Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0064/00647.txt

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$Title{Anthology Of Shorter Works
First Branch - Myself: Part I}
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$Author{Dickens, Charles}
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Title:       Anthology Of Shorter Works
Book:        Holly Tree: Three Branches, The
Author:      Dickens, Charles

First Branch - Myself: Part I

     I have kept one secret in the course of my life.  I am a bashful man.
Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody ever did suppose
it, but I am naturally a bashful man.  This is the secret which I have never
breathed until now.

[Hear Myself]
I keep a secret.

     I might greatly move the reader by some account of the innumerable
places I have not been to, the innumerable people I have not called upon or
received, the innumerable social evasions I have been guilty of, solely
because I am by original constitution and character a bashful man.  But I
will leave the reader unmoved, and proceed with the object before me.

     That object is to give a plain account of my travels and discoveries in
the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place of good entertainment for man and beast
I was once snowed up.

     It happened in the memorable year when I parted forever from Angela
Leath, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the discovery that she
preferred my bosom friend.  From our school-days I had freely admitted Edwin,
in my own mind, to be far superior to myself; and though I was grievously
wounded at heart, I felt the preference to be natural, and tried to forgive
them both.  It was under these circumstances that I resolved to go to America
- on my way to the Devil.

     Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but resolving
to write to each of them an affecting letter conveying my blessing and
forgiveness, which the steam-tender for shore should carry to the post when
I myself should be bound for the New World, far beyond recall, - I say,
locking up my grief in my own breast, and consoling myself as I could with
the prospect of being generous, I quietly left all I held dear, and started
on the desolate journey I have mentioned.

     The dead winter-time was in full dreariness when I left my chambers
forever at five o'clock in the morning.  I had shaved by candle-light, of
course, and was miserably cold, and experienced that general all-pervading
sensation of getting up to be hanged which I have usually found inseparable
from untimely rising under such circumstances.

     How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I came out
of the Temple!  The street-lamps flickering in the gusty northeast wind, as
if the very gas were contorted with cold; the white-topped houses; the bleak,
star-lighted sky; the market people and other early stragglers, trotting, to
circulate their almost frozen blood; the hospitable light and warmth of the
few coffee-shops and public-houses that were open for such customers; the
hard, dry, frosty rime with which the air was charged (the wind had already
beaten it into every crevice), and which lashed my face like a steel whip.

     It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the year.  The
Post-office packet for the United States was to depart from Liverpool,
weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month, and I had the
intervening time on my hands.  I had taken this into consideration, and had
resolved to make a visit to a certain spot (which I need not name) on the
farther borders of Yorkshire.  It was endeared to me by my having first seen
Angela at a farm-house in that place, and my melancholy was gratified by
the idea of taking a wintry leave of it before my expatriation.  I ought to
explain, that, to avoid being sought out before my resolution should have
been rendered irrevocable by being carried into full effect, I had written
to Angela over night, in my usual manner, lamenting that urgent business -
of which she should know all particulars by and by - took me unexpectedly
away from her for a week or ten days.

     There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place there were
stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common with some other
people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody dreaded as a very
serious penance then.  I had secured the box-seat on the fastest of these,
and my business in Fleet Street was to get into a cab with my portmanteau,
so to make the best of my way to the Peacock at Islington, where I was to
join this coach.  But when one of our Temple watchmen, who carried my
portmanteau into Fleet Street for me, told me about the huge blocks of ice
that had for some days past been floating in the river, having closed up in
the night, and made a walk from the Temple Gardens over to the Surrey shore,
I began to ask myself the question, whether the box-seat would not be likely
to put a sudden and a frosty end to my unhappiness.  I was heart-broken, it
is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to wish to be frozen to
death.

     When I got up to the Peacock, - where I found everybody drinking not
purl, in self-preservation, - I asked if there were an inside seat to spare.
I then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only passenger.  This gave
me a still livelier idea of the great inclemency of the weather, since that
coach always loaded particularly well.  However, I took a little purl (which
I found uncommonly good), and got into the coach.  When I was seated, they
built me up with straw to the waist, and conscious of making a rather
ridiculous appearance, I began my journey.

     It was still dark when we left the Peacock.  For a little while, pale,
uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished, and then it was
hard, black, frozen day.  People were lighting their fires; smoke was
mounting straight up high into the rarefied air; and we were rattling for
Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I have ever heard the ring of iron
shoes on.  As we got into the country, everything seemed to have grown old
and gray.  The roads, the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and homesteads,
the ricks in farmers' yards.  Out-door work was abandoned, horsetroughs at
roadside inns were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged about, doors were close
shut, little turnpike houses had blazing fires inside, and children (even
turnpike people have children, and seem to like them) rubbed the frost from
the little panes of glass with their chubby arms, that their bright eyes
might catch a glimpse of the solitary coach going by.  I don't know when
the snow began to set in, but I know that we were changing horses somewhere
when I heard the guard remark, "That the old lady up in the sky was picking
her geese pretty hard to-day." Then, indeed, I found the white down falling
fast and thick.

     The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out, as a lonely traveller does.
I was warm and valiant after eating and drinking, - particularly after
dinner; cold and depressed at all other times.  I was always bewildered as
to time and place, and always more or less out of my senses.  The coach and
horses seemed to execute in chorus Auld Lang Syne, without a moment's
intermission.  They kept the time and tune with the greatest regularity, and
rose into the swell at the beginning of the Refrain, with a precision that
worried me to death.  While we changed horses, the guard and coachman went
stumping up and down the road, printing off their shoes in the snow, and
poured so much liquid consolation into themselves without being any the worse
for it, that I began to confound them, as it darkened again, with two great
white casks standing on end.  Our horses tumbled down in solitary places, and
we got them up, - which was the pleasantest variety I had, for it warmed me.
And it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.
All night long, we went on in this manner.  Thus we came round the clock,
upon the Great North Road, to the performance of Auld Lang Syne by day again.
And it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.

     I forget now where we were at noon on the second day, and where we
ought to have been; but I know that we were scores of miles behindhand, and
that our case was growing worse every hour.  The drift was becoming
prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting snowed out; the road and the fields
were all one; instead of having fences and hedge-rows to guide us, we went
crunching on over an unbroken surface of ghastly white that might sink
beneath us at any moment and drop us down a whole hillside.  Still the
coachman and guard - who kept together on the box, always in council, and
looking well about them - made out the track with astonishing sagacity.

     When we came in sight of a town, it looked, to my fancy, like a large
drawing on a slate, with abundance of slate-pencil expended on the churches
and houses where the snow lay thickest.  When we came within a town, and
found the church clocks all stopped, the dial-faces choked with snow, and the
Inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as if the whole place were overgrown with
white moss.  As to the coach, it was a mere snowball; similarly, the men and
boys who ran along beside us to the town's end, turning our clogged wheels
and encouraging our horses, were men and boys of snow; and the bleak wild
solitude to which they at last dismissed us was a snowy Sahara.  One would
have thought this enough: notwithstanding which, I pledge my word that it
snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.

     We performed Auld Lang Syne the whole day; seeing nothing, out of towns
and villages, but the track of stoats, hares, and foxes, and sometimes of
birds.  At nine o'clock at night, on a Yorkshire moor, a cheerful burst from
our horn, and a welcome sound of talking, with a glimmering and moving about
of lanterns, roused me from my drowsy state.  I found that we were going to
change.

     They helped me out, and I said to a waiter, whose bare head became as
white as King Lear's in a single minute, "What Inn is this!"

     "The Holly-Tree, sir," said he.

     "Upon my word, I believe," said I, apologetically, to the guard and
coachman, "that I must stop here."

     Now the landlord, and the landlady, and the ostler, and the postboy, and
all the stable authorities, had already asked the coachman, to the wide-eyed
interest of all the rest of the establishment, if he meant to go on.  The
coachman had already replied, "Yes, he'd take her through it," - meaning by
Her the coach, - "if so be as George would stand by him." George was the
guard, and he had already sworn that he would stand by him.  So the helpers
were already getting the horses out.

     My declaring myself beaten, after this parley, was not an announcement
without preparation.  Indeed, but for the way to the announcement being
smoothed by the parley, I more than doubt whether, as an innately bashful
man, I should have had the confidence to make it.  As it was, it received the
approval even of the guard and coachman.  Therefore, with many confirmations
of my inclining, and many remarks from one bystander to another, that the
gentleman could go for'ard by the mail to-morrow, whereas to-night he would
only be froze, and where was the good of a gentleman being froze, - ah, let
alone buried alive (which latter clause was added by a humorous helper as a
joke at my expense, and was extremely well received), I saw my portmanteau
got out stiff, like a frozen body; did the handsome thing by the guard and
coachman; wished them good night and a prosperous journey; and, a little
ashamed of myself, after all, for leaving them to fight it out alone,
followed the landlord, landlady, and waiter of the Holly-Tree upstairs.

     I thought I had never seen such a large room as that into which they
showed me.  It had five windows, with dark red curtains that would have
absorbed the light of a general illumination, and there were complications
of drapery at the top of the curtains, that went wandering about the wall in
a most extraordinary manner.  I asked for a smaller room, and they told me
there was no smaller room.  They could screen me in, however, the landlord
said.  They brought a great old japanned screen, with natives (Japanese, I
suppose) engaged in a variety of idiotic pursuits all over it; and left me
roasting whole before an immense fire.

     My bedroom was some quarter of a mile off, up a great staircase, at
the end of a long gallery; and nobody knows what a misery this is to a
bashful man who would rather not meet people on the stairs.  It was the
grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the furniture, from
the four posts of the bed to the two old silver candlesticks, was tall,
high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted.  Below, in my sitting-room, if I looked
round my screen, the wind rushed at me like a mad bull; if I stuck to my
arm-chair, the fire scorched me to the colour of a new brick.  The
chimney-piece was very high, and there was a bad glass - what I may call a
wavy glass - above it, which, when I stood up, just showed me my anterior
phrenological developments, - and these never look well, in any subject, cut
short off at the eyebrow.  If I stood with my back to the fire, a gloomy
vault of darkness above and beyond the screen insisted on being looked at;
and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery of the ten curtains of the five
windows went twisting and creeping about, like a nest of gigantic worms.

     I suppose that what I observe in myself must be observed by some other
men of similar character in themselves; therefore I am emboldened to mention,
that, when I travel, I never arrive at a place but I immediately want to go
away from it.  Before I had finished my supper of broiled fowl and mulled
port, I had impressed upon the waiter in detail my arrangements for departure
in the morning.  Breakfast and bill at eight.  Fly at nine.  Two horses, or,
if needful, even four.

     Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week long.  In oases of
nightmare, I thought of Angela, and felt more depressed than ever by the
reflection that I was on the shortest road to Gretna Green.  What had I to
do with Gretna Green?  I was not going that way to the Devil, but by the
American route, I remarked, in my bitterness.

     In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it had snowed all
night, and that I was snowed up.  Nothing could get out of that spot on the
moor, or could come at it, until the road had been cut out by labourers from
the market-town.  When they might cut their way to the Holly-Tree, nobody
could tell me.

     It was now Christmas Eve.  I should have had a dismal Christmas-time of
it anywhere, and consequently that did not so much matter; still, being
snowed up was, like dying of frost, a thing I had not bargained for.  I felt
very lonely.  Yet I could no more have proposed to the landlord and landlady
to admit me to their society (though I should have liked it very much), than
I could have asked them to present me with a piece of plate.  Here my great
secret, the real bashfulness of my character, is to be observed.  Like most
bashful men, I judge of other people as if they were bashful too.  Besides
being far too shamefaced to make the proposal myself, I really had a delicate
misgiving that it would be in the last degree disconcerting to them.

     Trying to settle down, therefore, in my solitude, I first of all asked
what books there were in the house.  The waiter brought me a Book of Roads,
two or three old Newspapers, a little Song-Book terminating in a collection
of Toasts and Sentiments, a little Jest-book, an odd volume of Peregrine
Pickle, and the Sentimental Journey.  I knew every word of the two last
already, but I read them through again, then tried to hum all the songs (Auld
Lang Syne was among them); went entirely through the jokes, - in which I
found a fund of melancholy adapted to my state of mind; proposed all the
toasts, enunciated all the sentiments, and mastered all the papers.  The
latter had nothing in them but Stock advertisements, a meeting about a county
rate, and a highway robbery.  As I am a greedy reader, I could not make this
supply hold out until night; it was exhausted by tea-time.  Being then
entirely cast upon my own resources, I got through an hour in considering
what to do next.  Ultimately, it came into my head (from which I was anxious
by any means to exclude Angela and Edwin), that I would endeavour to recall
my experience of Inns, and would try how long it lasted me.  I stirred the
fire, moved my chair a little to one side of the screen, - not daring to go
far, for I knew the wind was waiting to make a rush at me, I could hear it
growling, - and began.

     My first impressions of an Inn dated from the Nursery; consequently, I
went back to the Nursery, for a starting-point, and found myself at the knee
of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a green gown, whose
specialty was a dismal narrative of a landlord by the roadside, whose
visitors unaccountably disappeared for many years, until it was discovered
that the pursuit of his life had been to convert them into pies.  For the
better devotion of himself to this branch of industry, he had constructed a
secret door behind the head of the bed; and when the visitor (oppressed with
pie), had fallen asleep, this wicked landlord would look softly in with a
lamp in one hand and a knife in the other, would cut his throat, and would
make him into pies; for which purpose he had coppers underneath a trap-door,
always boiling; and rolled out his pastry in the dead of the night.  Yet
even he was not insensible to the stings of conscience, for he never went to
sleep without being heard to mutter, "Too much pepper!" which was eventually
the cause of his being brought to justice.  I had no sooner disposed of this
criminal than there started up another, of the same period, whose profession
was originally housebreaking; in the pursuit of which art he had had his
right ear chopped off one night, as he was burglariously getting in at a
window, by a brave and lovely servant-maid (whom the aquiline-nosed woman,
though not at all answering the description, always mysteriously implied to
be herself).  After several years, this brave and lovely servant-maid was
married to the landlord of a country Inn; which landlord had this remarkable
characteristic, that he always wore a silk nightcap, and never would on any
consideration take it off.  At last, one night, when he was fast asleep, the
brave and lovely woman lifted up his silk nightcap on the right side, and
found that he had no ear there; upon which she sagaciously perceived that he
was the clipped housebreaker, who had married her with the intention of
putting her to death.  She immediately heated the poker and terminated his
career, for which she was taken to King George upon his throne, and received
the compliments of royalty on her great discretion and valour.  This same
narrator, who had a Ghoulish pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in
terrifying me to the utmost confines of my reason, had another authentic
anecdote within her own experience, founded, I now believe, upon Raymond and
Agnes, or the Bleeding Nun.  She said it happened to her brother-in-law, who
was immensely rich, - which my father was not; and immensely tall, - which
my father was not.  It was always a point with this Ghoul to present my
dearest relations and friends to my youthful mind under circumstances of
disparaging contrast.  The brother-in-law was riding once through a forest
on a magnificent horse (we had no magnificent horse at our house), attended
by a favourite and valuable Newfoundland dog (we had no dog), when he found
himself benighted, and came to an Inn.  A dark woman opened the door, and he
asked her if he could have a bed there.  She answered yes, and put his horse
in the stable, and took him into a room where there were two dark men.  While
he was at supper, a parrot in the room began to talk, - saying, "Blood,
blood!  Wipe up the blood!" Upon which one of the dark men wrung the parrot's
neck, and said he was fond of roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one
for breakfast in the morning.  After eating and drinking heartily, the
immensely rich, tall brother-in-law went up to bed; but he was rather vexed,
because they had shut his dog in the stable, saying that they never allowed
dogs in the house.  He sat very quiet for more than an hour, thinking and
thinking, when, just as his candle was burning out, he heard a scratch at the
door.  He opened the door, and there was the Newfoundland dog!  The dog came
softly in, smelt about him, went straight to some straw in a corner which the
dark men had said covered apples, tore the straw away, and disclosed two
sheets steeped in blood.  Just at that moment the candle went out, and the
brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door, saw the two dark men
stealing up-stairs; one armed with a dagger that long (about five feet); the
other carrying a chopper, a sack, and a spade.  Having no remembrance of the
close of his adventure, I suppose my faculties to have been always so frozen
with terror at this stage of it, that the power of listening stagnated within
me for some quarter of an hour.

     These barbarous stories carried me, sitting there on the Holly-Tree
hearth, to the Roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny book with a
folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the
portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four incidents
of the tragedy with which the name is associated, - coloured with a hand at
once so free and economical, that the bloom of Jonathan's complexion passed
without any pause into the breeches of the ostler, and, smearing itself off
into the next division, became rum in a bottle.  Then I remembered how the
landlord was found at the murdered traveller's bedside, with his own knife
at his feet, and blood upon his hand; how he was hanged for the murder,
notwithstanding his protestation that he had indeed come there to kill the
traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been stricken motionless on finding
him already slain; and how the ostler, years afterwards, owned the deed.  By
this time I had made myself quite uncomfortable.  I stirred the fire, and
stood with my back to it as long as I could bear the heat, looking up at the
darkness beyond the screen, and at the wormy curtains creeping in and
creeping out, like the worms in the ballad of Alonzo the Brave and the fair
Imogene.

     There was an Inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which had
pleasanter recollections about it than any of these.  I took it next.  It was
the Inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to see parents,
and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped.  It had an ecclesiastical sign,
- the Mitre, - and a bar that seemed to be the next best thing to a
bishopric, it was so snug.  I loved the landlord's youngest daughter to
distraction, - but let that pass.  It was in this Inn that I was cried over
by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight, And
though she had been, that Holly-Tree night, for many a long year where all
tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.

     "To be continued to-morrow," said I, when I took my candle to go to
bed.  But my bed took it upon itself to continue the train of thought that
night.  It carried me away, like the enchanted carpet, to a distant place
(though still in England), and there, alighting from a stage-coach at another
Inn in the snow, as I had actually done some years before, I repeated in my
sleep a curious experience I had really had there.  More than a year before
I made the journey in the course of which I put up at that Inn, I had lost
a very near and dear friend by death.  Every night since, at home or away
from home, I had dreamed of that friend; sometimes as still living; sometimes
as returning from the world of shadows to comfort me; always as being
beautiful, placid, and happy, never in association with any approach to fear
or distress.  It was at a lonely Inn in a wide moorland place, that I halted
to pass the night.  When I had looked from my bedroom window over the waste
of snow on which the moon was shining, I sat down by my fire to write a
letter.  I had always, until that hour, kept it within my own breast that I
dreamed every night of the dear lost one.  But in the letter that I wrote I
recorded the circumstance, and added that I felt much interested in proving
whether the subject of my dream would still be faithful to me, travel-tired,
and in that remote place.  No.  I lost the beloved figure of my vision in
parting with the secret.  My sleep has never looked upon it since, in sixteen
years, but once.  I was in Italy, and awoke (or seemed to awake), the
well-remembered voice distinctly in my ears, conversing with it.  I entreated
it, as it rose above my bed and soared up to the vaulted roof of the old
room, to answer me a question I had asked touching the Future Life.  My hands
were still outstretched towards it as it vanished, when I heard a bell
ringing by the garden wall, and a voice in the deep stillness of the night
calling on all good Christians to pray for the souls of the dead; it being
All Souls' Eve.

     To return to the Holly-Tree.  When I awoke next day, it was freezing
hard, and the lowering sky threatened more snow.  My breakfast cleared away,
I drew my chair into its former place, and, with the fire getting so much the
better of the landscape that I sat in twilight, resumed my Inn remembrances.

     That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the days
of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness.  It was on the
skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that rattled my lattice
window came moaning at me from Stonehenge.  There was a hanger-on at that
establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to have been,
and to be still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking
afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be ever
watching for the reappearance, on the verge of the horizon, of some ghostly
flock of sheep that had been mutton for many ages.  He was a man with a weird
belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice, and
make the same number of them; likewise, that any one who counted them three
times nine times, and then stood in the centre and said, "I dare!" would
behold a tremendous apparition, and be stricken dead.  He pretended to have
seen a bustard (I suspect him to have been familiar with the dodo), in manner
following: He was out upon the plain at the close of a late autumn day, when
he dimly discerned, going on before him at a curious fitfully bounding pace,
what he at first supposed to be a gig-umbrella that had been blown from some
conveyance, but what he presently believed to be a lean dwarf man upon a
little pony.  Having followed this object for some distance without gaining
on it, and having called to it many times without receiving any answer, he
pursued it for miles and miles, when, at length coming up with it, he
discovered it to be the last bustard in Great Britain, degenerated into a
wingless state, and running along the ground.  Resolved to capture him or
perish in the attempt, he closed with the bustard; but the bustard, who had
formed a counter-resolution that he should do neither, threw him, stunned
him, and was at last seen making off due west.  This weird man, at that state
of metempsychosis, may have been a sleep-walker or an enthusiast or a robber;
but I awoke one night to find him in the dark at my bedside, repeating the
Athanasian Creed in a terrific voice.  I paid my bill next day, and retired
from the county with all possible precipitation.

     That was not a commonplace story which worked itself out at a little Inn
in Switzerland, while I was staying there.  It was a very homely place, in
a village of one narrow, zigzag street among mountains, and you went in at
the main door through the cow-house, and among the mules and the dogs and the
fowls, before ascending a great bare staircase to the rooms; which were all
of unpainted wood, without plastering or papering - like rough packing-cases.
Outside there was nothing but the straggling street, a little toy church with
a copper-coloured steeple, a pine forest, a torrent, mists, and
mountain-sides.  A young man belonging to this Inn had disappeared eight
weeks before (it was winter-time), and was supposed to have had some
undiscovered love affair, and to have gone for a soldier.  He had got up in
the night, and dropped into the village street from the loft in which he
slept with another man; and he had done it so quietly, that his companion and
fellow-labourer had heard no movement when he was awakened in the morning,
and they said, "Louis, where is Henri?" They looked for him high and low, in
vain, and gave him up.   Now, outside Inn, there stood, as there stood
outside every dwelling in the village, a stack of firewood; but the stack
belonging to the Inn was higher than any of the rest, because the Inn was the
richest house, and burnt the most fuel.  It began to be noticed, while they
were looking high and low, that a Bantam cock, part of the live stock of the
Inn, put himself wonderfully out of his way to get to the top of this
wood-stack; and that he would stay there for hours and hours, crowing, until
he appeared in danger of splitting himself.  Five weeks went on, - six weeks,
- and still this terrible Bantam, neglecting his domestic affairs, was always
on the top of the wood stack, crowing the very eyes out of his head.  By this
time it was perceived that Louis had become inspired with a violent animosity
towards the terrible Bantam, and one morning he was seen by a woman, who
sat nursing her goitre at a little window in a gleam of sun, to catch up a
rough billet of wood, with a great oath, hurl it at the terrible Bantam
crowing on the wood-stack, and bring him down dead.  Hereupon the woman, with
a sudden light in her mind, stole round to the back of the wood-stack, and,
being a good climber, as all those women are, climbed up, and soon was seen
upon the summit, screaming, looking down the hollow within, and crying,
"Seize Louis, the murderer!  Ring the church bell!  Here is the body!" I saw
the murderer that day, and I saw him as I sat by my fire at the Holly-Tree
Inn, and I see him now, lying shackled with cords on the stable litter, among
the mild eyes and the smoking breath of the cows, waiting to be taken away
by the police, and stared at by the fearful village.  A heavy animal, - the
dullest animal in the stables, - with a stupid head, and a lumpish face
devoid of any trace of sensibility, who had been, within the knowledge of the
murdered youth, an embezzler of certain small moneys belonging to his master,
and who had taken this hopeful mode of putting a possible accuser out of his
way.  All of which he confessed next day, like a sulky wretch who couldn't
be troubled any more, now that they had got hold of him, and meant to make
an end of him.  I saw him once again, on the day of my departure from the
Inn.  In that Canton the headsman still does his office with a sword; and I
came upon this murderer sitting bound to a chair, with his eyes bandaged, on
a scaffold in a little market-place.  In that instant, a great sword (loaded
with quicksilver in the thick part of the blade), swept round him like a gust
of wind or fire, and there was no such creature in the world.  My wonder was,
not that he was so suddenly despatched, but that any head was left unreaped,
within a radius of fifty yards of that tremendous sickle.

     That was a good Inn, too, with the kind, cheerful landlady and the
honest landlord, where I lived in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and where one of
the apartments has a zoological papering on the walls, not so accurately
joined but that the elephant occasionally rejoices in a tiger's hind legs and
tail, while the lion puts on a trunk and tusks, and the bear, moulting as it
were, appears as to portions of himself like a leopard.  I made several
American friends at that Inn, who all called Mont Blanc Mount Blank, - except
one good-humoured gentleman, of a very sociable nature, who became on such
intimate terms with it that he spoke of it familiarly as "Blank"; observing,
at breakfast, "Blank looks pretty tall this morning"; or considerably
doubting in the court-yard in the evening, whether there warn't some go-ahead
naters in our country, sir, that would make out the top of Blank in a couple
of hours from the first start - now!

     Once I passed a fortnight at an Inn in the North of England, where I was
haunted by the ghost of a tremendous pie.  It was a Yorkshire pie, like a
fort, - an abandoned fort with nothing in it; but the waiter had a fixed idea
that it was a point of ceremony at every meal to put the pie on the table.
After some days I tried to hint, in several delicate ways, that I considered
the pie done with; as, for example, by emptying fag-ends of glasses of wine
into it; putting cheese-plates and spoons into it, as into a basket; putting
wine-bottles into it, as into a cooler; but always in vain, the pie being
invariably cleaned out again and brought up as before.  At last beginning to
be doubtful whether I was not the victim of a spectral illusion, and whether
my health and spirits might not sink under the horrors of an imaginary pie,
I cut a triangle out of it, fully as large as the musical instrument of that
name in a powerful orchestra.  Human prevision could not have foreseen the
result - but the waiter mended the pie.  With some effectual species of
cement, he adroitly fitted the triangle in again, and I paid my reckoning and
fled.