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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, by
+Charles Dickens
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
+
+
+Author: Charles Dickens
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 11, 2015  [eBook #888]
+[This file was first posted on April 28, 1997]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAZY TOUR OF TWO IDLE
+APPRENTICES***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall edition (_The Works of Charles
+Dickens_, volume 28) by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+                  THE LAZY TOUR OF TWO IDLE APPRENTICES
+
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                            By CHARLES DICKENS
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+         _With Illustrations by Harry Furniss and A. J. Goodman_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                       LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
+                    NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+                                   1905
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+IN the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven,
+wherein these presents bear date, two idle apprentices, exhausted by the
+long, hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away
+from their employer.  They were bound to a highly meritorious lady (named
+Literature), of fair credit and repute, though, it must be acknowledged,
+not quite so highly esteemed in the City as she might be.  This is the
+more remarkable, as there is nothing against the respectable lady in that
+quarter, but quite the contrary; her family having rendered eminent
+service to many famous citizens of London.  It may be sufficient to name
+Sir William Walworth, Lord Mayor under King Richard II., at the time of
+Wat Tyler’s insurrection, and Sir Richard Whittington: which latter
+distinguished man and magistrate was doubtless indebted to the lady’s
+family for the gift of his celebrated cat.  There is also strong reason
+to suppose that they rang the Highgate bells for him with their own
+hands.
+
+The misguided young men who thus shirked their duty to the mistress from
+whom they had received many favours, were actuated by the low idea of
+making a perfectly idle trip, in any direction.  They had no intention of
+going anywhere in particular; they wanted to see nothing, they wanted to
+know nothing, they wanted to learn nothing, they wanted to do nothing.
+They wanted only to be idle.  They took to themselves (after HOGARTH),
+the names of Mr. Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild; but there was not
+a moral pin to choose between them, and they were both idle in the last
+degree.
+
+Between Francis and Thomas, however, there was this difference of
+character: Goodchild was laboriously idle, and would take upon himself
+any amount of pains and labour to assure himself that he was idle; in
+short, had no better idea of idleness than that it was useless industry.
+Thomas Idle, on the other hand, was an idler of the unmixed Irish or
+Neapolitan type; a passive idler, a born-and-bred idler, a consistent
+idler, who practised what he would have preached if he had not been too
+idle to preach; a one entire and perfect chrysolite of idleness.
+
+The two idle apprentices found themselves, within a few hours of their
+escape, walking down into the North of England, that is to say, Thomas
+was lying in a meadow, looking at the railway trains as they passed over
+a distant viaduct—which was _his_ idea of walking down into the North;
+while Francis was walking a mile due South against time—which was _his_
+idea of walking down into the North.  In the meantime the day waned, and
+the milestones remained unconquered.
+
+‘Tom,’ said Goodchild, ‘the sun is getting low.  Up, and let us go
+forward!’
+
+‘Nay,’ quoth Thomas Idle, ‘I have not done with Annie Laurie yet.’  And
+he proceeded with that idle but popular ballad, to the effect that for
+the bonnie young person of that name he would ‘lay him doon and
+dee’—equivalent, in prose, to lay him down and die.
+
+‘What an ass that fellow was!’ cried Goodchild, with the bitter emphasis
+of contempt.
+
+‘Which fellow?’ asked Thomas Idle.
+
+‘The fellow in your song.  Lay him doon and dee!  Finely he’d show off
+before the girl by doing _that_.  A sniveller!  Why couldn’t he get up,
+and punch somebody’s head!’
+
+‘Whose?’ asked Thomas Idle.
+
+‘Anybody’s.  Everybody’s would be better than nobody’s!  If I fell into
+that state of mind about a girl, do you think I’d lay me doon and dee?
+No, sir,’ proceeded Goodchild, with a disparaging assumption of the
+Scottish accent, ‘I’d get me oop and peetch into somebody.  Wouldn’t
+you?’
+
+‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with her,’ yawned Thomas Idle.  ‘Why
+should I take the trouble?’
+
+‘It’s no trouble, Tom, to fall in love,’ said Goodchild, shaking his
+head.
+
+‘It’s trouble enough to fall out of it, once you’re in it,’ retorted Tom.
+‘So I keep out of it altogether.  It would be better for you, if you did
+the same.’
+
+Mr. Goodchild, who is always in love with somebody, and not unfrequently
+with several objects at once, made no reply.  He heaved a sigh of the
+kind which is termed by the lower orders ‘a bellowser,’ and then, heaving
+Mr. Idle on his feet (who was not half so heavy as the sigh), urged him
+northward.
+
+These two had sent their personal baggage on by train: only retaining
+each a knapsack.  Idle now applied himself to constantly regretting the
+train, to tracking it through the intricacies of Bradshaw’s Guide, and
+finding out where it is now—and where now—and where now—and to asking
+what was the use of walking, when you could ride at such a pace as that.
+Was it to see the country?  If that was the object, look at it out of the
+carriage windows.  There was a great deal more of it to be seen there
+than here.  Besides, who wanted to see the country?  Nobody.  And again,
+whoever did walk?  Nobody.  Fellows set off to walk, but they never did
+it.  They came back and said they did, but they didn’t.  Then why should
+he walk?  He wouldn’t walk.  He swore it by this milestone!
+
+It was the fifth from London, so far had they penetrated into the North.
+Submitting to the powerful chain of argument, Goodchild proposed a return
+to the Metropolis, and a falling back upon Euston Square Terminus.
+Thomas assented with alacrity, and so they walked down into the North by
+the next morning’s express, and carried their knapsacks in the
+luggage-van.
+
+It was like all other expresses, as every express is and must be.  It
+bore through the harvest country a smell like a large washing-day, and a
+sharp issue of steam as from a huge brazen tea-urn.  The greatest power
+in nature and art combined, it yet glided over dangerous heights in the
+sight of people looking up from fields and roads, as smoothly and
+unreally as a light miniature plaything.  Now, the engine shrieked in
+hysterics of such intensity, that it seemed desirable that the men who
+had her in charge should hold her feet, slap her hands, and bring her to;
+now, burrowed into tunnels with a stubborn and undemonstrative energy so
+confusing that the train seemed to be flying back into leagues of
+darkness.  Here, were station after station, swallowed up by the express
+without stopping; here, stations where it fired itself in like a volley
+of cannon-balls, swooped away four country-people with nosegays, and
+three men of business with portmanteaus, and fired itself off again,
+bang, bang, bang!  At long intervals were uncomfortable
+refreshment-rooms, made more uncomfortable by the scorn of Beauty towards
+Beast, the public (but to whom she never relented, as Beauty did in the
+story, towards the other Beast), and where sensitive stomachs were fed,
+with a contemptuous sharpness occasioning indigestion.  Here, again, were
+stations with nothing going but a bell, and wonderful wooden razors set
+aloft on great posts, shaving the air.  In these fields, the horses,
+sheep, and cattle were well used to the thundering meteor, and didn’t
+mind; in those, they were all set scampering together, and a herd of pigs
+scoured after them.  The pastoral country darkened, became coaly, became
+smoky, became infernal, got better, got worse, improved again, grew
+rugged, turned romantic; was a wood, a stream, a chain of hills, a gorge,
+a moor, a cathedral town, a fortified place, a waste.  Now, miserable
+black dwellings, a black canal, and sick black towers of chimneys; now, a
+trim garden, where the flowers were bright and fair; now, a wilderness of
+hideous altars all a-blaze; now, the water meadows with their fairy
+rings; now, the mangy patch of unlet building ground outside the stagnant
+town, with the larger ring where the Circus was last week.  The
+temperature changed, the dialect changed, the people changed, faces got
+sharper, manner got shorter, eyes got shrewder and harder; yet all so
+quickly, that the spruce guard in the London uniform and silver lace, had
+not yet rumpled his shirt-collar, delivered half the dispatches in his
+shiny little pouch, or read his newspaper.
+
+Carlisle!  Idle and Goodchild had got to Carlisle.  It looked congenially
+and delightfully idle.  Something in the way of public amusement had
+happened last month, and something else was going to happen before
+Christmas; and, in the meantime there was a lecture on India for those
+who liked it—which Idle and Goodchild did not.  Likewise, by those who
+liked them, there were impressions to be bought of all the vapid prints,
+going and gone, and of nearly all the vapid books.  For those who wanted
+to put anything in missionary boxes, here were the boxes.  For those who
+wanted the Reverend Mr. Podgers (artist’s proofs, thirty shillings), here
+was Mr. Podgers to any amount.  Not less gracious and abundant, Mr.
+Codgers also of the vineyard, but opposed to Mr. Podgers, brotherly tooth
+and nail.  Here, were guide-books to the neighbouring antiquities, and
+eke the Lake country, in several dry and husky sorts; here, many
+physically and morally impossible heads of both sexes, for young ladies
+to copy, in the exercise of the art of drawing; here, further, a large
+impression of MR. SPURGEON, solid as to the flesh, not to say even
+something gross.  The working young men of Carlisle were drawn up, with
+their hands in their pockets, across the pavements, four and six abreast,
+and appeared (much to the satisfaction of Mr. Idle) to have nothing else
+to do.  The working and growing young women of Carlisle, from the age of
+twelve upwards, promenaded the streets in the cool of the evening, and
+rallied the said young men.  Sometimes the young men rallied the young
+women, as in the case of a group gathered round an accordion-player, from
+among whom a young man advanced behind a young woman for whom he appeared
+to have a tenderness, and hinted to her that he was there and playful, by
+giving her (he wore clogs) a kick.
+
+On market morning, Carlisle woke up amazingly, and became (to the two
+Idle Apprentices) disagreeably and reproachfully busy.  There were its
+cattle market, its sheep market, and its pig market down by the river,
+with raw-boned and shock-headed Rob Roys hiding their Lowland dresses
+beneath heavy plaids, prowling in and out among the animals, and
+flavouring the air with fumes of whiskey.  There was its corn market down
+the main street, with hum of chaffering over open sacks.  There was its
+general market in the street too, with heather brooms on which the purple
+flower still flourished, and heather baskets primitive and fresh to
+behold.  With women trying on clogs and caps at open stalls, and ‘Bible
+stalls’ adjoining.  With ‘Doctor Mantle’s Dispensary for the cure of all
+Human Maladies and no charge for advice,’ and with Doctor Mantle’s
+‘Laboratory of Medical, Chemical, and Botanical Science’—both healing
+institutions established on one pair of trestles, one board, and one
+sun-blind.  With the renowned phrenologist from London, begging to be
+favoured (at sixpence each) with the company of clients of both sexes, to
+whom, on examination of their heads, he would make revelations ‘enabling
+him or her to know themselves.’  Through all these bargains and
+blessings, the recruiting-sergeant watchfully elbowed his way, a thread
+of War in the peaceful skein.  Likewise on the walls were printed hints
+that the Oxford Blues might not be indisposed to hear of a few fine
+active young men; and that whereas the standard of that distinguished
+corps is full six feet, ‘growing lads of five feet eleven’ need not
+absolutely despair of being accepted.
+
+Scenting the morning air more pleasantly than the buried majesty of
+Denmark did, Messrs. Idle and Goodchild rode away from Carlisle at eight
+o’clock one forenoon, bound for the village of Hesket, Newmarket, some
+fourteen miles distant.  Goodchild (who had already begun to doubt
+whether he was idle: as his way always is when he has nothing to do) had
+read of a certain black old Cumberland hill or mountain, called Carrock,
+or Carrock Fell; and had arrived at the conclusion that it would be the
+culminating triumph of Idleness to ascend the same.  Thomas Idle,
+dwelling on the pains inseparable from that achievement, had expressed
+the strongest doubts of the expediency, and even of the sanity, of the
+enterprise; but Goodchild had carried his point, and they rode away.
+
+Up hill and down hill, and twisting to the right, and twisting to the
+left, and with old Skiddaw (who has vaunted himself a great deal more
+than his merits deserve; but that is rather the way of the Lake country),
+dodging the apprentices in a picturesque and pleasant manner.  Good,
+weather-proof, warm, pleasant houses, well white-limed, scantily dotting
+the road.  Clean children coming out to look, carrying other clean
+children as big as themselves.  Harvest still lying out and much rained
+upon; here and there, harvest still unreaped.  Well-cultivated gardens
+attached to the cottages, with plenty of produce forced out of their hard
+soil.  Lonely nooks, and wild; but people can be born, and married, and
+buried in such nooks, and can live and love, and be loved, there as
+elsewhere, thank God! (Mr. Goodchild’s remark.)  By-and-by, the village.
+Black, coarse-stoned, rough-windowed houses; some with outer staircases,
+like Swiss houses; a sinuous and stony gutter winding up hill and round
+the corner, by way of street.  All the children running out directly.
+Women pausing in washing, to peep from doorways and very little windows.
+Such were the observations of Messrs. Idle and Goodchild, as their
+conveyance stopped at the village shoemaker’s.  Old Carrock gloomed down
+upon it all in a very ill-tempered state; and rain was beginning.
+
+The village shoemaker declined to have anything to do with Carrock.  No
+visitors went up Carrock.  No visitors came there at all.  Aa’ the world
+ganged awa’ yon.  The driver appealed to the Innkeeper.  The Innkeeper
+had two men working in the fields, and one of them should be called in,
+to go up Carrock as guide.  Messrs. Idle and Goodchild, highly approving,
+entered the Innkeeper’s house, to drink whiskey and eat oatcake.
+
+The Innkeeper was not idle enough—was not idle at all, which was a great
+fault in him—but was a fine specimen of a north-country man, or any kind
+of man.  He had a ruddy cheek, a bright eye, a well-knit frame, an
+immense hand, a cheery, outspeaking voice, and a straight, bright, broad
+look.  He had a drawing-room, too, upstairs, which was worth a visit to
+the Cumberland Fells.  (This was Mr. Francis Goodchild’s opinion, in
+which Mr. Thomas Idle did not concur.)
+
+The ceiling of this drawing-room was so crossed and recrossed by beams of
+unequal lengths, radiating from a centre, in a corner, that it looked
+like a broken star-fish.  The room was comfortably and solidly furnished
+with good mahogany and horsehair.  It had a snug fireside, and a couple
+of well-curtained windows, looking out upon the wild country behind the
+house.  What it most developed was, an unexpected taste for little
+ornaments and nick-nacks, of which it contained a most surprising number.
+They were not very various, consisting in great part of waxen babies with
+their limbs more or less mutilated, appealing on one leg to the parental
+affections from under little cupping glasses; but, Uncle Tom was there,
+in crockery, receiving theological instructions from Miss Eva, who grew
+out of his side like a wen, in an exceedingly rough state of profile
+propagandism.  Engravings of Mr. Hunt’s country boy, before and after his
+pie, were on the wall, divided by a highly-coloured nautical piece, the
+subject of which had all her colours (and more) flying, and was making
+great way through a sea of a regular pattern, like a lady’s collar.  A
+benevolent, elderly gentleman of the last century, with a powdered head,
+kept guard, in oil and varnish, over a most perplexing piece of furniture
+on a table; in appearance between a driving seat and an angular
+knife-box, but, when opened, a musical instrument of tinkling wires,
+exactly like David’s harp packed for travelling.  Everything became a
+nick-nack in this curious room.  The copper tea-kettle, burnished up to
+the highest point of glory, took his station on a stand of his own at the
+greatest possible distance from the fireplace, and said: ‘By your leave,
+not a kettle, but a bijou.’  The Staffordshire-ware butter-dish with the
+cover on, got upon a little round occasional table in a window, with a
+worked top, and announced itself to the two chairs accidentally placed
+there, as an aid to polite conversation, a graceful trifle in china to be
+chatted over by callers, as they airily trifled away the visiting moments
+of a butterfly existence, in that rugged old village on the Cumberland
+Fells.  The very footstool could not keep the floor, but got upon a sofa,
+and there-from proclaimed itself, in high relief of white and
+liver-coloured wool, a favourite spaniel coiled up for repose.  Though,
+truly, in spite of its bright glass eyes, the spaniel was the least
+successful assumption in the collection: being perfectly flat, and
+dismally suggestive of a recent mistake in sitting down on the part of
+some corpulent member of the family.
+
+There were books, too, in this room; books on the table, books on the
+chimney-piece, books in an open press in the corner.  Fielding was there,
+and Smollett was there, and Steele and Addison were there, in dispersed
+volumes; and there were tales of those who go down to the sea in ships,
+for windy nights; and there was really a choice of good books for rainy
+days or fine.  It was so very pleasant to see these things in such a
+lonesome by-place—so very agreeable to find these evidences of a taste,
+however homely, that went beyond the beautiful cleanliness and trimness
+of the house—so fanciful to imagine what a wonder a room must be to the
+little children born in the gloomy village—what grand impressions of it
+those of them who became wanderers over the earth would carry away; and
+how, at distant ends of the world, some old voyagers would die,
+cherishing the belief that the finest apartment known to men was once in
+the Hesket-Newmarket Inn, in rare old Cumberland—it was such a charmingly
+lazy pursuit to entertain these rambling thoughts over the choice oatcake
+and the genial whiskey, that Mr. Idle and Mr. Goodchild never asked
+themselves how it came to pass that the men in the fields were never
+heard of more, how the stalwart landlord replaced them without
+explanation, how his dog-cart came to be waiting at the door, and how
+everything was arranged without the least arrangement for climbing to old
+Carrock’s shoulders, and standing on his head.
+
+Without a word of inquiry, therefore, the Two Idle Apprentices drifted
+out resignedly into a fine, soft, close, drowsy, penetrating rain; got
+into the landlord’s light dog-cart, and rattled off through the village
+for the foot of Carrock.  The journey at the outset was not remarkable.
+The Cumberland road went up and down like all other roads; the Cumberland
+curs burst out from backs of cottages and barked like other curs, and the
+Cumberland peasantry stared after the dog-cart amazedly, as long as it
+was in sight, like the rest of their race.  The approach to the foot of
+the mountain resembled the approaches to the feet of most other mountains
+all over the world.  The cultivation gradually ceased, the trees grew
+gradually rare, the road became gradually rougher, and the sides of the
+mountain looked gradually more and more lofty, and more and more
+difficult to get up.  The dog-cart was left at a lonely farm-house.  The
+landlord borrowed a large umbrella, and, assuming in an instant the
+character of the most cheerful and adventurous of guides, led the way to
+the ascent.  Mr. Goodchild looked eagerly at the top of the mountain,
+and, feeling apparently that he was now going to be very lazy indeed,
+shone all over wonderfully to the eye, under the influence of the
+contentment within and the moisture without.  Only in the bosom of Mr.
+Thomas Idle did Despondency now hold her gloomy state.  He kept it a
+secret; but he would have given a very handsome sum, when the ascent
+began, to have been back again at the inn.  The sides of Carrock looked
+fearfully steep, and the top of Carrock was hidden in mist.  The rain was
+falling faster and faster.  The knees of Mr. Idle—always weak on walking
+excursions—shivered and shook with fear and damp.  The wet was already
+penetrating through the young man’s outer coat to a brand-new
+shooting-jacket, for which he had reluctantly paid the large sum of two
+guineas on leaving town; he had no stimulating refreshment about him but
+a small packet of clammy gingerbread nuts; he had nobody to give him an
+arm, nobody to push him gently behind, nobody to pull him up tenderly in
+front, nobody to speak to who really felt the difficulties of the ascent,
+the dampness of the rain, the denseness of the mist, and the unutterable
+folly of climbing, undriven, up any steep place in the world, when there
+is level ground within reach to walk on instead.  Was it for this that
+Thomas had left London?  London, where there are nice short walks in
+level public gardens, with benches of repose set up at convenient
+distances for weary travellers—London, where rugged stone is humanely
+pounded into little lumps for the road, and intelligently shaped into
+smooth slabs for the pavement!  No! it was not for the laborious ascent
+of the crags of Carrock that Idle had left his native city, and travelled
+to Cumberland.  Never did he feel more disastrously convinced that he had
+committed a very grave error in judgment than when he found himself
+standing in the rain at the bottom of a steep mountain, and knew that the
+responsibility rested on his weak shoulders of actually getting to the
+top of it.
+
+The honest landlord went first, the beaming Goodchild followed, the
+mournful Idle brought up the rear.  From time to time, the two foremost
+members of the expedition changed places in the order of march; but the
+rearguard never altered his position.  Up the mountain or down the
+mountain, in the water or out of it, over the rocks, through the bogs,
+skirting the heather, Mr. Thomas Idle was always the last, and was always
+the man who had to be looked after and waited for.  At first the ascent
+was delusively easy, the sides of the mountain sloped gradually, and the
+material of which they were composed was a soft spongy turf, very tender
+and pleasant to walk upon.  After a hundred yards or so, however, the
+verdant scene and the easy slope disappeared, and the rocks began.  Not
+noble, massive rocks, standing upright, keeping a certain regularity in
+their positions, and possessing, now and then, flat tops to sit upon, but
+little irritating, comfortless rocks, littered about anyhow, by Nature;
+treacherous, disheartening rocks of all sorts of small shapes and small
+sizes, bruisers of tender toes and trippers-up of wavering feet.  When
+these impediments were passed, heather and slough followed.  Here the
+steepness of the ascent was slightly mitigated; and here the exploring
+party of three turned round to look at the view below them.  The scene of
+the moorland and the fields was like a feeble water-colour drawing half
+sponged out.  The mist was darkening, the rain was thickening, the trees
+were dotted about like spots of faint shadow, the division-lines which
+mapped out the fields were all getting blurred together, and the lonely
+farm-house where the dog-cart had been left, loomed spectral in the grey
+light like the last human dwelling at the end of the habitable world.
+Was this a sight worth climbing to see?  Surely—surely not!
+
+Up again—for the top of Carrock is not reached yet.  The land-lord, just
+as good-tempered and obliging as he was at the bottom of the mountain.
+Mr. Goodchild brighter in the eyes and rosier in the face than ever; full
+of cheerful remarks and apt quotations; and walking with a springiness of
+step wonderful to behold.  Mr. Idle, farther and farther in the rear,
+with the water squeaking in the toes of his boots, with his two-guinea
+shooting-jacket clinging damply to his aching sides, with his overcoat so
+full of rain, and standing out so pyramidically stiff, in consequence,
+from his shoulders downwards, that he felt as if he was walking in a
+gigantic extinguisher—the despairing spirit within him representing but
+too aptly the candle that had just been put out.  Up and up and up again,
+till a ridge is reached and the outer edge of the mist on the summit of
+Carrock is darkly and drizzingly near.  Is this the top?  No, nothing
+like the top.  It is an aggravating peculiarity of all mountains, that,
+although they have only one top when they are seen (as they ought always
+to be seen) from below, they turn out to have a perfect eruption of false
+tops whenever the traveller is sufficiently ill-advised to go out of his
+way for the purpose of ascending them.  Carrock is but a trumpery little
+mountain of fifteen hundred feet, and it presumes to have false tops, and
+even precipices, as if it were Mont Blanc.  No matter; Goodchild enjoys
+it, and will go on; and Idle, who is afraid of being left behind by
+himself, must follow.  On entering the edge of the mist, the landlord
+stops, and says he hopes that it will not get any thicker.  It is twenty
+years since he last ascended Carrock, and it is barely possible, if the
+mist increases, that the party may be lost on the mountain.  Goodchild
+hears this dreadful intimation, and is not in the least impressed by it.
+He marches for the top that is never to be found, as if he was the
+Wandering Jew, bound to go on for ever, in defiance of everything.  The
+landlord faithfully accompanies him.  The two, to the dim eye of Idle,
+far below, look in the exaggerative mist, like a pair of friendly giants,
+mounting the steps of some invisible castle together.  Up and up, and
+then down a little, and then up, and then along a strip of level ground,
+and then up again.  The wind, a wind unknown in the happy valley, blows
+keen and strong; the rain-mist gets impenetrable; a dreary little cairn
+of stones appears.  The landlord adds one to the heap, first walking all
+round the cairn as if he were about to perform an incantation, then
+dropping the stone on to the top of the heap with the gesture of a
+magician adding an ingredient to a cauldron in full bubble.  Goodchild
+sits down by the cairn as if it was his study-table at home; Idle,
+drenched and panting, stands up with his back to the wind, ascertains
+distinctly that this is the top at last, looks round with all the little
+curiosity that is left in him, and gets, in return, a magnificent view
+of—Nothing!
+
+The effect of this sublime spectacle on the minds of the exploring party
+is a little injured by the nature of the direct conclusion to which the
+sight of it points—the said conclusion being that the mountain mist has
+actually gathered round them, as the landlord feared it would.  It now
+becomes imperatively necessary to settle the exact situation of the
+farm-house in the valley at which the dog-cart has been left, before the
+travellers attempt to descend.  While the landlord is endeavouring to
+make this discovery in his own way, Mr. Goodchild plunges his hand under
+his wet coat, draws out a little red morocco-case, opens it, and displays
+to the view of his companions a neat pocket-compass.  The north is found,
+the point at which the farm-house is situated is settled, and the descent
+begins.  After a little downward walking, Idle (behind as usual) sees his
+fellow-travellers turn aside sharply—tries to follow them—loses them in
+the mist—is shouted after, waited for, recovered—and then finds that a
+halt has been ordered, partly on his account, partly for the purpose of
+again consulting the compass.
+
+The point in debate is settled as before between Goodchild and the
+landlord, and the expedition moves on, not down the mountain, but
+marching straight forward round the slope of it.  The difficulty of
+following this new route is acutely felt by Thomas Idle.  He finds the
+hardship of walking at all greatly increased by the fatigue of moving his
+feet straight forward along the side of a slope, when their natural
+tendency, at every step, is to turn off at a right angle, and go straight
+down the declivity.  Let the reader imagine himself to be walking along
+the roof of a barn, instead of up or down it, and he will have an exact
+idea of the pedestrian difficulty in which the travellers had now
+involved themselves.  In ten minutes more Idle was lost in the distance
+again, was shouted for, waited for, recovered as before; found Goodchild
+repeating his observation of the compass, and remonstrated warmly against
+the sideway route that his companions persisted in following.  It
+appeared to the uninstructed mind of Thomas that when three men want to
+get to the bottom of a mountain, their business is to walk down it; and
+he put this view of the case, not only with emphasis, but even with some
+irritability.  He was answered from the scientific eminence of the
+compass on which his companions were mounted, that there was a frightful
+chasm somewhere near the foot of Carrock, called The Black Arches, into
+which the travellers were sure to march in the mist, if they risked
+continuing the descent from the place where they had now halted.  Idle
+received this answer with the silent respect which was due to the
+commanders of the expedition, and followed along the roof of the barn, or
+rather the side of the mountain, reflecting upon the assurance which he
+received on starting again, that the object of the party was only to gain
+‘a certain point,’ and, this haven attained, to continue the descent
+afterwards until the foot of Carrock was reached.  Though quite
+unexceptionable as an abstract form of expression, the phrase ‘a certain
+point’ has the disadvantage of sounding rather vaguely when it is
+pronounced on unknown ground, under a canopy of mist much thicker than a
+London fog.  Nevertheless, after the compass, this phrase was all the
+clue the party had to hold by, and Idle clung to the extreme end of it as
+hopefully as he could.
+
+More sideway walking, thicker and thicker mist, all sorts of points
+reached except the ‘certain point;’ third loss of Idle, third shouts for
+him, third recovery of him, third consultation of compass.  Mr. Goodchild
+draws it tenderly from his pocket, and prepares to adjust it on a stone.
+Something falls on the turf—it is the glass.  Something else drops
+immediately after—it is the needle.  The compass is broken, and the
+exploring party is lost!
+
+It is the practice of the English portion of the human race to receive
+all great disasters in dead silence.  Mr. Goodchild restored the useless
+compass to his pocket without saying a word, Mr. Idle looked at the
+landlord, and the landlord looked at Mr. Idle.  There was nothing for it
+now but to go on blindfold, and trust to the chapter of chances.
+Accordingly, the lost travellers moved forward, still walking round the
+slope of the mountain, still desperately resolved to avoid the Black
+Arches, and to succeed in reaching the ‘certain point.’
+
+A quarter of an hour brought them to the brink of a ravine, at the bottom
+of which there flowed a muddy little stream.  Here another halt was
+called, and another consultation took place.  The landlord, still
+clinging pertinaciously to the idea of reaching the ‘point,’ voted for
+crossing the ravine, and going on round the slope of the mountain.  Mr.
+Goodchild, to the great relief of his fellow-traveller, took another view
+of the case, and backed Mr. Idle’s proposal to descend Carrock at once,
+at any hazard—the rather as the running stream was a sure guide to follow
+from the mountain to the valley.  Accordingly, the party descended to the
+rugged and stony banks of the stream; and here again Thomas lost ground
+sadly, and fell far behind his travelling companions.  Not much more than
+six weeks had elapsed since he had sprained one of his ankles, and he
+began to feel this same ankle getting rather weak when he found himself
+among the stones that were strewn about the running water.  Goodchild and
+the landlord were getting farther and farther ahead of him.  He saw them
+cross the stream and disappear round a projection on its banks.  He heard
+them shout the moment after as a signal that they had halted and were
+waiting for him.  Answering the shout, he mended his pace, crossed the
+stream where they had crossed it, and was within one step of the opposite
+bank, when his foot slipped on a wet stone, his weak ankle gave a twist
+outwards, a hot, rending, tearing pain ran through it at the same moment,
+and down fell the idlest of the Two Idle Apprentices, crippled in an
+instant.
+
+The situation was now, in plain terms, one of absolute danger.  There lay
+Mr. Idle writhing with pain, there was the mist as thick as ever, there
+was the landlord as completely lost as the strangers whom he was
+conducting, and there was the compass broken in Goodchild’s pocket.  To
+leave the wretched Thomas on unknown ground was plainly impossible; and
+to get him to walk with a badly sprained ankle seemed equally out of the
+question.  However, Goodchild (brought back by his cry for help) bandaged
+the ankle with a pocket-handkerchief, and assisted by the landlord,
+raised the crippled Apprentice to his legs, offered him a shoulder to
+lean on, and exhorted him for the sake of the whole party to try if he
+could walk.  Thomas, assisted by the shoulder on one side, and a stick on
+the other, did try, with what pain and difficulty those only can imagine
+who have sprained an ankle and have had to tread on it afterwards.  At a
+pace adapted to the feeble hobbling of a newly-lamed man, the lost party
+moved on, perfectly ignorant whether they were on the right side of the
+mountain or the wrong, and equally uncertain how long Idle would be able
+to contend with the pain in his ankle, before he gave in altogether and
+fell down again, unable to stir another step.
+
+Slowly and more slowly, as the clog of crippled Thomas weighed heavily
+and more heavily on the march of the expedition, the lost travellers
+followed the windings of the stream, till they came to a faintly-marked
+cart-track, branching off nearly at right angles, to the left.  After a
+little consultation it was resolved to follow this dim vestige of a road
+in the hope that it might lead to some farm or cottage, at which Idle
+could be left in safety.  It was now getting on towards the afternoon,
+and it was fast becoming more than doubtful whether the party, delayed in
+their progress as they now were, might not be overtaken by the darkness
+before the right route was found, and be condemned to pass the night on
+the mountain, without bit or drop to comfort them, in their wet clothes.
+
+The cart-track grew fainter and fainter, until it was washed out
+altogether by another little stream, dark, turbulent, and rapid.  The
+landlord suggested, judging by the colour of the water, that it must be
+flowing from one of the lead mines in the neighbourhood of Carrock; and
+the travellers accordingly kept by the stream for a little while, in the
+hope of possibly wandering towards help in that way.  After walking
+forward about two hundred yards, they came upon a mine indeed, but a
+mine, exhausted and abandoned; a dismal, ruinous place, with nothing but
+the wreck of its works and buildings left to speak for it.  Here, there
+were a few sheep feeding.  The landlord looked at them earnestly, thought
+he recognised the marks on them—then thought he did not—finally gave up
+the sheep in despair—and walked on just as ignorant of the whereabouts of
+the party as ever.
+
+The march in the dark, literally as well as metaphorically in the dark,
+had now been continued for three-quarters of an hour from the time when
+the crippled Apprentice had met with his accident.  Mr. Idle, with all
+the will to conquer the pain in his ankle, and to hobble on, found the
+power rapidly failing him, and felt that another ten minutes at most
+would find him at the end of his last physical resources.  He had just
+made up his mind on this point, and was about to communicate the dismal
+result of his reflections to his companions, when the mist suddenly
+brightened, and begun to lift straight ahead.  In another minute, the
+landlord, who was in advance, proclaimed that he saw a tree.  Before
+long, other trees appeared—then a cottage—then a house beyond the
+cottage, and a familiar line of road rising behind it.  Last of all,
+Carrock itself loomed darkly into view, far away to the right hand.  The
+party had not only got down the mountain without knowing how, but had
+wandered away from it in the mist, without knowing why—away, far down on
+the very moor by which they had approached the base of Carrock that
+morning.
+
+The happy lifting of the mist, and the still happier discovery that the
+travellers had groped their way, though by a very roundabout direction,
+to within a mile or so of the part of the valley in which the farm-house
+was situated, restored Mr. Idle’s sinking spirits and reanimated his
+failing strength.  While the landlord ran off to get the dog-cart, Thomas
+was assisted by Goodchild to the cottage which had been the first
+building seen when the darkness brightened, and was propped up against
+the garden wall, like an artist’s lay figure waiting to be forwarded,
+until the dog-cart should arrive from the farm-house below.  In due
+time—and a very long time it seemed to Mr. Idle—the rattle of wheels was
+heard, and the crippled Apprentice was lifted into the seat.  As the
+dog-cart was driven back to the inn, the landlord related an anecdote
+which he had just heard at the farm-house, of an unhappy man who had been
+lost, like his two guests and himself, on Carrock; who had passed the
+night there alone; who had been found the next morning, ‘scared and
+starved;’ and who never went out afterwards, except on his way to the
+grave.  Mr. Idle heard this sad story, and derived at least one useful
+impression from it.  Bad as the pain in his ankle was, he contrived to
+bear it patiently, for he felt grateful that a worse accident had not
+befallen him in the wilds of Carrock.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+THE dog-cart, with Mr. Thomas Idle and his ankle on the hanging seat
+behind, Mr. Francis Goodchild and the Innkeeper in front, and the rain in
+spouts and splashes everywhere, made the best of its way back to the
+little inn; the broken moor country looking like miles upon miles of
+Pre-Adamite sop, or the ruins of some enormous jorum of antediluvian
+toast-and-water.  The trees dripped; the eaves of the scattered cottages
+dripped; the barren stone walls dividing the land, dripped; the yelping
+dogs dripped; carts and waggons under ill-roofed penthouses, dripped;
+melancholy cocks and hens perching on their shafts, or seeking shelter
+underneath them, dripped; Mr. Goodchild dripped; Thomas Idle dripped; the
+Inn-keeper dripped; the mare dripped; the vast curtains of mist and cloud
+passed before the shadowy forms of the hills, streamed water as they were
+drawn across the landscape.  Down such steep pitches that the mare seemed
+to be trotting on her head, and up such steep pitches that she seemed to
+have a supplementary leg in her tail, the dog-cart jolted and tilted back
+to the village.  It was too wet for the women to look out, it was too wet
+even for the children to look out; all the doors and windows were closed,
+and the only sign of life or motion was in the rain-punctured puddles.
+
+Whiskey and oil to Thomas Idle’s ankle, and whiskey without oil to
+Francis Goodchild’s stomach, produced an agreeable change in the systems
+of both; soothing Mr. Idle’s pain, which was sharp before, and sweetening
+Mr. Goodchild’s temper, which was sweet before.  Portmanteaus being then
+opened and clothes changed, Mr. Goodchild, through having no change of
+outer garments but broadcloth and velvet, suddenly became a magnificent
+portent in the Innkeeper’s house, a shining frontispiece to the fashions
+for the month, and a frightful anomaly in the Cumberland village.
+
+Greatly ashamed of his splendid appearance, the conscious Goodchild
+quenched it as much as possible, in the shadow of Thomas Idle’s ankle,
+and in a corner of the little covered carriage that started with them for
+Wigton—a most desirable carriage for any country, except for its having a
+flat roof and no sides; which caused the plumps of rain accumulating on
+the roof to play vigorous games of bagatelle into the interior all the
+way, and to score immensely.  It was comfortable to see how the people
+coming back in open carts from Wigton market made no more of the rain
+than if it were sunshine; how the Wigton policeman taking a country walk
+of half-a-dozen miles (apparently for pleasure), in resplendent uniform,
+accepted saturation as his normal state; how clerks and schoolmasters in
+black, loitered along the road without umbrellas, getting varnished at
+every step; how the Cumberland girls, coming out to look after the
+Cumberland cows, shook the rain from their eyelashes and laughed it away;
+and how the rain continued to fall upon all, as it only does fall in hill
+countries.
+
+Wigton market was over, and its bare booths were smoking with rain all
+down the street.  Mr. Thomas Idle, melodramatically carried to the inn’s
+first floor, and laid upon three chairs (he should have had the sofa, if
+there had been one), Mr. Goodchild went to the window to take an
+observation of Wigton, and report what he saw to his disabled companion.
+
+‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘What do you see
+from the turret?’
+
+‘I see,’ said Brother Francis, ‘what I hope and believe to be one of the
+most dismal places ever seen by eyes.  I see the houses with their roofs
+of dull black, their stained fronts, and their dark-rimmed windows,
+looking as if they were all in mourning.  As every little puff of wind
+comes down the street, I see a perfect train of rain let off along the
+wooden stalls in the market-place and exploded against me.  I see a very
+big gas lamp in the centre which I know, by a secret instinct, will not
+be lighted to-night.  I see a pump, with a trivet underneath its spout
+whereon to stand the vessels that are brought to be filled with water.  I
+see a man come to pump, and he pumps very hard, but no water follows, and
+he strolls empty away.’
+
+‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘what more do you
+see from the turret, besides the man and the pump, and the trivet and the
+houses all in mourning and the rain?’
+
+‘I see,’ said Brother Francis, ‘one, two, three, four, five,
+linen-drapers’ shops in front of me.  I see a linen-draper’s shop next
+door to the right—and there are five more linen-drapers’ shops down the
+corner to the left.  Eleven homicidal linen-drapers’ shops within a short
+stone’s throw, each with its hands at the throats of all the rest!  Over
+the small first-floor of one of these linen-drapers’ shops appears the
+wonderful inscription, BANK.’
+
+‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘what more do you
+see from the turret, besides the eleven homicidal linen-drapers’ shops,
+and the wonderful inscription, “Bank,”—on the small first-floor, and the
+man and the pump and the trivet and the houses all in mourning and the
+rain?’
+
+‘I see,’ said Brother Francis, ‘the depository for Christian Knowledge,
+and through the dark vapour I think I again make out Mr. Spurgeon looming
+heavily.  Her Majesty the Queen, God bless her, printed in colours, I am
+sure I see.  I see the _Illustrated London News_ of several years ago,
+and I see a sweetmeat shop—which the proprietor calls a “Salt
+Warehouse”—with one small female child in a cotton bonnet looking in on
+tip-toe, oblivious of rain.  And I see a watchmaker’s with only three
+great pale watches of a dull metal hanging in his window, each in a
+separate pane.’
+
+‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘what more do you
+see of Wigton, besides these objects, and the man and the pump and the
+trivet and the houses all in mourning and the rain?’
+
+‘I see nothing more,’ said Brother Francis, ‘and there is nothing more to
+see, except the curlpaper bill of the theatre, which was opened and shut
+last week (the manager’s family played all the parts), and the short,
+square, chinky omnibus that goes to the railway, and leads too rattling a
+life over the stones to hold together long.  O yes!  Now, I see two men
+with their hands in their pockets and their backs towards me.’
+
+‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘what do you make
+out from the turret, of the expression of the two men with their hands in
+their pockets and their backs towards you?’
+
+‘They are mysterious men,’ said Brother Francis, ‘with inscrutable backs.
+They keep their backs towards me with persistency.  If one turns an inch
+in any direction, the other turns an inch in the same direction, and no
+more.  They turn very stiffly, on a very little pivot, in the middle of
+the market-place.  Their appearance is partly of a mining, partly of a
+ploughing, partly of a stable, character.  They are looking at
+nothing—very hard.  Their backs are slouched, and their legs are curved
+with much standing about.  Their pockets are loose and dog’s-eared, on
+account of their hands being always in them.  They stand to be rained
+upon, without any movement of impatience or dissatisfaction, and they
+keep so close together that an elbow of each jostles an elbow of the
+other, but they never speak.  They spit at times, but speak not.  I see
+it growing darker and darker, and still I see them, sole visible
+population of the place, standing to be rained upon with their backs
+towards me, and looking at nothing very hard.’
+
+‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘before you draw
+down the blind of the turret and come in to have your head scorched by
+the hot gas, see if you can, and impart to me, something of the
+expression of those two amazing men.’
+
+‘The murky shadows,’ said Francis Goodchild, ‘are gathering fast; and the
+wings of evening, and the wings of coal, are folding over Wigton.  Still,
+they look at nothing very hard, with their backs towards me.  Ah!  Now,
+they turn, and I see—’
+
+‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘tell me quickly
+what you see of the two men of Wigton!’
+
+‘I see,’ said Francis Goodchild, ‘that they have no expression at all.
+And now the town goes to sleep, undazzled by the large unlighted lamp in
+the market-place; and let no man wake it.’
+
+At the close of the next day’s journey, Mr. Thomas Idle’s ankle became
+much swollen and inflamed.  There are reasons which will presently
+explain themselves for not publicly indicating the exact direction in
+which that journey lay, or the place in which it ended.  It was a long
+day’s shaking of Thomas Idle over the rough roads, and a long day’s
+getting out and going on before the horses, and fagging up hills, and
+scouring down hills, on the part of Mr. Goodchild, who in the fatigues of
+such labours congratulated himself on attaining a high point of idleness.
+It was at a little town, still in Cumberland, that they halted for the
+night—a very little town, with the purple and brown moor close upon its
+one street; a curious little ancient market-cross set up in the midst of
+it; and the town itself looking much as if it were a collection of great
+stones piled on end by the Druids long ago, which a few recluse people
+had since hollowed out for habitations.
+
+‘Is there a doctor here?’ asked Mr. Goodchild, on his knee, of the
+motherly landlady of the little Inn: stopping in his examination of Mr.
+Idle’s ankle, with the aid of a candle.
+
+‘Ey, my word!’ said the landlady, glancing doubtfully at the ankle for
+herself; ‘there’s Doctor Speddie.’
+
+‘Is he a good Doctor?’
+
+‘Ey!’ said the landlady, ‘I ca’ him so.  A’ cooms efther nae doctor that
+I ken.  Mair nor which, a’s just THE doctor heer.’
+
+‘Do you think he is at home?’
+
+Her reply was, ‘Gang awa’, Jock, and bring him.’
+
+Jock, a white-headed boy, who, under pretence of stirring up some bay
+salt in a basin of water for the laving of this unfortunate ankle, had
+greatly enjoyed himself for the last ten minutes in splashing the carpet,
+set off promptly.  A very few minutes had elapsed when he showed the
+Doctor in, by tumbling against the door before him and bursting it open
+with his head.
+
+‘Gently, Jock, gently,’ said the Doctor as he advanced with a quiet step.
+‘Gentlemen, a good evening.  I am sorry that my presence is required
+here.  A slight accident, I hope?  A slip and a fall?  Yes, yes, yes.
+Carrock, indeed?  Hah!  Does that pain you, sir?  No doubt, it does.  It
+is the great connecting ligament here, you see, that has been badly
+strained.  Time and rest, sir!  They are often the recipe in greater
+cases,’ with a slight sigh, ‘and often the recipe in small.  I can send a
+lotion to relieve you, but we must leave the cure to time and rest.’
+
+This he said, holding Idle’s foot on his knee between his two hands, as
+he sat over against him.  He had touched it tenderly and skilfully in
+explanation of what he said, and, when his careful examination was
+completed, softly returned it to its former horizontal position on a
+chair.
+
+He spoke with a little irresolution whenever he began, but afterwards
+fluently.  He was a tall, thin, large-boned, old gentleman, with an
+appearance at first sight of being hard-featured; but, at a second
+glance, the mild expression of his face and some particular touches of
+sweetness and patience about his mouth, corrected this impression and
+assigned his long professional rides, by day and night, in the bleak
+hill-weather, as the true cause of that appearance.  He stooped very
+little, though past seventy and very grey.  His dress was more like that
+of a clergyman than a country doctor, being a plain black suit, and a
+plain white neck-kerchief tied behind like a band.  His black was the
+worse for wear, and there were darns in his coat, and his linen was a
+little frayed at the hems and edges.  He might have been poor—it was
+likely enough in that out-of-the-way spot—or he might have been a little
+self-forgetful and eccentric.  Any one could have seen directly, that he
+had neither wife nor child at home.  He had a scholarly air with him, and
+that kind of considerate humanity towards others which claimed a gentle
+consideration for himself.  Mr. Goodchild made this study of him while he
+was examining the limb, and as he laid it down.  Mr. Goodchild wishes to
+add that he considers it a very good likeness.
+
+It came out in the course of a little conversation, that Doctor Speddie
+was acquainted with some friends of Thomas Idle’s, and had, when a young
+man, passed some years in Thomas Idle’s birthplace on the other side of
+England.  Certain idle labours, the fruit of Mr. Goodchild’s
+apprenticeship, also happened to be well known to him.  The lazy
+travellers were thus placed on a more intimate footing with the Doctor
+than the casual circumstances of the meeting would of themselves have
+established; and when Doctor Speddie rose to go home, remarking that he
+would send his assistant with the lotion, Francis Goodchild said that was
+unnecessary, for, by the Doctor’s leave, he would accompany him, and
+bring it back.  (Having done nothing to fatigue himself for a full
+quarter of an hour, Francis began to fear that he was not in a state of
+idleness.)
+
+Doctor Speddie politely assented to the proposition of Francis Goodchild,
+‘as it would give him the pleasure of enjoying a few more minutes of Mr.
+Goodchild’s society than he could otherwise have hoped for,’ and they
+went out together into the village street.  The rain had nearly ceased,
+the clouds had broken before a cool wind from the north-east, and stars
+were shining from the peaceful heights beyond them.
+
+Doctor Speddie’s house was the last house in the place.  Beyond it, lay
+the moor, all dark and lonesome.  The wind moaned in a low, dull,
+shivering manner round the little garden, like a houseless creature that
+knew the winter was coming.  It was exceedingly wild and solitary.
+‘Roses,’ said the Doctor, when Goodchild touched some wet leaves
+overhanging the stone porch; ‘but they get cut to pieces.’
+
+The Doctor opened the door with a key he carried, and led the way into a
+low but pretty ample hall with rooms on either side.  The door of one of
+these stood open, and the Doctor entered it, with a word of welcome to
+his guest.  It, too, was a low room, half surgery and half parlour, with
+shelves of books and bottles against the walls, which were of a very dark
+hue.  There was a fire in the grate, the night being damp and chill.
+Leaning against the chimney-piece looking down into it, stood the
+Doctor’s Assistant.
+
+A man of a most remarkable appearance.  Much older than Mr. Goodchild had
+expected, for he was at least two-and-fifty; but, that was nothing.  What
+was startling in him was his remarkable paleness.  His large black eyes,
+his sunken cheeks, his long and heavy iron-grey hair, his wasted hands,
+and even the attenuation of his figure, were at first forgotten in his
+extraordinary pallor.  There was no vestige of colour in the man.  When
+he turned his face, Francis Goodchild started as if a stone figure had
+looked round at him.
+
+‘Mr. Lorn,’ said the Doctor.  ‘Mr. Goodchild.’
+
+The Assistant, in a distraught way—as if he had forgotten something—as if
+he had forgotten everything, even to his own name and
+himself—acknowledged the visitor’s presence, and stepped further back
+into the shadow of the wall behind him.  But, he was so pale that his
+face stood out in relief again the dark wall, and really could not be
+hidden so.
+
+‘Mr. Goodchild’s friend has met with accident, Lorn,’ said Doctor
+Speddie.  ‘We want the lotion for a bad sprain.’
+
+A pause.
+
+‘My dear fellow, you are more than usually absent to-night.  The lotion
+for a bad sprain.’
+
+‘Ah! yes!  Directly.’
+
+He was evidently relieved to turn away, and to take his white face and
+his wild eyes to a table in a recess among the bottles.  But, though he
+stood there, compounding the lotion with his back towards them, Goodchild
+could not, for many moments, withdraw his gaze from the man.  When he at
+length did so, he found the Doctor observing him, with some trouble in
+his face.  ‘He is absent,’ explained the Doctor, in a low voice.  ‘Always
+absent.  Very absent.’
+
+‘Is he ill?’
+
+‘No, not ill.’
+
+‘Unhappy?’
+
+‘I have my suspicions that he was,’ assented the Doctor, ‘once.’
+
+Francis Goodchild could not but observe that the Doctor accompanied these
+words with a benignant and protecting glance at their subject, in which
+there was much of the expression with which an attached father might have
+looked at a heavily afflicted son.  Yet, that they were not father and
+son must have been plain to most eyes.  The Assistant, on the other hand,
+turning presently to ask the Doctor some question, looked at him with a
+wan smile as if he were his whole reliance and sustainment in life.
+
+It was in vain for the Doctor in his easy-chair, to try to lead the mind
+of Mr. Goodchild in the opposite easy-chair, away from what was before
+him.  Let Mr. Goodchild do what he would to follow the Doctor, his eyes
+and thoughts reverted to the Assistant.  The Doctor soon perceived it,
+and, after falling silent, and musing in a little perplexity, said:
+
+‘Lorn!’
+
+‘My dear Doctor.’
+
+‘Would you go to the Inn, and apply that lotion?  You will show the best
+way of applying it, far better than Mr. Goodchild can.’
+
+‘With pleasure.’
+
+The Assistant took his hat, and passed like a shadow to the door.
+
+‘Lorn!’ said the Doctor, calling after him.
+
+He returned.
+
+‘Mr. Goodchild will keep me company till you come home.  Don’t hurry.
+Excuse my calling you back.’
+
+‘It is not,’ said the Assistant, with his former smile, ‘the first time
+you have called me back, dear Doctor.’  With those words he went away.
+
+‘Mr. Goodchild,’ said Doctor Speddie, in a low voice, and with his former
+troubled expression of face, ‘I have seen that your attention has been
+concentrated on my friend.’
+
+‘He fascinates me.  I must apologise to you, but he has quite bewildered
+and mastered me.’
+
+‘I find that a lonely existence and a long secret,’ said the Doctor,
+drawing his chair a little nearer to Mr. Goodchild’s, ‘become in the
+course of time very heavy.  I will tell you something.  You may make what
+use you will of it, under fictitious names.  I know I may trust you.  I
+am the more inclined to confidence to-night, through having been
+unexpectedly led back, by the current of our conversation at the Inn, to
+scenes in my early life.  Will you please to draw a little nearer?’
+
+Mr. Goodchild drew a little nearer, and the Doctor went on thus:
+speaking, for the most part, in so cautious a voice, that the wind,
+though it was far from high, occasionally got the better of him.
+
+When this present nineteenth century was younger by a good many years
+than it is now, a certain friend of mine, named Arthur Holliday, happened
+to arrive in the town of Doncaster, exactly in the middle of a race-week,
+or, in other words, in the middle of the month of September.  He was one
+of those reckless, rattle-pated, open-hearted, and open-mouthed young
+gentlemen, who possess the gift of familiarity in its highest perfection,
+and who scramble carelessly along the journey of life making friends, as
+the phrase is, wherever they go.  His father was a rich manufacturer, and
+had bought landed property enough in one of the midland counties to make
+all the born squires in his neighbourhood thoroughly envious of him.
+Arthur was his only son, possessor in prospect of the great estate and
+the great business after his father’s death; well supplied with money,
+and not too rigidly looked after, during his father’s lifetime.  Report,
+or scandal, whichever you please, said that the old gentleman had been
+rather wild in his youthful days, and that, unlike most parents, he was
+not disposed to be violently indignant when he found that his son took
+after him.  This may be true or not.  I myself only knew the elder Mr.
+Holliday when he was getting on in years; and then he was as quiet and as
+respectable a gentleman as ever I met with.
+
+Well, one September, as I told you, young Arthur comes to Doncaster,
+having decided all of a sudden, in his harebrained way, that he would go
+to the races.  He did not reach the town till towards the close of the
+evening, and he went at once to see about his dinner and bed at the
+principal hotel.  Dinner they were ready enough to give him; but as for a
+bed, they laughed when he mentioned it.  In the race-week at Doncaster,
+it is no uncommon thing for visitors who have not bespoken apartments, to
+pass the night in their carriages at the inn doors.  As for the lower
+sort of strangers, I myself have often seen them, at that full time,
+sleeping out on the doorsteps for want of a covered place to creep under.
+Rich as he was, Arthur’s chance of getting a night’s lodging (seeing that
+he had not written beforehand to secure one) was more than doubtful.  He
+tried the second hotel, and the third hotel, and two of the inferior inns
+after that; and was met everywhere by the same form of answer.  No
+accommodation for the night of any sort was left.  All the bright golden
+sovereigns in his pocket would not buy him a bed at Doncaster in the
+race-week.
+
+To a young fellow of Arthur’s temperament, the novelty of being turned
+away into the street, like a penniless vagabond, at every house where he
+asked for a lodging, presented itself in the light of a new and highly
+amusing piece of experience.  He went on, with his carpet-bag in his
+hand, applying for a bed at every place of entertainment for travellers
+that he could find in Doncaster, until he wandered into the outskirts of
+the town.  By this time, the last glimmer of twilight had faded out, the
+moon was rising dimly in a mist, the wind was getting cold, the clouds
+were gathering heavily, and there was every prospect that it was soon
+going to rain.
+
+The look of the night had rather a lowering effect on young Holliday’s
+good spirits.  He began to contemplate the houseless situation in which
+he was placed, from the serious rather than the humorous point of view;
+and he looked about him, for another public-house to inquire at, with
+something very like downright anxiety in his mind on the subject of a
+lodging for the night.  The suburban part of the town towards which he
+had now strayed was hardly lighted at all, and he could see nothing of
+the houses as he passed them, except that they got progressively smaller
+and dirtier, the farther he went.  Down the winding road before him shone
+the dull gleam of an oil lamp, the one faint, lonely light that struggled
+ineffectually with the foggy darkness all round him.  He resolved to go
+on as far as this lamp, and then, if it showed him nothing in the shape
+of an Inn, to return to the central part of the town and to try if he
+could not at least secure a chair to sit down on, through the night, at
+one of the principal Hotels.
+
+As he got near the lamp, he heard voices; and, walking close under it,
+found that it lighted the entrance to a narrow court, on the wall of
+which was painted a long hand in faded flesh-colour, pointing with a lean
+forefinger, to this inscription:—
+
+                               THE TWO ROBINS.
+
+Arthur turned into the court without hesitation, to see what The Two
+Robins could do for him.  Four or five men were standing together round
+the door of the house which was at the bottom of the court, facing the
+entrance from the street.  The men were all listening to one other man,
+better dressed than the rest, who was telling his audience something, in
+a low voice, in which they were apparently very much interested.
+
+On entering the passage, Arthur was passed by a stranger with a knapsack
+in his hand, who was evidently leaving the house.
+
+‘No,’ said the traveller with the knapsack, turning round and addressing
+himself cheerfully to a fat, sly-looking, bald-headed man, with a dirty
+white apron on, who had followed him down the passage.  ‘No, Mr.
+landlord, I am not easily scared by trifles; but, I don’t mind confessing
+that I can’t quite stand _that_.’
+
+It occurred to young Holliday, the moment he heard these words, that the
+stranger had been asked an exorbitant price for a bed at The Two Robins;
+and that he was unable or unwilling to pay it.  The moment his back was
+turned, Arthur, comfortably conscious of his own well-filled pockets,
+addressed himself in a great hurry, for fear any other benighted
+traveller should slip in and forestall him, to the sly-looking landlord
+with the dirty apron and the bald head.
+
+‘If you have got a bed to let,’ he said, ‘and if that gentleman who has
+just gone out won’t pay your price for it, I will.’
+
+The sly landlord looked hard at Arthur.
+
+‘Will you, sir?’ he asked, in a meditative, doubtful way.
+
+‘Name your price,’ said young Holliday, thinking that the landlord’s
+hesitation sprang from some boorish distrust of him.  ‘Name your price,
+and I’ll give you the money at once if you like?’
+
+‘Are you game for five shillings?’ inquired the landlord, rubbing his
+stubbly double chin, and looking up thoughtfully at the ceiling above
+him.
+
+Arthur nearly laughed in the man’s face; but thinking it prudent to
+control himself, offered the five shillings as seriously as he could.
+The sly landlord held out his hand, then suddenly drew it back again.
+
+‘You’re acting all fair and above-board by me,’ he said: ‘and, before I
+take your money, I’ll do the same by you.  Look here, this is how it
+stands.  You can have a bed all to yourself for five shillings; but you
+can’t have more than a half-share of the room it stands in.  Do you see
+what I mean, young gentleman?’
+
+‘Of course I do,’ returned Arthur, a little irritably.  ‘You mean that it
+is a double-bedded room, and that one of the beds is occupied?’
+
+The landlord nodded his head, and rubbed his double chin harder than
+ever.  Arthur hesitated, and mechanically moved back a step or two
+towards the door.  The idea of sleeping in the same room with a total
+stranger, did not present an attractive prospect to him.  He felt more
+than half inclined to drop his five shillings into his pocket, and to go
+out into the street once more.
+
+‘Is it yes, or no?’ asked the landlord.  ‘Settle it as quick as you can,
+because there’s lots of people wanting a bed at Doncaster to-night,
+besides you.’
+
+Arthur looked towards the court, and heard the rain falling heavily in
+the street outside.  He thought he would ask a question or two before he
+rashly decided on leaving the shelter of The Two Robins.
+
+‘What sort of a man is it who has got the other bed?’ he inquired.  ‘Is
+he a gentleman?  I mean, is he a quiet, well-behaved person?’
+
+‘The quietest man I ever came across,’ said the landlord, rubbing his fat
+hands stealthily one over the other.  ‘As sober as a judge, and as
+regular as clock-work in his habits.  It hasn’t struck nine, not ten
+minutes ago, and he’s in his bed already.  I don’t know whether that
+comes up to your notion of a quiet man: it goes a long way ahead of mine,
+I can tell you.’
+
+‘Is he asleep, do you think?’ asked Arthur.
+
+‘I know he’s asleep,’ returned the landlord.  ‘And what’s more, he’s gone
+off so fast, that I’ll warrant you don’t wake him.  This way, sir,’ said
+the landlord, speaking over young Holliday’s shoulder, as if he was
+addressing some new guest who was approaching the house.
+
+‘Here you are,’ said Arthur, determined to be beforehand with the
+stranger, whoever he might be.  ‘I’ll take the bed.’  And he handed the
+five shillings to the landlord, who nodded, dropped the money carelessly
+into his waistcoat-pocket, and lighted the candle.
+
+‘Come up and see the room,’ said the host of The Two Robins, leading the
+way to the staircase quite briskly, considering how fat he was.
+
+They mounted to the second-floor of the house.  The landlord half opened
+a door, fronting the landing, then stopped, and turned round to Arthur.
+
+‘It’s a fair bargain, mind, on my side as well as on yours,’ he said.
+‘You give me five shillings, I give you in return a clean, comfortable
+bed; and I warrant, beforehand, that you won’t be interfered with, or
+annoyed in any way, by the man who sleeps in the same room as you.’
+Saying those words, he looked hard, for a moment, in young Holliday’s
+face, and then led the way into the room.
+
+It was larger and cleaner than Arthur had expected it would be.  The two
+beds stood parallel with each other—a space of about six feet intervening
+between them.  They were both of the same medium size, and both had the
+same plain white curtains, made to draw, if necessary, all round them.
+The occupied bed was the bed nearest the window.  The curtains were all
+drawn round this, except the half curtain at the bottom, on the side of
+the bed farthest from the window.  Arthur saw the feet of the sleeping
+man raising the scanty clothes into a sharp little eminence, as if he was
+lying flat on his back.  He took the candle, and advanced softly to draw
+the curtain—stopped half-way, and listened for a moment—then turned to
+the landlord.
+
+‘He’s a very quiet sleeper,’ said Arthur.
+
+‘Yes,’ said the landlord, ‘very quiet.’
+
+Young Holliday advanced with the candle, and looked in at the man
+cautiously.
+
+‘How pale he is!’ said Arthur.
+
+‘Yes,’ returned the landlord, ‘pale enough, isn’t he?’
+
+Arthur looked closer at the man.  The bedclothes were drawn up to his
+chin, and they lay perfectly still over the region of his chest.
+Surprised and vaguely startled, as he noticed this, Arthur stooped down
+closer over the stranger; looked at his ashy, parted lips; listened
+breathlessly for an instant; looked again at the strangely still face,
+and the motionless lips and chest; and turned round suddenly on the
+landlord, with his own cheeks as pale for the moment as the hollow cheeks
+of the man on the bed.
+
+‘Come here,’ he whispered, under his breath.  ‘Come here, for God’s sake!
+The man’s not asleep—he is dead!’
+
+‘You have found that out sooner than I thought you would,’ said the
+landlord, composedly.  ‘Yes, he’s dead, sure enough.  He died at five
+o’clock to-day.’
+
+‘How did he die?  Who is he?’ asked Arthur, staggered, for a moment, by
+the audacious coolness of the answer.
+
+‘As to who is he,’ rejoined the landlord, ‘I know no more about him than
+you do.  There are his books and letters and things, all sealed up in
+that brown-paper parcel, for the Coroner’s inquest to open to-morrow or
+next day.  He’s been here a week, paying his way fairly enough, and
+stopping in-doors, for the most part, as if he was ailing.  My girl
+brought him up his tea at five to-day; and as he was pouring of it out,
+he fell down in a faint, or a fit, or a compound of both, for anything I
+know.  We could not bring him to—and I said he was dead.  And the doctor
+couldn’t bring him to—and the doctor said he was dead.  And there he is.
+And the Coroner’s inquest’s coming as soon as it can.  And that’s as much
+as I know about it.’
+
+Arthur held the candle close to the man’s lips.  The flame still burnt
+straight up, as steadily as before.  There was a moment of silence; and
+the rain pattered drearily through it against the panes of the window.
+
+‘If you haven’t got nothing more to say to me,’ continued the landlord,
+‘I suppose I may go.  You don’t expect your five shillings back, do you?
+There’s the bed I promised you, clean and comfortable.  There’s the man I
+warranted not to disturb you, quiet in this world for ever.  If you’re
+frightened to stop alone with him, that’s not my look out.  I’ve kept my
+part of the bargain, and I mean to keep the money.  I’m not Yorkshire,
+myself, young gentleman; but I’ve lived long enough in these parts to
+have my wits sharpened; and I shouldn’t wonder if you found out the way
+to brighten up yours, next time you come amongst us.’  With these words,
+the landlord turned towards the door, and laughed to himself softly, in
+high satisfaction at his own sharpness.
+
+Startled and shocked as he was, Arthur had by this time sufficiently
+recovered himself to feel indignant at the trick that had been played on
+him, and at the insolent manner in which the landlord exulted in it.
+
+‘Don’t laugh,’ he said sharply, ‘till you are quite sure you have got the
+laugh against me.  You shan’t have the five shillings for nothing, my
+man.  I’ll keep the bed.’
+
+‘Will you?’ said the landlord.  ‘Then I wish you a goodnight’s rest.’
+With that brief farewell, he went out, and shut the door after him.
+
+A good night’s rest!  The words had hardly been spoken, the door had
+hardly been closed, before Arthur half-repented the hasty words that had
+just escaped him.  Though not naturally over-sensitive, and not wanting
+in courage of the moral as well as the physical sort, the presence of the
+dead man had an instantaneously chilling effect on his mind when he found
+himself alone in the room—alone, and bound by his own rash words to stay
+there till the next morning.  An older man would have thought nothing of
+those words, and would have acted, without reference to them, as his
+calmer sense suggested.  But Arthur was too young to treat the ridicule,
+even of his inferiors, with contempt—too young not to fear the momentary
+humiliation of falsifying his own foolish boast, more than he feared the
+trial of watching out the long night in the same chamber with the dead.
+
+‘It is but a few hours,’ he thought to himself, ‘and I can get away the
+first thing in the morning.’
+
+He was looking towards the occupied bed as that idea passed through his
+mind, and the sharp, angular eminence made in the clothes by the dead
+man’s upturned feet again caught his eye.  He advanced and drew the
+curtains, purposely abstaining, as he did so, from looking at the face of
+the corpse, lest he might unnerve himself at the outset by fastening some
+ghastly impression of it on his mind.  He drew the curtain very gently,
+and sighed involuntarily as he closed it.  ‘Poor fellow,’ he said, almost
+as sadly as if he had known the man.  ‘Ah, poor fellow!’
+
+He went next to the window.  The night was black, and he could see
+nothing from it.  The rain still pattered heavily against the glass.  He
+inferred, from hearing it, that the window was at the back of the house;
+remembering that the front was sheltered from the weather by the court
+and the buildings over it.
+
+While he was still standing at the window—for even the dreary rain was a
+relief, because of the sound it made; a relief, also, because it moved,
+and had some faint suggestion, in consequence, of life and companionship
+in it—while he was standing at the window, and looking vacantly into the
+black darkness outside, he heard a distant church-clock strike ten.  Only
+ten!  How was he to pass the time till the house was astir the next
+morning?
+
+Under any other circumstances, he would have gone down to the
+public-house parlour, would have called for his grog, and would have
+laughed and talked with the company assembled as familiarly as if he had
+known them all his life.  But the very thought of whiling away the time
+in this manner was distasteful to him.  The new situation in which he was
+placed seemed to have altered him to himself already.  Thus far, his life
+had been the common, trifling, prosaic, surface-life of a prosperous
+young man, with no troubles to conquer, and no trials to face.  He had
+lost no relation whom he loved, no friend whom he treasured.  Till this
+night, what share he had of the immortal inheritance that is divided
+amongst us all, had laid dormant within him.  Till this night, Death and
+he had not once met, even in thought.
+
+He took a few turns up and down the room—then stopped.  The noise made by
+his boots on the poorly carpeted floor, jarred on his ear.  He hesitated
+a little, and ended by taking the boots off, and walking backwards and
+forwards noiselessly.  All desire to sleep or to rest had left him.  The
+bare thought of lying down on the unoccupied bed instantly drew the
+picture on his mind of a dreadful mimicry of the position of the dead
+man.  Who was he?  What was the story of his past life?  Poor he must
+have been, or he would not have stopped at such a place as The Two Robins
+Inn—and weakened, probably, by long illness, or he could hardly have died
+in the manner in which the landlord had described.  Poor, ill,
+lonely,—dead in a strange place; dead, with nobody but a stranger to pity
+him.  A sad story: truly, on the mere face of it, a very sad story.
+
+While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he had stopped
+insensibly at the window, close to which stood the foot of the bed with
+the closed curtains.  At first he looked at it absently; then he became
+conscious that his eyes were fixed on it; and then, a perverse desire
+took possession of him to do the very thing which he had resolved not to
+do, up to this time—to look at the dead man.
+
+He stretched out his hand towards the curtains; but checked himself in
+the very act of undrawing them, turned his back sharply on the bed, and
+walked towards the chimney-piece, to see what things were placed on it,
+and to try if he could keep the dead man out of his mind in that way.
+
+There was a pewter inkstand on the chimney-piece, with some mildewed
+remains of ink in the bottle.  There were two coarse china ornaments of
+the commonest kind; and there was a square of embossed card, dirty and
+fly-blown, with a collection of wretched riddles printed on it, in all
+sorts of zig-zag directions, and in variously coloured inks.  He took the
+card, and went away, to read it, to the table on which the candle was
+placed; sitting down, with his back resolutely turned to the curtained
+bed.
+
+He read the first riddle, the second, the third, all in one corner of the
+card—then turned it round impatiently to look at another.  Before he
+could begin reading the riddles printed here, the sound of the
+church-clock stopped him.  Eleven.  He had got through an hour of the
+time, in the room with the dead man.
+
+Once more he looked at the card.  It was not easy to make out the letters
+printed on it, in consequence of the dimness of the light which the
+landlord had left him—a common tallow candle, furnished with a pair of
+heavy old-fashioned steel snuffers.  Up to this time, his mind had been
+too much occupied to think of the light.  He had left the wick of the
+candle unsnuffed, till it had risen higher than the flame, and had burnt
+into an odd pent-house shape at the top, from which morsels of the
+charred cotton fell off, from time to time, in little flakes.  He took up
+the snuffers now, and trimmed the wick.  The light brightened directly,
+and the room became less dismal.
+
+Again he turned to the riddles; reading them doggedly and resolutely, now
+in one corner of the card, now in another.  All his efforts, however,
+could not fix his attention on them.  He pursued his occupation
+mechanically, deriving no sort of impression from what he was reading.
+It was as if a shadow from the curtained bed had got between his mind and
+the gaily printed letters—a shadow that nothing could dispel.  At last,
+he gave up the struggle, and threw the card from him impatiently, and
+took to walking softly up and down the room again.
+
+The dead man, the dead man, the _hidden_ dead man on the bed!  There was
+the one persistent idea still haunting him.  Hidden?  Was it only the
+body being there, or was it the body being there, concealed, that was
+preying on his mind?  He stopped at the window, with that doubt in him;
+once more listening to the pattering rain, once more looking out into the
+black darkness.
+
+Still the dead man!  The darkness forced his mind back upon itself, and
+set his memory at work, reviving, with a painfully-vivid distinctness the
+momentary impression it had received from the first sight of the corpse.
+Before long the face seemed to be hovering out in the middle of the
+darkness, confronting him through the window, with the paleness whiter,
+with the dreadful dull line of light between the imperfectly-closed
+eyelids broader than he had seen it—with the parted lips slowly dropping
+farther and farther away from each other—with the features growing larger
+and moving closer, till they seemed to fill the window and to silence the
+rain, and to shut out the night.
+
+The sound of a voice, shouting below-stairs, woke him suddenly from the
+dream of his own distempered fancy.  He recognised it as the voice of the
+landlord.  ‘Shut up at twelve, Ben,’ he heard it say.  ‘I’m off to bed.’
+
+He wiped away the damp that had gathered on his forehead, reasoned with
+himself for a little while, and resolved to shake his mind free of the
+ghastly counterfeit which still clung to it, by forcing himself to
+confront, if it was only for a moment, the solemn reality.  Without
+allowing himself an instant to hesitate, he parted the curtains at the
+foot of the bed, and looked through.
+
+There was a sad, peaceful, white face, with the awful mystery of
+stillness on it, laid back upon the pillow.  No stir, no change there!
+He only looked at it for a moment before he closed the curtains again—but
+that moment steadied him, calmed him, restored him—mind and body—to
+himself.
+
+He returned to his old occupation of walking up and down the room;
+persevering in it, this time, till the clock struck again.  Twelve.
+
+As the sound of the clock-bell died away, it was succeeded by the
+confused noise, down-stairs, of the drinkers in the tap-room leaving the
+house.  The next sound, after an interval of silence, was caused by the
+barring of the door, and the closing of the shutters, at the back of the
+Inn.  Then the silence followed again, and was disturbed no more.
+
+He was alone now—absolutely, utterly, alone with the dead man, till the
+next morning.
+
+The wick of the candle wanted trimming again.  He took up the
+snuffers—but paused suddenly on the very point of using them, and looked
+attentively at the candle—then back, over his shoulder, at the curtained
+bed—then again at the candle.  It had been lighted, for the first time,
+to show him the way up-stairs, and three parts of it, at least, were
+already consumed.  In another hour it would be burnt out.  In another
+hour—unless he called at once to the man who had shut up the Inn, for a
+fresh candle—he would be left in the dark.
+
+Strongly as his mind had been affected since he had entered his room, his
+unreasonable dread of encountering ridicule, and of exposing his courage
+to suspicion, had not altogether lost its influence over him, even yet.
+He lingered irresolutely by the table, waiting till he could prevail on
+himself to open the door, and call, from the landing, to the man who had
+shut up the Inn.  In his present hesitating frame of mind, it was a kind
+of relief to gain a few moments only by engaging in the trifling
+occupation of snuffing the candle.  His hand trembled a little, and the
+snuffers were heavy and awkward to use.  When he closed them on the wick,
+he closed them a hair’s breadth too low.  In an instant the candle was
+out, and the room was plunged in pitch darkness.
+
+The one impression which the absence of light immediately produced on his
+mind, was distrust of the curtained bed—distrust which shaped itself into
+no distinct idea, but which was powerful enough in its very vagueness, to
+bind him down to his chair, to make his heart beat fast, and to set him
+listening intently.  No sound stirred in the room but the familiar sound
+of the rain against the window, louder and sharper now than he had heard
+it yet.
+
+Still the vague distrust, the inexpressible dread possessed him, and kept
+him to his chair.  He had put his carpet-bag on the table, when he first
+entered the room; and he now took the key from his pocket, reached out
+his hand softly, opened the bag, and groped in it for his travelling
+writing-case, in which he knew that there was a small store of matches.
+When he had got one of the matches, he waited before he struck it on the
+coarse wooden table, and listened intently again, without knowing why.
+Still there was no sound in the room but the steady, ceaseless, rattling
+sound of the rain.
+
+He lighted the candle again, without another moment of delay and, on the
+instant of its burning up, the first object in the room that his eyes
+sought for was the curtained bed.
+
+Just before the light had been put out, he had looked in that direction,
+and had seen no change, no disarrangement of any sort, in the folds of
+the closely-drawn curtains.
+
+When he looked at the bed, now, he saw, hanging over the side of it, a
+long white hand.
+
+It lay perfectly motionless, midway on the side of the bed, where the
+curtain at the head and the curtain at the foot met.  Nothing more was
+visible.  The clinging curtains hid everything but the long white hand.
+
+He stood looking at it unable to stir, unable to call out; feeling
+nothing, knowing nothing, every faculty he possessed gathered up and lost
+in the one seeing faculty.  How long that first panic held him he never
+could tell afterwards.  It might have been only for a moment; it might
+have been for many minutes together.  How he got to the bed—whether he
+ran to it headlong, or whether he approached it slowly—how he wrought
+himself up to unclose the curtains and look in, he never has remembered,
+and never will remember to his dying day.  It is enough that he did go to
+the bed, and that he did look inside the curtains.
+
+The man had moved.  One of his arms was outside the clothes; his face was
+turned a little on the pillow; his eyelids were wide open.  Changed as to
+position, and as to one of the features, the face was, otherwise,
+fearfully and wonderfully unaltered.  The dead paleness and the dead
+quiet were on it still.
+
+One glance showed Arthur this—one glance, before he flew breathlessly to
+the door, and alarmed the house.
+
+The man whom the landlord called ‘Ben,’ was the first to appear on the
+stairs.  In three words, Arthur told him what had happened, and sent him
+for the nearest doctor.
+
+I, who tell you this story, was then staying with a medical friend of
+mine, in practice at Doncaster, taking care of his patients for him,
+during his absence in London; and I, for the time being, was the nearest
+doctor.  They had sent for me from the Inn, when the stranger was taken
+ill in the afternoon; but I was not at home, and medical assistance was
+sought for elsewhere.  When the man from The Two Robins rang the
+night-bell, I was just thinking of going to bed.  Naturally enough, I did
+not believe a word of his story about ‘a dead man who had come to life
+again.’  However, I put on my hat, armed myself with one or two bottles
+of restorative medicine, and ran to the Inn, expecting to find nothing
+more remarkable, when I got there, than a patient in a fit.
+
+My surprise at finding that the man had spoken the literal truth was
+almost, if not quite, equalled by my astonishment at finding myself face
+to face with Arthur Holliday as soon as I entered the bedroom.  It was no
+time then for giving or seeking explanations.  We just shook hands
+amazedly; and then I ordered everybody but Arthur out of the room, and
+hurried to the man on the bed.
+
+The kitchen fire had not been long out.  There was plenty of hot water in
+the boiler, and plenty of flannel to be had.  With these, with my
+medicines, and with such help as Arthur could render under my direction,
+I dragged the man, literally, out of the jaws of death.  In less than an
+hour from the time when I had been called in, he was alive and talking in
+the bed on which he had been laid out to wait for the Coroner’s inquest.
+
+You will naturally ask me, what had been the matter with him; and I might
+treat you, in reply, to a long theory, plentifully sprinkled with, what
+the children call, hard words.  I prefer telling you that, in this case,
+cause and effect could not be satisfactorily joined together by any
+theory whatever.  There are mysteries in life, and the condition of it,
+which human science has not fathomed yet; and I candidly confess to you,
+that, in bringing that man back to existence, I was, morally speaking,
+groping haphazard in the dark.  I know (from the testimony of the doctor
+who attended him in the afternoon) that the vital machinery, so far as
+its action is appreciable by our senses, had, in this case,
+unquestionably stopped; and I am equally certain (seeing that I recovered
+him) that the vital principle was not extinct.  When I add, that he had
+suffered from a long and complicated illness, and that his whole nervous
+system was utterly deranged, I have told you all I really know of the
+physical condition of my dead-alive patient at The Two Robins Inn.
+
+When he ‘came to,’ as the phrase goes, he was a startling object to look
+at, with his colourless face, his sunken cheeks, his wild black eyes, and
+his long black hair.  The first question he asked me about himself, when
+he could speak, made me suspect that I had been called in to a man in my
+own profession.  I mentioned to him my surmise; and he told me that I was
+right.
+
+He said he had come last from Paris, where he had been attached to a
+hospital.  That he had lately returned to England, on his way to
+Edinburgh, to continue his studies; that he had been taken ill on the
+journey; and that he had stopped to rest and recover himself at
+Doncaster.  He did not add a word about his name, or who he was: and, of
+course, I did not question him on the subject.  All I inquired, when he
+ceased speaking, was what branch of the profession he intended to follow.
+
+‘Any branch,’ he said, bitterly, ‘which will put bread into the mouth of
+a poor man.’
+
+At this, Arthur, who had been hitherto watching him in silent curiosity,
+burst out impetuously in his usual good-humoured way:—
+
+‘My dear fellow!’ (everybody was ‘my dear fellow’ with Arthur) ‘now you
+have come to life again, don’t begin by being down-hearted about your
+prospects.  I’ll answer for it, I can help you to some capital thing in
+the medical line—or, if I can’t, I know my father can.’
+
+The medical student looked at him steadily.
+
+‘Thank you,’ he said, coldly.  Then added, ‘May I ask who your father
+is?’
+
+‘He’s well enough known all about this part of the country,’ replied
+Arthur.  ‘He is a great manufacturer, and his name is Holliday.’
+
+My hand was on the man’s wrist during this brief conversation.  The
+instant the name of Holliday was pronounced I felt the pulse under my
+fingers flutter, stop, go on suddenly with a bound, and beat afterwards,
+for a minute or two, at the fever rate.
+
+‘How did you come here?’ asked the stranger, quickly, excitably,
+passionately almost.
+
+Arthur related briefly what had happened from the time of his first
+taking the bed at the inn.
+
+‘I am indebted to Mr. Holliday’s son then for the help that has saved my
+life,’ said the medical student, speaking to himself, with a singular
+sarcasm in his voice.  ‘Come here!’
+
+He held out, as he spoke, his long, white, bony, right hand.
+
+‘With all my heart,’ said Arthur, taking the hand-cordially.  ‘I may
+confess it now,’ he continued, laughing.  ‘Upon my honour, you almost
+frightened me out of my wits.’
+
+The stranger did not seem to listen.  His wild black eyes were fixed with
+a look of eager interest on Arthur’s face, and his long bony fingers kept
+tight hold of Arthur’s hand.  Young Holliday, on his side, returned the
+gaze, amazed and puzzled by the medical student’s odd language and
+manners.  The two faces were close together; I looked at them; and, to my
+amazement, I was suddenly impressed by the sense of a likeness between
+them—not in features, or complexion, but solely in expression.  It must
+have been a strong likeness, or I should certainly not have found it out,
+for I am naturally slow at detecting resemblances between faces.
+
+‘You have saved my life,’ said the strange man, still looking hard in
+Arthur’s face, still holding tightly by his hand.  ‘If you had been my
+own brother, you could not have done more for me than that.’
+
+He laid a singularly strong emphasis on those three words ‘my own
+brother,’ and a change passed over his face as he pronounced them,—a
+change that no language of mine is competent to describe.
+
+‘I hope I have not done being of service to you yet,’ said Arthur.  ‘I’ll
+speak to my father, as soon as I get home.’
+
+‘You seem to be fond and proud of your father,’ said the medical student.
+‘I suppose, in return, he is fond and proud of you?’
+
+‘Of course, he is!’ answered Arthur, laughing.  ‘Is there anything
+wonderful in that?  Isn’t _your_ father fond—’
+
+The stranger suddenly dropped young Holliday’s hand, and turned his face
+away.
+
+‘I beg your pardon,’ said Arthur.  ‘I hope I have not unintentionally
+pained you.  I hope you have not lost your father.’
+
+‘I can’t well lose what I have never had,’ retorted the medical student,
+with a harsh, mocking laugh.
+
+‘What you have never had!’
+
+The strange man suddenly caught Arthur’s hand again, suddenly looked once
+more hard in his face.
+
+‘Yes,’ he said, with a repetition of the bitter laugh.  ‘You have brought
+a poor devil back into the world, who has no business there.  Do I
+astonish you?  Well!  I have a fancy of my own for telling you what men
+in my situation generally keep a secret.  I have no name and no father.
+The merciful law of Society tells me I am Nobody’s Son!  Ask your father
+if he will be my father too, and help me on in life with the family
+name.’
+
+Arthur looked at me, more puzzled than ever.  I signed to him to say
+nothing, and then laid my fingers again on the man’s wrist.  No!  In
+spite of the extraordinary speech that he had just made, he was not, as I
+had been disposed to suspect, beginning to get light-headed.  His pulse,
+by this time, had fallen back to a quiet, slow beat, and his skin was
+moist and cool.  Not a symptom of fever or agitation about him.
+
+Finding that neither of us answered him, he turned to me, and began
+talking of the extraordinary nature of his case, and asking my advice
+about the future course of medical treatment to which he ought to subject
+himself.  I said the matter required careful thinking over, and suggested
+that I should submit certain prescriptions to him the next morning.  He
+told me to write them at once, as he would, most likely, be leaving
+Doncaster, in the morning, before I was up.  It was quite useless to
+represent to him the folly and danger of such a proceeding as this.  He
+heard me politely and patiently, but held to his resolution, without
+offering any reasons or any explanations, and repeated to me, that if I
+wished to give him a chance of seeing my prescription, I must write it at
+once.  Hearing this, Arthur volunteered the loan of a travelling
+writing-case, which, he said, he had with him; and, bringing it to the
+bed, shook the note-paper out of the pocket of the case forthwith in his
+usual careless way.  With the paper, there fell out on the counterpane of
+the bed a small packet of sticking-plaster, and a little water-colour
+drawing of a landscape.
+
+The medical student took up the drawing and looked at it.  His eye fell
+on some initials neatly written, in cypher, in one corner.  He started
+and trembled; his pale face grew whiter than ever; his wild black eyes
+turned on Arthur, and looked through and through him.
+
+‘A pretty drawing,’ he said in a remarkably quiet tone of voice.
+
+‘Ah! and done by such a pretty girl,’ said Arthur.  ‘Oh, such a pretty
+girl!  I wish it was not a landscape—I wish it was a portrait of her!’
+
+‘You admire her very much?’
+
+Arthur, half in jest, half in earnest, kissed his hand for answer.
+
+‘Love at first sight!’ he said, putting the drawing away again.  ‘But the
+course of it doesn’t run smooth.  It’s the old story.  She’s monopolised
+as usual.  Trammelled by a rash engagement to some poor man who is never
+likely to get money enough to marry her.  It was lucky I heard of it in
+time, or I should certainly have risked a declaration when she gave me
+that drawing.  Here, doctor!  Here is pen, ink, and paper all ready for
+you.’
+
+‘When she gave you that drawing?  Gave it.  Gave it.’  He repeated the
+words slowly to himself, and suddenly closed his eyes.  A momentary
+distortion passed across his face, and I saw one of his hands clutch up
+the bedclothes and squeeze them hard.  I thought he was going to be ill
+again, and begged that there might be no more talking.  He opened his
+eyes when I spoke, fixed them once more searchingly on Arthur, and said,
+slowly and distinctly, ‘You like her, and she likes you.  The poor man
+may die out of your way.  Who can tell that she may not give you herself
+as well as her drawing, after all?’
+
+Before young Holliday could answer, he turned to me, and said in a
+whisper, ‘Now for the prescription.’  From that time, though he spoke to
+Arthur again, he never looked at him more.
+
+When I had written the prescription, he examined it, approved of it, and
+then astonished us both by abruptly wishing us good night.  I offered to
+sit up with him, and he shook his head.  Arthur offered to sit up with
+him, and he said, shortly, with his face turned away, ‘No.’  I insisted
+on having somebody left to watch him.  He gave way when he found I was
+determined, and said he would accept the services of the waiter at the
+Inn.
+
+‘Thank you, both,’ he said, as we rose to go.  ‘I have one last favour to
+ask—not of you, doctor, for I leave you to exercise your professional
+discretion—but of Mr. Holliday.’  His eyes, while he spoke, still rested
+steadily on me, and never once turned towards Arthur.  ‘I beg that Mr.
+Holliday will not mention to any one—least of all to his father—the
+events that have occurred, and the words that have passed, in this room.
+I entreat him to bury me in his memory, as, but for him, I might have
+been buried in my grave.  I cannot give my reasons for making this
+strange request.  I can only implore him to grant it.’
+
+His voice faltered for the first time, and he hid his face on the pillow.
+Arthur, completely bewildered, gave the required pledge.  I took young
+Holliday away with me, immediately afterwards, to the house of my friend;
+determining to go back to the Inn, and to see the medical student again
+before he had left in the morning.
+
+I returned to the Inn at eight o’clock, purposely abstaining from waking
+Arthur, who was sleeping off the past night’s excitement on one of my
+friend’s sofas.  A suspicion had occurred to me as soon as I was alone in
+my bedroom, which made me resolve that Holliday and the stranger whose
+life he had saved should not meet again, if I could prevent it.  I have
+already alluded to certain reports, or scandals, which I knew of,
+relating to the early life of Arthur’s father.  While I was thinking, in
+my bed, of what had passed at the Inn—of the change in the student’s
+pulse when he heard the name of Holliday; of the resemblance of
+expression that I had discovered between his face and Arthur’s; of the
+emphasis he had laid on those three words, ‘my own brother;’ and of his
+incomprehensible acknowledgment of his own illegitimacy—while I was
+thinking of these things, the reports I have mentioned suddenly flew into
+my mind, and linked themselves fast to the chain of my previous
+reflections.  Something within me whispered, ‘It is best that those two
+young men should not meet again.’  I felt it before I slept; I felt it
+when I woke; and I went, as I told you, alone to the Inn the next
+morning.
+
+I had missed my only opportunity of seeing my nameless patient again.  He
+had been gone nearly an hour when I inquired for him.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I have now told you everything that I know for certain, in relation to
+the man whom I brought back to life in the double-bedded room of the Inn
+at Doncaster.  What I have next to add is matter for inference and
+surmise, and is not, strictly speaking, matter of fact.
+
+I have to tell you, first, that the medical student turned out to be
+strangely and unaccountably right in assuming it as more than probable
+that Arthur Holliday would marry the young lady who had given him the
+water-colour drawing of the landscape.  That marriage took place a little
+more than a year after the events occurred which I have just been
+relating.  The young couple came to live in the neighbourhood in which I
+was then established in practice.  I was present at the wedding, and was
+rather surprised to find that Arthur was singularly reserved with me,
+both before and after his marriage, on the subject of the young lady’s
+prior engagement.  He only referred to it once, when we were alone,
+merely telling me, on that occasion, that his wife had done all that
+honour and duty required of her in the matter, and that the engagement
+had been broken off with the full approval of her parents.  I never heard
+more from him than this.  For three years he and his wife lived together
+happily.  At the expiration of that time, the symptoms of a serious
+illness first declared themselves in Mrs. Arthur Holliday.  It turned out
+to be a long, lingering, hopeless malady.  I attended her throughout.  We
+had been great friends when she was well, and we became more attached to
+each other than ever when she was ill.  I had many long and interesting
+conversations with her in the intervals when she suffered least.  The
+result of one of these conversations I may briefly relate, leaving you to
+draw any inferences from it that you please.
+
+The interview to which I refer, occurred shortly before her death.  I
+called one evening, as usual, and found her alone, with a look in her
+eyes which told me that she had been crying.  She only informed me at
+first, that she had been depressed in spirits; but, by little and little,
+she became more communicative, and confessed to me that she had been
+looking over some old letters, which had been addressed to her, before
+she had seen Arthur, by a man to whom she had been engaged to be married.
+I asked her how the engagement came to be broken off.  She replied that
+it had not been broken off, but that it had died out in a very mysterious
+way.  The person to whom she was engaged—her first love, she called
+him—was very poor, and there was no immediate prospect of their being
+married.  He followed my profession, and went abroad to study.  They had
+corresponded regularly, until the time when, as she believed, he had
+returned to England.  From that period she heard no more of him.  He was
+of a fretful, sensitive temperament; and she feared that she might have
+inadvertently done or said something that offended him.  However that
+might be, he had never written to her again; and, after waiting a year,
+she had married Arthur.  I asked when the first estrangement had begun,
+and found that the time at which she ceased to hear anything of her first
+lover exactly corresponded with the time at which I had been called in to
+my mysterious patient at The Two Robins Inn.
+
+A fortnight after that conversation, she died.  In course of time, Arthur
+married again.  Of late years, he has lived principally in London, and I
+have seen little or nothing of him.
+
+I have many years to pass over before I can approach to anything like a
+conclusion of this fragmentary narrative.  And even when that later
+period is reached, the little that I have to say will not occupy your
+attention for more than a few minutes.  Between six and seven years ago,
+the gentleman to whom I introduced you in this room, came to me, with
+good professional recommendations, to fill the position of my assistant.
+We met, not like strangers, but like friends—the only difference between
+us being, that I was very much surprised to see him, and that he did not
+appear to be at all surprised to see me.  If he was my son or my brother,
+I believe he could not be fonder of me than he is; but he has never
+volunteered any confidences since he has been here, on the subject of his
+past life.  I saw something that was familiar to me in his face when we
+first met; and yet it was also something that suggested the idea of
+change.  I had a notion once that my patient at the Inn might be a
+natural son of Mr. Holliday’s; I had another idea that he might also have
+been the man who was engaged to Arthur’s first wife; and I have a third
+idea, still clinging to me, that Mr. Lorn is the only man in England who
+could really enlighten me, if he chose, on both those doubtful points.
+His hair is not black, now, and his eyes are dimmer than the piercing
+eyes that I remember, but, for all that, he is very like the nameless
+medical student of my young days—very like him.  And, sometimes, when I
+come home late at night, and find him asleep, and wake him, he looks, in
+coming to, wonderfully like the stranger at Doncaster, as he raised
+himself in the bed on that memorable night!
+
+The Doctor paused.  Mr. Goodchild, who had been following every word that
+fell from his lips up to this time, leaned forward eagerly to ask a
+question.  Before he could say a word, the latch of the door was raised,
+without any warning sound of footsteps in the passage outside.  A long,
+white, bony hand appeared through the opening, gently pushing the door,
+which was prevented from working freely on its hinges by a fold in the
+carpet under it.
+
+‘That hand!  Look at that hand, Doctor!’ said Mr. Goodchild, touching
+him.
+
+At the same moment, the Doctor looked at Mr. Goodchild, and whispered to
+him, significantly:
+
+‘Hush! he has come back.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+THE Cumberland Doctor’s mention of Doncaster Races, inspired Mr. Francis
+Goodchild with the idea of going down to Doncaster to see the races.
+Doncaster being a good way off, and quite out of the way of the Idle
+Apprentices (if anything could be out of their way, who had no way), it
+necessarily followed that Francis perceived Doncaster in the race-week to
+be, of all possible idleness, the particular idleness that would
+completely satisfy him.
+
+Thomas, with an enforced idleness grafted on the natural and voluntary
+power of his disposition, was not of this mind; objecting that a man
+compelled to lie on his back on a floor, a sofa, a table, a line of
+chairs, or anything he could get to lie upon, was not in racing
+condition, and that he desired nothing better than to lie where he was,
+enjoying himself in looking at the flies on the ceiling.  But, Francis
+Goodchild, who had been walking round his companion in a circuit of
+twelve miles for two days, and had begun to doubt whether it was reserved
+for him ever to be idle in his life, not only overpowered this objection,
+but even converted Thomas Idle to a scheme he formed (another idle
+inspiration), of conveying the said Thomas to the sea-coast, and putting
+his injured leg under a stream of salt-water.
+
+Plunging into this happy conception headforemost, Mr. Goodchild
+immediately referred to the county-map, and ardently discovered that the
+most delicious piece of sea-coast to be found within the limits of
+England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and the Channel
+Islands, all summed up together, was Allonby on the coast of Cumberland.
+There was the coast of Scotland opposite to Allonby, said Mr. Goodchild
+with enthusiasm; there was a fine Scottish mountain on that Scottish
+coast; there were Scottish lights to be seen shining across the glorious
+Channel, and at Allonby itself there was every idle luxury (no doubt)
+that a watering-place could offer to the heart of idle man.  Moreover,
+said Mr. Goodchild, with his finger on the map, this exquisite retreat
+was approached by a coach-road, from a railway-station called Aspatria—a
+name, in a manner, suggestive of the departed glories of Greece,
+associated with one of the most engaging and most famous of Greek women.
+On this point, Mr. Goodchild continued at intervals to breathe a vein of
+classic fancy and eloquence exceedingly irksome to Mr. Idle, until it
+appeared that the honest English pronunciation of that Cumberland country
+shortened Aspatria into ‘Spatter.’  After this supplementary discovery,
+Mr. Goodchild said no more about it.
+
+By way of Spatter, the crippled Idle was carried, hoisted, pushed, poked,
+and packed, into and out of carriages, into and out of beds, into and out
+of tavern resting-places, until he was brought at length within sniff of
+the sea.  And now, behold the apprentices gallantly riding into Allonby
+in a one-horse fly, bent upon staying in that peaceful marine valley
+until the turbulent Doncaster time shall come round upon the wheel, in
+its turn among what are in sporting registers called the ‘Fixtures’ for
+the month.
+
+‘Do you see Allonby!’ asked Thomas Idle.
+
+‘I don’t see it yet,’ said Francis, looking out of window.
+
+‘It must be there,’ said Thomas Idle.
+
+‘I don’t see it,’ returned Francis.
+
+‘It must be there,’ repeated Thomas Idle, fretfully.
+
+‘Lord bless me!’ exclaimed Francis, drawing in his head, ‘I suppose this
+is it!’
+
+‘A watering-place,’ retorted Thomas Idle, with the pardonable sharpness
+of an invalid, ‘can’t be five gentlemen in straw hats, on a form on one
+side of a door, and four ladies in hats and falls, on a form on another
+side of a door, and three geese in a dirty little brook before them, and
+a boy’s legs hanging over a bridge (with a boy’s body I suppose on the
+other side of the parapet), and a donkey running away.  What are you
+talking about?’
+
+‘Allonby, gentlemen,’ said the most comfortable of landladies as she
+opened one door of the carriage; ‘Allonby, gentlemen,’ said the most
+attentive of landlords, as he opened the other.
+
+Thomas Idle yielded his arm to the ready Goodchild, and descended from
+the vehicle.  Thomas, now just able to grope his way along, in a
+doubled-up condition, with the aid of two thick sticks, was no bad
+embodiment of Commodore Trunnion, or of one of those many gallant
+Admirals of the stage, who have all ample fortunes, gout, thick sticks,
+tempers, wards, and nephews.  With this distinguished naval appearance
+upon him, Thomas made a crab-like progress up a clean little bulk-headed
+staircase, into a clean little bulk-headed room, where he slowly
+deposited himself on a sofa, with a stick on either hand of him, looking
+exceedingly grim.
+
+‘Francis,’ said Thomas Idle, ‘what do you think of this place?’
+
+‘I think,’ returned Mr. Goodchild, in a glowing way, ‘it is everything we
+expected.’
+
+‘Hah!’ said Thomas Idle.
+
+‘There is the sea,’ cried Mr. Goodchild, pointing out of window; ‘and
+here,’ pointing to the lunch on the table, ‘are shrimps.  Let us—’ here
+Mr. Goodchild looked out of window, as if in search of something, and
+looked in again,—‘let us eat ’em.’
+
+The shrimps eaten and the dinner ordered, Mr. Goodchild went out to
+survey the watering-place.  As Chorus of the Drama, without whom Thomas
+could make nothing of the scenery, he by-and-by returned, to have the
+following report screwed out of him.
+
+In brief, it was the most delightful place ever seen.
+
+‘But,’ Thomas Idle asked, ‘where is it?’
+
+‘It’s what you may call generally up and down the beach, here and there,’
+said Mr. Goodchild, with a twist of his hand.
+
+‘Proceed,’ said Thomas Idle.
+
+It was, Mr. Goodchild went on to say, in cross-examination, what you
+might call a primitive place.  Large?  No, it was not large.  Who ever
+expected it would be large?  Shape?  What a question to ask!  No shape.
+What sort of a street?  Why, no street.  Shops?  Yes, of course (quite
+indignant).  How many?  Who ever went into a place to count the shops?
+Ever so many.  Six?  Perhaps.  A library?  Why, of course (indignant
+again).  Good collection of books?  Most likely—couldn’t say—had seen
+nothing in it but a pair of scales.  Any reading-room?  Of course, there
+was a reading-room.  Where?  Where! why, over there.  Where was over
+there?  Why, _there_!  Let Mr. Idle carry his eye to that bit of waste
+ground above high-water mark, where the rank grass and loose stones were
+most in a litter; and he would see a sort of long, ruinous brick loft,
+next door to a ruinous brick out-house, which loft had a ladder outside,
+to get up by.  That was the reading-room, and if Mr. Idle didn’t like the
+idea of a weaver’s shuttle throbbing under a reading-room, that was his
+look out.  _He_ was not to dictate, Mr. Goodchild supposed (indignant
+again), to the company.
+
+‘By-the-by,’ Thomas Idle observed; ‘the company?’
+
+Well! (Mr. Goodchild went on to report) very nice company.  Where were
+they?  Why, there they were.  Mr. Idle could see the tops of their hats,
+he supposed.  What?  Those nine straw hats again, five gentlemen’s and
+four ladies’?  Yes, to be sure.  Mr. Goodchild hoped the company were not
+to be expected to wear helmets, to please Mr. Idle.
+
+Beginning to recover his temper at about this point, Mr. Goodchild
+voluntarily reported that if you wanted to be primitive, you could be
+primitive here, and that if you wanted to be idle, you could be idle
+here.  In the course of some days, he added, that there were three
+fishing-boats, but no rigging, and that there were plenty of fishermen
+who never fished.  That they got their living entirely by looking at the
+ocean.  What nourishment they looked out of it to support their strength,
+he couldn’t say; but, he supposed it was some sort of Iodine.  The place
+was full of their children, who were always upside down on the public
+buildings (two small bridges over the brook), and always hurting
+themselves or one another, so that their wailings made more continual
+noise in the air than could have been got in a busy place.  The houses
+people lodged in, were nowhere in particular, and were in capital
+accordance with the beach; being all more or less cracked and damaged as
+its shells were, and all empty—as its shells were.  Among them, was an
+edifice of destitute appearance, with a number of wall-eyed windows in
+it, looking desperately out to Scotland as if for help, which said it was
+a Bazaar (and it ought to know), and where you might buy anything you
+wanted—supposing what you wanted, was a little camp-stool or a child’s
+wheelbarrow.  The brook crawled or stopped between the houses and the
+sea, and the donkey was always running away, and when he got into the
+brook he was pelted out with stones, which never hit him, and which
+always hit some of the children who were upside down on the public
+buildings, and made their lamentations louder.  This donkey was the
+public excitement of Allonby, and was probably supported at the public
+expense.
+
+The foregoing descriptions, delivered in separate items, on separate days
+of adventurous discovery, Mr. Goodchild severally wound up, by looking
+out of window, looking in again, and saying, ‘But there is the sea, and
+here are the shrimps—let us eat ’em.’
+
+There were fine sunsets at Allonby when the low flat beach, with its
+pools of water and its dry patches, changed into long bars of silver and
+gold in various states of burnishing, and there were fine views—on fine
+days—of the Scottish coast.  But, when it rained at Allonby, Allonby
+thrown back upon its ragged self, became a kind of place which the donkey
+seemed to have found out, and to have his highly sagacious reasons for
+wishing to bolt from.  Thomas Idle observed, too, that Mr. Goodchild,
+with a noble show of disinterestedness, became every day more ready to
+walk to Maryport and back, for letters; and suspicions began to harbour
+in the mind of Thomas, that his friend deceived him, and that Maryport
+was a preferable place.
+
+Therefore, Thomas said to Francis on a day when they had looked at the
+sea and eaten the shrimps, ‘My mind misgives me, Goodchild, that you go
+to Maryport, like the boy in the story-book, to ask _it_ to be idle with
+you.’
+
+‘Judge, then,’ returned Francis, adopting the style of the story-book,
+‘with what success.  I go to a region which is a bit of water-side
+Bristol, with a slice of Wapping, a seasoning of Wolverhampton, and a
+garnish of Portsmouth, and I say, “Will _you_ come and be idle with me?”
+And it answers, “No; for I am a great deal too vaporous, and a great deal
+too rusty, and a great deal too muddy, and a great deal too dirty
+altogether; and I have ships to load, and pitch and tar to boil, and iron
+to hammer, and steam to get up, and smoke to make, and stone to quarry,
+and fifty other disagreeable things to do, and I can’t be idle with you.”
+Then I go into jagged up-hill and down-hill streets, where I am in the
+pastrycook’s shop at one moment, and next moment in savage fastnesses of
+moor and morass, beyond the confines of civilisation, and I say to those
+murky and black-dusty streets, “Will _you_ come and be idle with me?”  To
+which they reply, “No, we can’t, indeed, for we haven’t the spirits, and
+we are startled by the echo of your feet on the sharp pavement, and we
+have so many goods in our shop-windows which nobody wants, and we have so
+much to do for a limited public which never comes to us to be done for,
+that we are altogether out of sorts and can’t enjoy ourselves with any
+one.”  So I go to the Post-office, and knock at the shutter, and I say to
+the Post-master, “Will _you_ come and be idle with me?”  To which he
+rejoins, “No, I really can’t, for I live, as you may see, in such a very
+little Post-office, and pass my life behind such a very little shutter,
+that my hand, when I put it out, is as the hand of a giant crammed
+through the window of a dwarf’s house at a fair, and I am a mere
+Post-office anchorite in a cell much too small for him, and I can’t get
+out, and I can’t get in, and I have no space to be idle in, even if I
+would.”  So, the boy,’ said Mr. Goodchild, concluding the tale, ‘comes
+back with the letters after all, and lives happy never afterwards.’
+
+But it may, not unreasonably, be asked—while Francis Goodchild was
+wandering hither and thither, storing his mind with perpetual observation
+of men and things, and sincerely believing himself to be the laziest
+creature in existence all the time—how did Thomas Idle, crippled and
+confined to the house, contrive to get through the hours of the day?
+
+Prone on the sofa, Thomas made no attempt to get through the hours, but
+passively allowed the hours to get through _him_.  Where other men in his
+situation would have read books and improved their minds, Thomas slept
+and rested his body.  Where other men would have pondered anxiously over
+their future prospects, Thomas dreamed lazily of his past life.  The one
+solitary thing he did, which most other people would have done in his
+place, was to resolve on making certain alterations and improvements in
+his mode of existence, as soon as the effects of the misfortune that had
+overtaken him had all passed away.  Remembering that the current of his
+life had hitherto oozed along in one smooth stream of laziness,
+occasionally troubled on the surface by a slight passing ripple of
+industry, his present ideas on the subject of self-reform, inclined
+him—not as the reader may be disposed to imagine, to project schemes for
+a new existence of enterprise and exertion—but, on the contrary, to
+resolve that he would never, if he could possibly help it, be active or
+industrious again, throughout the whole of his future career.
+
+It is due to Mr. Idle to relate that his mind sauntered towards this
+peculiar conclusion on distinct and logically-producible grounds.  After
+reviewing, quite at his ease, and with many needful intervals of repose,
+the generally-placid spectacle of his past existence, he arrived at the
+discovery that all the great disasters which had tried his patience and
+equanimity in early life, had been caused by his having allowed himself
+to be deluded into imitating some pernicious example of activity and
+industry that had been set him by others.  The trials to which he here
+alludes were three in number, and may be thus reckoned up: First, the
+disaster of being an unpopular and a thrashed boy at school; secondly,
+the disaster of falling seriously ill; thirdly, the disaster of becoming
+acquainted with a great bore.
+
+The first disaster occurred after Thomas had been an idle and a popular
+boy at school, for some happy years.  One Christmas-time, he was
+stimulated by the evil example of a companion, whom he had always trusted
+and liked, to be untrue to himself, and to try for a prize at the ensuing
+half-yearly examination.  He did try, and he got a prize—how, he did not
+distinctly know at the moment, and cannot remember now.  No sooner,
+however, had the book—Moral Hints to the Young on the Value of Time—been
+placed in his hands, than the first troubles of his life began.  The idle
+boys deserted him, as a traitor to their cause.  The industrious boys
+avoided him, as a dangerous interloper; one of their number, who had
+always won the prize on previous occasions, expressing just resentment at
+the invasion of his privileges by calling Thomas into the play-ground,
+and then and there administering to him the first sound and genuine
+thrashing that he had ever received in his life.  Unpopular from that
+moment, as a beaten boy, who belonged to no side and was rejected by all
+parties, young Idle soon lost caste with his masters, as he had
+previously lost caste with his schoolfellows.  He had forfeited the
+comfortable reputation of being the one lazy member of the youthful
+community whom it was quite hopeless to punish.  Never again did he hear
+the headmaster say reproachfully to an industrious boy who had committed
+a fault, ‘I might have expected this in Thomas Idle, but it is
+inexcusable, sir, in you, who know better.’  Never more, after winning
+that fatal prize, did he escape the retributive imposition, or the
+avenging birch.  From that time, the masters made him work, and the boys
+would not let him play.  From that time his social position steadily
+declined, and his life at school became a perpetual burden to him.
+
+So, again, with the second disaster.  While Thomas was lazy, he was a
+model of health.  His first attempt at active exertion and his first
+suffering from severe illness are connected together by the intimate
+relations of cause and effect.  Shortly after leaving school, he
+accompanied a party of friends to a cricket-field, in his natural and
+appropriate character of spectator only.  On the ground it was discovered
+that the players fell short of the required number, and facile Thomas was
+persuaded to assist in making up the complement.  At a certain appointed
+time, he was roused from peaceful slumber in a dry ditch, and placed
+before three wickets with a bat in his hand.  Opposite to him, behind
+three more wickets, stood one of his bosom friends, filling the situation
+(as he was informed) of bowler.  No words can describe Mr. Idle’s horror
+and amazement, when he saw this young man—on ordinary occasions, the
+meekest and mildest of human beings—suddenly contract his eye-brows,
+compress his lips, assume the aspect of an infuriated savage, run back a
+few steps, then run forward, and, without the slightest previous
+provocation, hurl a detestably hard ball with all his might straight at
+Thomas’s legs.  Stimulated to preternatural activity of body and
+sharpness of eye by the instinct of self-preservation, Mr. Idle
+contrived, by jumping deftly aside at the right moment, and by using his
+bat (ridiculously narrow as it was for the purpose) as a shield, to
+preserve his life and limbs from the dastardly attack that had been made
+on both, to leave the full force of the deadly missile to strike his
+wicket instead of his leg; and to end the innings, so far as his side was
+concerned, by being immediately bowled out.  Grateful for his escape, he
+was about to return to the dry ditch, when he was peremptorily stopped,
+and told that the other side was ‘going in,’ and that he was expected to
+‘field.’  His conception of the whole art and mystery of ‘fielding,’ may
+be summed up in the three words of serious advice which he privately
+administered to himself on that trying occasion—avoid the ball.
+Fortified by this sound and salutary principle, he took his own course,
+impervious alike to ridicule and abuse.  Whenever the ball came near him,
+he thought of his shins, and got out of the way immediately.  ‘Catch it!’
+‘Stop it!’  ‘Pitch it up!’ were cries that passed by him like the idle
+wind that he regarded not.  He ducked under it, he jumped over it, he
+whisked himself away from it on either side.  Never once, through the
+whole innings did he and the ball come together on anything approaching
+to intimate terms.  The unnatural activity of body which was necessarily
+called forth for the accomplishment of this result threw Thomas Idle, for
+the first time in his life, into a perspiration.  The perspiration, in
+consequence of his want of practice in the management of that particular
+result of bodily activity, was suddenly checked; the inevitable chill
+succeeded; and that, in its turn, was followed by a fever.  For the first
+time since his birth, Mr. Idle found himself confined to his bed for many
+weeks together, wasted and worn by a long illness, of which his own
+disastrous muscular exertion had been the sole first cause.
+
+The third occasion on which Thomas found reason to reproach himself
+bitterly for the mistake of having attempted to be industrious, was
+connected with his choice of a calling in life.  Having no interest in
+the Church, he appropriately selected the next best profession for a lazy
+man in England—the Bar.  Although the Benchers of the Inns of Court have
+lately abandoned their good old principles, and oblige their students to
+make some show of studying, in Mr. Idle’s time no such innovation as this
+existed.  Young men who aspired to the honourable title of barrister
+were, very properly, not asked to learn anything of the law, but were
+merely required to eat a certain number of dinners at the table of their
+Hall, and to pay a certain sum of money; and were called to the Bar as
+soon as they could prove that they had sufficiently complied with these
+extremely sensible regulations.  Never did Thomas move more harmoniously
+in concert with his elders and betters than when he was qualifying
+himself for admission among the barristers of his native country.  Never
+did he feel more deeply what real laziness was in all the serene majesty
+of its nature, than on the memorable day when he was called to the Bar,
+after having carefully abstained from opening his law-books during his
+period of probation, except to fall asleep over them.  How he could ever
+again have become industrious, even for the shortest period, after that
+great reward conferred upon his idleness, quite passes his comprehension.
+The kind Benchers did everything they could to show him the folly of
+exerting himself.  They wrote out his probationary exercise for him, and
+never expected him even to take the trouble of reading it through when it
+was written.  They invited him, with seven other choice spirits as lazy
+as himself, to come and be called to the Bar, while they were sitting
+over their wine and fruit after dinner.  They put his oaths of
+allegiance, and his dreadful official denunciations of the Pope and the
+Pretender, so gently into his mouth, that he hardly knew how the words
+got there.  They wheeled all their chairs softly round from the table,
+and sat surveying the young barristers with their backs to their bottles,
+rather than stand up, or adjourn to hear the exercises read.  And when
+Mr. Idle and the seven unlabouring neophytes, ranged in order, as a
+class, with their backs considerately placed against a screen, had begun,
+in rotation, to read the exercises which they had not written, even then,
+each Bencher, true to the great lazy principle of the whole proceeding,
+stopped each neophyte before he had stammered through his first line, and
+bowed to him, and told him politely that he was a barrister from that
+moment.  This was all the ceremony.  It was followed by a social supper,
+and by the presentation, in accordance with ancient custom, of a pound of
+sweetmeats and a bottle of Madeira, offered in the way of needful
+refreshment, by each grateful neophyte to each beneficent Bencher.  It
+may seem inconceivable that Thomas should ever have forgotten the great
+do-nothing principle instilled by such a ceremony as this; but it is,
+nevertheless, true, that certain designing students of industrious habits
+found him out, took advantage of his easy humour, persuaded him that it
+was discreditable to be a barrister and to know nothing whatever about
+the law, and lured him, by the force of their own evil example, into a
+conveyancer’s chambers, to make up for lost time, and to qualify himself
+for practice at the Bar.  After a fortnight of self-delusion, the curtain
+fell from his eyes; he resumed his natural character, and shut up his
+books.  But the retribution which had hitherto always followed his little
+casual errors of industry followed them still.  He could get away from
+the conveyancer’s chambers, but he could not get away from one of the
+pupils, who had taken a fancy to him,—a tall, serious, raw-boned,
+hard-working, disputatious pupil, with ideas of his own about reforming
+the Law of Real Property, who has been the scourge of Mr. Idle’s
+existence ever since the fatal day when he fell into the mistake of
+attempting to study the law.  Before that time his friends were all
+sociable idlers like himself.  Since that time the burden of bearing with
+a hard-working young man has become part of his lot in life.  Go where he
+will now, he can never feel certain that the raw-boned pupil is not
+affectionately waiting for him round a corner, to tell him a little more
+about the Law of Real Property.  Suffer as he may under the infliction,
+he can never complain, for he must always remember, with unavailing
+regret, that he has his own thoughtless industry to thank for first
+exposing him to the great social calamity of knowing a bore.
+
+These events of his past life, with the significant results that they
+brought about, pass drowsily through Thomas Idle’s memory, while he lies
+alone on the sofa at Allonby and elsewhere, dreaming away the time which
+his fellow-apprentice gets through so actively out of doors.  Remembering
+the lesson of laziness which his past disasters teach, and bearing in
+mind also the fact that he is crippled in one leg because he exerted
+himself to go up a mountain, when he ought to have known that his proper
+course of conduct was to stop at the bottom of it, he holds now, and will
+for the future firmly continue to hold, by his new resolution never to be
+industrious again, on any pretence whatever, for the rest of his life.
+The physical results of his accident have been related in a previous
+chapter.  The moral results now stand on record; and, with the
+enumeration of these, that part of the present narrative which is
+occupied by the Episode of The Sprained Ankle may now perhaps be
+considered, in all its aspects, as finished and complete.
+
+‘How do you propose that we get through this present afternoon and
+evening?’ demanded Thomas Idle, after two or three hours of the foregoing
+reflections at Allonby.
+
+Mr. Goodchild faltered, looked out of window, looked in again, and said,
+as he had so often said before, ‘There is the sea, and here are the
+shrimps;—let us eat ’em’!’
+
+But, the wise donkey was at that moment in the act of bolting: not with
+the irresolution of his previous efforts which had been wanting in
+sustained force of character, but with real vigour of purpose: shaking
+the dust off his mane and hind-feet at Allonby, and tearing away from it,
+as if he had nobly made up his mind that he never would be taken alive.
+At sight of this inspiring spectacle, which was visible from his sofa,
+Thomas Idle stretched his neck and dwelt upon it rapturously.
+
+‘Francis Goodchild,’ he then said, turning to his companion with a solemn
+air, ‘this is a delightful little Inn, excellently kept by the most
+comfortable of landladies and the most attentive of landlords, but—the
+donkey’s right!’
+
+The words, ‘There is the sea, and here are the—’ again trembled on the
+lips of Goodchild, unaccompanied however by any sound.
+
+‘Let us instantly pack the portmanteaus,’ said Thomas Idle, ‘pay the
+bill, and order a fly out, with instructions to the driver to follow the
+donkey!’
+
+Mr. Goodchild, who had only wanted encouragement to disclose the real
+state of his feelings, and who had been pining beneath his weary secret,
+now burst into tears, and confessed that he thought another day in the
+place would be the death of him.
+
+So, the two idle apprentices followed the donkey until the night was far
+advanced.  Whether he was recaptured by the town-council, or is bolting
+at this hour through the United Kingdom, they know not.  They hope he may
+be still bolting; if so, their best wishes are with him.
+
+It entered Mr. Idle’s head, on the borders of Cumberland, that there
+could be no idler place to stay at, except by snatches of a few minutes
+each, than a railway station.  ‘An intermediate station on a line—a
+junction—anything of that sort,’ Thomas suggested.  Mr. Goodchild
+approved of the idea as eccentric, and they journeyed on and on, until
+they came to such a station where there was an Inn.
+
+‘Here,’ said Thomas, ‘we may be luxuriously lazy; other people will
+travel for us, as it were, and we shall laugh at their folly.’
+
+It was a Junction-Station, where the wooden razors before mentioned
+shaved the air very often, and where the sharp electric-telegraph bell
+was in a very restless condition.  All manner of cross-lines of rails
+came zig-zagging into it, like a Congress of iron vipers; and, a little
+way out of it, a pointsman in an elevated signal-box was constantly going
+through the motions of drawing immense quantities of beer at a
+public-house bar.  In one direction, confused perspectives of embankments
+and arches were to be seen from the platform; in the other, the rails
+soon disentangled themselves into two tracks and shot away under a
+bridge, and curved round a corner.  Sidings were there, in which empty
+luggage-vans and cattle-boxes often butted against each other as if they
+couldn’t agree; and warehouses were there, in which great quantities of
+goods seemed to have taken the veil (of the consistency of tarpaulin),
+and to have retired from the world without any hope of getting back to
+it.  Refreshment-rooms were there; one, for the hungry and thirsty Iron
+Locomotives where their coke and water were ready, and of good quality,
+for they were dangerous to play tricks with; the other, for the hungry
+and thirsty human Locomotives, who might take what they could get, and
+whose chief consolation was provided in the form of three terrific urns
+or vases of white metal, containing nothing, each forming a breastwork
+for a defiant and apparently much-injured woman.
+
+Established at this Station, Mr. Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild
+resolved to enjoy it.  But, its contrasts were very violent, and there
+was also an infection in it.
+
+First, as to its contrasts.  They were only two, but they were Lethargy
+and Madness.  The Station was either totally unconscious, or wildly
+raving.  By day, in its unconscious state, it looked as if no life could
+come to it,—as if it were all rust, dust, and ashes—as if the last train
+for ever, had gone without issuing any Return-Tickets—as if the last
+Engine had uttered its last shriek and burst.  One awkward shave of the
+air from the wooden razor, and everything changed.  Tight office-doors
+flew open, panels yielded, books, newspapers, travelling-caps and
+wrappers broke out of brick walls, money chinked, conveyances oppressed
+by nightmares of luggage came careering into the yard, porters started up
+from secret places, ditto the much-injured women, the shining bell, who
+lived in a little tray on stilts by himself, flew into a man’s hand and
+clamoured violently.  The pointsman aloft in the signal-box made the
+motions of drawing, with some difficulty, hogsheads of beer.  Down Train!
+More bear!  Up Train!  More beer.  Cross junction Train!  More beer!
+Cattle Train!  More beer.  Goods Train!  Simmering, whistling, trembling,
+rumbling, thundering.  Trains on the whole confusion of intersecting
+rails, crossing one another, bumping one another, hissing one another,
+backing to go forward, tearing into distance to come close.  People
+frantic.  Exiles seeking restoration to their native carriages, and
+banished to remoter climes.  More beer and more bell.  Then, in a minute,
+the Station relapsed into stupor as the stoker of the Cattle Train, the
+last to depart, went gliding out of it, wiping the long nose of his
+oil-can with a dirty pocket-handkerchief.
+
+By night, in its unconscious state, the Station was not so much as
+visible.  Something in the air, like an enterprising chemist’s
+established in business on one of the boughs of Jack’s beanstalk, was all
+that could be discerned of it under the stars.  In a moment it would
+break out, a constellation of gas.  In another moment, twenty rival
+chemists, on twenty rival beanstalks, came into existence.  Then, the
+Furies would be seen, waving their lurid torches up and down the confused
+perspectives of embankments and arches—would be heard, too, wailing and
+shrieking.  Then, the Station would be full of palpitating trains, as in
+the day; with the heightening difference that they were not so clearly
+seen as in the day, whereas the Station walls, starting forward under the
+gas, like a hippopotamus’s eyes, dazzled the human locomotives with the
+sauce-bottle, the cheap music, the bedstead, the distorted range of
+buildings where the patent safes are made, the gentleman in the rain with
+the registered umbrella, the lady returning from the ball with the
+registered respirator, and all their other embellishments.  And now, the
+human locomotives, creased as to their countenances and purblind as to
+their eyes, would swarm forth in a heap, addressing themselves to the
+mysterious urns and the much-injured women; while the iron locomotives,
+dripping fire and water, shed their steam about plentifully, making the
+dull oxen in their cages, with heads depressed, and foam hanging from
+their mouths as their red looks glanced fearfully at the surrounding
+terrors, seem as though they had been drinking at half-frozen waters and
+were hung with icicles.  Through the same steam would be caught glimpses
+of their fellow-travellers, the sheep, getting their white kid faces
+together, away from the bars, and stuffing the interstices with trembling
+wool.  Also, down among the wheels, of the man with the sledge-hammer,
+ringing the axles of the fast night-train; against whom the oxen have a
+misgiving that he is the man with the pole-axe who is to come by-and-by,
+and so the nearest of them try to get back, and get a purchase for a
+thrust at him through the bars.  Suddenly, the bell would ring, the steam
+would stop with one hiss and a yell, the chemists on the beanstalks would
+be busy, the avenging Furies would bestir themselves, the fast
+night-train would melt from eye and ear, the other trains going their
+ways more slowly would be heard faintly rattling in the distance like
+old-fashioned watches running down, the sauce-bottle and cheap music
+retired from view, even the bedstead went to bed, and there was no such
+visible thing as the Station to vex the cool wind in its blowing, or
+perhaps the autumn lightning, as it found out the iron rails.
+
+The infection of the Station was this:—When it was in its raving state,
+the Apprentices found it impossible to be there, without labouring under
+the delusion that they were in a hurry.  To Mr. Goodchild, whose ideas of
+idleness were so imperfect, this was no unpleasant hallucination, and
+accordingly that gentleman went through great exertions in yielding to
+it, and running up and down the platform, jostling everybody, under the
+impression that he had a highly important mission somewhere, and had not
+a moment to lose.  But, to Thomas Idle, this contagion was so very
+unacceptable an incident of the situation, that he struck on the fourth
+day, and requested to be moved.
+
+‘This place fills me with a dreadful sensation,’ said Thomas, ‘of having
+something to do.  Remove me, Francis.’
+
+‘Where would you like to go next?’ was the question of the ever-engaging
+Goodchild.
+
+‘I have heard there is a good old Inn at Lancaster, established in a fine
+old house: an Inn where they give you Bride-cake every day after dinner,’
+said Thomas Idle.  ‘Let us eat Bride-cake without the trouble of being
+married, or of knowing anybody in that ridiculous dilemma.’
+
+Mr. Goodchild, with a lover’s sigh, assented.  They departed from the
+Station in a violent hurry (for which, it is unnecessary to observe,
+there was not the least occasion), and were delivered at the fine old
+house at Lancaster, on the same night.
+
+It is Mr. Goodchild’s opinion, that if a visitor on his arrival at
+Lancaster could be accommodated with a pole which would push the opposite
+side of the street some yards farther off, it would be better for all
+parties.  Protesting against being required to live in a trench, and
+obliged to speculate all day upon what the people can possibly be doing
+within a mysterious opposite window, which is a shop-window to look at,
+but not a shop-window in respect of its offering nothing for sale and
+declining to give any account whatever of itself, Mr. Goodchild concedes
+Lancaster to be a pleasant place.  A place dropped in the midst of a
+charming landscape, a place with a fine ancient fragment of castle, a
+place of lovely walks, a place possessing staid old houses richly fitted
+with old Honduras mahogany, which has grown so dark with time that it
+seems to have got something of a retrospective mirror-quality into
+itself, and to show the visitor, in the depth of its grain, through all
+its polish, the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old
+Lancaster merchants.  And Mr. Goodchild adds that the stones of Lancaster
+do sometimes whisper, even yet, of rich men passed away—upon whose great
+prosperity some of these old doorways frowned sullen in the brightest
+weather—that their slave-gain turned to curses, as the Arabian Wizard’s
+money turned to leaves, and that no good ever came of it, even unto the
+third and fourth generations, until it was wasted and gone.
+
+It was a gallant sight to behold, the Sunday procession of the Lancaster
+elders to Church—all in black, and looking fearfully like a funeral
+without the Body—under the escort of Three Beadles.
+
+‘Think,’ said Francis, as he stood at the Inn window, admiring, ‘of being
+taken to the sacred edifice by three Beadles!  I have, in my early time,
+been taken out of it by one Beadle; but, to be taken into it by three, O
+Thomas, is a distinction I shall never enjoy!’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+WHEN Mr. Goodchild had looked out of the Lancaster Inn window for two
+hours on end, with great perseverance, he begun to entertain a misgiving
+that he was growing industrious.  He therefore set himself next, to
+explore the country from the tops of all the steep hills in the
+neighbourhood.
+
+He came back at dinner-time, red and glowing, to tell Thomas Idle what he
+had seen.  Thomas, on his back reading, listened with great composure,
+and asked him whether he really had gone up those hills, and bothered
+himself with those views, and walked all those miles?
+
+‘Because I want to know,’ added Thomas, ‘what you would say of it, if you
+were obliged to do it?’
+
+‘It would be different, then,’ said Francis.  ‘It would be work, then;
+now, it’s play.’
+
+‘Play!’ replied Thomas Idle, utterly repudiating the reply.  ‘Play!  Here
+is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting
+himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always
+under articles to fight a match for the champion’s belt, and he calls it
+Play!  Play!’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one
+boot in the air.  ‘You _can’t_ play.  You don’t know what it is.  You
+make work of everything.’
+
+The bright Goodchild amiably smiled.
+
+‘So you do,’ said Thomas.  ‘I mean it.  To me you are an absolutely
+terrible fellow.  You do nothing like another man.  Where another fellow
+would fall into a footbath of action or emotion, you fall into a mine.
+Where any other fellow would be a painted butterfly, you are a fiery
+dragon.  Where another man would stake a sixpence, you stake your
+existence.  If you were to go up in a balloon, you would make for Heaven;
+and if you were to dive into the depths of the earth, nothing short of
+the other place would content you.  What a fellow you are, Francis!’  The
+cheerful Goodchild laughed.
+
+‘It’s all very well to laugh, but I wonder you don’t feel it to be
+serious,’ said Idle.  ‘A man who can do nothing by halves appears to me
+to be a fearful man.’
+
+‘Tom, Tom,’ returned Goodchild, ‘if I can do nothing by halves, and be
+nothing by halves, it’s pretty clear that you must take me as a whole,
+and make the best of me.’
+
+With this philosophical rejoinder, the airy Goodchild clapped Mr. Idle on
+the shoulder in a final manner, and they sat down to dinner.
+
+‘By-the-by,’ said Goodchild, ‘I have been over a lunatic asylum too,
+since I have been out.’
+
+‘He has been,’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, casting up his eyes, ‘over a
+lunatic asylum!  Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain
+Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy Commissioner of
+himself—for nothing!’
+
+‘An immense place,’ said Goodchild, ‘admirable offices, very good
+arrangements, very good attendants; altogether a remarkable place.’
+
+‘And what did you see there?’ asked Mr. Idle, adapting Hamlet’s advice to
+the occasion, and assuming the virtue of interest, though he had it not.
+
+‘The usual thing,’ said Francis Goodchild, with a sigh.  ‘Long groves of
+blighted men-and-women-trees; interminable avenues of hopeless faces;
+numbers, without the slightest power of really combining for any earthly
+purpose; a society of human creatures who have nothing in common but that
+they have all lost the power of being humanly social with one another.’
+
+‘Take a glass of wine with me,’ said Thomas Idle, ‘and let _us_ be
+social.’
+
+‘In one gallery, Tom,’ pursued Francis Goodchild, ‘which looked to me
+about the length of the Long Walk at Windsor, more or less—’
+
+‘Probably less,’ observed Thomas Idle.
+
+‘In one gallery, which was otherwise clear of patients (for they were all
+out), there was a poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, with a perplexed
+brow and a pensive face, stooping low over the matting on the floor, and
+picking out with his thumb and forefinger the course of its fibres.  The
+afternoon sun was slanting in at the large end-window, and there were
+cross patches of light and shade all down the vista, made by the unseen
+windows and the open doors of the little sleeping-cells on either side.
+In about the centre of the perspective, under an arch, regardless of the
+pleasant weather, regardless of the solitude, regardless of approaching
+footsteps, was the poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, poring over the
+matting.  “What are you doing there?” said my conductor, when we came to
+him.  He looked up, and pointed to the matting.  “I wouldn’t do that, I
+think,” said my conductor, kindly; “if I were you, I would go and read,
+or I would lie down if I felt tired; but I wouldn’t do that.”  The
+patient considered a moment, and vacantly answered, “No, sir, I won’t;
+I’ll—I’ll go and read,” and so he lamely shuffled away into one of the
+little rooms.  I turned my head before we had gone many paces.  He had
+already come out again, and was again poring over the matting, and
+tracking out its fibres with his thumb and forefinger.  I stopped to look
+at him, and it came into my mind, that probably the course of those
+fibres as they plaited in and out, over and under, was the only course of
+things in the whole wide world that it was left to him to understand—that
+his darkening intellect had narrowed down to the small cleft of light
+which showed him, “This piece was twisted this way, went in here, passed
+under, came out there, was carried on away here to the right where I now
+put my finger on it, and in this progress of events, the thing was made
+and came to be here.”  Then, I wondered whether he looked into the
+matting, next, to see if it could show him anything of the process
+through which _he_ came to be there, so strangely poring over it.  Then,
+I thought how all of us, GOD help us! in our different ways are poring
+over our bits of matting, blindly enough, and what confusions and
+mysteries we make in the pattern.  I had a sadder fellow-feeling with the
+little dark-chinned, meagre man, by that time, and I came away.’
+
+Mr. Idle diverting the conversation to grouse, custards, and bride-cake,
+Mr. Goodchild followed in the same direction.  The bride-cake was as
+bilious and indigestible as if a real Bride had cut it, and the dinner it
+completed was an admirable performance.
+
+The house was a genuine old house of a very quaint description, teeming
+with old carvings, and beams, and panels, and having an excellent old
+staircase, with a gallery or upper staircase, cut off from it by a
+curious fence-work of old oak, or of the old Honduras Mahogany wood.  It
+was, and is, and will be, for many a long year to come, a remarkably
+picturesque house; and a certain grave mystery lurking in the depth of
+the old mahogany panels, as if they were so many deep pools of dark
+water—such, indeed, as they had been much among when they were trees—gave
+it a very mysterious character after nightfall.
+
+When Mr. Goodchild and Mr. Idle had first alighted at the door, and
+stepped into the sombre, handsome old hall, they had been received by
+half-a-dozen noiseless old men in black, all dressed exactly alike, who
+glided up the stairs with the obliging landlord and waiter—but without
+appearing to get into their way, or to mind whether they did or no—and
+who had filed off to the right and left on the old staircase, as the
+guests entered their sitting-room.  It was then broad, bright day.  But,
+Mr. Goodchild had said, when their door was shut, ‘Who on earth are those
+old men?’  And afterwards, both on going out and coming in, he had
+noticed that there were no old men to be seen.
+
+Neither, had the old men, or any one of the old men, reappeared since.
+The two friends had passed a night in the house, but had seen nothing
+more of the old men.  Mr. Goodchild, in rambling about it, had looked
+along passages, and glanced in at doorways, but had encountered no old
+men; neither did it appear that any old men were, by any member of the
+establishment, missed or expected.
+
+Another odd circumstance impressed itself on their attention.  It was,
+that the door of their sitting-room was never left untouched for a
+quarter of an hour.  It was opened with hesitation, opened with
+confidence, opened a little way, opened a good way,—always clapped-to
+again without a word of explanation.  They were reading, they were
+writing, they were eating, they were drinking, they were talking, they
+were dozing; the door was always opened at an unexpected moment, and they
+looked towards it, and it was clapped-to again, and nobody was to be
+seen.  When this had happened fifty times or so, Mr. Goodchild had said
+to his companion, jestingly: ‘I begin to think, Tom, there was something
+wrong with those six old men.’
+
+Night had come again, and they had been writing for two or three hours:
+writing, in short, a portion of the lazy notes from which these lazy
+sheets are taken.  They had left off writing, and glasses were on the
+table between them.  The house was closed and quiet.  Around the head of
+Thomas Idle, as he lay upon his sofa, hovered light wreaths of fragrant
+smoke.  The temples of Francis Goodchild, as he leaned back in his chair,
+with his two hands clasped behind his head, and his legs crossed, were
+similarly decorated.
+
+They had been discussing several idle subjects of speculation, not
+omitting the strange old men, and were still so occupied, when Mr.
+Goodchild abruptly changed his attitude to wind up his watch.  They were
+just becoming drowsy enough to be stopped in their talk by any such
+slight check.  Thomas Idle, who was speaking at the moment, paused and
+said, ‘How goes it?’
+
+‘One,’ said Goodchild.
+
+As if he had ordered One old man, and the order were promptly executed
+(truly, all orders were so, in that excellent hotel), the door opened,
+and One old man stood there.
+
+He did not come in, but stood with the door in his hand.
+
+‘One of the six, Tom, at last!’ said Mr. Goodchild, in a surprised
+whisper.—‘Sir, your pleasure?’
+
+‘Sir, _your_ pleasure?’ said the One old man.
+
+‘I didn’t ring.’
+
+‘The bell did,’ said the One old man.
+
+He said BELL, in a deep, strong way, that would have expressed the church
+Bell.
+
+‘I had the pleasure, I believe, of seeing you, yesterday?’ said
+Goodchild.
+
+‘I cannot undertake to say for certain,’ was the grim reply of the One
+old man.
+
+‘I think you saw me?  Did you not?’
+
+‘Saw _you_?’ said the old man.  ‘O yes, I saw you.  But, I see many who
+never see me.’
+
+A chilled, slow, earthy, fixed old man.  A cadaverous old man of measured
+speech.  An old man who seemed as unable to wink, as if his eyelids had
+been nailed to his forehead.  An old man whose eyes—two spots of fire—had
+no more motion than if they had been connected with the back of his skull
+by screws driven through it, and rivetted and bolted outside, among his
+grey hair.
+
+The night had turned so cold, to Mr. Goodchild’s sensations, that he
+shivered.  He remarked lightly, and half apologetically, ‘I think
+somebody is walking over my grave.’
+
+‘No,’ said the weird old man, ‘there is no one there.’
+
+Mr. Goodchild looked at Idle, but Idle lay with his head enwreathed in
+smoke.
+
+‘No one there?’ said Goodchild.
+
+‘There is no one at your grave, I assure you,’ said the old man.
+
+He had come in and shut the door, and he now sat down.  He did not bend
+himself to sit, as other people do, but seemed to sink bolt upright, as
+if in water, until the chair stopped him.
+
+‘My friend, Mr. Idle,’ said Goodchild, extremely anxious to introduce a
+third person into the conversation.
+
+‘I am,’ said the old man, without looking at him, ‘at Mr. Idle’s
+service.’
+
+‘If you are an old inhabitant of this place,’ Francis Goodchild resumed.
+
+‘Yes.’
+
+‘Perhaps you can decide a point my friend and I were in doubt upon, this
+morning.  They hang condemned criminals at the Castle, I believe?’
+
+‘_I_ believe so,’ said the old man.
+
+‘Are their faces turned towards that noble prospect?’
+
+‘Your face is turned,’ replied the old man, ‘to the Castle wall.  When
+you are tied up, you see its stones expanding and contracting violently,
+and a similar expansion and contraction seem to take place in your own
+head and breast.  Then, there is a rush of fire and an earthquake, and
+the Castle springs into the air, and you tumble down a precipice.’
+
+His cravat appeared to trouble him.  He put his hand to his throat, and
+moved his neck from side to side.  He was an old man of a swollen
+character of face, and his nose was immoveably hitched up on one side, as
+if by a little hook inserted in that nostril.  Mr. Goodchild felt
+exceedingly uncomfortable, and began to think the night was hot, and not
+cold.
+
+‘A strong description, sir,’ he observed.
+
+‘A strong sensation,’ the old man rejoined.
+
+Again, Mr. Goodchild looked to Mr. Thomas Idle; but Thomas lay on his
+back with his face attentively turned towards the One old man, and made
+no sign.  At this time Mr. Goodchild believed that he saw threads of fire
+stretch from the old man’s eyes to his own, and there attach themselves.
+(Mr. Goodchild writes the present account of his experience, and, with
+the utmost solemnity, protests that he had the strongest sensation upon
+him of being forced to look at the old man along those two fiery films,
+from that moment.)
+
+‘I must tell it to you,’ said the old man, with a ghastly and a stony
+stare.
+
+‘What?’ asked Francis Goodchild.
+
+‘You know where it took place.  Yonder!’
+
+Whether he pointed to the room above, or to the room below, or to any
+room in that old house, or to a room in some other old house in that old
+town, Mr. Goodchild was not, nor is, nor ever can be, sure.  He was
+confused by the circumstance that the right forefinger of the One old man
+seemed to dip itself in one of the threads of fire, light itself, and
+make a fiery start in the air, as it pointed somewhere.  Having pointed
+somewhere, it went out.
+
+‘You know she was a Bride,’ said the old man.
+
+‘I know they still send up Bride-cake,’ Mr. Goodchild faltered.  ‘This is
+a very oppressive air.’
+
+‘She was a Bride,’ said the old man.  ‘She was a fair, flaxen-haired,
+large-eyed girl, who had no character, no purpose.  A weak, credulous,
+incapable, helpless nothing.  Not like her mother.  No, no.  It was her
+father whose character she reflected.
+
+‘Her mother had taken care to secure everything to herself, for her own
+life, when the father of this girl (a child at that time) died—of sheer
+helplessness; no other disorder—and then He renewed the acquaintance that
+had once subsisted between the mother and Him.  He had been put aside for
+the flaxen-haired, large-eyed man (or nonentity) with Money.  He could
+overlook that for Money.  He wanted compensation in Money.
+
+‘So, he returned to the side of that woman the mother, made love to her
+again, danced attendance on her, and submitted himself to her whims.  She
+wreaked upon him every whim she had, or could invent.  He bore it.  And
+the more he bore, the more he wanted compensation in Money, and the more
+he was resolved to have it.
+
+‘But, lo!  Before he got it, she cheated him.  In one of her imperious
+states, she froze, and never thawed again.  She put her hands to her head
+one night, uttered a cry, stiffened, lay in that attitude certain hours,
+and died.  And he had got no compensation from her in Money, yet.  Blight
+and Murrain on her!  Not a penny.
+
+‘He had hated her throughout that second pursuit, and had longed for
+retaliation on her.  He now counterfeited her signature to an instrument,
+leaving all she had to leave, to her daughter—ten years old then—to whom
+the property passed absolutely, and appointing himself the daughter’s
+Guardian.  When He slid it under the pillow of the bed on which she lay,
+He bent down in the deaf ear of Death, and whispered: “Mistress Pride, I
+have determined a long time that, dead or alive, you must make me
+compensation in Money.”’
+
+‘So, now there were only two left.  Which two were, He, and the fair
+flaxen-haired, large-eyed foolish daughter, who afterwards became the
+Bride.
+
+‘He put her to school.  In a secret, dark, oppressive, ancient house, he
+put her to school with a watchful and unscrupulous woman.  “My worthy
+lady,” he said, “here is a mind to be formed; will you help me to form
+it?”  She accepted the trust.  For which she, too, wanted compensation in
+Money, and had it.
+
+‘The girl was formed in the fear of him, and in the conviction, that
+there was no escape from him.  She was taught, from the first, to regard
+him as her future husband—the man who must marry her—the destiny that
+overshadowed her—the appointed certainty that could never be evaded.  The
+poor fool was soft white wax in their hands, and took the impression that
+they put upon her.  It hardened with time.  It became a part of herself.
+Inseparable from herself, and only to be torn away from her, by tearing
+life away from her.
+
+‘Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden.  He
+was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her
+close.  He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the
+strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the
+moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit-trees in the red-walled garden,
+the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks.  He surrounded her with
+images of sorrow and desolation.  He caused her to be filled with fears
+of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext
+of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about
+it in the dark.  When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors,
+then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he
+overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource.
+
+‘Thus, by being from her childhood the one embodiment her life presented
+to her of power to coerce and power to relieve, power to bind and power
+to loose, the ascendency over her weakness was secured.  She was
+twenty-one years and twenty-one days old, when he brought her home to the
+gloomy house, his half-witted, frightened, and submissive Bride of three
+weeks.
+
+                      [Picture: A submissive bride]
+
+‘He had dismissed the governess by that time—what he had left to do, he
+could best do alone—and they came back, upon a rain night, to the scene
+of her long preparation.  She turned to him upon the threshold, as the
+rain was dripping from the porch, and said:
+
+‘“O sir, it is the Death-watch ticking for me!”
+
+‘“Well!” he answered.  “And if it were?”
+
+‘“O sir!” she returned to him, “look kindly on me, and be merciful to me!
+I beg your pardon.  I will do anything you wish, if you will only forgive
+me!”
+
+‘That had become the poor fool’s constant song: “I beg your pardon,” and
+“Forgive me!”
+
+‘She was not worth hating; he felt nothing but contempt for her.  But,
+she had long been in the way, and he had long been weary, and the work
+was near its end, and had to be worked out.
+
+‘“You fool,” he said.  “Go up the stairs!”
+
+‘She obeyed very quickly, murmuring, “I will do anything you wish!”  When
+he came into the Bride’s Chamber, having been a little retarded by the
+heavy fastenings of the great door (for they were alone in the house, and
+he had arranged that the people who attended on them should come and go
+in the day), he found her withdrawn to the furthest corner, and there
+standing pressed against the paneling as if she would have shrunk through
+it: her flaxen hair all wild about her face, and her large eyes staring
+at him in vague terror.
+
+‘“What are you afraid of?  Come and sit down by me.”
+
+‘“I will do anything you wish.  I beg your pardon, sir.  Forgive me!”
+Her monotonous tune as usual.
+
+‘“Ellen, here is a writing that you must write out to-morrow, in your own
+hand.  You may as well be seen by others, busily engaged upon it.  When
+you have written it all fairly, and corrected all mistakes, call in any
+two people there may be about the house, and sign your name to it before
+them.  Then, put it in your bosom to keep it safe, and when I sit here
+again to-morrow night, give it to me.”
+
+‘“I will do it all, with the greatest care.  I will do anything you
+wish.”
+
+‘“Don’t shake and tremble, then.”
+
+‘“I will try my utmost not to do it—if you will only forgive me!”
+
+‘Next day, she sat down at her desk, and did as she had been told.  He
+often passed in and out of the room, to observe her, and always saw her
+slowly and laboriously writing: repeating to herself the words she
+copied, in appearance quite mechanically, and without caring or
+endeavouring to comprehend them, so that she did her task.  He saw her
+follow the directions she had received, in all particulars; and at night,
+when they were alone again in the same Bride’s Chamber, and he drew his
+chair to the hearth, she timidly approached him from her distant seat,
+took the paper from her bosom, and gave it into his hand.
+
+‘It secured all her possessions to him, in the event of her death.  He
+put her before him, face to face, that he might look at her steadily; and
+he asked her, in so many plain words, neither fewer nor more, did she
+know that?
+
+‘There were spots of ink upon the bosom of her white dress, and they made
+her face look whiter and her eyes look larger as she nodded her head.
+There were spots of ink upon the hand with which she stood before him,
+nervously plaiting and folding her white skirts.
+
+‘He took her by the arm, and looked her, yet more closely and steadily,
+in the face.  “Now, die!  I have done with you.”
+
+‘She shrunk, and uttered a low, suppressed cry.
+
+‘“I am not going to kill you.  I will not endanger my life for yours.
+Die!”
+
+‘He sat before her in the gloomy Bride’s Chamber, day after day, night
+after night, looking the word at her when he did not utter it.  As often
+as her large unmeaning eyes were raised from the hands in which she
+rocked her head, to the stern figure, sitting with crossed arms and
+knitted forehead, in the chair, they read in it, “Die!”  When she dropped
+asleep in exhaustion, she was called back to shuddering consciousness, by
+the whisper, “Die!”  When she fell upon her old entreaty to be pardoned,
+she was answered “Die!”  When she had out-watched and out-suffered the
+long night, and the rising sun flamed into the sombre room, she heard it
+hailed with, “Another day and not dead?—Die!”
+
+‘Shut up in the deserted mansion, aloof from all mankind, and engaged
+alone in such a struggle without any respite, it came to this—that either
+he must die, or she.  He knew it very well, and concentrated his strength
+against her feebleness.  Hours upon hours he held her by the arm when her
+arm was black where he held it, and bade her Die!
+
+‘It was done, upon a windy morning, before sunrise.  He computed the time
+to be half-past four; but, his forgotten watch had run down, and he could
+not be sure.  She had broken away from him in the night, with loud and
+sudden cries—the first of that kind to which she had given vent—and he
+had had to put his hands over her mouth.  Since then, she had been quiet
+in the corner of the paneling where she had sunk down; and he had left
+her, and had gone back with his folded arms and his knitted forehead to
+his chair.
+
+‘Paler in the pale light, more colourless than ever in the leaden dawn,
+he saw her coming, trailing herself along the floor towards him—a white
+wreck of hair, and dress, and wild eyes, pushing itself on by an
+irresolute and bending hand.
+
+‘“O, forgive me!  I will do anything.  O, sir, pray tell me I may live!”
+
+‘“Die!”
+
+‘“Are you so resolved?  Is there no hope for me?”
+
+‘“Die!”
+
+‘Her large eyes strained themselves with wonder and fear; wonder and fear
+changed to reproach; reproach to blank nothing.  It was done.  He was not
+at first so sure it was done, but that the morning sun was hanging jewels
+in her hair—he saw the diamond, emerald, and ruby, glittering among it in
+little points, as he stood looking down at her—when he lifted her and
+laid her on her bed.
+
+‘She was soon laid in the ground.  And now they were all gone, and he had
+compensated himself well.
+
+‘He had a mind to travel.  Not that he meant to waste his Money, for he
+was a pinching man and liked his Money dearly (liked nothing else,
+indeed), but, that he had grown tired of the desolate house and wished to
+turn his back upon it and have done with it.  But, the house was worth
+Money, and Money must not be thrown away.  He determined to sell it
+before he went.  That it might look the less wretched and bring a better
+price, he hired some labourers to work in the overgrown garden; to cut
+out the dead wood, trim the ivy that drooped in heavy masses over the
+windows and gables, and clear the walks in which the weeds were growing
+mid-leg high.
+
+‘He worked, himself, along with them.  He worked later than they did,
+and, one evening at dusk, was left working alone, with his bill-hook in
+his hand.  One autumn evening, when the Bride was five weeks dead.
+
+‘“It grows too dark to work longer,” he said to himself, “I must give
+over for the night.”
+
+‘He detested the house, and was loath to enter it.  He looked at the dark
+porch waiting for him like a tomb, and felt that it was an accursed
+house.  Near to the porch, and near to where he stood, was a tree whose
+branches waved before the old bay-window of the Bride’s Chamber, where it
+had been done.  The tree swung suddenly, and made him start.  It swung
+again, although the night was still.  Looking up into it, he saw a figure
+among the branches.
+
+‘It was the figure of a young man.  The face looked down, as his looked
+up; the branches cracked and swayed; the figure rapidly descended, and
+slid upon its feet before him.  A slender youth of about her age, with
+long light brown hair.
+
+‘“What thief are you?” he said, seizing the youth by the collar.
+
+‘The young man, in shaking himself free, swung him a blow with his arm
+across the face and throat.  They closed, but the young man got from him
+and stepped back, crying, with great eagerness and horror, “Don’t touch
+me!  I would as lieve be touched by the Devil!”
+
+‘He stood still, with his bill-hook in his hand, looking at the young
+man.  For, the young man’s look was the counterpart of her last look, and
+he had not expected ever to see that again.
+
+‘“I am no thief.  Even if I were, I would not have a coin of your wealth,
+if it would buy me the Indies.  You murderer!”
+
+‘“What!”
+
+‘“I climbed it,” said the young man, pointing up into the tree, “for the
+first time, nigh four years ago.  I climbed it, to look at her.  I saw
+her.  I spoke to her.  I have climbed it, many a time, to watch and
+listen for her.  I was a boy, hidden among its leaves, when from that
+bay-window she gave me this!”
+
+‘He showed a tress of flaxen hair, tied with a mourning ribbon.
+
+‘“Her life,” said the young man, “was a life of mourning.  She gave me
+this, as a token of it, and a sign that she was dead to every one but
+you.  If I had been older, if I had seen her sooner, I might have saved
+her from you.  But, she was fast in the web when I first climbed the
+tree, and what could I do then to break it!”
+
+‘In saying those words, he burst into a fit of sobbing and crying: weakly
+at first, then passionately.
+
+‘“Murderer!  I climbed the tree on the night when you brought her back.
+I heard her, from the tree, speak of the Death-watch at the door.  I was
+three times in the tree while you were shut up with her, slowly killing
+her.  I saw her, from the tree, lie dead upon her bed.  I have watched
+you, from the tree, for proofs and traces of your guilt.  The manner of
+it, is a mystery to me yet, but I will pursue you until you have rendered
+up your life to the hangman.  You shall never, until then, be rid of me.
+I loved her!  I can know no relenting towards you.  Murderer, I loved
+her!”
+
+‘The youth was bare-headed, his hat having fluttered away in his descent
+from the tree.  He moved towards the gate.  He had to pass—Him—to get to
+it.  There was breadth for two old-fashioned carriages abreast; and the
+youth’s abhorrence, openly expressed in every feature of his face and
+limb of his body, and very hard to bear, had verge enough to keep itself
+at a distance in.  He (by which I mean the other) had not stirred hand or
+foot, since he had stood still to look at the boy.  He faced round, now,
+to follow him with his eyes.  As the back of the bare light-brown head
+was turned to him, he saw a red curve stretch from his hand to it.  He
+knew, before he threw the bill-hook, where it had alighted—I say, had
+alighted, and not, would alight; for, to his clear perception the thing
+was done before he did it.  It cleft the head, and it remained there, and
+the boy lay on his face.
+
+‘He buried the body in the night, at the foot of the tree.  As soon as it
+was light in the morning, he worked at turning up all the ground near the
+tree, and hacking and hewing at the neighbouring bushes and undergrowth.
+When the labourers came, there was nothing suspicious, and nothing
+suspected.
+
+‘But, he had, in a moment, defeated all his precautions, and destroyed
+the triumph of the scheme he had so long concerted, and so successfully
+worked out.  He had got rid of the Bride, and had acquired her fortune
+without endangering his life; but now, for a death by which he had gained
+nothing, he had evermore to live with a rope around his neck.
+
+‘Beyond this, he was chained to the house of gloom and horror, which he
+could not endure.  Being afraid to sell it or to quit it, lest discovery
+should be made, he was forced to live in it.  He hired two old people,
+man and wife, for his servants; and dwelt in it, and dreaded it.  His
+great difficulty, for a long time, was the garden.  Whether he should
+keep it trim, whether he should suffer it to fall into its former state
+of neglect, what would be the least likely way of attracting attention to
+it?
+
+‘He took the middle course of gardening, himself, in his evening leisure,
+and of then calling the old serving-man to help him; but, of never
+letting him work there alone.  And he made himself an arbour over against
+the tree, where he could sit and see that it was safe.
+
+‘As the seasons changed, and the tree changed, his mind perceived dangers
+that were always changing.  In the leafy time, he perceived that the
+upper boughs were growing into the form of the young man—that they made
+the shape of him exactly, sitting in a forked branch swinging in the
+wind.  In the time of the falling leaves, he perceived that they came
+down from the tree, forming tell-tale letters on the path, or that they
+had a tendency to heap themselves into a churchyard mound above the
+grave.  In the winter, when the tree was bare, he perceived that the
+boughs swung at him the ghost of the blow the young man had given, and
+that they threatened him openly.  In the spring, when the sap was
+mounting in the trunk, he asked himself, were the dried-up particles of
+blood mounting with it: to make out more obviously this year than last,
+the leaf-screened figure of the young man, swinging in the wind?
+
+‘However, he turned his Money over and over, and still over.  He was in
+the dark trade, the gold-dust trade, and most secret trades that yielded
+great returns.  In ten years, he had turned his Money over, so many
+times, that the traders and shippers who had dealings with him,
+absolutely did not lie—for once—when they declared that he had increased
+his fortune, Twelve Hundred Per Cent.
+
+‘He possessed his riches one hundred years ago, when people could be lost
+easily.  He had heard who the youth was, from hearing of the search that
+was made after him; but, it died away, and the youth was forgotten.
+
+‘The annual round of changes in the tree had been repeated ten times
+since the night of the burial at its foot, when there was a great
+thunder-storm over this place.  It broke at midnight, and roared until
+morning.  The first intelligence he heard from his old serving-man that
+morning, was, that the tree had been struck by Lightning.
+
+‘It had been riven down the stem, in a very surprising manner, and the
+stem lay in two blighted shafts: one resting against the house, and one
+against a portion of the old red garden-wall in which its fall had made a
+gap.  The fissure went down the tree to a little above the earth, and
+there stopped.  There was great curiosity to see the tree, and, with most
+of his former fears revived, he sat in his arbour—grown quite an old
+man—watching the people who came to see it.
+
+‘They quickly began to come, in such dangerous numbers, that he closed
+his garden-gate and refused to admit any more.  But, there were certain
+men of science who travelled from a distance to examine the tree, and, in
+an evil hour, he let them in!—Blight and Murrain on them, let them in!
+
+‘They wanted to dig up the ruin by the roots, and closely examine it, and
+the earth about it.  Never, while he lived!  They offered money for it.
+They!  Men of science, whom he could have bought by the gross, with a
+scratch of his pen!  He showed them the garden-gate again, and locked and
+barred it.
+
+‘But they were bent on doing what they wanted to do, and they bribed the
+old serving-man—a thankless wretch who regularly complained when he
+received his wages, of being underpaid—and they stole into the garden by
+night with their lanterns, picks, and shovels, and fell to at the tree.
+He was lying in a turret-room on the other side of the house (the Bride’s
+Chamber had been unoccupied ever since), but he soon dreamed of picks and
+shovels, and got up.
+
+‘He came to an upper window on that side, whence he could see their
+lanterns, and them, and the loose earth in a heap which he had himself
+disturbed and put back, when it was last turned to the air.  It was
+found!  They had that minute lighted on it.  They were all bending over
+it.  One of them said, “The skull is fractured;” and another, “See here
+the bones;” and another, “See here the clothes;” and then the first
+struck in again, and said, “A rusty bill-hook!”
+
+‘He became sensible, next day, that he was already put under a strict
+watch, and that he could go nowhere without being followed.  Before a
+week was out, he was taken and laid in hold.  The circumstances were
+gradually pieced together against him, with a desperate malignity, and an
+appalling ingenuity.  But, see the justice of men, and how it was
+extended to him!  He was further accused of having poisoned that girl in
+the Bride’s Chamber.  He, who had carefully and expressly avoided
+imperilling a hair of his head for her, and who had seen her die of her
+own incapacity!
+
+‘There was doubt for which of the two murders he should be first tried;
+but, the real one was chosen, and he was found Guilty, and cast for
+death.  Bloodthirsty wretches!  They would have made him Guilty of
+anything, so set they were upon having his life.
+
+‘His money could do nothing to save him, and he was hanged.  _I_ am He,
+and I was hanged at Lancaster Castle with my face to the wall, a hundred
+years ago!’
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+At this terrific announcement, Mr. Goodchild tried to rise and cry out.
+But, the two fiery lines extending from the old man’s eyes to his own,
+kept him down, and he could not utter a sound.  His sense of hearing,
+however, was acute, and he could hear the clock strike Two.  No sooner
+had he heard the clock strike Two, than he saw before him Two old men!
+
+Two.
+
+The eyes of each, connected with his eyes by two films of fire: each,
+exactly like the other: each, addressing him at precisely one and the
+same instant: each, gnashing the same teeth in the same head, with the
+same twitched nostril above them, and the same suffused expression around
+it.  Two old men.  Differing in nothing, equally distinct to the sight,
+the copy no fainter than the original, the second as real as the first.
+
+‘At what time,’ said the Two old men, ‘did you arrive at the door below?’
+
+‘At Six.’
+
+‘And there were Six old men upon the stairs!’
+
+Mr. Goodchild having wiped the perspiration from his brow, or tried to do
+it, the Two old men proceeded in one voice, and in the singular number:
+
+‘I had been anatomised, but had not yet had my skeleton put together and
+re-hung on an iron hook, when it began to be whispered that the Bride’s
+Chamber was haunted.  It _was_ haunted, and I was there.
+
+‘_We_ were there.  She and I were there.  I, in the chair upon the
+hearth; she, a white wreck again, trailing itself towards me on the
+floor.  But, I was the speaker no more, and the one word that she said to
+me from midnight until dawn was, ‘Live!’
+
+‘The youth was there, likewise.  In the tree outside the window.  Coming
+and going in the moonlight, as the tree bent and gave.  He has, ever
+since, been there, peeping in at me in my torment; revealing to me by
+snatches, in the pale lights and slatey shadows where he comes and goes,
+bare-headed—a bill-hook, standing edgewise in his hair.
+
+‘In the Bride’s Chamber, every night from midnight until dawn—one month
+in the year excepted, as I am going to tell you—he hides in the tree, and
+she comes towards me on the floor; always approaching; never coming
+nearer; always visible as if by moon-light, whether the moon shines or
+no; always saying, from mid-night until dawn, her one word, “Live!”
+
+‘But, in the month wherein I was forced out of this life—this present
+month of thirty days—the Bride’s Chamber is empty and quiet.  Not so my
+old dungeon.  Not so the rooms where I was restless and afraid, ten
+years.  Both are fitfully haunted then.  At One in the morning.  I am
+what you saw me when the clock struck that hour—One old man.  At Two in
+the morning, I am Two old men.  At Three, I am Three.  By Twelve at noon,
+I am Twelve old men, One for every hundred per cent. of old gain.  Every
+one of the Twelve, with Twelve times my old power of suffering and agony.
+From that hour until Twelve at night, I, Twelve old men in anguish and
+fearful foreboding, wait for the coming of the executioner.  At Twelve at
+night, I, Twelve old men turned off, swing invisible outside Lancaster
+Castle, with Twelve faces to the wall!
+
+‘When the Bride’s Chamber was first haunted, it was known to me that this
+punishment would never cease, until I could make its nature, and my
+story, known to two living men together.  I waited for the coming of two
+living men together into the Bride’s Chamber, years upon years.  It was
+infused into my knowledge (of the means I am ignorant) that if two living
+men, with their eyes open, could be in the Bride’s Chamber at One in the
+morning, they would see me sitting in my chair.
+
+‘At length, the whispers that the room was spiritually troubled, brought
+two men to try the adventure.  I was scarcely struck upon the hearth at
+midnight (I come there as if the Lightning blasted me into being), when I
+heard them ascending the stairs.  Next, I saw them enter.  One of them
+was a bold, gay, active man, in the prime of life, some five and forty
+years of age; the other, a dozen years younger.  They brought provisions
+with them in a basket, and bottles.  A young woman accompanied them, with
+wood and coals for the lighting of the fire.  When she had lighted it,
+the bold, gay, active man accompanied her along the gallery outside the
+room, to see her safely down the staircase, and came back laughing.
+
+‘He locked the door, examined the chamber, put out the contents of the
+basket on the table before the fire—little recking of me, in my appointed
+station on the hearth, close to him—and filled the glasses, and ate and
+drank.  His companion did the same, and was as cheerful and confident as
+he: though he was the leader.  When they had supped, they laid pistols on
+the table, turned to the fire, and began to smoke their pipes of foreign
+make.
+
+‘They had travelled together, and had been much together, and had an
+abundance of subjects in common.  In the midst of their talking and
+laughing, the younger man made a reference to the leader’s being always
+ready for any adventure; that one, or any other.  He replied in these
+words:
+
+‘“Not quite so, Dick; if I am afraid of nothing else, I am afraid of
+myself.”
+
+‘His companion seeming to grow a little dull, asked him, in what sense?
+How?
+
+‘“Why, thus,” he returned.  “Here is a Ghost to be disproved.  Well!  I
+cannot answer for what my fancy might do if I were alone here, or what
+tricks my senses might play with me if they had me to themselves.  But,
+in company with another man, and especially with Dick, I would consent to
+outface all the Ghosts that were ever of in the universe.”
+
+‘“I had not the vanity to suppose that I was of so much importance
+to-night,” said the other.
+
+‘“Of so much,” rejoined the leader, more seriously than he had spoken
+yet, “that I would, for the reason I have given, on no account have
+undertaken to pass the night here alone.”
+
+‘It was within a few minutes of One.  The head of the younger man had
+drooped when he made his last remark, and it drooped lower now.
+
+‘“Keep awake, Dick!” said the leader, gaily.  “The small hours are the
+worst.”
+
+‘He tried, but his head drooped again.
+
+‘“Dick!” urged the leader.  “Keep awake!”
+
+‘“I can’t,” he indistinctly muttered.  “I don’t know what strange
+influence is stealing over me.  I can’t.”
+
+‘His companion looked at him with a sudden horror, and I, in my different
+way, felt a new horror also; for, it was on the stroke of One, and I felt
+that the second watcher was yielding to me, and that the curse was upon
+me that I must send him to sleep.
+
+‘“Get up and walk, Dick!” cried the leader.  “Try!”
+
+‘It was in vain to go behind the slumber’s chair and shake him.  One
+o’clock sounded, and I was present to the elder man, and he stood
+transfixed before me.
+
+‘To him alone, I was obliged to relate my story, without hope of benefit.
+To him alone, I was an awful phantom making a quite useless confession.
+I foresee it will ever be the same.  The two living men together will
+never come to release me.  When I appear, the senses of one of the two
+will be locked in sleep; he will neither see nor hear me; my
+communication will ever be made to a solitary listener, and will ever be
+unserviceable.  Woe!  Woe!  Woe!’
+
+As the Two old men, with these words, wrung their hands, it shot into Mr.
+Goodchild’s mind that he was in the terrible situation of being virtually
+alone with the spectre, and that Mr. Idle’s immoveability was explained
+by his having been charmed asleep at One o’clock.  In the terror of this
+sudden discovery which produced an indescribable dread, he struggled so
+hard to get free from the four fiery threads, that he snapped them, after
+he had pulled them out to a great width.  Being then out of bonds, he
+caught up Mr. Idle from the sofa and rushed down-stairs with him.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘What are you about, Francis?’ demanded Mr. Idle.  ‘My bedroom is not
+down here.  What the deuce are you carrying me at all for?  I can walk
+with a stick now.  I don’t want to be carried.  Put me down.’
+
+Mr. Goodchild put him down in the old hall, and looked about him wildly.
+
+‘What are you doing?  Idiotically plunging at your own sex, and rescuing
+them or perishing in the attempt?’ asked Mr. Idle, in a highly petulant
+state.
+
+‘The One old man!’ cried Mr. Goodchild, distractedly,—‘and the Two old
+men!’
+
+Mr. Idle deigned no other reply than ‘The One old woman, I think you
+mean,’ as he began hobbling his way back up the staircase, with the
+assistance of its broad balustrade.
+
+‘I assure you, Tom,’ began Mr. Goodchild, attending at his side, ‘that
+since you fell asleep—’
+
+‘Come, I like that!’ said Thomas Idle, ‘I haven’t closed an eye!’
+
+With the peculiar sensitiveness on the subject of the disgraceful action
+of going to sleep out of bed, which is the lot of all mankind, Mr. Idle
+persisted in this declaration.  The same peculiar sensitiveness impelled
+Mr. Goodchild, on being taxed with the same crime, to repudiate it with
+honourable resentment.  The settlement of the question of The One old man
+and The Two old men was thus presently complicated, and soon made quite
+impracticable.  Mr. Idle said it was all Bride-cake, and fragments, newly
+arranged, of things seen and thought about in the day.  Mr. Goodchild
+said how could that be, when he hadn’t been asleep, and what right could
+Mr. Idle have to say so, who had been asleep?  Mr. Idle said he had never
+been asleep, and never did go to sleep, and that Mr. Goodchild, as a
+general rule, was always asleep.  They consequently parted for the rest
+of the night, at their bedroom doors, a little ruffled.  Mr. Goodchild’s
+last words were, that he had had, in that real and tangible old
+sitting-room of that real and tangible old Inn (he supposed Mr. Idle
+denied its existence?), every sensation and experience, the present
+record of which is now within a line or two of completion; and that he
+would write it out and print it every word.  Mr. Idle returned that he
+might if he liked—and he did like, and has now done it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+TWO of the many passengers by a certain late Sunday evening train, Mr.
+Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild, yielded up their tickets at a
+little rotten platform (converted into artificial touchwood by smoke and
+ashes), deep in the manufacturing bosom of Yorkshire.  A mysterious bosom
+it appeared, upon a damp, dark, Sunday night, dashed through in the train
+to the music of the whirling wheels, the panting of the engine, and the
+part-singing of hundreds of third-class excursionists, whose vocal
+efforts ‘bobbed arayound’ from sacred to profane, from hymns, to our
+transatlantic sisters the Yankee Gal and Mairy Anne, in a remarkable way.
+There seemed to have been some large vocal gathering near to every lonely
+station on the line.  No town was visible, no village was visible, no
+light was visible; but, a multitude got out singing, and a multitude got
+in singing, and the second multitude took up the hymns, and adopted our
+transatlantic sisters, and sang of their own egregious wickedness, and of
+their bobbing arayound, and of how the ship it was ready and the wind it
+was fair, and they were bayound for the sea, Mairy Anne, until they in
+their turn became a getting-out multitude, and were replaced by another
+getting-in multitude, who did the same.  And at every station, the
+getting-in multitude, with an artistic reference to the completeness of
+their chorus, incessantly cried, as with one voice while scuffling into
+the carriages, ‘We mun aa’ gang toogither!’
+
+The singing and the multitudes had trailed off as the lonely places were
+left and the great towns were neared, and the way had lain as silently as
+a train’s way ever can, over the vague black streets of the great gulfs
+of towns, and among their branchless woods of vague black chimneys.
+These towns looked, in the cinderous wet, as though they had one and all
+been on fire and were just put out—a dreary and quenched panorama, many
+miles long.
+
+Thus, Thomas and Francis got to Leeds; of which enterprising and
+important commercial centre it may be observed with delicacy, that you
+must either like it very much or not at all.  Next day, the first of the
+Race-Week, they took train to Doncaster.
+
+And instantly the character, both of travellers and of luggage, entirely
+changed, and no other business than race-business any longer existed on
+the face of the earth.  The talk was all of horses and ‘John Scott.’
+Guards whispered behind their hands to station-masters, of horses and
+John Scott.  Men in cut-away coats and speckled cravats fastened with
+peculiar pins, and with the large bones of their legs developed under
+tight trousers, so that they should look as much as possible like horses’
+legs, paced up and down by twos at junction-stations, speaking low and
+moodily of horses and John Scott.  The young clergyman in the black
+strait-waistcoat, who occupied the middle seat of the carriage, expounded
+in his peculiar pulpit-accent to the young and lovely Reverend Mrs.
+Crinoline, who occupied the opposite middle-seat, a few passages of
+rumour relative to ‘Oartheth, my love, and Mithter John Eth-COTT.’  A
+bandy vagabond, with a head like a Dutch cheese, in a fustian
+stable-suit, attending on a horse-box and going about the platforms with
+a halter hanging round his neck like a Calais burgher of the ancient
+period much degenerated, was courted by the best society, by reason of
+what he had to hint, when not engaged in eating straw, concerning
+‘t’harses and Joon Scott.’  The engine-driver himself, as he applied one
+eye to his large stationary double-eye-glass on the engine, seemed to
+keep the other open, sideways, upon horses and John Scott.
+
+Breaks and barriers at Doncaster Station to keep the crowd off; temporary
+wooden avenues of ingress and egress, to help the crowd on.  Forty extra
+porters sent down for this present blessed Race-Week, and all of them
+making up their betting-books in the lamp-room or somewhere else, and
+none of them to come and touch the luggage.  Travellers disgorged into an
+open space, a howling wilderness of idle men.  All work but race-work at
+a stand-still; all men at a stand-still.  ‘Ey my word!  Deant ask noon o’
+us to help wi’ t’luggage.  Bock your opinion loike a mon.  Coom!  Dang
+it, coom, t’harses and Joon Scott!’  In the midst of the idle men, all
+the fly horses and omnibus horses of Doncaster and parts adjacent,
+rampant, rearing, backing, plunging, shying—apparently the result of
+their hearing of nothing but their own order and John Scott.
+
+Grand Dramatic Company from London for the Race-Week.  Poses Plastiques
+in the Grand Assembly Room up the Stable-Yard at seven and nine each
+evening, for the Race-Week.  Grand Alliance Circus in the field beyond
+the bridge, for the Race-Week.  Grand Exhibition of Aztec Lilliputians,
+important to all who want to be horrified cheap, for the Race-Week.
+Lodgings, grand and not grand, but all at grand prices, ranging from ten
+pounds to twenty, for the Grand Race-Week!
+
+Rendered giddy enough by these things, Messieurs Idle and Goodchild
+repaired to the quarters they had secured beforehand, and Mr. Goodchild
+looked down from the window into the surging street.
+
+‘By Heaven, Tom!’ cried he, after contemplating it, ‘I am in the Lunatic
+Asylum again, and these are all mad people under the charge of a body of
+designing keepers!’
+
+All through the Race-Week, Mr. Goodchild never divested himself of this
+idea.  Every day he looked out of window, with something of the dread of
+Lemuel Gulliver looking down at men after he returned home from the
+horse-country; and every day he saw the Lunatics, horse-mad, betting-mad,
+drunken-mad, vice-mad, and the designing Keepers always after them.  The
+idea pervaded, like the second colour in shot-silk, the whole of Mr.
+Goodchild’s impressions.  They were much as follows:
+
+Monday, mid-day.  Races not to begin until to-morrow, but all the
+mob-Lunatics out, crowding the pavements of the one main street of pretty
+and pleasant Doncaster, crowding the road, particularly crowding the
+outside of the Betting Rooms, whooping and shouting loudly after all
+passing vehicles.  Frightened lunatic horses occasionally running away,
+with infinite clatter.  All degrees of men, from peers to paupers,
+betting incessantly.  Keepers very watchful, and taking all good chances.
+An awful family likeness among the Keepers, to Mr. Palmer and Mr.
+Thurtell.  With some knowledge of expression and some acquaintance with
+heads (thus writes Mr. Goodchild), I never have seen anywhere, so many
+repetitions of one class of countenance and one character of head (both
+evil) as in this street at this time.  Cunning, covetousness, secrecy,
+cold calculation, hard callousness and dire insensibility, are the
+uniform Keeper characteristics.  Mr. Palmer passes me five times in five
+minutes, and, so I go down the street, the back of Mr. Thurtell’s skull
+is always going on before me.
+
+Monday evening.  Town lighted up; more Lunatics out than ever; a complete
+choke and stoppage of the thoroughfare outside the Betting Rooms.
+Keepers, having dined, pervade the Betting Rooms, and sharply snap at the
+moneyed Lunatics.  Some Keepers flushed with drink, and some not, but all
+close and calculating.  A vague echoing roar of ‘t’harses’ and ‘t’races’
+always rising in the air, until midnight, at about which period it dies
+away in occasional drunken songs and straggling yells.  But, all night,
+some unmannerly drinking-house in the neighbourhood opens its mouth at
+intervals and spits out a man too drunk to be retained: who thereupon
+makes what uproarious protest may be left in him, and either falls asleep
+where he tumbles, or is carried off in custody.
+
+Tuesday morning, at daybreak.  A sudden rising, as it were out of the
+earth, of all the obscene creatures, who sell ‘correct cards of the
+races.’  They may have been coiled in corners, or sleeping on door-steps,
+and, having all passed the night under the same set of circumstances, may
+all want to circulate their blood at the same time; but, however that may
+be, they spring into existence all at once and together, as though a new
+Cadmus had sown a race-horse’s teeth.  There is nobody up, to buy the
+cards; but, the cards are madly cried.  There is no patronage to quarrel
+for; but, they madly quarrel and fight.  Conspicuous among these hyænas,
+as breakfast-time discloses, is a fearful creature in the general
+semblance of a man: shaken off his next-to-no legs by drink and devilry,
+bare-headed and bare-footed, with a great shock of hair like a horrible
+broom, and nothing on him but a ragged pair of trousers and a pink
+glazed-calico coat—made on him—so very tight that it is as evident that
+he could never take it off, as that he never does.  This hideous
+apparition, inconceivably drunk, has a terrible power of making a
+gong-like imitation of the braying of an ass: which feat requires that he
+should lay his right jaw in his begrimed right paw, double himself up,
+and shake his bray out of himself, with much staggering on his next-to-no
+legs, and much twirling of his horrible broom, as if it were a mop.  From
+the present minute, when he comes in sight holding up his cards to the
+windows, and hoarsely proposing purchase to My Lord, Your Excellency,
+Colonel, the Noble Captain, and Your Honourable Worship—from the present
+minute until the Grand Race-Week is finished, at all hours of the
+morning, evening, day, and night, shall the town reverberate, at
+capricious intervals, to the brays of this frightful animal the
+Gong-donkey.
+
+No very great racing to-day, so no very great amount of vehicles: though
+there is a good sprinkling, too: from farmers’ carts and gigs, to
+carriages with post-horses and to fours-in-hand, mostly coming by the
+road from York, and passing on straight through the main street to the
+Course.  A walk in the wrong direction may be a better thing for Mr.
+Goodchild to-day than the Course, so he walks in the wrong direction.
+Everybody gone to the races.  Only children in the street.  Grand
+Alliance Circus deserted; not one Star-Rider left; omnibus which forms
+the Pay-Place, having on separate panels Pay here for the Boxes, Pay here
+for the Pit, Pay here for the Gallery, hove down in a corner and locked
+up; nobody near the tent but the man on his knees on the grass, who is
+making the paper balloons for the Star young gentlemen to jump through
+to-night.  A pleasant road, pleasantly wooded.  No labourers working in
+the fields; all gone ‘t’races.’  The few late wenders of their way
+‘t’races,’ who are yet left driving on the road, stare in amazement at
+the recluse who is not going ‘t’races.’  Roadside innkeeper has gone
+‘t’races.’  Turnpike-man has gone ‘t’races.’  His thrifty wife, washing
+clothes at the toll-house door, is going ‘t’races’ to-morrow.  Perhaps
+there may be no one left to take the toll to-morrow; who knows?  Though
+assuredly that would be neither turnpike-like nor Yorkshire-like.  The
+very wind and dust seem to be hurrying ‘t’races,’ as they briskly pass
+the only wayfarer on the road.  In the distance, the Railway Engine,
+waiting at the town-end, shrieks despairingly.  Nothing but the
+difficulty of getting off the Line, restrains that Engine from going
+‘t’races,’ too, it is very clear.
+
+At night, more Lunatics out than last night—and more Keepers.  The latter
+very active at the Betting Rooms, the street in front of which is now
+impassable.  Mr. Palmer as before.  Mr. Thurtell as before.  Roar and
+uproar as before.  Gradual subsidence as before.  Unmannerly
+drinking-house expectorates as before.  Drunken negro-melodists,
+Gong-donkey, and correct cards, in the night.
+
+On Wednesday morning, the morning of the great St. Leger, it becomes
+apparent that there has been a great influx since yesterday, both of
+Lunatics and Keepers.  The families of the tradesmen over the way are no
+longer within human ken; their places know them no more; ten, fifteen,
+and twenty guinea-lodgers fill them.  At the pastry-cook’s second-floor
+window, a Keeper is brushing Mr. Thurtell’s hair—thinking it his own.  In
+the wax-chandler’s attic, another Keeper is putting on Mr. Palmer’s
+braces.  In the gunsmith’s nursery, a Lunatic is shaving himself.  In the
+serious stationer’s best sitting-room, three Lunatics are taking a
+combination-breakfast, praising the (cook’s) devil, and drinking neat
+brandy in an atmosphere of last midnight’s cigars.  No family sanctuary
+is free from our Angelic messengers—we put up at the Angel—who in the
+guise of extra waiters for the grand Race-Week, rattle in and out of the
+most secret chambers of everybody’s house, with dishes and tin covers,
+decanters, soda-water bottles, and glasses.  An hour later.  Down the
+street and up the street, as far as eyes can see and a good deal farther,
+there is a dense crowd; outside the Betting Rooms it is like a great
+struggle at a theatre door—in the days of theatres; or at the vestibule
+of the Spurgeon temple—in the days of Spurgeon.  An hour later.  Fusing
+into this crowd, and somehow getting through it, are all kinds of
+conveyances, and all kinds of foot-passengers; carts, with brick-makers
+and brick-makeresses jolting up and down on planks; drags, with the
+needful grooms behind, sitting cross-armed in the needful manner, and
+slanting themselves backward from the soles of their boots at the needful
+angle; postboys, in the shining hats and smart jackets of the olden time,
+when stokers were not; beautiful Yorkshire horses, gallantly driven by
+their own breeders and masters.  Under every pole, and every shaft, and
+every horse, and every wheel as it would seem, the
+Gong-donkey—metallically braying, when not struggling for life, or
+whipped out of the way.
+
+By one o’clock, all this stir has gone out of the streets, and there is
+no one left in them but Francis Goodchild.  Francis Goodchild will not be
+left in them long; for, he too is on his way, ‘t’races.’
+
+A most beautiful sight, Francis Goodchild finds ‘t’races’ to be, when he
+has left fair Doncaster behind him, and comes out on the free course,
+with its agreeable prospect, its quaint Red House oddly changing and
+turning as Francis turns, its green grass, and fresh heath.  A free
+course and an easy one, where Francis can roll smoothly where he will,
+and can choose between the start, or the coming-in, or the turn behind
+the brow of the hill, or any out-of-the-way point where he lists to see
+the throbbing horses straining every nerve, and making the sympathetic
+earth throb as they come by.  Francis much delights to be, not in the
+Grand Stand, but where he can see it, rising against the sky with its
+vast tiers of little white dots of faces, and its last high rows and
+corners of people, looking like pins stuck into an enormous
+pincushion—not quite so symmetrically as his orderly eye could wish, when
+people change or go away.  When the race is nearly run out, it is as good
+as the race to him to see the flutter among the pins, and the change in
+them from dark to light, as hats are taken off and waved.  Not less full
+of interest, the loud anticipation of the winner’s name, the swelling,
+and the final, roar; then, the quick dropping of all the pins out of
+their places, the revelation of the shape of the bare pincushion, and the
+closing-in of the whole host of Lunatics and Keepers, in the rear of the
+three horses with bright-coloured riders, who have not yet quite subdued
+their gallop though the contest is over.
+
+Mr. Goodchild would appear to have been by no means free from lunacy
+himself at ‘t’races,’ though not of the prevalent kind.  He is suspected
+by Mr. Idle to have fallen into a dreadful state concerning a pair of
+little lilac gloves and a little bonnet that he saw there.  Mr. Idle
+asserts, that he did afterwards repeat at the Angel, with an appearance
+of being lunatically seized, some rhapsody to the following effect: ‘O
+little lilac gloves!  And O winning little bonnet, making in conjunction
+with her golden hair quite a Glory in the sunlight round the pretty head,
+why anything in the world but you and me!  Why may not this day’s
+running-of horses, to all the rest: of precious sands of life to me—be
+prolonged through an everlasting autumn-sunshine, without a sunset!
+Slave of the Lamp, or Ring, strike me yonder gallant equestrian Clerk of
+the Course, in the scarlet coat, motionless on the green grass for ages!
+Friendly Devil on Two Sticks, for ten times ten thousands years, keep
+Blink-Bonny jibbing at the post, and let us have no start!  Arab drums,
+powerful of old to summon Genii in the desert, sound of yourselves and
+raise a troop for me in the desert of my heart, which shall so enchant
+this dusty barouche (with a conspicuous excise-plate, resembling the
+Collector’s door-plate at a turnpike), that I, within it, loving the
+little lilac gloves, the winning little bonnet, and the dear
+unknown-wearer with the golden hair, may wait by her side for ever, to
+see a Great St. Leger that shall never be run!’
+
+Thursday morning.  After a tremendous night of crowding, shouting,
+drinking-house expectoration, Gong-donkey, and correct cards.  Symptoms
+of yesterday’s gains in the way of drink, and of yesterday’s losses in
+the way of money, abundant.  Money-losses very great.  As usual, nobody
+seems to have won; but, large losses and many losers are unquestionable
+facts.  Both Lunatics and Keepers, in general very low.  Several of both
+kinds look in at the chemist’s while Mr. Goodchild is making a purchase
+there, to be ‘picked up.’  One red-eyed Lunatic, flushed, faded, and
+disordered, enters hurriedly and cries savagely, ‘Hond us a gloss of sal
+volatile in wather, or soom dommed thing o’ thot sart!’  Faces at the
+Betting Rooms very long, and a tendency to bite nails observable.
+Keepers likewise given this morning to standing about solitary, with
+their hands in their pockets, looking down at their boots as they fit
+them into cracks of the pavement, and then looking up whistling and
+walking away.  Grand Alliance Circus out, in procession; buxom
+lady-member of Grand Alliance, in crimson riding-habit, fresher to look
+at, even in her paint under the day sky, than the cheeks of Lunatics or
+Keepers.  Spanish Cavalier appears to have lost yesterday, and jingles
+his bossed bridle with disgust, as if he were paying.  Reaction also
+apparent at the Guildhall opposite, whence certain pickpockets come out
+handcuffed together, with that peculiar walk which is never seen under
+any other circumstances—a walk expressive of going to jail, game, but
+still of jails being in bad taste and arbitrary, and how would _you_ like
+it if it was you instead of me, as it ought to be!  Mid-day.  Town filled
+as yesterday, but not so full; and emptied as yesterday, but not so
+empty.  In the evening, Angel ordinary where every Lunatic and Keeper has
+his modest daily meal of turtle, venison, and wine, not so crowded as
+yesterday, and not so noisy.  At night, the theatre.  More abstracted
+faces in it than one ever sees at public assemblies; such faces wearing
+an expression which strongly reminds Mr. Goodchild of the boys at school
+who were ‘going up next,’ with their arithmetic or mathematics.  These
+boys are, no doubt, going up to-morrow with _their_ sums and figures.
+Mr. Palmer and Mr. Thurtell in the boxes O. P.  Mr. Thurtell and Mr.
+Palmer in the boxes P. S.  The firm of Thurtell, Palmer, and Thurtell, in
+the boxes Centre.  A most odious tendency observable in these
+distinguished gentlemen to put vile constructions on sufficiently
+innocent phrases in the play, and then to applaud them in a Satyr-like
+manner.  Behind Mr. Goodchild, with a party of other Lunatics and one
+Keeper, the express incarnation of the thing called a ‘gent.’  A
+gentleman born; a gent manufactured.  A something with a scarf round its
+neck, and a slipshod speech issuing from behind the scarf; more depraved,
+more foolish, more ignorant, more unable to believe in any noble or good
+thing of any kind, than the stupidest Bosjesman.  The thing is but a boy
+in years, and is addled with drink.  To do its company justice, even its
+company is ashamed of it, as it drawls its slang criticisms on the
+representation, and inflames Mr. Goodchild with a burning ardour to fling
+it into the pit.  Its remarks are so horrible, that Mr. Goodchild, for
+the moment, even doubts whether that _is_ a wholesome Art, which sets
+women apart on a high floor before such a thing as this, though as good
+as its own sisters, or its own mother—whom Heaven forgive for bringing it
+into the world!  But, the consideration that a low nature must make a low
+world of its own to live in, whatever the real materials, or it could no
+more exist than any of us could without the sense of touch, brings Mr.
+Goodchild to reason: the rather, because the thing soon drops its downy
+chin upon its scarf, and slobbers itself asleep.
+
+Friday Morning.  Early fights.  Gong-donkey, and correct cards.  Again, a
+great set towards the races, though not so great a set as on Wednesday.
+Much packing going on too, upstairs at the gun-smith’s, the
+wax-chandler’s, and the serious stationer’s; for there will be a heavy
+drift of Lunatics and Keepers to London by the afternoon train.  The
+course as pretty as ever; the great pincushion as like a pincushion, but
+not nearly so full of pins; whole rows of pins wanting.  On the great
+event of the day, both Lunatics and Keepers become inspired with rage;
+and there is a violent scuffling, and a rushing at the losing jockey, and
+an emergence of the said jockey from a swaying and menacing crowd,
+protected by friends, and looking the worse for wear; which is a rough
+proceeding, though animating to see from a pleasant distance.  After the
+great event, rills begin to flow from the pincushion towards the
+railroad; the rills swell into rivers; the rivers soon unite into a lake.
+The lake floats Mr. Goodchild into Doncaster, past the Itinerant
+personage in black, by the way-side telling him from the vantage ground
+of a legibly printed placard on a pole that for all these things the Lord
+will bring him to judgment.  No turtle and venison ordinary this evening;
+that is all over.  No Betting at the rooms; nothing there but the plants
+in pots, which have, all the week, been stood about the entry to give it
+an innocent appearance, and which have sorely sickened by this time.
+
+Saturday.  Mr. Idle wishes to know at breakfast, what were those dreadful
+groanings in his bedroom doorway in the night?  Mr. Goodchild answers,
+Nightmare.  Mr. Idle repels the calumny, and calls the waiter.  The Angel
+is very sorry—had intended to explain; but you see, gentlemen, there was
+a gentleman dined down-stairs with two more, and he had lost a deal of
+money, and he would drink a deal of wine, and in the night he ‘took the
+horrors,’ and got up; and as his friends could do nothing with him he
+laid himself down and groaned at Mr. Idle’s door.  ‘And he DID groan
+there,’ Mr. Idle says; ‘and you will please to imagine me inside, “taking
+the horrors” too!’
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+So far, the picture of Doncaster on the occasion of its great sporting
+anniversary, offers probably a general representation of the social
+condition of the town, in the past as well as in the present time.  The
+sole local phenomenon of the current year, which may be considered as
+entirely unprecedented in its way, and which certainly claims, on that
+account, some slight share of notice, consists in the actual existence of
+one remarkable individual, who is sojourning in Doncaster, and who,
+neither directly nor indirectly, has anything at all to do, in any
+capacity whatever, with the racing amusements of the week.  Ranging
+throughout the entire crowd that fills the town, and including the
+inhabitants as well as the visitors, nobody is to be found altogether
+disconnected with the business of the day, excepting this one
+unparalleled man.  He does not bet on the races, like the sporting men.
+He does not assist the races, like the jockeys, starters, judges, and
+grooms.  He does not look on at the races, like Mr. Goodchild and his
+fellow-spectators.  He does not profit by the races, like the
+hotel-keepers and the tradespeople.  He does not minister to the
+necessities of the races, like the booth-keepers, the postilions, the
+waiters, and the hawkers of Lists.  He does not assist the attractions of
+the races, like the actors at the theatre, the riders at the circus, or
+the posturers at the Poses Plastiques.  Absolutely and literally, he is
+the only individual in Doncaster who stands by the brink of the
+full-flowing race-stream, and is not swept away by it in common with all
+the rest of his species.  Who is this modern hermit, this recluse of the
+St. Leger-week, this inscrutably ungregarious being, who lives apart from
+the amusements and activities of his fellow-creatures?  Surely, there is
+little difficulty in guessing that clearest and easiest of all riddles.
+Who could he be, but Mr. Thomas Idle?
+
+Thomas had suffered himself to be taken to Doncaster, just as he would
+have suffered himself to be taken to any other place in the habitable
+globe which would guarantee him the temporary possession of a comfortable
+sofa to rest his ankle on.  Once established at the hotel, with his leg
+on one cushion and his back against another, he formally declined taking
+the slightest interest in any circumstance whatever connected with the
+races, or with the people who were assembled to see them.  Francis
+Goodchild, anxious that the hours should pass by his crippled
+travelling-companion as lightly as possible, suggested that his sofa
+should be moved to the window, and that he should amuse himself by
+looking out at the moving panorama of humanity, which the view from it of
+the principal street presented.  Thomas, however, steadily declined
+profiting by the suggestion.
+
+‘The farther I am from the window,’ he said, ‘the better, Brother
+Francis, I shall be pleased.  I have nothing in common with the one
+prevalent idea of all those people who are passing in the street.  Why
+should I care to look at them?’
+
+‘I hope I have nothing in common with the prevalent idea of a great many
+of them, either,’ answered Goodchild, thinking of the sporting gentlemen
+whom he had met in the course of his wanderings about Doncaster.  ‘But,
+surely, among all the people who are walking by the house, at this very
+moment, you may find—’
+
+‘Not one living creature,’ interposed Thomas, ‘who is not, in one way or
+another, interested in horses, and who is not, in a greater or less
+degree, an admirer of them.  Now, I hold opinions in reference to these
+particular members of the quadruped creation, which may lay claim (as I
+believe) to the disastrous distinction of being unpartaken by any other
+human being, civilised or savage, over the whole surface of the earth.
+Taking the horse as an animal in the abstract, Francis, I cordially
+despise him from every point of view.’
+
+‘Thomas,’ said Goodchild, ‘confinement to the house has begun to affect
+your biliary secretions.  I shall go to the chemist’s and get you some
+physic.’
+
+‘I object,’ continued Thomas, quietly possessing himself of his friend’s
+hat, which stood on a table near him,—‘I object, first, to the personal
+appearance of the horse.  I protest against the conventional idea of
+beauty, as attached to that animal.  I think his nose too long, his
+forehead too low, and his legs (except in the case of the cart-horse)
+ridiculously thin by comparison with the size of his body.  Again,
+considering how big an animal he is, I object to the contemptible
+delicacy of his constitution.  Is he not the sickliest creature in
+creation?  Does any child catch cold as easily as a horse?  Does he not
+sprain his fetlock, for all his appearance of superior strength, as
+easily as I sprained my ankle!  Furthermore, to take him from another
+point of view, what a helpless wretch he is!  No fine lady requires more
+constant waiting-on than a horse.  Other animals can make their own
+toilette: he must have a groom.  You will tell me that this is because we
+want to make his coat artificially glossy.  Glossy!  Come home with me,
+and see my cat,—my clever cat, who can groom herself!  Look at your own
+dog! see how the intelligent creature curry-combs himself with his own
+honest teeth!  Then, again, what a fool the horse is, what a poor,
+nervous fool!  He will start at a piece of white paper in the road as if
+it was a lion.  His one idea, when he hears a noise that he is not
+accustomed to, is to run away from it.  What do you say to those two
+common instances of the sense and courage of this absurdly overpraised
+animal?  I might multiply them to two hundred, if I chose to exert my
+mind and waste my breath, which I never do.  I prefer coming at once to
+my last charge against the horse, which is the most serious of all,
+because it affects his moral character.  I accuse him boldly, in his
+capacity of servant to man, of slyness and treachery.  I brand him
+publicly, no matter how mild he may look about the eyes, or how sleek he
+may be about the coat, as a systematic betrayer, whenever he can get the
+chance, of the confidence reposed in him.  What do you mean by laughing
+and shaking your head at me?’
+
+‘Oh, Thomas, Thomas!’ said Goodchild.  ‘You had better give me my hat;
+you had better let me get you that physic.’
+
+‘I will let you get anything you like, including a composing draught for
+yourself,’ said Thomas, irritably alluding to his fellow-apprentice’s
+inexhaustible activity, ‘if you will only sit quiet for five minutes
+longer, and hear me out.  I say again the horse is a betrayer of the
+confidence reposed in him; and that opinion, let me add, is drawn from my
+own personal experience, and is not based on any fanciful theory
+whatever.  You shall have two instances, two overwhelming instances.  Let
+me start the first of these by asking, what is the distinguishing quality
+which the Shetland Pony has arrogated to himself, and is still
+perpetually trumpeting through the world by means of popular report and
+books on Natural History?  I see the answer in your face: it is the
+quality of being Sure-Footed.  He professes to have other virtues, such
+as hardiness and strength, which you may discover on trial; but the one
+thing which he insists on your believing, when you get on his back, is
+that he may be safely depended on not to tumble down with you.  Very
+good.  Some years ago, I was in Shetland with a party of friends.  They
+insisted on taking me with them to the top of a precipice that overhung
+the sea.  It was a great distance off, but they all determined to walk to
+it except me.  I was wiser then than I was with you at Carrock, and I
+determined to be carried to the precipice.  There was no carriage-road in
+the island, and nobody offered (in consequence, as I suppose, of the
+imperfectly-civilised state of the country) to bring me a sedan-chair,
+which is naturally what I should have liked best.  A Shetland pony was
+produced instead.  I remembered my Natural History, I recalled popular
+report, and I got on the little beast’s back, as any other man would have
+done in my position, placing implicit confidence in the sureness of his
+feet.  And how did he repay that confidence?  Brother Francis, carry your
+mind on from morning to noon.  Picture to yourself a howling wilderness
+of grass and bog, bounded by low stony hills.  Pick out one particular
+spot in that imaginary scene, and sketch me in it, with outstretched
+arms, curved back, and heels in the air, plunging headforemost into a
+black patch of water and mud.  Place just behind me the legs, the body,
+and the head of a sure-footed Shetland pony, all stretched flat on the
+ground, and you will have produced an accurate representation of a very
+lamentable fact.  And the moral device, Francis, of this picture will be
+to testify that when gentlemen put confidence in the legs of Shetland
+ponies, they will find to their cost that they are leaning on nothing but
+broken reeds.  There is my first instance—and what have you got to say to
+that?’
+
+‘Nothing, but that I want my hat,’ answered Goodchild, starting up and
+walking restlessly about the room.
+
+‘You shall have it in a minute,’ rejoined Thomas.  ‘My second
+instance’—(Goodchild groaned, and sat down again)—‘My second instance is
+more appropriate to the present time and place, for it refers to a
+race-horse.  Two years ago an excellent friend of mine, who was desirous
+of prevailing on me to take regular exercise, and who was well enough
+acquainted with the weakness of my legs to expect no very active
+compliance with his wishes on their part, offered to make me a present of
+one of his horses.  Hearing that the animal in question had started in
+life on the turf, I declined accepting the gift with many thanks; adding,
+by way of explanation, that I looked on a race-horse as a kind of
+embodied hurricane, upon which no sane man of my character and habits
+could be expected to seat himself.  My friend replied that, however
+appropriate my metaphor might be as applied to race-horses in general, it
+was singularly unsuitable as applied to the particular horse which he
+proposed to give me.  From a foal upwards this remarkable animal had been
+the idlest and most sluggish of his race.  Whatever capacities for speed
+he might possess he had kept so strictly to himself, that no amount of
+training had ever brought them out.  He had been found hopelessly slow as
+a racer, and hopelessly lazy as a hunter, and was fit for nothing but a
+quiet, easy life of it with an old gentleman or an invalid.  When I heard
+this account of the horse, I don’t mind confessing that my heart warmed
+to him.  Visions of Thomas Idle ambling serenely on the back of a steed
+as lazy as himself, presenting to a restless world the soothing and
+composite spectacle of a kind of sluggardly Centaur, too peaceable in his
+habits to alarm anybody, swam attractively before my eyes.  I went to
+look at the horse in the stable.  Nice fellow! he was fast asleep with a
+kitten on his back.  I saw him taken out for an airing by the groom.  If
+he had had trousers on his legs I should not have known them from my own,
+so deliberately were they lifted up, so gently were they put down, so
+slowly did they get over the ground.  From that moment I gratefully
+accepted my friend’s offer.  I went home; the horse followed me—by a slow
+train.  Oh, Francis, how devoutly I believed in that horse I how
+carefully I looked after all his little comforts!  I had never gone the
+length of hiring a man-servant to wait on myself; but I went to the
+expense of hiring one to wait upon him.  If I thought a little of myself
+when I bought the softest saddle that could be had for money, I thought
+also of my horse.  When the man at the shop afterwards offered me spurs
+and a whip, I turned from him with horror.  When I sallied out for my
+first ride, I went purposely unarmed with the means of hurrying my steed.
+He proceeded at his own pace every step of the way; and when he stopped,
+at last, and blew out both his sides with a heavy sigh, and turned his
+sleepy head and looked behind him, I took him home again, as I might take
+home an artless child who said to me, “If you please, sir, I am tired.”
+For a week this complete harmony between me and my horse lasted
+undisturbed.  At the end of that time, when he had made quite sure of my
+friendly confidence in his laziness, when he had thoroughly acquainted
+himself with all the little weaknesses of my seat (and their name is
+Legion), the smouldering treachery and ingratitude of the equine nature
+blazed out in an instant.  Without the slightest provocation from me,
+with nothing passing him at the time but a pony-chaise driven by an old
+lady, he started in one instant from a state of sluggish depression to a
+state of frantic high spirits.  He kicked, he plunged, he shied, he
+pranced, he capered fearfully.  I sat on him as long as I could, and when
+I could sit no longer, I fell off.  No, Francis! this is not a
+circumstance to be laughed at, but to be wept over.  What would be said
+of a Man who had requited my kindness in that way?  Range over all the
+rest of the animal creation, and where will you find me an instance of
+treachery so black as this?  The cow that kicks down the milking-pail may
+have some reason for it; she may think herself taxed too heavily to
+contribute to the dilution of human tea and the greasing of human bread.
+The tiger who springs out on me unawares has the excuse of being hungry
+at the time, to say nothing of the further justification of being a total
+stranger to me.  The very flea who surprises me in my sleep may defend
+his act of assassination on the ground that I, in my turn, am always
+ready to murder him when I am awake.  I defy the whole body of Natural
+Historians to move me, logically, off the ground that I have taken in
+regard to the horse.  Receive back your hat, Brother Francis, and go to
+the chemist’s, if you please; for I have now done.  Ask me to take
+anything you like, except an interest in the Doncaster races.  Ask me to
+look at anything you like, except an assemblage of people all animated by
+feelings of a friendly and admiring nature towards the horse.  You are a
+remarkably well-informed man, and you have heard of hermits.  Look upon
+me as a member of that ancient fraternity, and you will sensibly add to
+the many obligations which Thomas Idle is proud to owe to Francis
+Goodchild.’
+
+Here, fatigued by the effort of excessive talking, disputatious Thomas
+waved one hand languidly, laid his head back on the sofa-pillow, and
+calmly closed his eyes.
+
+At a later period, Mr. Goodchild assailed his travelling companion boldly
+from the impregnable fortress of common sense.  But Thomas, though tamed
+in body by drastic discipline, was still as mentally unapproachable as
+ever on the subject of his favourite delusion.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+The view from the window after Saturday’s breakfast is altogether
+changed.  The tradesmen’s families have all come back again.  The serious
+stationer’s young woman of all work is shaking a duster out of the window
+of the combination breakfast-room; a child is playing with a doll, where
+Mr. Thurtell’s hair was brushed; a sanitary scrubbing is in progress on
+the spot where Mr. Palmer’s braces were put on.  No signs of the Races
+are in the streets, but the tramps and the tumble-down-carts and trucks
+laden with drinking-forms and tables and remnants of booths, that are
+making their way out of the town as fast as they can.  The Angel, which
+has been cleared for action all the week, already begins restoring every
+neat and comfortable article of furniture to its own neat and comfortable
+place.  The Angel’s daughters (pleasanter angels Mr. Idle and Mr.
+Goodchild never saw, nor more quietly expert in their business, nor more
+superior to the common vice of being above it), have a little time to
+rest, and to air their cheerful faces among the flowers in the yard.  It
+is market-day.  The market looks unusually natural, comfortable, and
+wholesome; the market-people too.  The town seems quite restored, when,
+hark! a metallic bray—The Gong-donkey!
+
+The wretched animal has not cleared off with the rest, but is here, under
+the window.  How much more inconceivably drunk now, how much more
+begrimed of paw, how much more tight of calico hide, how much more
+stained and daubed and dirty and dunghilly, from his horrible broom to
+his tender toes, who shall say!  He cannot even shake the bray out of
+himself now, without laying his cheek so near to the mud of the street,
+that he pitches over after delivering it.  Now, prone in the mud, and now
+backing himself up against shop-windows, the owners of which come out in
+terror to remove him; now, in the drinking-shop, and now in the
+tobacconist’s, where he goes to buy tobacco, and makes his way into the
+parlour, and where he gets a cigar, which in half-a-minute he forgets to
+smoke; now dancing, now dozing, now cursing, and now complimenting My
+Lord, the Colonel, the Noble Captain, and Your Honourable Worship, the
+Gong-donkey kicks up his heels, occasionally braying, until suddenly, he
+beholds the dearest friend he has in the world coming down the street.
+
+The dearest friend the Gong-donkey has in the world, is a sort of
+Jackall, in a dull, mangy, black hide, of such small pieces that it looks
+as if it were made of blacking bottles turned inside out and cobbled
+together.  The dearest friend in the world (inconceivably drunk too)
+advances at the Gong-donkey, with a hand on each thigh, in a series of
+humorous springs and stops, wagging his head as he comes.  The
+Gong-donkey regarding him with attention and with the warmest affection,
+suddenly perceives that he is the greatest enemy he has in the world, and
+hits him hard in the countenance.  The astonished Jackall closes with the
+Donkey, and they roll over and over in the mud, pummelling one another.
+A Police Inspector, supernaturally endowed with patience, who has long
+been looking on from the Guildhall-steps, says, to a myrmidon, ‘Lock ’em
+up!  Bring ’em in!’
+
+Appropriate finish to the Grand Race-Week.  The Gong-donkey, captive and
+last trace of it, conveyed into limbo, where they cannot do better than
+keep him until next Race-Week.  The Jackall is wanted too, and is much
+looked for, over the way and up and down.  But, having had the good
+fortune to be undermost at the time of the capture, he has vanished into
+air.
+
+On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Goodchild walks out and looks at the Course.
+It is quite deserted; heaps of broken crockery and bottles are raised to
+its memory; and correct cards and other fragments of paper are blowing
+about it, as the regulation little paper-books, carried by the French
+soldiers in their breasts, were seen, soon after the battle was fought,
+blowing idly about the plains of Waterloo.
+
+Where will these present idle leaves be blown by the idle winds, and
+where will the last of them be one day lost and forgotten?  An idle
+question, and an idle thought.; and with it Mr. Idle fitly makes his bow,
+and Mr. Goodchild his, and thus ends the Lazy Tour of Two Idle
+Apprentices.
+
+
+
+
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