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Title: Some Christmas Stories


Author: Charles Dickens



Release Date: May 6, 2015  [eBook #1467]
[This file was first posted in June/July 1998]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME CHRISTMAS STORIES***


Transcribed from the 1911 Chapman and Hall Christmas Stories edition,
Volume 1, by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org





                       SOME SHORT CHRISTMAS STORIES
                                    by
                             CHARLES DICKENS


CONTENTS.

                                         PAGE
A Christmas Tree                            1
What Christmas is as we Grow Older         23
The Poor Relation’s Story                  31
The Child’s Story                          47
The Schoolboy’s Story                      55
Nobody’s Story                             69




A CHRISTMAS TREE.
[1850]


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




WHAT CHRISTMAS IS AS WE GROW OLDER.
[1851]


TIME was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited
world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound
together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped
everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little
picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.

Time came, perhaps, all so soon, when our thoughts over-leaped that
narrow boundary; when there was some one (very dear, we thought then,
very beautiful, and absolutely perfect) wanting to the fulness of our
happiness; when we were wanting too (or we thought so, which did just as
well) at the Christmas hearth by which that some one sat; and when we
intertwined with every wreath and garland of our life that some one’s
name.

That was the time for the bright visionary Christmases which have long
arisen from us to show faintly, after summer rain, in the palest edges of
the rainbow!  That was the time for the beatified enjoyment of the things
that were to be, and never were, and yet the things that were so real in
our resolute hope that it would be hard to say, now, what realities
achieved since, have been stronger!

What!  Did that Christmas never really come when we and the priceless
pearl who was our young choice were received, after the happiest of
totally impossible marriages, by the two united families previously at
daggers—drawn on our account?  When brothers and sisters-in-law who had
always been rather cool to us before our relationship was effected,
perfectly doted on us, and when fathers and mothers overwhelmed us with
unlimited incomes?  Was that Christmas dinner never really eaten, after
which we arose, and generously and eloquently rendered honour to our late
rival, present in the company, then and there exchanging friendship and
forgiveness, and founding an attachment, not to be surpassed in Greek or
Roman story, which subsisted until death?  Has that same rival long
ceased to care for that same priceless pearl, and married for money, and
become usurious?  Above all, do we really know, now, that we should
probably have been miserable if we had won and worn the pearl, and that
we are better without her?

That Christmas when we had recently achieved so much fame; when we had
been carried in triumph somewhere, for doing something great and good;
when we had won an honoured and ennobled name, and arrived and were
received at home in a shower of tears of joy; is it possible that _that_
Christmas has not come yet?

And is our life here, at the best, so constituted that, pausing as we
advance at such a noticeable mile-stone in the track as this great
birthday, we look back on the things that never were, as naturally and
full as gravely as on the things that have been and are gone, or have
been and still are?  If it be so, and so it seems to be, must we come to
the conclusion that life is little better than a dream, and little worth
the loves and strivings that we crowd into it?

No!  Far be such miscalled philosophy from us, dear Reader, on Christmas
Day!  Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is
the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of
duty, kindness and forbearance!  It is in the last virtues especially,
that we are, or should be, strengthened by the unaccomplished visions of
our youth; for, who shall say that they are not our teachers to deal
gently even with the impalpable nothings of the earth!

Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of
our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands!
Let us welcome every one of them, and summon them to take their places by
the Christmas hearth.

Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy, to
your shelter underneath the holly!  We know you, and have not outlived
you yet.  Welcome, old projects and old loves, however fleeting, to your
nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us.  Welcome, all that
was ever real to our hearts; and for the earnestness that made you real,
thanks to Heaven!  Do we build no Christmas castles in the clouds now?
Let our thoughts, fluttering like butterflies among these flowers of
children, bear witness!  Before this boy, there stretches out a Future,
brighter than we ever looked on in our old romantic time, but bright with
honour and with truth.  Around this little head on which the sunny curls
lie heaped, the graces sport, as prettily, as airily, as when there was
no scythe within the reach of Time to shear away the curls of our
first-love.  Upon another girl’s face near it—placider but smiling
bright—a quiet and contented little face, we see Home fairly written.
Shining from the word, as rays shine from a star, we see how, when our
graves are old, other hopes than ours are young, other hearts than ours
are moved; how other ways are smoothed; how other happiness blooms,
ripens, and decays—no, not decays, for other homes and other bands of
children, not yet in being nor for ages yet to be, arise, and bloom and
ripen to the end of all!

Welcome, everything!  Welcome, alike what has been, and what never was,
and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly, to your
places round the Christmas fire, where what is sits open-hearted!  In
yonder shadow, do we see obtruding furtively upon the blaze, an enemy’s
face?  By Christmas Day we do forgive him!  If the injury he has done us
may admit of such companionship, let him come here and take his place.
If otherwise, unhappily, let him go hence, assured that we will never
injure nor accuse him.

On this day we shut out Nothing!

“Pause,” says a low voice.  “Nothing?  Think!”

“On Christmas Day, we will shut out from our fireside, Nothing.”

“Not the shadow of a vast City where the withered leaves are lying deep?”
the voice replies.  “Not the shadow that darkens the whole globe?  Not
the shadow of the City of the Dead?”

Not even that.  Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards
that City upon Christmas Day, and from its silent hosts bring those we
loved, among us.  City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are
gathered together at this time, and in the Presence that is here among us
according to the promise, we will receive, and not dismiss, thy people
who are dear to us!

Yes.  We can look upon these children angels that alight, so solemnly, so
beautifully among the living children by the fire, and can bear to think
how they departed from us.  Entertaining angels unawares, as the
Patriarchs did, the playful children are unconscious of their guests; but
we can see them—can see a radiant arm around one favourite neck, as if
there were a tempting of that child away.  Among the celestial figures
there is one, a poor misshapen boy on earth, of a glorious beauty now, of
whom his dying mother said it grieved her much to leave him here, alone,
for so many years as it was likely would elapse before he came to
her—being such a little child.  But he went quickly, and was laid upon
her breast, and in her hand she leads him.

There was a gallant boy, who fell, far away, upon a burning sand beneath
a burning sun, and said, “Tell them at home, with my last love, how much
I could have wished to kiss them once, but that I died contented and had
done my duty!”  Or there was another, over whom they read the words,
“Therefore we commit his body to the deep,” and so consigned him to the
lonely ocean and sailed on.  Or there was another, who lay down to his
rest in the dark shadow of great forests, and, on earth, awoke no more.
O shall they not, from sand and sea and forest, be brought home at such a
time!

There was a dear girl—almost a woman—never to be one—who made a mourning
Christmas in a house of joy, and went her trackless way to the silent
City.  Do we recollect her, worn out, faintly whispering what could not
be heard, and falling into that last sleep for weariness?  O look upon
her now!  O look upon her beauty, her serenity, her changeless youth, her
happiness!  The daughter of Jairus was recalled to life, to die; but she,
more blest, has heard the same voice, saying unto her, “Arise for ever!”

We had a friend who was our friend from early days, with whom we often
pictured the changes that were to come upon our lives, and merrily
imagined how we would speak, and walk, and think, and talk, when we came
to be old.  His destined habitation in the City of the Dead received him
in his prime.  Shall he be shut out from our Christmas remembrance?
Would his love have so excluded us?  Lost friend, lost child, lost
parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you!  You
shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our
Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday
of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!

The winter sun goes down over town and village; on the sea it makes a
rosy path, as if the Sacred tread were fresh upon the water.  A few more
moments, and it sinks, and night comes on, and lights begin to sparkle in
the prospect.  On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and
in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple,
remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers, growing in
grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth.  In
town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the weather,
there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there is
healthy music of voices.  Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the
temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with
tender encouragement!  They are of the time and all its comforting and
peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united even upon earth
the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that
too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.




THE POOR RELATION’S STORY.
[1852]


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“These are hard words, uncle!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                * * * * *

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

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

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

“You had, John,” I returned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Exactly so,” said I.

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

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

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

“My dear John Spatter,” I interrupted, “I _don’t_ expect you to humour
it.  I want to correct it.”

“And I, too,” said John.

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

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

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

                                * * * * *

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

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

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

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

                                * * * * *

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

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




THE CHILD’S STORY.
[1852]


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE SCHOOLBOY’S STORY.
[1853]


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

        [Picture: Schoolboy with book: illustrated by Fred Walker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—and on in that way through more than a dozen verses, which he used to go
and sing, every morning, close by the new master’s desk.  He trained one
of the low boys, too, a rosy-cheeked little Brass who didn’t care what he
did, to go up to him with his Latin Grammar one morning, and say it so:
_Nominativus pronominum_—Old Cheeseman, _raro exprimitur_—was never
suspected, _nisi distinctionis_—of being an informer, _aut emphasis
gratîa_—until he proved one.  _Ut_—for instance, _Vos damnastis_—when he
sold the boys.  _Quasi_—as though, _dicat_—he should say, _Pretærea
nemo_—I’m a Judas!  All this produced a great effect on Old Cheeseman.
He had never had much hair; but what he had, began to get thinner and
thinner every day.  He grew paler and more worn; and sometimes of an
evening he was seen sitting at his desk with a precious long snuff to his
candle, and his hands before his face, crying.  But no member of the
Society could pity him, even if he felt inclined, because the President
said it was Old Cheeseman’s conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never! never! never!” on all sides.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




NOBODY’S STORY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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