He again begged to remark that he had not finished.

I again begged his pardon for being betrayed into interruptions.

“This,” he said, again laying his hand upon my arm, and glancing
over his shoulder with hollow eyes, “was just a year ago. Six or
seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and
shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at the
door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again.” He
stopped, with a fixed look at me.

“Did it cry out?”

“No. It was silent.”

“Did it wave its arm?”

“No. It leaned against the shaft of the light, with both hands
before the face. Like this.”

Once more I followed his action with my eyes. It was an action of
mourning. I have seen such an attitude in stone figures on tombs.

“Did you go up to it?”

“I came in and sat down, partly to collect my thoughts, partly
because it had turned me faint. When I went to the door again,
daylight was above me, and the ghost was gone.”

“But nothing followed? Nothing came of this?”

He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice giving
a ghastly nod each time:-

“That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a
carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands
and heads, and something waved. I saw it just in time to signal the
driver, Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train
drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after
it, and, as I went along, heard terrible screams and cries. A
beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the
compartments, and was brought in here, and laid down on this floor
between us.”

Involuntarily I pushed my chair back, as I looked from the boards at
which he pointed to himself.

“True, sir. True. Precisely as it happened, so I tell it you.”

I could think of nothing to say, to any purpose, and my mouth was
very dry. The wind and the wires took up the story with a long
lamenting wail.

He resumed. “Now, sir, mark this, and judge how my mind is
troubled. The spectre came back a week ago. Ever since, it has
been there, now and again, by fits and starts.”

“At the light?”

“At the Danger-light.”

“What does it seem to do?”

He repeated, if possible with increased passion and vehemence, that
former gesticulation of, “For God’s sake, clear the way!”

Then he went on. “I have no peace or rest for it. It calls to me,
for many minutes together, in an agonised manner, ‘Below there!
Look out! Look out!’ It stands waving to me. It rings my little
bell–”

I caught at that. “Did it ring your bell yesterday evening when I
was here, and you went to the door?”

“Twice.”

“Why, see,” said I, “how your imagination misleads you. My eyes
were on the bell, and my ears were open to the bell, and if I am a
living man, it did NOT ring at those times. No, nor at any other
time, except when it was rung in the natural course of physical
things by the station communicating with you.”

He shook his head. “I have never made a mistake as to that yet, sir.
I have never confused the spectre’s ring with the man’s. The
ghost’s ring is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from
nothing else, and I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the
eye. I don’t wonder that you failed to hear it. But I heard it.”

“And did the spectre seem to be there, when you looked out?”

“It WAS there.”‘

“Both times?”

He repeated firmly: “Both times.”

“Will you come to the door with me, and look for it now?”

He bit his under lip as though he were somewhat unwilling, but
arose. I opened the door, and stood on the step, while he stood in
the doorway. There was the Danger-light. There was the dismal
mouth of the tunnel. There were the high, wet stone walls of the
cutting. There were the stars above them.

“Do you see it?” I asked him, taking particular note of his face.
His eyes were prominent and strained, but not very much more so,
perhaps, than my own had been when I had directed them earnestly
towards the same spot.

“No,” he answered. “It is not there.”

“Agreed,” said I.

We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats. I was
thinking how best to improve this advantage, if it might be called
one, when he took up the conversation in such a matter-of-course
way, so assuming that there could be no serious question of fact
between us, that I felt myself placed in the weakest of positions.

“By this time you will fully understand, sir,” he said, “that what
troubles me so dreadfully is the question, What does the spectre
mean?”

I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand.

“What is its warning against?” he said, ruminating, with his eyes on
the fire, and only by times turning them on me. “What is the
danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging somewhere
on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be
doubted this third time, after what has gone before. But surely
this is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do?”

He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated
forehead.

“If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give
no reason for it,” he went on, wiping the palms of his hands. “I
should get into trouble, and do no good. They would think I was
mad. This is the way it would work,–Message: ‘Danger! Take
care!’ Answer: ‘What Danger? Where?’ Message: ‘Don’t know.
But, for God’s sake, take care!’ They would displace me. What else
could they do?”

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental
torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an
unintelligible responsibility involving life.

“When it first stood under the Danger-light,” he went on, putting
his dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward
across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress,
“why not tell me where that accident was to happen,–if it must
happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted,–if it could have
been averted? When on its second coming it hid its face, why not
tell me, instead, ‘She is going to die. Let them keep her at home’?
If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its
warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn
me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signal-man on
this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be
believed, and power to act?”

When I saw him in this state, I saw that for the poor man’s sake, as
well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to
compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality
or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever
thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it
was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not
understand these confounding Appearances. In this effort I
succeeded far better than in the attempt to reason him out of his
conviction. He became calm; the occupations incidental to his post
as the night advanced began to make larger demands on his attention:
and I left him at two in the morning. I had offered to stay through
the night, but he would not hear of it.

That I more than once looked back at the red light as I ascended the
pathway, that I did not like the red light, and that I should have
slept but poorly if my bed had been under it, I see no reason to
conceal. Nor did I like the two sequences of the accident and the
dead girl. I see no reason to conceal that either.

But what ran most in my thoughts was the consideration how ought I
to act, having become the recipient of this disclosure? I had
proved the man to be intelligent, vigilant, painstaking, and exact;
but how long might he remain so, in his state of mind? Though in a
subordinate position, still he held a most important trust, and
would I (for instance) like to stake my own life on the chances of
his continuing to execute it with precision?

Unable to overcome a feeling that there would be something
treacherous in my communicating what he had told me to his superiors
in the Company, without first being plain with himself and proposing
a middle course to him, I ultimately resolved to offer to accompany
him (otherwise keeping his secret for the present) to the wisest
medical practitioner we could hear of in those parts, and to take
his opinion. A change in his time of duty would come round next
night, he had apprised me, and he would be off an hour or two after
sunrise, and on again soon after sunset. I had appointed to return
accordingly.

Next evening was a lovely evening, and I walked out early to enjoy
it. The sun was not yet quite down when I traversed the field-path
near the top of the deep cutting. I would extend my walk for an
hour, I said to myself, half an hour on and half an hour back, and
it would then be time to go to my signal-man’s box.

Before pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically
looked down, from the point from which I had first seen him. I
cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the
mouth of the tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left
sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm.

The nameless horror that oppressed me passed in a moment, for in a
moment I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and
that there was a little group of other men, standing at a short
distance, to whom he seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made.
The Danger-light was not yet lighted. Against its shaft, a little
low hut, entirely new to me, had been made of some wooden supports
and tarpaulin. It looked no bigger than a bed.

With an irresistible sense that something was wrong,–with a
flashing self-reproachful fear that fatal mischief had come of my
leaving the man there, and causing no one to be sent to overlook or
correct what he did,–I descended the notched path with all the
speed I could make.

“What is the matter?” I asked the men.

“Signal-man killed this morning, sir.”

“Not the man belonging to that box?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not the man I know?”

“You will recognise him, sir, if you knew him,” said the man who
spoke for the others, solemnly uncovering his own head, and raising
an end of the tarpaulin, “for his face is quite composed.”

“O, how did this happen, how did this happen?” I asked, turning from
one to another as the hut closed in again.

“He was cut down by an engine, sir. No man in England knew his work
better. But somehow he was not clear of the outer rail. It was
just at broad day. He had struck the light, and had the lamp in his
hand. As the engine came out of the tunnel, his back was towards
her, and she cut him down. That man drove her, and was showing how
it happened. Show the gentleman, Tom.”

The man, who wore a rough dark dress, stepped back to his former
place at the mouth of the tunnel.

“Coming round the curve in the tunnel, sir,” he said, “I saw him at
the end, like as if I saw him down a perspective-glass. There was
no time to check speed, and I knew him to be very careful. As he
didn’t seem to take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were
running down upon him, and called to him as loud as I could call.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Below there! Look out! Look out! For God’s sake, clear
the way!’”

I started.

“Ah! it was a dreadful time, sir. I never left off calling to him.
I put this arm before my eyes not to see, and I waved this arm to
the last; but it was no use.”

Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious
circumstances more than on any other, I may, in closing it, point
out the coincidence that the warning of the Engine-Driver included,
not only the words which the unfortunate Signal-man had repeated to
me as haunting him, but also the words which I myself–not he–had
attached, and that only in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had
imitated.

I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among
persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their
own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange
sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such
wise would find no parallel or response in a listener’s internal
life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller,
who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of
a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same
traveller, having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of
thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental
impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it.
To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such
subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our
experiences of these subjective things as we do our experiences of
objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of
experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in
respect of being miserably imperfect.

In what I am going to relate, I have no intention of setting up,
opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever. I know the history of
the Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a
late Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have
followed the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of
Spectral Illusion occurring within my private circle of friends. It
may be necessary to state as to this last, that the sufferer (a
lady) was in no degree, however distant, related to me. A mistaken
assumption on that head might suggest an explanation of a part of my
own case,–but only a part,–which would be wholly without
foundation. It cannot be referred to my inheritance of any
developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at all similar
experience, nor have I ever had any at all similar experience since.

It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain murder
was committed in England, which attracted great attention. We hear
more than enough of murderers as they rise in succession to their
atrocious eminence, and I would bury the memory of this particular
brute, if I could, as his body was buried, in Newgate Jail. I
purposely abstain from giving any direct clue to the criminal’s
individuality.

When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell–or I ought
rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was
nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicion fell–on the man who was
afterwards brought to trial. As no reference was at that time made
to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any
description of him can at that time have been given in the
newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered.

Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of
that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I
read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times.
The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the
paper, I was aware of a flash–rush–flow–I do not know what to
call it,–no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive,–in
which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a
picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost
instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that
I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of
the dead body from the bed.

It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but
in chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of St. James’s
Street. It was entirely new to me. I was in my easy-chair at the
moment, and the sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver
which started the chair from its position. (But it is to be noted
that the chair ran easily on castors.) I went to one of the windows
(there are two in the room, and the room is on the second floor) to
refresh my eyes with the moving objects down in Piccadilly. It was
a bright autumn morning, and the street was sparkling and cheerful.
The wind was high. As I looked out, it brought down from the Park a
quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and whirled into a
spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I saw
two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East.
They were one behind the other. The foremost man often looked back
over his shoulder. The second man followed him, at a distance of
some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised. First,
the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so
public a thoroughfare attracted my attention; and next, the more
remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded
their way among the other passengers with a smoothness hardly
consistent even with the action of walking on a pavement; and no
single creature, that I could see, gave them place, touched them, or
looked after them. In passing before my windows, they both stared
up at me. I saw their two faces very distinctly, and I knew that I
could recognise them anywhere. Not that I had consciously noticed
anything very remarkable in either face, except that the man who
went first had an unusually lowering appearance, and that the face
of the man who followed him was of the colour of impure wax.

I am a bachelor, and my valet and his wife constitute my whole
establishment. My occupation is in a certain Branch Bank, and I
wish that my duties as head of a Department were as light as they
are popularly supposed to be. They kept me in town that autumn,
when I stood in need of change. I was not ill, but I was not well.
My reader is to make the most that can be reasonably made of my
feeling jaded, having a depressing sense upon me of a monotonous
life, and being “slightly dyspeptic.” I am assured by my renowned
doctor that my real state of health at that time justifies no
stronger description, and I quote his own from his written answer to
my request for it.

As the circumstances of the murder, gradually unravelling, took
stronger and stronger possession of the public mind, I kept them
away from mine by knowing as little about them as was possible in
the midst of the universal excitement. But I knew that a verdict of
Wilful Murder had been found against the suspected murderer, and
that he had been committed to Newgate for trial. I also knew that
his trial had been postponed over one Sessions of the Central
Criminal Court, on the ground of general prejudice and want of time
for the preparation of the defence. I may further have known, but I
believe I did not, when, or about when, the Sessions to which his
trial stood postponed would come on.

My sitting-room, bedroom, and dressing-room, are all on one floor.
With the last there is no communication but through the bedroom.
True, there is a door in it, once communicating with the staircase;
but a part of the fitting of my bath has been–and had then been for
some years–fixed across it. At the same period, and as a part of
the same arrangement,–the door had been nailed up and canvased
over.

I was standing in my bedroom late one night, giving some directions
to my servant before he went to bed. My face was towards the only
available door of communication with the dressing-room, and it was
closed. My servant’s back was towards that door. While I was
speaking to him, I saw it open, and a man look in, who very
earnestly and mysteriously beckoned to me. That man was the man who
had gone second of the two along Piccadilly, and whose face was of
the colour of impure wax.

The figure, having beckoned, drew back, and closed the door. With
no longer pause than was made by my crossing the bedroom, I opened
the dressing-room door, and looked in. I had a lighted candle
already in my hand. I felt no inward expectation of seeing the
figure in the dressing-room, and I did not see it there.

Conscious that my servant stood amazed, I turned round to him, and
said: “Derrick, could you believe that in my cool senses I fancied
I saw a–” As I there laid my hand upon his breast, with a sudden
start he trembled violently, and said, “O Lord, yes, sir! A dead
man beckoning!”

Now I do not believe that this John Derrick, my trusty and attached
servant for more than twenty years, had any impression whatever of
having seen any such figure, until I touched him. The change in him
was so startling, when I touched him, that I fully believe he
derived his impression in some occult manner from me at that
instant.

I bade John Derrick bring some brandy, and I gave him a dram, and
was glad to take one myself. Of what had preceded that night’s
phenomenon, I told him not a single word. Reflecting on it, I was
absolutely certain that I had never seen that face before, except on
the one occasion in Piccadilly. Comparing its expression when
beckoning at the door with its expression when it had stared up at
me as I stood at my window, I came to the conclusion that on the
first occasion it had sought to fasten itself upon my memory, and
that on the second occasion it had made sure of being immediately
remembered.

I was not very comfortable that night, though I felt a certainty,
difficult to explain, that the figure would not return. At daylight
I fell into a heavy sleep, from which I was awakened by John
Derrick’s coming to my bedside with a paper in his hand.

This paper, it appeared, had been the subject of an altercation at
the door between its bearer and my servant. It was a summons to me
to serve upon a Jury at the forthcoming Sessions of the Central
Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. I had never before been summoned
on such a Jury, as John Derrick well knew. He believed–I am not
certain at this hour whether with reason or otherwise–that that
class of Jurors were customarily chosen on a lower qualification
than mine, and he had at first refused to accept the summons. The
man who served it had taken the matter very coolly. He had said
that my attendance or non-attendance was nothing to him; there the
summons was; and I should deal with it at my own peril, and not at
his.

For a day or two I was undecided whether to respond to this call, or
take no notice of it. I was not conscious of the slightest
mysterious bias, influence, or attraction, one way or other. Of
that I am as strictly sure as of every other statement that I make
here. Ultimately I decided, as a break in the monotony of my life,
that I would go.

The appointed morning was a raw morning in the month of November.
There was a dense brown fog in Piccadilly, and it became positively
black and in the last degree oppressive East of Temple Bar. I found
the passages and staircases of the Court-House flaringly lighted
with gas, and the Court itself similarly illuminated. I THINK that,
until I was conducted by officers into the Old Court and saw its
crowded state, I did not know that the Murderer was to be tried that
day. I THINK that, until I was so helped into the Old Court with
considerable difficulty, I did not know into which of the two Courts
sitting my summons would take me. But this must not be received as
a positive assertion, for I am not completely satisfied in my mind
on either point.

I took my seat in the place appropriated to Jurors in waiting, and I
looked about the Court as well as I could through the cloud of fog
and breath that was heavy in it. I noticed the black vapour hanging
like a murky curtain outside the great windows, and I noticed the
stifled sound of wheels on the straw or tan that was littered in the
street; also, the hum of the people gathered there, which a shrill
whistle, or a louder song or hail than the rest, occasionally
pierced. Soon afterwards the Judges, two in number, entered, and
took their seats. The buzz in the Court was awfully hushed. The
direction was given to put the Murderer to the bar. He appeared
there. And in that same instant I recognised in him the first of
the two men who had gone down Piccadilly.

If my name had been called then, I doubt if I could have answered to
it audibly. But it was called about sixth or eighth in the panel,
and I was by that time able to say, “Here!” Now, observe. As I
stepped into the box, the prisoner, who had been looking on
attentively, but with no sign of concern, became violently agitated,
and beckoned to his attorney. The prisoner’s wish to challenge me
was so manifest, that it occasioned a pause, during which the
attorney, with his hand upon the dock, whispered with his client,
and shook his head. I afterwards had it from that gentleman, that
the prisoner’s first affrighted words to him were, “AT ALL HAZARDS,
CHALLENGE THAT MAN!” But that, as he would give no reason for it,
and admitted that he had not even known my name until he heard it
called and I appeared, it was not done.

Both on the ground already explained, that I wish to avoid reviving
the unwholesome memory of that Murderer, and also because a detailed
account of his long trial is by no means indispensable to my
narrative, I shall confine myself closely to such incidents in the
ten days and nights during which we, the Jury, were kept together,
as directly bear on my own curious personal experience. It is in
that, and not in the Murderer, that I seek to interest my reader.
It is to that, and not to a page of the Newgate Calendar, that I beg
attention.

I was chosen Foreman of the Jury. On the second morning of the
trial, after evidence had been taken for two hours (I heard the
church clocks strike), happening to cast my eyes over my brother
jurymen, I found an inexplicable difficulty in counting them. I
counted them several times, yet always with the same difficulty. In
short, I made them one too many.

I touched the brother jurymen whose place was next me, and I
whispered to him, “Oblige me by counting us.” He looked surprised
by the request, but turned his head and counted. “Why,” says he,
suddenly, “we are Thirt-; but no, it’s not possible. No. We are
twelve.”

According to my counting that day, we were always right in detail,
but in the gross we were always one too many. There was no
appearance–no figure–to account for it; but I had now an inward
foreshadowing of the figure that was surely coming.

The Jury were housed at the London Tavern. We all slept in one
large room on separate tables, and we were constantly in the charge
and under the eye of the officer sworn to hold us in safe-keeping.
I see no reason for suppressing the real name of that officer. He
was intelligent, highly polite, and obliging, and (I was glad to
hear) much respected in the City. He had an agreeable presence,
good eyes, enviable black whiskers, and a fine sonorous voice. His
name was Mr. Harker.

When we turned into our twelve beds at night, Mr. Harker’s bed was
drawn across the door. On the night of the second day, not being
disposed to lie down, and seeing Mr. Harker sitting on his bed, I
went and sat beside him, and offered him a pinch of snuff. As Mr.
Harker’s hand touched mine in taking it from my box, a peculiar
shiver crossed him, and he said, “Who is this?”

Following Mr. Harker’s eyes, and looking along the room, I saw again
the figure I expected,–the second of the two men who had gone down
Piccadilly. I rose, and advanced a few steps; then stopped, and
looked round at Mr. Harker. He was quite unconcerned, laughed, and
said in a pleasant way, “I thought for a moment we had a thirteenth
juryman, without a bed. But I see it is the moonlight.”

Making no revelation to Mr. Harker, but inviting him to take a walk
with me to the end of the room, I watched what the figure did. It
stood for a few moments by the bedside of each of my eleven brother
jurymen, close to the pillow. It always went to the right-hand side
of the bed, and always passed out crossing the foot of the next bed.
It seemed, from the action of the head, merely to look down
pensively at each recumbent figure. It took no notice of me, or of
my bed, which was that nearest to Mr. Harker’s. It seemed to go out
where the moonlight came in, through a high window, as by an aerial
flight of stairs.

Next morning at breakfast, it appeared that everybody present had
dreamed of the murdered man last night, except myself and Mr.
Harker.

I now felt as convinced that the second man who had gone down
Piccadilly was the murdered man (so to speak), as if it had been
borne into my comprehension by his immediate testimony. But even
this took place, and in a manner for which I was not at all
prepared.

On the fifth day of the trial, when the case for the prosecution was
drawing to a close, a miniature of the murdered man, missing from
his bedroom upon the discovery of the deed, and afterwards found in
a hiding-place where the Murderer had been seen digging, was put in
evidence. Having been identified by the witness under examination,
it was handed up to the Bench, and thence handed down to be
inspected by the Jury. As an officer in a black gown was making his
way with it across to me, the figure of the second man who had gone
down Piccadilly impetuously started from the crowd, caught the
miniature from the officer, and gave it to me with his own hands, at
the same time saying, in a low and hollow tone,–before I saw the
miniature, which was in a locket,–”I WAS YOUNGER THEN, AND MY FACE
WAS NOT THEN DRAINED OF BLOOD.” It also came between me and the
brother juryman to whom I would have given the miniature, and
between him and the brother juryman to whom he would have given it,
and so passed it on through the whole of our number, and back into
my possession. Not one of them, however, detected this.

At table, and generally when we were shut up together in Mr.
Harker’s custody, we had from the first naturally discussed the
day’s proceedings a good deal. On that fifth day, the case for the
prosecution being closed, and we having that side of the question in
a completed shape before us, our discussion was more animated and
serious. Among our number was a vestryman,–the densest idiot I
have ever seen at large,–who met the plainest evidence with the
most preposterous objections, and who was sided with by two flabby
parochial parasites; all the three impanelled from a district so
delivered over to Fever that they ought to have been upon their own
trial for five hundred Murders. When these mischievous blockheads
were at their loudest, which was towards midnight, while some of us
were already preparing for bed, I again saw the murdered man. He
stood grimly behind them, beckoning to me. On my going towards
them, and striking into the conversation, he immediately retired.
This was the beginning of a separate series of appearances, confined
to that long room in which we were confined. Whenever a knot of my
brother jurymen laid their heads together, I saw the head of the
murdered man among theirs. Whenever their comparison of notes was
going against him, he would solemnly and irresistibly beckon to me.

It will be borne in mind that down to the production of the
miniature, on the fifth day of the trial, I had never seen the
Appearance in Court. Three changes occurred now that we entered on
the case for the defence. Two of them I will mention together,
first. The figure was now in Court continually, and it never there
addressed itself to me, but always to the person who was speaking at
the time. For instance: the throat of the murdered man had been
cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defence, it was
suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat. At that
very moment, the figure, with its throat in the dreadful condition
referred to (this it had concealed before), stood at the speaker’s
elbow, motioning across and across its windpipe, now with the right
hand, now with the left, vigorously suggesting to the speaker
himself the impossibility of such a wound having been self-inflicted
by either hand. For another instance: a witness to character, a
woman, deposed to the prisoner’s being the most amiable of mankind.
The figure at that instant stood on the floor before her, looking
her full in the face, and pointing out the prisoner’s evil
countenance with an extended arm and an outstretched finger.

The third change now to be added impressed me strongly as the most
marked and striking of all. I do not theorise upon it; I accurately
state it, and there leave it. Although the Appearance was not
itself perceived by those whom it addressed, its coming close to
such persons was invariably attended by some trepidation or
disturbance on their part. It seemed to me as if it were prevented,
by laws to which I was not amenable, from fully revealing itself to
others, and yet as if it could invisibly, dumbly, and darkly
overshadow their minds. When the leading counsel for the defence
suggested that hypothesis of suicide, and the figure stood at the
learned gentleman’s elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed throat,
it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a
few seconds the thread of his ingenious discourse, wiped his
forehead with his handkerchief, and turned extremely pale. When the
witness to character was confronted by the Appearance, her eyes most
certainly did follow the direction of its pointed finger, and rest
in great hesitation and trouble upon the prisoner’s face. Two
additional illustrations will suffice. On the eighth day of the
trial, after the pause which was every day made early in the
afternoon for a few minutes’ rest and refreshment, I came back into
Court with the rest of the Jury some little time before the return
of the Judges. Standing up in the box and looking about me, I
thought the figure was not there, until, chancing to raise my eyes
to the gallery, I saw it bending forward, and leaning over a very
decent woman, as if to assure itself whether the Judges had resumed
their seats or not. Immediately afterwards that woman screamed,
fainted, and was carried out. So with the venerable, sagacious, and
patient Judge who conducted the trial. When the case was over, and
he settled himself and his papers to sum up, the murdered man,
entering by the Judges’ door, advanced to his Lordship’s desk, and
looked eagerly over his shoulder at the pages of his notes which he
was turning. A change came over his Lordship’s face; his hand
stopped; the peculiar shiver, that I knew so well, passed over him;
he faltered, “Excuse me, gentlemen, for a few moments. I am
somewhat oppressed by the vitiated air;” and did not recover until
he had drunk a glass of water.

Through all the monotony of six of those interminable ten days,–the
same Judges and others on the bench, the same Murderer in the dock,
the same lawyers at the table, the same tones of question and answer
rising to the roof of the court, the same scratching of the Judge’s
pen, the same ushers going in and out, the same lights kindled at
the same hour when there had been any natural light of day, the same
foggy curtain outside the great windows when it was foggy, the same
rain pattering and dripping when it was rainy, the same footmarks of
turnkeys and prisoner day after day on the same sawdust, the same
keys locking and unlocking the same heavy doors,–through all the
wearisome monotony which made me feel as if I had been Foreman of
the Jury for a vast cried of time, and Piccadilly had flourished
coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost one trace of his
distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less distinct than
anybody else. I must not omit, as a matter of fact, that I never
once saw the Appearance which I call by the name of the murdered man
look at the Murderer. Again and again I wondered, “Why does he
not?” But he never did.

Nor did he look at me, after the production of the miniature, until
the last closing minutes of the trial arrived. We retired to
consider, at seven minutes before ten at night. The idiotic
vestryman and his two parochial parasites gave us so much trouble
that we twice returned into Court to beg to have certain extracts
from the Judge’s notes re-read. Nine of us had not the smallest
doubt about those passages, neither, I believe, had any one in the
Court; the dunder-headed triumvirate, having no idea but
obstruction, disputed them for that very reason. At length we
prevailed, and finally the Jury returned into Court at ten minutes
past twelve.

The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the Jury-box,
on the other side of the Court. As I took my place, his eyes rested
on me with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a
great gray veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time,
over his head and whole form. As I gave in our verdict, “Guilty,”
the veil collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty.

The Murderer, being asked by the Judge, according to usage, whether
he had anything to say before sentence of Death should be passed
upon him, indistinctly muttered something which was described in the
leading newspapers of the following day as “a few rambling,
incoherent, and half-audible words, in which he was understood to
complain that he had not had a fair trial, because the Foreman of
the Jury was prepossessed against him.” The remarkable declaration
that he really made was this: “MY LORD, I KNEW I WAS A DOOMED MAN,
WHEN THE FOREMAN OF MY JURY CAME INTO THE BOX. MY LORD, I KNEW HE
WOULD NEVER LET ME OFF, BECAUSE, BEFORE I WAS TAKEN, HE SOMEHOW GOT
TO MY BEDSIDE IN THE NIGHT, WOKE ME, AND PUT A ROPE ROUND MY NECK.”