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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Holly-Tree by Charles Dickens
+#37 in our series by Charles Dickens
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+The Holly-Tree
+
+by Charles Dickens
+
+July, 1998  [Etext #1394]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Holly-Tree by Charles Dickens
+******This file should be named hlytr10.txt or hlytr10.zip******
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+This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas
+Stories" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
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+This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas
+Stories" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HOLLY-TREE--THREE BRANCHES
+
+
+
+
+FIRST BRANCH--MYSELF
+
+
+
+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.
+
+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 for ever 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 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
+for ever, 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 north-
+east 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 farmhouse 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 overnight, 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 hot
+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 rarified 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, horse-troughs at road-
+side 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 begin 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 post-
+boy, 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 up-stairs.
+
+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
+candle-sticks, 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 cases
+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 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 specially 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 house-breaking; 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 clearest 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 the 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 this 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 last seen making off due west.  This weird main, at
+that stage 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 this 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 insensibility, 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 dispatched, 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 courtyard 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 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 provision 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.
+
+The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal.  I made an overland
+expedition beyond the screen, and penetrated as far as the fourth
+window.  Here I was driven back by stress of weather.  Arrived at my
+winter-quarters once more, I made up the fire, and took another Inn.
+
+It was in the remotest part of Cornwall.  A great annual Miners'
+Feast was being holden at the Inn, when I and my travelling
+companions presented ourselves at night among the wild crowd that
+were dancing before it by torchlight.  We had had a break-down in
+the dark, on a stony morass some miles away; and I had the honour of
+leading one of the unharnessed post-horses.  If any lady or
+gentleman, on perusal of the present lines, will take any very tall
+post-horse with his traces hanging about his legs, and will conduct
+him by the bearing-rein into the heart of a country dance of a
+hundred and fifty couples, that lady or gentleman will then, and
+only then, form an adequate idea of the extent to which that post-
+horse will tread on his conductor's toes.  Over and above which, the
+post-horse, finding three hundred people whirling about him, will
+probably rear, and also lash out with his hind legs, in a manner
+incompatible with dignity or self-respect on his conductor's part.
+With such little drawbacks on my usually impressive aspect, I
+appeared at this Cornish Inn, to the unutterable wonder of the
+Cornish Miners.  It was full, and twenty times full, and nobody
+could be received but the post-horse,--though to get rid of that
+noble animal was something.  While my fellow-travellers and I were
+discussing how to pass the night and so much of the next day as must
+intervene before the jovial blacksmith and the jovial wheelwright
+would be in a condition to go out on the morass and mend the coach,
+an honest man stepped forth from the crowd and proposed his unlet
+floor of two rooms, with supper of eggs and bacon, ale and punch.
+We joyfully accompanied him home to the strangest of clean houses,
+where we were well entertained to the satisfaction of all parties.
+But the novel feature of the entertainment was, that our host was a
+chair-maker, and that the chairs assigned to us were mere frames,
+altogether without bottoms of any sort; so that we passed the
+evening on perches.  Nor was this the absurdest consequence; for
+when we unbent at supper, and any one of us gave way to laughter, he
+forgot the peculiarity of his position, and instantly disappeared.
+I myself, doubled up into an attitude from which self-extrication
+was impossible, was taken out of my frame, like a clown in a comic
+pantomime who has tumbled into a tub, five times by the taper's
+light during the eggs and bacon.
+
+The Holly-Tree was fast reviving within me a sense of loneliness.  I
+began to feel conscious that my subject would never carry on until I
+was dug out.  I might be a week here,--weeks!
+
+There was a story with a singular idea in it, connected with an Inn
+I once passed a night at in a picturesque old town on the Welsh
+border.  In a large double-bedded room of this Inn there had been a
+suicide committed by poison, in one bed, while a tired traveller
+slept unconscious in the other.  After that time, the suicide bed
+was never used, but the other constantly was; the disused bedstead
+remaining in the room empty, though as to all other respects in its
+old state.  The story ran, that whosoever slept in this room, though
+never so entire a stranger, from never so far off, was invariably
+observed to come down in the morning with an impression that he
+smelt Laudanum, and that his mind always turned upon the subject of
+suicide; to which, whatever kind of man he might be, he was certain
+to make some reference if he conversed with any one.  This went on
+for years, until it at length induced the landlord to take the
+disused bedstead down, and bodily burn it,--bed, hangings, and all.
+The strange influence (this was the story) now changed to a fainter
+one, but never changed afterwards.  The occupant of that room, with
+occasional but very rare exceptions, would come down in the morning,
+trying to recall a forgotten dream he had had in the night.  The
+landlord, on his mentioning his perplexity, would suggest various
+commonplace subjects, not one of which, as he very well knew, was
+the true subject.  But the moment the landlord suggested "Poison,"
+the traveller started, and cried, "Yes!"  He never failed to accept
+that suggestion, and he never recalled any more of the dream.
+
+This reminiscence brought the Welsh Inns in general before me; with
+the women in their round hats, and the harpers with their white
+beards (venerable, but humbugs, I am afraid), playing outside the
+door while I took my dinner.  The transition was natural to the
+Highland Inns, with the oatmeal bannocks, the honey, the venison
+steaks, the trout from the loch, the whisky, and perhaps (having the
+materials so temptingly at hand) the Athol brose.  Once was I coming
+south from the Scottish Highlands in hot haste, hoping to change
+quickly at the station at the bottom of a certain wild historical
+glen, when these eyes did with mortification see the landlord come
+out with a telescope and sweep the whole prospect for the horses;
+which horses were away picking up their own living, and did not
+heave in sight under four hours.  Having thought of the loch-trout,
+I was taken by quick association to the Anglers' Inns of England (I
+have assisted at innumerable feats of angling by lying in the bottom
+of the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing with the greatest
+perseverance; which I have generally found to be as effectual
+towards the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost
+science), and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated
+bedrooms of those inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and
+the green ait, and the church-spire, and the country bridge; and to
+the pearless Emma with the bright eyes and the pretty smile, who
+waited, bless her! with a natural grace that would have converted
+Blue-Beard.  Casting my eyes upon my Holly-Tree fire, I next
+discerned among the glowing coals the pictures of a score or more of
+those wonderful English posting-inns which we are all so sorry to
+have lost, which were so large and so comfortable, and which were
+such monuments of British submission to rapacity and extortion.  He
+who would see these houses pining away, let him walk from
+Basingstoke, or even Windsor, to London, by way of Hounslow, and
+moralise on their perishing remains; the stables crumbling to dust;
+unsettled labourers and wanderers bivouacking in the outhouses;
+grass growing in the yards; the rooms, where erst so many hundred
+beds of down were made up, let off to Irish lodgers at eighteenpence
+a week; a little ill-looking beer-shop shrinking in the tap of
+former days, burning coach-house gates for firewood, having one of
+its two windows bunged up, as if it had received punishment in a
+fight with the Railroad; a low, bandy-legged, brick-making bulldog
+standing in the doorway.  What could I next see in my fire so
+naturally as the new railway-house of these times near the dismal
+country station; with nothing particular on draught but cold air and
+damp, nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new mortar, and no
+business doing beyond a conceited affectation of luggage in the
+hall?  Then I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment
+of four pieces up one hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs, the
+privilege of ringing the bell all day long without influencing
+anybody's mind or body but your own, and the not-too-much-for-
+dinner, considering the price.  Next to the provincial Inns of
+France, with the great church-tower rising above the courtyard, the
+horse-bells jingling merrily up and down the street beyond, and the
+clocks of all descriptions in all the rooms, which are never right,
+unless taken at the precise minute when, by getting exactly twelve
+hours too fast or too slow, they unintentionally become so.  Away I
+went, next, to the lesser roadside Inns of Italy; where all the
+dirty clothes in the house (not in wear) are always lying in your
+anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a raisin pudding of your face in
+summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter; where you get what you
+can, and forget what you can't:  where I should again like to be
+boiling my tea in a pocket-handkerchief dumpling, for want of a
+teapot.  So to the old palace Inns and old monastery Inns, in towns
+and cities of the same bright country; with their massive
+quadrangular staircases, whence you may look from among clustering
+pillars high into the blue vault of heaven; with their stately
+banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with their labyrinths of
+ghostly bedchambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous streets that
+have no appearance of reality or possibility.  So to the close
+little Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants,
+and their peculiar smell of never letting in the air.  So to the
+immense fantastic Inns of Venice, with the cry of the gondolier
+below, as he skims the corner; the grip of the watery odours on one
+particular little bit of the bridge of your nose (which is never
+released while you stay there); and the great bell of St. Mark's
+Cathedral tolling midnight.  Next I put up for a minute at the
+restless Inns upon the Rhine, where your going to bed, no matter at
+what hour, appears to be the tocsin for everybody else's getting up;
+and where, in the table-d'hote room at the end of the long table
+(with several Towers of Babel on it at the other end, all made of
+white plates), one knot of stoutish men, entirely dressed in jewels
+and dirt, and having nothing else upon them, will remain all night,
+clinking glasses, and singing about the river that flows, and the
+grape that grows, and Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine woman that
+smiles and hi drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my brother,
+and all the rest of it.  I departed thence, as a matter of course,
+to other German Inns, where all the eatables are soddened down to
+the same flavour, and where the mind is disturbed by the apparition
+of hot puddings, and boiled cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully
+unexpected periods of the repast.  After a draught of sparkling beer
+from a foaming glass jug, and a glance of recognition through the
+windows of the student beer-houses at Heidelberg and elsewhere, I
+put out to sea for the Inns of America, with their four hundred beds
+apiece, and their eight or nine hundred ladies and gentlemen at
+dinner every day.  Again I stood in the bar-rooms thereof, taking my
+evening cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail.  Again I listened to my
+friend the General,--whom I had known for five minutes, in the
+course of which period he had made me intimate for life with two
+Majors, who again had made me intimate for life with three Colonels,
+who again had made me brother to twenty-two civilians,--again, I
+say, I listened to my friend the General, leisurely expounding the
+resources of the establishment, as to gentlemen's morning-room, sir;
+ladies' morning-room, sir; gentlemen's evening-room, sir; ladies'
+evening-room, sir; ladies' and gentlemen's evening reuniting-room,
+sir; music-room, sir; reading-room, sir; over four hundred sleeping-
+rooms, sir; and the entire planned and finited within twelve
+calendar months from the first clearing off of the old encumbrances
+on the plot, at a cost of five hundred thousand dollars, sir.  Again
+I found, as to my individual way of thinking, that the greater, the
+more gorgeous, and the more dollarous the establishment was, the
+less desirable it was.  Nevertheless, again I drank my cobbler,
+julep, sling, or cocktail, in all good-will, to my friend the
+General, and my friends the Majors, Colonels, and civilians all;
+full well knowing that, whatever little motes my beamy eyes may have
+descried in theirs, they belong to a kind, generous, large-hearted,
+and great people.
+
+I had been going on lately at a quick pace to keep my solitude out
+of my mind; but here I broke down for good, and gave up the subject.
+What was I to do?  What was to become of me?  Into what extremity
+was I submissively to sink?  Supposing that, like Baron Trenck, I
+looked out for a mouse or spider, and found one, and beguiled my
+imprisonment by training it?  Even that might be dangerous with a
+view to the future.  I might be so far gone when the road did come
+to be cut through the snow, that, on my way forth, I might burst
+into tears, and beseech, like the prisoner who was released in his
+old age from the Bastille, to be taken back again to the five
+windows, the ten curtains, and the sinuous drapery.
+
+A desperate idea came into my head.  Under any other circumstances I
+should have rejected it; but, in the strait at which I was, I held
+it fast.  Could I so far overcome the inherent bashfulness which
+withheld me from the landlord's table and the company I might find
+there, as to call up the Boots, and ask him to take a chair,--and
+something in a liquid form,--and talk to me?  I could, I would, I
+did.
+
+
+
+SECOND BRANCH--THE BOOTS
+
+
+
+Where had he been in his time? he repeated, when I asked him the
+question.  Lord, he had been everywhere!  And what had he been?
+Bless you, he had been everything you could mention a'most!
+
+Seen a good deal?  Why, of course he had.  I should say so, he could
+assure me, if I only knew about a twentieth part of what had come in
+his way.  Why, it would be easier for him, he expected, to tell what
+he hadn't seen than what he had.  Ah!  A deal, it would.
+
+What was the curiousest thing he had seen?  Well!  He didn't know.
+He couldn't momently name what was the curiousest thing he had seen-
+-unless it was a Unicorn, and he see him once at a Fair.  But
+supposing a young gentleman not eight year old was to run away with
+a fine young woman of seven, might I think that a queer start?
+Certainly.  Then that was a start as he himself had had his blessed
+eyes on, and he had cleaned the shoes they run away in--and they was
+so little that he couldn't get his hand into 'em.
+
+Master Harry Walmers' father, you see, he lived at the Elmses, down
+away by Shooter's Hill there, six or seven miles from Lunnon.  He
+was a gentleman of spirit, and good-looking, and held his head up
+when he walked, and had what you may call Fire about him.  He wrote
+poetry, and he rode, and he ran, and he cricketed, and he danced,
+and he acted, and he done it all equally beautiful.  He was uncommon
+proud of Master Harry as was his only child; but he didn't spoil him
+neither.  He was a gentleman that had a will of his own and a eye of
+his own, and that would be minded.  Consequently, though he made
+quite a companion of the fine bright boy, and was delighted to see
+him so fond of reading his fairy books, and was never tired of
+hearing him say my name is Norval, or hearing him sing his songs
+about Young May Moons is beaming love, and When he as adores thee
+has left but the name, and that; still he kept the command over the
+child, and the child was a child, and it's to be wished more of 'em
+was!
+
+How did Boots happen to know all this?  Why, through being under-
+gardener.  Of course he couldn't be under-gardener, and be always
+about, in the summer-time, near the windows on the lawn, a mowing,
+and sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without
+getting acquainted with the ways of the family.  Even supposing
+Master Harry hadn't come to him one morning early, and said, "Cobbs,
+how should you spell Norah, if you was asked?" and then began
+cutting it in print all over the fence.
+
+He couldn't say he had taken particular notice of children before
+that; but really it was pretty to see them two mites a going about
+the place together, deep in love.  And the courage of the boy!
+Bless your soul, he'd have throwed off his little hat, and tucked up
+his little sleeves, and gone in at a Lion, he would, if they had
+happened to meet one, and she had been frightened of him.  One day
+he stops, along with her, where Boots was hoeing weeds in the
+gravel, and says, speaking up, "Cobbs," he says, "I like you."  "Do
+you, sir?  I'm proud to hear it."  "Yes, I do, Cobbs.  Why do I like
+you, do you think, Cobbs?"  "Don't know, Master Harry, I am sure."
+"Because Norah likes you, Cobbs."  "Indeed, sir?  That's very
+gratifying."  "Gratifying, Cobbs?  It's better than millions of the
+brightest diamonds to be liked by Norah."  "Certainly, sir."
+"You're going away, ain't you, Cobbs?"  "Yes, sir."  "Would you like
+another situation, Cobbs?"  "Well, sir, I shouldn't object, if it
+was a good Inn."  "Then, Cobbs," says he, "you shall be our Head
+Gardener when we are married."  And he tucks her, in her little sky-
+blue mantle, under his arm, and walks away.
+
+Boots could assure me that it was better than a picter, and equal to
+a play, to see them babies, with their long, bright, curling hair,
+their sparkling eyes, and their beautiful light tread, a rambling
+about the garden, deep in love.  Boots was of opinion that the birds
+believed they was birds, and kept up with 'em, singing to please
+'em.  Sometimes they would creep under the Tulip-tree, and would sit
+there with their arms round one another's necks, and their soft
+cheeks touching, a reading about the Prince and the Dragon, and the
+good and bad enchanters, and the king's fair daughter.  Sometimes he
+would hear them planning about having a house in a forest, keeping
+bees and a cow, and living entirely on milk and honey.  Once he came
+upon them by the pond, and heard Master Harry say, "Adorable Norah,
+kiss me, and say you love me to distraction, or I'll jump in head-
+foremost."  And Boots made no question he would have done it if she
+hadn't complied.  On the whole, Boots said it had a tendency to make
+him feel as if he was in love himself--only he didn't exactly know
+who with.
+
+"Cobbs," said Master Harry, one evening, when Cobbs was watering the
+flowers, "I am going on a visit, this present Midsummer, to my
+grandmamma's at York."
+
+"Are you indeed, sir?  I hope you'll have a pleasant time.  I am
+going into Yorkshire, myself, when I leave here."
+
+"Are you going to your grandmamma's, Cobbs?"
+
+"No, sir.  I haven't got such a thing."
+
+"Not as a grandmamma, Cobbs?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+The boy looked on at the watering of the flowers for a little while,
+and then said, "I shall be very glad indeed to go, Cobbs,--Norah's
+going."
+
+"You'll be all right then, sir," says Cobbs, "with your beautiful
+sweetheart by your side."
+
+"Cobbs," returned the boy, flushing, "I never let anybody joke about
+it, when I can prevent them."
+
+"It wasn't a joke, sir," says Cobbs, with humility,--"wasn't so
+meant."
+
+"I am glad of that, Cobbs, because I like you, you know, and you're
+going to live with us.--Cobbs!"
+
+"Sir."
+
+"What do you think my grandmamma gives me when I go down there?"
+
+"I couldn't so much as make a guess, sir."
+
+"A Bank of England five-pound note, Cobbs."
+
+"Whew!" says Cobbs, "that's a spanking sum of money, Master Harry."
+
+"A person could do a good deal with such a sum of money as that,--
+couldn't a person, Cobbs?"
+
+"I believe you, sir!"
+
+"Cobbs," said the boy, "I'll tell you a secret.  At Norah's house,
+they have been joking her about me, and pretending to laugh at our
+being engaged,--pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!"
+
+"Such, sir," says Cobbs, "is the depravity of human natur."
+
+The boy, looking exactly like his father, stood for a few minutes
+with his glowing face towards the sunset, and then departed with,
+"Good-night, Cobbs.  I'm going in."
+
+If I was to ask Boots how it happened that he was a-going to leave
+that place just at that present time, well, he couldn't rightly
+answer me.  He did suppose he might have stayed there till now if he
+had been anyways inclined.  But, you see, he was younger then, and
+he wanted change.  That's what he wanted,--change.  Mr. Walmers, he
+said to him when he gave him notice of his intentions to leave,
+"Cobbs," he says, "have you anythink to complain of?  I make the
+inquiry because if I find that any of my people really has anythink
+to complain of, I wish to make it right if I can."  "No, sir." says
+Cobbs; "thanking you, sir, I find myself as well sitiwated here as I
+could hope to be anywheres.  The truth is, sir, that I'm a-going to
+seek my fortun'."  "O, indeed, Cobbs!" he says; "I hope you may find
+it."  And Boots could assure me--which he did, touching his hair
+with his bootjack, as a salute in the way of his present calling--
+that he hadn't found it yet.
+
+Well, sir!  Boots left the Elmses when his time was up, and Master
+Harry, he went down to the old lady's at York, which old lady would
+have given that child the teeth out of her head (if she had had
+any), she was so wrapped up in him.  What does that Infant do,--for
+Infant you may call him and be within the mark,--but cut away from
+that old lady's with his Norah, on a expedition to go to Gretna
+Green and be married!
+
+Sir, Boots was at this identical Holly-Tree Inn (having left it
+several times since to better himself, but always come back through
+one thing or another), when, one summer afternoon, the coach drives
+up, and out of the coach gets them two children.  The Guard says to
+our Governor, "I don't quite make out these little passengers, but
+the young gentleman's words was, that they was to be brought here."
+The young gentleman gets out; hands his lady out; gives the Guard
+something for himself; says to our Governor, "We're to stop here to-
+night, please.  Sitting-room and two bedrooms will be required.
+Chops and cherry-pudding for two!" and tucks her, in her sky-blue
+mantle, under his arm, and walks into the house much bolder than
+Brass.
+
+Boots leaves me to judge what the amazement of that establishment
+was, when these two tiny creatures all alone by themselves was
+marched into the Angel,--much more so, when he, who had seen them
+without their seeing him, give the Governor his views of the
+expedition they was upon.  "Cobbs," says the Governor, "if this is
+so, I must set off myself to York, and quiet their friends' minds.
+In which case you must keep your eye upon 'em, and humour 'em, till
+I come back.  But before I take these measures, Cobbs, I should wish
+you to find from themselves whether your opinion is correct."  "Sir,
+to you," says Cobbs, "that shall be done directly."
+
+So Boots goes up-stairs to the Angel, and there he finds Master
+Harry on a e-normous sofa,--immense at any time, but looking like
+the Great Bed of Ware, compared with him,--a drying the eyes of Miss
+Norah with his pocket-hankecher.  Their little legs was entirely off
+the ground, of course, and it really is not possible for Boots to
+express to me how small them children looked.
+
+"It's Cobbs!  It's Cobbs!" cries Master Harry, and comes running to
+him, and catching hold of his hand.  Miss Norah comes running to him
+on t'other side and catching hold of his t'other hand, and they both
+jump for joy.
+
+"I see you a getting out, sir," says Cobbs.  "I thought it was you.
+I thought I couldn't be mistaken in your height and figure.  What's
+the object of your journey, sir?--Matrimonial?"
+
+"We are going to be married, Cobbs, at Gretna Green," returned the
+boy.  "We have run away on purpose.  Norah has been in rather low
+spirits, Cobbs; but she'll be happy, now we have found you to be our
+friend."
+
+"Thank you, sir, and thank you, miss," says Cobbs, "for your good
+opinion.  Did you bring any luggage with you, sir?"
+
+If I will believe Boots when he gives me his word and honour upon
+it, the lady had got a parasol, a smelling-bottle, a round and a
+half of cold buttered toast, eight peppermint drops, and a hair-
+brush,--seemingly a doll's.  The gentleman had got about half a
+dozen yards of string, a knife, three or four sheets of writing-
+paper folded up surprising small, a orange, and a Chaney mug with
+his name upon it.
+
+"What may be the exact natur of your plans, sir?" says Cobbs.
+
+"To go on," replied the boy,--which the courage of that boy was
+something wonderful!--"in the morning, and be married to-morrow."
+
+"Just so, sir," says Cobbs.  "Would it meet your views, sir, if I
+was to accompany you?"
+
+When Cobbs said this, they both jumped for joy again, and cried out,
+"Oh, yes, yes, Cobbs!  Yes!"
+
+"Well, sir," says Cobbs.  "If you will excuse my having the freedom
+to give an opinion, what I should recommend would be this.  I'm
+acquainted with a pony, sir, which, put in a pheayton that I could
+borrow, would take you and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, (myself
+driving, if you approved,) to the end of your journey in a very
+short space of time.  I am not altogether sure, sir, that this pony
+will be at liberty to-morrow, but even if you had to wait over to-
+morrow for him, it might be worth your while.  As to the small
+account here, sir, in case you was to find yourself running at all
+short, that don't signify; because I'm a part proprietor of this
+inn, and it could stand over."
+
+Boots assures me that when they clapped their hands, and jumped for
+joy again, and called him "Good Cobbs!" and "Dear Cobbs!" and bent
+across him to kiss one another in the delight of their confiding
+hearts, he felt himself the meanest rascal for deceiving 'em that
+ever was born.
+
+"Is there anything you want just at present, sir?" says Cobbs,
+mortally ashamed of himself.
+
+"We should like some cakes after dinner," answered Master Harry,
+folding his arms, putting out one leg, and looking straight at him,
+"and two apples,--and jam.  With dinner we should like to have
+toast-and-water.  But Norah has always been accustomed to half a
+glass of currant wine at dessert.  And so have I."
+
+"It shall be ordered at the bar, sir," says Cobbs; and away he went.
+
+Boots has the feeling as fresh upon him at this minute of speaking
+as he had then, that he would far rather have had it out in half-a-
+dozen rounds with the Governor than have combined with him; and that
+he wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where
+those two babies could make an impossible marriage, and live
+impossibly happy ever afterwards.  However, as it couldn't be, he
+went into the Governor's plans, and the Governor set off for York in
+half an hour.
+
+The way in which the women of that house--without exception--every
+one of 'em--married and single--took to that boy when they heard the
+story, Boots considers surprising.  It was as much as he could do to
+keep 'em from dashing into the room and kissing him.  They climbed
+up all sorts of places, at the risk of their lives, to look at him
+through a pane of glass.  They was seven deep at the keyhole.  They
+was out of their minds about him and his bold spirit.
+
+In the evening, Boots went into the room to see how the runaway
+couple was getting on.  The gentleman was on the window-seat,
+supporting the lady in his arms.  She had tears upon her face, and
+was lying, very tired and half asleep, with her head upon his
+shoulder.
+
+"Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, fatigued, sir?" says Cobbs.
+
+"Yes, she is tired, Cobbs; but she is not used to be away from home,
+and she has been in low spirits again.  Cobbs, do you think you
+could bring a biffin, please?"
+
+"I ask your pardon, sir," says Cobbs.  "What was it you--?"
+
+"I think a Norfolk biffin would rouse her, Cobbs.  She is very fond
+of them."
+
+Boots withdrew in search of the required restorative, and when he
+brought it in, the gentleman handed it to the lady, and fed her with
+a spoon, and took a little himself; the lady being heavy with sleep,
+and rather cross.  "What should you think, sir," says Cobbs, "of a
+chamber candlestick?"  The gentleman approved; the chambermaid went
+first, up the great staircase; the lady, in her sky-blue mantle,
+followed, gallantly escorted by the gentleman; the gentleman
+embraced her at her door, and retired to his own apartment, where
+Boots softly locked him up.
+
+Boots couldn't but feel with increased acuteness what a base
+deceiver he was, when they consulted him at breakfast (they had
+ordered sweet milk-and-water, and toast and currant jelly, over-
+night) about the pony.  It really was as much as he could do, he
+don't mind confessing to me, to look them two young things in the
+face, and think what a wicked old father of lies he had grown up to
+be.  Howsomever, he went on a lying like a Trojan about the pony.
+He told 'em that it did so unfortunately happen that the pony was
+half clipped, you see, and that he couldn't be taken out in that
+state, for fear it should strike to his inside.  But that he'd be
+finished clipping in the course of the day, and that to-morrow
+morning at eight o'clock the pheayton would be ready.  Boots's view
+of the whole case, looking back on it in my room, is, that Mrs.
+Harry Walmers, Junior, was beginning to give in.  She hadn't had her
+hair curled when she went to bed, and she didn't seem quite up to
+brushing it herself, and its getting in her eyes put her out.  But
+nothing put out Master Harry.  He sat behind his breakfast-cup, a
+tearing away at the jelly, as if he had been his own father.
+
+After breakfast, Boots is inclined to consider that they drawed
+soldiers,--at least, he knows that many such was found in the fire-
+place, all on horseback.  In the course of the morning, Master Harry
+rang the bell,--it was surprising how that there boy did carry on,--
+and said, in a sprightly way, "Cobbs, is there any good walks in
+this neighbourhood?"
+
+"Yes, sir," says Cobbs.  "There's Love Lane."
+
+"Get out with you, Cobbs!"--that was that there boy's expression,--
+"you're joking."
+
+"Begging your pardon, sir," says Cobbs, "there really is Love Lane.
+And a pleasant walk it is, and proud shall I be to show it to
+yourself and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior."
+
+"Norah, dear," said Master Harry, "this is curious.  We really ought
+to see Love Lane.  Put on your bonnet, my sweetest darling, and we
+will go there with Cobbs."
+
+Boots leaves me to judge what a Beast he felt himself to be, when
+that young pair told him, as they all three jogged along together,
+that they had made up their minds to give him two thousand guineas a
+year as head-gardener, on accounts of his being so true a friend to
+'em.  Boots could have wished at the moment that the earth would
+have opened and swallowed him up, he felt so mean, with their
+beaming eyes a looking at him, and believing him.  Well, sir, he
+turned the conversation as well as he could, and he took 'em down
+Love Lane to the water-meadows, and there Master Harry would have
+drowned himself in half a moment more, a getting out a water-lily
+for her,--but nothing daunted that boy.  Well, sir, they was tired
+out.  All being so new and strange to 'em, they was tired as tired
+could be.  And they laid down on a bank of daisies, like the
+children in the wood, leastways meadows, and fell asleep.
+
+Boots don't know--perhaps I do,--but never mind, it don't signify
+either way--why it made a man fit to make a fool of himself to see
+them two pretty babies a lying there in the clear still sunny day,
+not dreaming half so hard when they was asleep as they done when
+they was awake.  But, Lord! when you come to think of yourself, you
+know, and what a game you have been up to ever since you was in your
+own cradle, and what a poor sort of a chap you are, and how it's
+always either Yesterday with you, or else To-morrow, and never To-
+day, that's where it is!
+
+Well, sir, they woke up at last, and then one thing was getting
+pretty clear to Boots, namely, that Mrs. Harry Walmerses, Junior's,
+temper was on the move.  When Master Harry took her round the waist,
+she said he "teased her so;" and when he says, "Norah, my young May
+Moon, your Harry tease you?" she tells him, "Yes; and I want to go
+home!"
+
+A biled fowl, and baked bread-and-butter pudding, brought Mrs.
+Walmers up a little; but Boots could have wished, he must privately
+own to me, to have seen her more sensible of the woice of love, and
+less abandoning of herself to currants.  However, Master Harry, he
+kept up, and his noble heart was as fond as ever.  Mrs. Walmers
+turned very sleepy about dusk, and began to cry.  Therefore, Mrs.
+Walmers went off to bed as per yesterday; and Master Harry ditto
+repeated.
+
+About eleven or twelve at night comes back the Governor in a chaise,
+along with Mr. Walmers and a elderly lady.  Mr. Walmers looks amused
+and very serious, both at once, and says to our missis, "We are much
+indebted to you, ma'am, for your kind care of our little children,
+which we can never sufficiently acknowledge.  Pray, ma'am, where is
+my boy?"  Our missis says, "Cobbs has the dear child in charge, sir.
+Cobbs, show Forty!"  Then he says to Cobbs, "Ah, Cobbs, I am glad to
+see you!  I understood you was here!"  And Cobbs says, "Yes, sir.
+Your most obedient, sir."
+
+I may be surprised to hear Boots say it, perhaps; but Boots assures
+me that his heart beat like a hammer, going up-stairs.  "I beg your
+pardon, sir," says he, while unlocking the door; "I hope you are not
+angry with Master Harry.  For Master Harry is a fine boy, sir, and
+will do you credit and honour."  And Boots signifies to me, that, if
+the fine boy's father had contradicted him in the daring state of
+mind in which he then was, he thinks he should have "fetched him a
+crack," and taken the consequences.
+
+But Mr. Walmers only says, "No, Cobbs.  No, my good fellow.  Thank
+you!"  And, the door being opened, goes in.
+
+Boots goes in too, holding the light, and he sees Mr. Walmers go up
+to the bedside, bend gently down, and kiss the little sleeping face.
+Then he stands looking at it for a minute, looking wonderfully like
+it (they do say he ran away with Mrs. Walmers); and then he gently
+shakes the little shoulder.
+
+"Harry, my dear boy!  Harry!"
+
+Master Harry starts up and looks at him.  Looks at Cobbs too.  Such
+is the honour of that mite, that he looks at Cobbs, to see whether
+he has brought him into trouble.
+
+"I am not angry, my child.  I only want you to dress yourself and
+come home."
+
+"Yes, pa."
+
+Master Harry dresses himself quickly.  His breast begins to swell
+when he has nearly finished, and it swells more and more as he
+stands, at last, a looking at his father:  his father standing a
+looking at him, the quiet image of him.
+
+"Please may I"--the spirit of that little creatur, and the way he
+kept his rising tears down!--"please, dear pa--may I--kiss Norah
+before I go?"
+
+"You may, my child."
+
+So he takes Master Harry in his hand, and Boots leads the way with
+the candle, and they come to that other bedroom, where the elderly
+lady is seated by the bed, and poor little Mrs. Harry Walmers,
+Junior, is fast asleep.  There the father lifts the child up to the
+pillow, and he lays his little face down for an instant by the
+little warm face of poor unconscious little Mrs. Harry Walmers,
+Junior, and gently draws it to him,--a sight so touching to the
+chambermaids who are peeping through the door, that one of them
+calls out, "It's a shame to part 'em!"  But this chambermaid was
+always, as Boots informs me, a soft-hearted one.  Not that there was
+any harm in that girl.  Far from it.
+
+Finally, Boots says, that's all about it.  Mr. Walmers drove away in
+the chaise, having hold of Master Harry's hand.  The elderly lady
+and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, that was never to be (she married a
+Captain long afterwards, and died in India), went off next day.  In
+conclusion, Boots put it to me whether I hold with him in two
+opinions:  firstly, that there are not many couples on their way to
+be married who are half as innocent of guile as those two children;
+secondly, that it would be a jolly good thing for a great many
+couples on their way to be married, if they could only be stopped in
+time, and brought back separately.
+
+
+
+THIRD BRANCH--THE BILL
+
+
+
+I had been snowed up a whole week.  The time had hung so lightly on
+my hands, that I should have been in great doubt of the fact but for
+a piece of documentary evidence that lay upon my table.
+
+The road had been dug out of the snow on the previous day, and the
+document in question was my bill.  It testified emphatically to my
+having eaten and drunk, and warmed myself, and slept among the
+sheltering branches of the Holly-Tree, seven days and nights.
+
+I had yesterday allowed the road twenty-four hours to improve
+itself, finding that I required that additional margin of time for
+the completion of my task.  I had ordered my Bill to be upon the
+table, and a chaise to be at the door, "at eight o'clock to-morrow
+evening."  It was eight o'clock to-morrow evening when I buckled up
+my travelling writing-desk in its leather case, paid my Bill, and
+got on my warm coats and wrappers.  Of course, no time now remained
+for my travelling on to add a frozen tear to the icicles which were
+doubtless hanging plentifully about the farmhouse where I had first
+seen Angela.  What I had to do was to get across to Liverpool by the
+shortest open road, there to meet my heavy baggage and embark.  It
+was quite enough to do, and I had not an hour too much time to do it
+in.
+
+I had taken leave of all my Holly-Tree friends--almost, for the time
+being, of my bashfulness too--and was standing for half a minute at
+the Inn door watching the ostler as he took another turn at the cord
+which tied my portmanteau on the chaise, when I saw lamps coming
+down towards the Holly-Tree.  The road was so padded with snow that
+no wheels were audible; but all of us who were standing at the Inn
+door saw lamps coming on, and at a lively rate too, between the
+walls of snow that had been heaped up on either side of the track.
+The chambermaid instantly divined how the case stood, and called to
+the ostler, "Tom, this is a Gretna job!"  The ostler, knowing that
+her sex instinctively scented a marriage, or anything in that
+direction, rushed up the yard bawling, "Next four out!" and in a
+moment the whole establishment was thrown into commotion.
+
+I had a melancholy interest in seeing the happy man who loved and
+was beloved; and therefore, instead of driving off at once, I
+remained at the Inn door when the fugitives drove up.  A bright-eyed
+fellow, muffled in a mantle, jumped out so briskly that he almost
+overthrew me.  He turned to apologise, and, by heaven, it was Edwin!
+
+"Charley!" said he, recoiling.  "Gracious powers, what do you do
+here?"
+
+"Edwin," said I, recoiling, "gracious powers, what do you do here?"
+I struck my forehead as I said it, and an insupportable blaze of
+light seemed to shoot before my eyes.
+
+He hurried me into the little parlour (always kept with a slow fire
+in it and no poker), where posting company waited while their horses
+were putting to, and, shutting the door, said:
+
+"Charley, forgive me!"
+
+"Edwin!" I returned.  "Was this well?  When I loved her so dearly!
+When I had garnered up my heart so long!"  I could say no more.
+
+He was shocked when he saw how moved I was, and made the cruel
+observation, that he had not thought I should have taken it so much
+to heart.
+
+I looked at him.  I reproached him no more.  But I looked at him.
+"My dear, dear Charley," said he, "don't think ill of me, I beseech
+you!  I know you have a right to my utmost confidence, and, believe
+me, you have ever had it until now.  I abhor secrecy.  Its meanness
+is intolerable to me.  But I and my dear girl have observed it for
+your sake."
+
+He and his dear girl!  It steeled me.
+
+"You have observed it for my sake, sir?" said I, wondering how his
+frank face could face it out so.
+
+"Yes!--and Angela's," said he.
+
+I found the room reeling round in an uncertain way, like a
+labouring, humming-top.  "Explain yourself," said I, holding on by
+one hand to an arm-chair.
+
+"Dear old darling Charley!" returned Edwin, in his cordial manner,
+"consider!  When you were going on so happily with Angela, why
+should I compromise you with the old gentleman by making you a party
+to our engagement, and (after he had declined my proposals) to our
+secret intention?  Surely it was better that you should be able
+honourably to say, 'He never took counsel with me, never told me,
+never breathed a word of it.'  If Angela suspected it, and showed me
+all the favour and support she could--God bless her for a precious
+creature and a priceless wife!--I couldn't help that.  Neither I nor
+Emmeline ever told her, any more than we told you.  And for the same
+good reason, Charley; trust me, for the same good reason, and no
+other upon earth!"
+
+Emmeline was Angela's cousin.  Lived with her.  Had been brought up
+with her.  Was her father's ward.  Had property.
+
+"Emmeline is in the chaise, my dear Edwin!" said I, embracing him
+with the greatest affection.
+
+"My good fellow!" said he, "do you suppose I should be going to
+Gretna Green without her?"
+
+I ran out with Edwin, I opened the chaise door, I took Emmeline in
+my arms, I folded her to my heart.  She was wrapped in soft white
+fur, like the snowy landscape:  but was warm, and young, and lovely.
+I put their leaders to with my own hands, I gave the boys a five-
+pound note apiece, I cheered them as they drove away, I drove the
+other way myself as hard as I could pelt.
+
+I never went to Liverpool, I never went to America, I went straight
+back to London, and I married Angela.  I have never until this time,
+even to her, disclosed the secret of my character, and the mistrust
+and the mistaken journey into which it led me.  When she, and they,
+and our eight children and their seven--I mean Edwin and Emmeline's,
+whose oldest girl is old enough now to wear white for herself, and
+to look very like her mother in it--come to read these pages, as of
+course they will, I shall hardly fail to be found out at last.
+Never mind!  I can bear it.  I began at the Holly-Tree, by idle
+accident, to associate the Christmas time of year with human
+interest, and with some inquiry into, and some care for, the lives
+of those by whom I find myself surrounded.  I hope that I am none
+the worse for it, and that no one near me or afar off is the worse
+for it.  And I say, May the green Holly-Tree flourish, striking its
+roots deep into our English ground, and having its germinating
+qualities carried by the birds of Heaven all over the world!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText The Holly-Tree by Charles Dickens
+
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