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_ I have kept one secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful
man. Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody
ever did suppose it, but I am naturally a bashful man. This is the
secret which I have never breathed until now.
I might greatly move the reader by some account of the innumerable
places I have not been to, the innumerable people I have not called
upon or received, the innumerable social evasions I have been guilty
of, solely because I am by original constitution and character a
bashful man. But I will leave the reader unmoved, and proceed with
the object before me.
That object is to give a plain account of my travels and discoveries
in the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place of good entertainment for man
and beast I was once snowed up.
It happened in the memorable year when I parted for ever from Angela
Leath, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the discovery
that she preferred my bosom friend. From our school-days I had
freely admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior to myself;
and, though I was grievously wounded at heart, I felt the preference
to be natural, and tried to forgive them both. It was under these
circumstances that I resolved to go to America--on my way to the
Devil.
Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but
resolving to write each of them an affecting letter conveying my
blessing and forgiveness, which the steam-tender for shore should
carry to the post when I myself should be bound for the New World,
far beyond recall,--I say, locking up my grief in my own breast, and
consoling myself as I could with the prospect of being generous, I
quietly left all I held dear, and started on the desolate journey I
have mentioned.
The dead winter-time was in full dreariness when I left my chambers
for ever, at five o'clock in the morning. I had shaved by candle-
light, of course, and was miserably cold, and experienced that
general all-pervading sensation of getting up to be hanged which I
have usually found inseparable from untimely rising under such
circumstances.
How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I came
out of the Temple! The street-lamps flickering in the gusty north-
east wind, as if the very gas were contorted with cold; the white-
topped houses; the bleak, star-lighted sky; the market people and
other early stragglers, trotting to circulate their almost frozen
blood; the hospitable light and warmth of the few coffee-shops and
public-houses that were open for such customers; the hard, dry,
frosty rime with which the air was charged (the wind had already
beaten it into every crevice), and which lashed my face like a steel
whip.
It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the year.
The Post-office packet for the United States was to depart from
Liverpool, weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month,
and I had the intervening time on my hands. I had taken this into
consideration, and had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot
(which I need not name) on the farther borders of Yorkshire. It was
endeared to me by my having first seen Angela at a farmhouse in that
place, and my melancholy was gratified by the idea of taking a
wintry leave of it before my expatriation. I ought to explain,
that, to avoid being sought out before my resolution should have
been rendered irrevocable by being carried into full effect, I had
written to Angela overnight, in my usual manner, lamenting that
urgent business, of which she should know all particulars by-and-by-
-took me unexpectedly away from her for a week or ten days.
There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place there
were stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common with
some other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody
dreaded as a very serious penance then. I had secured the box-seat
on the fastest of these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get
into a cab with my portmanteau, so to make the best of my way to the
Peacock at Islington, where I was to join this coach. But when one
of our Temple watchmen, who carried my portmanteau into Fleet Street
for me, told me about the huge blocks of ice that had for some days
past been floating in the river, having closed up in the night, and
made a walk from the Temple Gardens over to the Surrey shore, I
began to ask myself the question, whether the box-seat would not be
likely to put a sudden and a frosty end to my unhappiness. I was
heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to
wish to be frozen to death.
When I got up to the Peacock,--where I found everybody drinking hot
purl, in self-preservation,--I asked if there were an inside seat to
spare. I then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only
passenger. This gave me a still livelier idea of the great
inclemency of the weather, since that coach always loaded
particularly well. However, I took a little purl (which I found
uncommonly good), and got into the coach. When I was seated, they
built me up with straw to the waist, and, conscious of making a
rather ridiculous appearance, I began my journey.
It was still dark when we left the Peacock. For a little while,
pale, uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished,
and then it was hard, black, frozen day. People were lighting their
fires; smoke was mounting straight up high into the rarified air;
and we were rattling for Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I
have ever heard the ring of iron shoes on. As we got into the
country, everything seemed to have grown old and gray. The roads,
the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and homesteads, the ricks in
farmers' yards. Out-door work was abandoned, horse-troughs at road-
side inns were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged about, doors were
close shut, little turnpike houses had blazing fires inside, and
children (even turnpike people have children, and seem to like them)
rubbed the frost from the little panes of glass with their chubby
arms, that their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of the solitary
coach going by. I don't know when the snow begin to set in; but I
know that we were changing horses somewhere when I heard the guard
remark, "That the old lady up in the sky was picking her geese
pretty hard to-day." Then, indeed, I found the white down falling
fast and thick.
The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out, as a lonely traveller
does. I was warm and valiant after eating and drinking,--
particularly after dinner; cold and depressed at all other times. I
was always bewildered as to time and place, and always more or less
out of my senses. The coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus
Auld Lang Syne, without a moment's intermission. They kept the time
and tune with the greatest regularity, and rose into the swell at
the beginning of the Refrain, with a precision that worried me to
death. While we changed horses, the guard and coachman went
stumping up and down the road, printing off their shoes in the snow,
and poured so much liquid consolation into themselves without being
any the worse for it, that I began to confound them, as it darkened
again, with two great white casks standing on end. Our horses
tumbled down in solitary places, and we got them up,--which was the
pleasantest variety I had, for it warmed me. And it snowed and
snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing. All night
long we went on in this manner. Thus we came round the clock, upon
the Great North Road, to the performance of Auld Lang Syne by day
again. And it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never
left off snowing.
I forget now where we were at noon on the second day, and where we
ought to have been; but I know that we were scores of miles
behindhand, and that our case was growing worse every hour. The
drift was becoming prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting snowed
out; the road and the fields were all one; instead of having fences
and hedge-rows to guide us, we went crunching on over an unbroken
surface of ghastly white that might sink beneath us at any moment
and drop us down a whole hillside. Still the coachman and guard--
who kept together on the box, always in council, and looking well
about them--made out the track with astonishing sagacity.
When we came in sight of a town, it looked, to my fancy, like a
large drawing on a slate, with abundance of slate-pencil expended on
the churches and houses where the snow lay thickest. When we came
within a town, and found the church clocks all stopped, the dial-
faces choked with snow, and the inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as
if the whole place were overgrown with white moss. As to the coach,
it was a mere snowball; similarly, the men and boys who ran along
beside us to the town's end, turning our clogged wheels and
encouraging our horses, were men and boys of snow; and the bleak
wild solitude to which they at last dismissed us was a snowy Sahara.
One would have thought this enough: notwithstanding which, I pledge
my word that it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never
left off snowing.
We performed Auld Lang Syne the whole day; seeing nothing, out of
towns and villages, but the track of stoats, hares, and foxes, and
sometimes of birds. At nine o'clock at night, on a Yorkshire moor,
a cheerful burst from our horn, and a welcome sound of talking, with
a glimmering and moving about of lanterns, roused me from my drowsy
state. I found that we were going to change.
They helped me out, and I said to a waiter, whose bare head became
as white as King Lear's in a single minute, "What Inn is this?"
"The Holly-Tree, sir," said he.
"Upon my word, I believe," said I, apologetically, to the guard and
coachman, "that I must stop here."
Now the landlord, and the landlady, and the ostler, and the post-
boy, and all the stable authorities, had already asked the coachman,
to the wide-eyed interest of all the rest of the establishment, if
he meant to go on. The coachman had already replied, "Yes, he'd
take her through it,"--meaning by Her the coach,--"if so be as
George would stand by him." George was the guard, and he had
already sworn that he would stand by him. So the helpers were
already getting the horses out.
My declaring myself beaten, after this parley, was not an
announcement without preparation. Indeed, but for the way to the
announcement being smoothed by the parley, I more than doubt
whether, as an innately bashful man, I should have had the
confidence to make it. As it was, it received the approval even of
the guard and coachman. Therefore, with many confirmations of my
inclining, and many remarks from one bystander to another, that the
gentleman could go for'ard by the mail to-morrow, whereas to-night
he would only be froze, and where was the good of a gentleman being
froze--ah, let alone buried alive (which latter clause was added by
a humorous helper as a joke at my expense, and was extremely well
received), I saw my portmanteau got out stiff, like a frozen body;
did the handsome thing by the guard and coachman; wished them good-
night and a prosperous journey; and, a little ashamed of myself,
after all, for leaving them to fight it out alone, followed the
landlord, landlady, and waiter of the Holly-Tree up-stairs.
I thought I had never seen such a large room as that into which they
showed me. It had five windows, with dark red curtains that would
have absorbed the light of a general illumination; and there were
complications of drapery at the top of the curtains, that went
wandering about the wall in a most extraordinary manner. I asked
for a smaller room, and they told me there was no smaller room.
They could screen me in, however, the landlord said. They brought a
great old japanned screen, with natives (Japanese, I suppose)
engaged in a variety of idiotic pursuits all over it; and left me
roasting whole before an immense fire.
My bedroom was some quarter of a mile off, up a great staircase at
the end of a long gallery; and nobody knows what a misery this is to
a bashful man who would rather not meet people on the stairs. It
was the grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the
furniture, from the four posts of the bed to the two old silver
candle-sticks, was tall, high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted.
Below, in my sitting-room, if I looked round my screen, the wind
rushed at me like a mad bull; if I stuck to my arm-chair, the fire
scorched me to the colour of a new brick. The chimney-piece was
very high, and there was a bad glass--what I may call a wavy glass--
above it, which, when I stood up, just showed me my anterior
phrenological developments,--and these never look well, in any
subject, cut short off at the eyebrow. If I stood with my back to
the fire, a gloomy vault of darkness above and beyond the screen
insisted on being looked at; and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery
of the ten curtains of the five windows went twisting and creeping
about, like a nest of gigantic worms.
I suppose that what I observe in myself must be observed by some
other men of similar character in themselves; therefore I am
emboldened to mention, that, when I travel, I never arrive at a
place but I immediately want to go away from it. Before I had
finished my supper of broiled fowl and mulled port, I had impressed
upon the waiter in detail my arrangements for departure in the
morning. Breakfast and bill at eight. Fly at nine. Two horses,
or, if needful, even four.
Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week long. In cases
of nightmare, I thought of Angela, and felt more depressed than ever
by the reflection that I was on the shortest road to Gretna Green.
What had I to do with Gretna Green? I was not going that way to the
Devil, but by the American route, I remarked in my bitterness.
In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it had snowed
all night, and that I was snowed up. Nothing could get out of that
spot on the moor, or could come at it, until the road had been cut
out by labourers from the market-town. When they might cut their
way to the Holly-Tree nobody could tell me.
It was now Christmas-eve. I should have had a dismal Christmas-time
of it anywhere, and consequently that did not so much matter; still,
being snowed up was like dying of frost, a thing I had not bargained
for. I felt very lonely. Yet I could no more have proposed to the
landlord and landlady to admit me to their society (though I should
have liked it--very much) than I could have asked them to present me
with a piece of plate. Here my great secret, the real bashfulness
of my character, is to be observed. Like most bashful men, I judge
of other people as if they were bashful too. Besides being far too
shamefaced to make the proposal myself, I really had a delicate
misgiving that it would be in the last degree disconcerting to them.
Trying to settle down, therefore, in my solitude, I first of all
asked what books there were in the house. The waiter brought me a
Book of Roads, two or three old Newspapers, a little Song-Book,
terminating in a collection of Toasts and Sentiments, a little Jest-
Book, an odd volume of Peregrine Pickle, and the Sentimental
Journey. I knew every word of the two last already, but I read them
through again, then tried to hum all the songs (Auld Lang Syne was
among them); went entirely through the jokes,--in which I found a
fund of melancholy adapted to my state of mind; proposed all the
toasts, enunciated all the sentiments, and mastered the papers. The
latter had nothing in them but stock advertisements, a meeting about
a county rate, and a highway robbery. As I am a greedy reader, I
could not make this supply hold out until night; it was exhausted by
tea-time. Being then entirely cast upon my own resources, I got
through an hour in considering what to do next. Ultimately, it came
into my head (from which I was anxious by any means to exclude
Angela and Edwin), that I would endeavour to recall my experience of
Inns, and would try how long it lasted me. I stirred the fire,
moved my chair a little to one side of the screen,--not daring to go
far, for I knew the wind was waiting to make a rush at me, I could
hear it growling,--and began.
My first impressions of an Inn dated from the Nursery; consequently
I went back to the Nursery for a starting-point, and found myself at
the knee of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a
green gown, whose specially was a dismal narrative of a landlord by
the roadside, whose visitors unaccountably disappeared for many
years, until it was discovered that the pursuit of his life had been
to convert them into pies. For the better devotion of himself to
this branch of industry, he had constructed a secret door behind the
head of the bed; and when the visitor (oppressed with pie) had
fallen asleep, this wicked landlord would look softly in with a lamp
in one hand and a knife in the other, would cut his throat, and
would make him into pies; for which purpose he had coppers,
underneath a trap-door, always boiling; and rolled out his pastry in
the dead of the night. Yet even he was not insensible to the stings
of conscience, for he never went to sleep without being heard to
mutter, "Too much pepper!" which was eventually the cause of his
being brought to justice. I had no sooner disposed of this criminal
than there started up another of the same period, whose profession
was originally house-breaking; in the pursuit of which art he had
had his right ear chopped off one night, as he was burglariously
getting in at a window, by a brave and lovely servant-maid (whom the
aquiline-nosed woman, though not at all answering the description,
always mysteriously implied to be herself). After several years,
this brave and lovely servant-maid was married to the landlord of a
country Inn; which landlord had this remarkable characteristic, that
he always wore a silk nightcap, and never would on any consideration
take it off. At last, one night, when he was fast asleep, the brave
and lovely woman lifted up his silk nightcap on the right side, and
found that he had no ear there; upon which she sagaciously perceived
that he was the clipped housebreaker, who had married her with the
intention of putting her to death. She immediately heated the poker
and terminated his career, for which she was taken to King George
upon his throne, and received the compliments of royalty on her
great discretion and valour. This same narrator, who had a Ghoulish
pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in terrifying me to the utmost
confines of my reason, had another authentic anecdote within her own
experience, founded, I now believe, upon Raymond and Agnes, or the
Bleeding Nun. She said it happened to her brother-in-law, who was
immensely rich,--which my father was not; and immensely tall,--which
my father was not. It was always a point with this Ghoul to present
my clearest relations and friends to my youthful mind under
circumstances of disparaging contrast. The brother-in-law was
riding once through a forest on a magnificent horse (we had no
magnificent horse at our house), attended by a favourite and
valuable Newfoundland dog (we had no dog), when he found himself
benighted, and came to an Inn. A dark woman opened the door, and he
asked her if he could have a bed there. She answered yes, and put
his horse in the stable, and took him into a room where there were
two dark men. While he was at supper, a parrot in the room began to
talk, saying, "Blood, blood! Wipe up the blood!" Upon which one of
the dark men wrung the parrot's neck, and said he was fond of
roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one for breakfast in the
morning. After eating and drinking heartily, the immensely rich,
tall brother-in-law went up to bed; but he was rather vexed, because
they had shut his dog in the stable, saying that they never allowed
dogs in the house. He sat very quiet for more than an hour,
thinking and thinking, when, just as his candle was burning out, he
heard a scratch at the door. He opened the door, and there was the
Newfoundland dog! The dog came softly in, smelt about him, went
straight to some straw in the corner which the dark men had said
covered apples, tore the straw away, and disclosed two sheets
steeped in blood. Just at that moment the candle went out, and the
brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door, saw the two
dark men stealing up-stairs; one armed with a dagger that long
(about five feet); the other carrying a chopper, a sack, and a
spade. Having no remembrance of the close of this adventure, I
suppose my faculties to have been always so frozen with terror at
this stage of it, that the power of listening stagnated within me
for some quarter of an hour.
These barbarous stories carried me, sitting there on the Holly-Tree
hearth, to the Roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny book
with a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval
form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner
compartments four incidents of the tragedy with which the name is
associated,--coloured with a hand at once so free and economical,
that the bloom of Jonathan's complexion passed without any pause
into the breeches of the ostler, and, smearing itself off into the
next division, became rum in a bottle. Then I remembered how the
landlord was found at the murdered traveller's bedside, with his own
knife at his feet, and blood upon his hand; how he was hanged for
the murder, notwithstanding his protestation that he had indeed come
there to kill the traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been
stricken motionless on finding him already slain; and how the
ostler, years afterwards, owned the deed. By this time I had made
myself quite uncomfortable. I stirred the fire, and stood with my
back to it as long as I could bear the heat, looking up at the
darkness beyond the screen, and at the wormy curtains creeping in
and creeping out, like the worms in the ballad of Alonzo the Brave
and the Fair Imogene.
There was an Inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which
had pleasanter recollections about it than any of these. I took it
next. It was the Inn where friends used to put up, and where we
used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be
tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign,--the Mitre,--and a bar that
seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I
loved the landlord's youngest daughter to distraction,--but let that
pass. It was in this Inn that I was cried over by my rosy little
sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight. And though
she had been, that Holly-Tree night, for many a long year where all
tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.
"To be continued to-morrow," said I, when I took my candle to go to
bed. But my bed took it upon itself to continue the train of
thought that night. It carried me away, like the enchanted carpet,
to a distant place (though still in England), and there, alighting
from a stage-coach at another Inn in the snow, as I had actually
done some years before, I repeated in my sleep a curious experience
I had really had there. More than a year before I made the journey
in the course of which I put up at that Inn, I had lost a very near
and dear friend by death. Every night since, at home or away from
home, I had dreamed of that friend; sometimes as still living;
sometimes as returning from the world of shadows to comfort me;
always as being beautiful, placid, and happy, never in association
with any approach to fear or distress. It was at a lonely Inn in a
wide moorland place, that I halted to pass the night. When I had
looked from my bedroom window over the waste of snow on which the
moon was shining, I sat down by my fire to write a letter. I had
always, until that hour, kept it within my own breast that I dreamed
every night of the dear lost one. But in the letter that I wrote I
recorded the circumstance, and added that I felt much interested in
proving whether the subject of my dream would still be faithful to
me, travel-tired, and in that remote place. No. I lost the beloved
figure of my vision in parting with the secret. My sleep has never
looked upon it since, in sixteen years, but once. I was in Italy,
and awoke (or seemed to awake), the well-remembered voice distinctly
in my ears, conversing with it. I entreated it, as it rose above my
bed and soared up to the vaulted roof of the old room, to answer me
a question I had asked touching the Future Life. My hands were
still outstretched towards it as it vanished, when I heard a bell
ringing by the garden wall, and a voice in the deep stillness of the
night calling on all good Christians to pray for the souls of the
dead; it being All Souls' Eve.
To return to the Holly-Tree. When I awoke next day, it was freezing
hard, and the lowering sky threatened more snow. My breakfast
cleared away, I drew my chair into its former place, and, with the
fire getting so much the better of the landscape that I sat in
twilight, resumed my Inn remembrances.
That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the
days of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness.
It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that
rattled my lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge. There
was a hanger-on at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved
Druid I believe him to have been, and to be still), with long white
hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off; who claimed to
have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be ever watching for the
reappearance, on the verge of the horizon, of some ghostly flock of
sheep that had been mutton for many ages. He was a man with a weird
belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge
twice, and make the same number of them; likewise, that any one who
counted them three times nine times, and then stood in the centre
and said, "I dare!" would behold a tremendous apparition, and be
stricken dead. He pretended to have seen a bustard (I suspect him
to have been familiar with the dodo), in manner following: He was
out upon the plain at the close of a late autumn day, when he dimly
discerned, going on before him at a curious fitfully bounding pace,
what he at first supposed to be a gig-umbrella that had been blown
from some conveyance, but what he presently believed to be a lean
dwarf man upon a little pony. Having followed this object for some
distance without gaining on it, and having called to it many times
without receiving any answer, he pursued it for miles and miles,
when, at length coming up with it, he discovered it to be the last
bustard in Great Britain, degenerated into a wingless state, and
running along the ground. Resolved to capture him or perish in the
attempt, he closed with the bustard; but the bustard, who had formed
a counter-resolution that he should do neither, threw him, stunned
him, and was last seen making off due west. This weird main, at
that stage of metempsychosis, may have been a sleep-walker or an
enthusiast or a robber; but I awoke one night to find him in the
dark at my bedside, repeating the Athanasian Creed in a terrific
voice. I paid my bill next day, and retired from the county with
all possible precipitation.
That was not a commonplace story which worked itself out at a little
Inn in Switzerland, while I was staying there. It was a very homely
place, in a village of one narrow zigzag street, among mountains,
and you went in at the main door through the cow-house, and among
the mules and the dogs and the fowls, before ascending a great bare
staircase to the rooms; which were all of unpainted wood, without
plastering or papering,--like rough packing-cases. Outside there
was nothing but the straggling street, a little toy church with a
copper-coloured steeple, a pine forest, a torrent, mists, and
mountain-sides. A young man belonging to this Inn had disappeared
eight weeks before (it was winter-time), and was supposed to have
had some undiscovered love affair, and to have gone for a soldier.
He had got up in the night, and dropped into the village street from
the loft in which he slept with another man; and he had done it so
quietly, that his companion and fellow-labourer had heard no
movement when he was awakened in the morning, and they said, "Louis,
where is Henri?" They looked for him high and low, in vain, and
gave him up. Now, outside this Inn, there stood, as there stood
outside every dwelling in the village, a stack of firewood; but the
stack belonging to the Inn was higher than any of the rest, because
the Inn was the richest house, and burnt the most fuel. It began to
be noticed, while they were looking high and low, that a Bantam
cock, part of the live stock of the Inn, put himself wonderfully out
of his way to get to the top of this wood-stack; and that he would
stay there for hours and hours, crowing, until he appeared in danger
of splitting himself. Five weeks went on,--six weeks,--and still
this terrible Bantam, neglecting his domestic affairs, was always on
the top of the wood-stack, crowing the very eyes out of his head.
By this time it was perceived that Louis had become inspired with a
violent animosity towards the terrible Bantam, and one morning he
was seen by a woman, who sat nursing her goitre at a little window
in a gleam of sun, to catch up a rough billet of wood, with a great
oath, hurl it at the terrible Bantam crowing on the wood-stack, and
bring him down dead. Hereupon the woman, with a sudden light in her
mind, stole round to the back of the wood-stack, and, being a good
climber, as all those women are, climbed up, and soon was seen upon
the summit, screaming, looking down the hollow within, and crying,
"Seize Louis, the murderer! Ring the church bell! Here is the
body!" I saw the murderer that day, and I saw him as I sat by my
fire at the Holly-Tree Inn, and I see him now, lying shackled with
cords on the stable litter, among the mild eyes and the smoking
breath of the cows, waiting to be taken away by the police, and
stared at by the fearful village. A heavy animal,--the dullest
animal in the stables,--with a stupid head, and a lumpish face
devoid of any trace of insensibility, who had been, within the
knowledge of the murdered youth, an embezzler of certain small
moneys belonging to his master, and who had taken this hopeful mode
of putting a possible accuser out of his way. All of which he
confessed next day, like a sulky wretch who couldn't be troubled any
more, now that they had got hold of him, and meant to make an end of
him. I saw him once again, on the day of my departure from the Inn.
In that Canton the headsman still does his office with a sword; and
I came upon this murderer sitting bound, to a chair, with his eyes
bandaged, on a scaffold in a little market-place. In that instant,
a great sword (loaded with quicksilver in the thick part of the
blade) swept round him like a gust of wind or fire, and there was no
such creature in the world. My wonder was, not that he was so
suddenly dispatched, but that any head was left unreaped, within a
radius of fifty yards of that tremendous sickle.
That was a good Inn, too, with the kind, cheerful landlady and the
honest landlord, where I lived in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and
where one of the apartments has a zoological papering on the walls,
not so accurately joined but that the elephant occasionally rejoices
in a tiger's hind legs and tail, while the lion puts on a trunk and
tusks, and the bear, moulting as it were, appears as to portions of
himself like a leopard. I made several American friends at that
Inn, who all called Mont Blanc Mount Blank,--except one good-
humoured gentleman, of a very sociable nature, who became on such
intimate terms with it that he spoke of it familiarly as "Blank;"
observing, at breakfast, "Blank looks pretty tall this morning;" or
considerably doubting in the courtyard in the evening, whether there
warn't some go-ahead naters in our country, sir, that would make out
the top of Blank in a couple of hours from first start--now!
Once I passed a fortnight at an Inn in the North of England, where I
was haunted by the ghost of a tremendous pie. It was a Yorkshire
pie, like a fort,--an abandoned fort with nothing in it; but the
waiter had a fixed idea that it was a point of ceremony at every
meal to put the pie on the table. After some days I tried to hint,
in several delicate ways, that I considered the pie done with; as,
for example, by emptying fag-ends of glasses of wine into it;
putting cheese-plates and spoons into it, as into a basket; putting
wine-bottles into it, as into a cooler; but always in vain, the pie
being invariably cleaned out again and brought up as before. At
last, beginning to be doubtful whether I was not the victim of a
spectral illusion, and whether my health and spirits might not sink
under the horrors of an imaginary pie, I cut a triangle out of it,
fully as large as the musical instrument of that name in a powerful
orchestra. Human provision could not have foreseen the result--but
the waiter mended the pie. With some effectual species of cement,
he adroitly fitted the triangle in again, and I paid my reckoning
and fled.
The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal. I made an overland
expedition beyond the screen, and penetrated as far as the fourth
window. Here I was driven back by stress of weather. Arrived at my
winter-quarters once more, I made up the fire, and took another Inn.
It was in the remotest part of Cornwall. A great annual Miners'
Feast was being holden at the Inn, when I and my travelling
companions presented ourselves at night among the wild crowd that
were dancing before it by torchlight. We had had a break-down in
the dark, on a stony morass some miles away; and I had the honour of
leading one of the unharnessed post-horses. If any lady or
gentleman, on perusal of the present lines, will take any very tall
post-horse with his traces hanging about his legs, and will conduct
him by the bearing-rein into the heart of a country dance of a
hundred and fifty couples, that lady or gentleman will then, and
only then, form an adequate idea of the extent to which that post-
horse will tread on his conductor's toes. Over and above which, the
post-horse, finding three hundred people whirling about him, will
probably rear, and also lash out with his hind legs, in a manner
incompatible with dignity or self-respect on his conductor's part.
With such little drawbacks on my usually impressive aspect, I
appeared at this Cornish Inn, to the unutterable wonder of the
Cornish Miners. It was full, and twenty times full, and nobody
could be received but the post-horse,--though to get rid of that
noble animal was something. While my fellow-travellers and I were
discussing how to pass the night and so much of the next day as must
intervene before the jovial blacksmith and the jovial wheelwright
would be in a condition to go out on the morass and mend the coach,
an honest man stepped forth from the crowd and proposed his unlet
floor of two rooms, with supper of eggs and bacon, ale and punch.
We joyfully accompanied him home to the strangest of clean houses,
where we were well entertained to the satisfaction of all parties.
But the novel feature of the entertainment was, that our host was a
chair-maker, and that the chairs assigned to us were mere frames,
altogether without bottoms of any sort; so that we passed the
evening on perches. Nor was this the absurdest consequence; for
when we unbent at supper, and any one of us gave way to laughter, he
forgot the peculiarity of his position, and instantly disappeared.
I myself, doubled up into an attitude from which self-extrication
was impossible, was taken out of my frame, like a clown in a comic
pantomime who has tumbled into a tub, five times by the taper's
light during the eggs and bacon.
The Holly-Tree was fast reviving within me a sense of loneliness. I
began to feel conscious that my subject would never carry on until I
was dug out. I might be a week here,--weeks!
There was a story with a singular idea in it, connected with an Inn
I once passed a night at in a picturesque old town on the Welsh
border. In a large double-bedded room of this Inn there had been a
suicide committed by poison, in one bed, while a tired traveller
slept unconscious in the other. After that time, the suicide bed
was never used, but the other constantly was; the disused bedstead
remaining in the room empty, though as to all other respects in its
old state. The story ran, that whosoever slept in this room, though
never so entire a stranger, from never so far off, was invariably
observed to come down in the morning with an impression that he
smelt Laudanum, and that his mind always turned upon the subject of
suicide; to which, whatever kind of man he might be, he was certain
to make some reference if he conversed with any one. This went on
for years, until it at length induced the landlord to take the
disused bedstead down, and bodily burn it,--bed, hangings, and all.
The strange influence (this was the story) now changed to a fainter
one, but never changed afterwards. The occupant of that room, with
occasional but very rare exceptions, would come down in the morning,
trying to recall a forgotten dream he had had in the night. The
landlord, on his mentioning his perplexity, would suggest various
commonplace subjects, not one of which, as he very well knew, was
the true subject. But the moment the landlord suggested "Poison,"
the traveller started, and cried, "Yes!" He never failed to accept
that suggestion, and he never recalled any more of the dream.
This reminiscence brought the Welsh Inns in general before me; with
the women in their round hats, and the harpers with their white
beards (venerable, but humbugs, I am afraid), playing outside the
door while I took my dinner. The transition was natural to the
Highland Inns, with the oatmeal bannocks, the honey, the venison
steaks, the trout from the loch, the whisky, and perhaps (having the
materials so temptingly at hand) the Athol brose. Once was I coming
south from the Scottish Highlands in hot haste, hoping to change
quickly at the station at the bottom of a certain wild historical
glen, when these eyes did with mortification see the landlord come
out with a telescope and sweep the whole prospect for the horses;
which horses were away picking up their own living, and did not
heave in sight under four hours. Having thought of the loch-trout,
I was taken by quick association to the Anglers' Inns of England (I
have assisted at innumerable feats of angling by lying in the bottom
of the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing with the greatest
perseverance; which I have generally found to be as effectual
towards the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost
science), and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated
bedrooms of those inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and
the green ait, and the church-spire, and the country bridge; and to
the pearless Emma with the bright eyes and the pretty smile, who
waited, bless her! with a natural grace that would have converted
Blue-Beard. Casting my eyes upon my Holly-Tree fire, I next
discerned among the glowing coals the pictures of a score or more of
those wonderful English posting-inns which we are all so sorry to
have lost, which were so large and so comfortable, and which were
such monuments of British submission to rapacity and extortion. He
who would see these houses pining away, let him walk from
Basingstoke, or even Windsor, to London, by way of Hounslow, and
moralise on their perishing remains; the stables crumbling to dust;
unsettled labourers and wanderers bivouacking in the outhouses;
grass growing in the yards; the rooms, where erst so many hundred
beds of down were made up, let off to Irish lodgers at eighteenpence
a week; a little ill-looking beer-shop shrinking in the tap of
former days, burning coach-house gates for firewood, having one of
its two windows bunged up, as if it had received punishment in a
fight with the Railroad; a low, bandy-legged, brick-making bulldog
standing in the doorway. What could I next see in my fire so
naturally as the new railway-house of these times near the dismal
country station; with nothing particular on draught but cold air and
damp, nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new mortar, and no
business doing beyond a conceited affectation of luggage in the
hall? Then I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment
of four pieces up one hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs, the
privilege of ringing the bell all day long without influencing
anybody's mind or body but your own, and the not-too-much-for-
dinner, considering the price. Next to the provincial Inns of
France, with the great church-tower rising above the courtyard, the
horse-bells jingling merrily up and down the street beyond, and the
clocks of all descriptions in all the rooms, which are never right,
unless taken at the precise minute when, by getting exactly twelve
hours too fast or too slow, they unintentionally become so. Away I
went, next, to the lesser roadside Inns of Italy; where all the
dirty clothes in the house (not in wear) are always lying in your
anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a raisin pudding of your face in
summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter; where you get what you
can, and forget what you can't: where I should again like to be
boiling my tea in a pocket-handkerchief dumpling, for want of a
teapot. So to the old palace Inns and old monastery Inns, in towns
and cities of the same bright country; with their massive
quadrangular staircases, whence you may look from among clustering
pillars high into the blue vault of heaven; with their stately
banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with their labyrinths of
ghostly bedchambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous streets that
have no appearance of reality or possibility. So to the close
little Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants,
and their peculiar smell of never letting in the air. So to the
immense fantastic Inns of Venice, with the cry of the gondolier
below, as he skims the corner; the grip of the watery odours on one
particular little bit of the bridge of your nose (which is never
released while you stay there); and the great bell of St. Mark's
Cathedral tolling midnight. Next I put up for a minute at the
restless Inns upon the Rhine, where your going to bed, no matter at
what hour, appears to be the tocsin for everybody else's getting up;
and where, in the table-d'hote room at the end of the long table
(with several Towers of Babel on it at the other end, all made of
white plates), one knot of stoutish men, entirely dressed in jewels
and dirt, and having nothing else upon them, will remain all night,
clinking glasses, and singing about the river that flows, and the
grape that grows, and Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine woman that
smiles and hi drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my brother,
and all the rest of it. I departed thence, as a matter of course,
to other German Inns, where all the eatables are soddened down to
the same flavour, and where the mind is disturbed by the apparition
of hot puddings, and boiled cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully
unexpected periods of the repast. After a draught of sparkling beer
from a foaming glass jug, and a glance of recognition through the
windows of the student beer-houses at Heidelberg and elsewhere, I
put out to sea for the Inns of America, with their four hundred beds
apiece, and their eight or nine hundred ladies and gentlemen at
dinner every day. Again I stood in the bar-rooms thereof, taking my
evening cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail. Again I listened to my
friend the General,--whom I had known for five minutes, in the
course of which period he had made me intimate for life with two
Majors, who again had made me intimate for life with three Colonels,
who again had made me brother to twenty-two civilians,--again, I
say, I listened to my friend the General, leisurely expounding the
resources of the establishment, as to gentlemen's morning-room, sir;
ladies' morning-room, sir; gentlemen's evening-room, sir; ladies'
evening-room, sir; ladies' and gentlemen's evening reuniting-room,
sir; music-room, sir; reading-room, sir; over four hundred sleeping-
rooms, sir; and the entire planned and finited within twelve
calendar months from the first clearing off of the old encumbrances
on the plot, at a cost of five hundred thousand dollars, sir. Again
I found, as to my individual way of thinking, that the greater, the
more gorgeous, and the more dollarous the establishment was, the
less desirable it was. Nevertheless, again I drank my cobbler,
julep, sling, or cocktail, in all good-will, to my friend the
General, and my friends the Majors, Colonels, and civilians all;
full well knowing that, whatever little motes my beamy eyes may have
descried in theirs, they belong to a kind, generous, large-hearted,
and great people.
I had been going on lately at a quick pace to keep my solitude out
of my mind; but here I broke down for good, and gave up the subject.
What was I to do? What was to become of me? Into what extremity
was I submissively to sink? Supposing that, like Baron Trenck, I
looked out for a mouse or spider, and found one, and beguiled my
imprisonment by training it? Even that might be dangerous with a
view to the future. I might be so far gone when the road did come
to be cut through the snow, that, on my way forth, I might burst
into tears, and beseech, like the prisoner who was released in his
old age from the Bastille, to be taken back again to the five
windows, the ten curtains, and the sinuous drapery.
A desperate idea came into my head. Under any other circumstances I
should have rejected it; but, in the strait at which I was, I held
it fast. Could I so far overcome the inherent bashfulness which
withheld me from the landlord's table and the company I might find
there, as to call up the Boots, and ask him to take a chair,--and
something in a liquid form,--and talk to me? I could, I would, I
did. _
Read next: SECOND BRANCH - THE BOOTS
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