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The Holly-Tree



by Charles Dickens



July, 1998  [Etext #1394]





The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Holly-Tree by Charles Dickens

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This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas

Stories" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk



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This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas

Stories" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk











THE HOLLY-TREE--THREE BRANCHES









FIRST BRANCH--MYSELF







I have kept one secret in the course of my life.  I am a bashful

man.  Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody

ever did suppose it, but I am naturally a bashful man.  This is the

secret which I have never breathed until now.



I might greatly move the reader by some account of the innumerable

places I have not been to, the innumerable people I have not called

upon or received, the innumerable social evasions I have been guilty

of, solely because I am by original constitution and character a

bashful man.  But I will leave the reader unmoved, and proceed with

the object before me.



That object is to give a plain account of my travels and discoveries

in the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place of good entertainment for man

and beast I was once snowed up.



It happened in the memorable year when I parted for ever from Angela

Leath, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the discovery

that she preferred my bosom friend.  From our school-days I had

freely admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior to myself;

and, though I was grievously wounded at heart, I felt the preference

to be natural, and tried to forgive them both.  It was under these

circumstances that I resolved to go to America--on my way to the

Devil.



Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but

resolving to write each of them an affecting letter conveying my

blessing and forgiveness, which the steam-tender for shore should

carry to the post when I myself should be bound for the New World,

far beyond recall,--I say, locking up my grief in my own breast, and

consoling myself as I could with the prospect of being generous, I

quietly left all I held dear, and started on the desolate journey I

have mentioned.



The dead winter-time was in full dreariness when I left my chambers

for ever, at five o'clock in the morning.  I had shaved by candle-

light, of course, and was miserably cold, and experienced that

general all-pervading sensation of getting up to be hanged which I

have usually found inseparable from untimely rising under such

circumstances.



How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I came

out of the Temple!  The street-lamps flickering in the gusty north-

east wind, as if the very gas were contorted with cold; the white-

topped houses; the bleak, star-lighted sky; the market people and

other early stragglers, trotting to circulate their almost frozen

blood; the hospitable light and warmth of the few coffee-shops and

public-houses that were open for such customers; the hard, dry,

frosty rime with which the air was charged (the wind had already

beaten it into every crevice), and which lashed my face like a steel

whip.



It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the year.

The Post-office packet for the United States was to depart from

Liverpool, weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month,

and I had the intervening time on my hands.  I had taken this into

consideration, and had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot

(which I need not name) on the farther borders of Yorkshire.  It was

endeared to me by my having first seen Angela at a farmhouse in that

place, and my melancholy was gratified by the idea of taking a

wintry leave of it before my expatriation.  I ought to explain,

that, to avoid being sought out before my resolution should have

been rendered irrevocable by being carried into full effect, I had

written to Angela overnight, in my usual manner, lamenting that

urgent business, of which she should know all particulars by-and-by-

-took me unexpectedly away from her for a week or ten days.



There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place there

were stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common with

some other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody

dreaded as a very serious penance then.  I had secured the box-seat

on the fastest of these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get

into a cab with my portmanteau, so to make the best of my way to the

Peacock at Islington, where I was to join this coach.  But when one

of our Temple watchmen, who carried my portmanteau into Fleet Street

for me, told me about the huge blocks of ice that had for some days

past been floating in the river, having closed up in the night, and

made a walk from the Temple Gardens over to the Surrey shore, I

began to ask myself the question, whether the box-seat would not be

likely to put a sudden and a frosty end to my unhappiness.  I was

heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to

wish to be frozen to death.



When I got up to the Peacock,--where I found everybody drinking hot

purl, in self-preservation,--I asked if there were an inside seat to

spare.  I then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only

passenger.  This gave me a still livelier idea of the great

inclemency of the weather, since that coach always loaded

particularly well.  However, I took a little purl (which I found

uncommonly good), and got into the coach.  When I was seated, they

built me up with straw to the waist, and, conscious of making a

rather ridiculous appearance, I began my journey.



It was still dark when we left the Peacock.  For a little while,

pale, uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished,

and then it was hard, black, frozen day.  People were lighting their

fires; smoke was mounting straight up high into the rarified air;

and we were rattling for Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I

have ever heard the ring of iron shoes on.  As we got into the

country, everything seemed to have grown old and gray.  The roads,

the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and homesteads, the ricks in

farmers' yards.  Out-door work was abandoned, horse-troughs at road-

side inns were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged about, doors were

close shut, little turnpike houses had blazing fires inside, and

children (even turnpike people have children, and seem to like them)

rubbed the frost from the little panes of glass with their chubby

arms, that their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of the solitary

coach going by.  I don't know when the snow begin to set in; but I

know that we were changing horses somewhere when I heard the guard

remark, "That the old lady up in the sky was picking her geese

pretty hard to-day."  Then, indeed, I found the white down falling

fast and thick.



The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out, as a lonely traveller

does.  I was warm and valiant after eating and drinking,--

particularly after dinner; cold and depressed at all other times.  I

was always bewildered as to time and place, and always more or less

out of my senses.  The coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus

Auld Lang Syne, without a moment's intermission.  They kept the time

and tune with the greatest regularity, and rose into the swell at

the beginning of the Refrain, with a precision that worried me to

death.  While we changed horses, the guard and coachman went

stumping up and down the road, printing off their shoes in the snow,

and poured so much liquid consolation into themselves without being

any the worse for it, that I began to confound them, as it darkened

again, with two great white casks standing on end.  Our horses

tumbled down in solitary places, and we got them up,--which was the

pleasantest variety I had, for it warmed me.  And it snowed and

snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.  All night

long we went on in this manner.  Thus we came round the clock, upon

the Great North Road, to the performance of Auld Lang Syne by day

again.  And it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never

left off snowing.



I forget now where we were at noon on the second day, and where we

ought to have been; but I know that we were scores of miles

behindhand, and that our case was growing worse every hour.  The

drift was becoming prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting snowed

out; the road and the fields were all one; instead of having fences

and hedge-rows to guide us, we went crunching on over an unbroken

surface of ghastly white that might sink beneath us at any moment

and drop us down a whole hillside.  Still the coachman and guard--

who kept together on the box, always in council, and looking well

about them--made out the track with astonishing sagacity.



When we came in sight of a town, it looked, to my fancy, like a

large drawing on a slate, with abundance of slate-pencil expended on

the churches and houses where the snow lay thickest.  When we came

within a town, and found the church clocks all stopped, the dial-

faces choked with snow, and the inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as

if the whole place were overgrown with white moss.  As to the coach,

it was a mere snowball; similarly, the men and boys who ran along

beside us to the town's end, turning our clogged wheels and

encouraging our horses, were men and boys of snow; and the bleak

wild solitude to which they at last dismissed us was a snowy Sahara.

One would have thought this enough:  notwithstanding which, I pledge

my word that it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never

left off snowing.



We performed Auld Lang Syne the whole day; seeing nothing, out of

towns and villages, but the track of stoats, hares, and foxes, and

sometimes of birds.  At nine o'clock at night, on a Yorkshire moor,

a cheerful burst from our horn, and a welcome sound of talking, with

a glimmering and moving about of lanterns, roused me from my drowsy

state.  I found that we were going to change.



They helped me out, and I said to a waiter, whose bare head became

as white as King Lear's in a single minute, "What Inn is this?"



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



"Upon my word, I believe," said I, apologetically, to the guard and

coachman, "that I must stop here."



Now the landlord, and the landlady, and the ostler, and the post-

boy, and all the stable authorities, had already asked the coachman,

to the wide-eyed interest of all the rest of the establishment, if

he meant to go on.  The coachman had already replied, "Yes, he'd

take her through it,"--meaning by Her the coach,--"if so be as

George would stand by him."  George was the guard, and he had

already sworn that he would stand by him.  So the helpers were

already getting the horses out.



My declaring myself beaten, after this parley, was not an

announcement without preparation.  Indeed, but for the way to the

announcement being smoothed by the parley, I more than doubt

whether, as an innately bashful man, I should have had the

confidence to make it.  As it was, it received the approval even of

the guard and coachman.  Therefore, with many confirmations of my

inclining, and many remarks from one bystander to another, that the

gentleman could go for'ard by the mail to-morrow, whereas to-night

he would only be froze, and where was the good of a gentleman being

froze--ah, let alone buried alive (which latter clause was added by

a humorous helper as a joke at my expense, and was extremely well

received), I saw my portmanteau got out stiff, like a frozen body;

did the handsome thing by the guard and coachman; wished them good-

night and a prosperous journey; and, a little ashamed of myself,

after all, for leaving them to fight it out alone, followed the

landlord, landlady, and waiter of the Holly-Tree up-stairs.



I thought I had never seen such a large room as that into which they

showed me.  It had five windows, with dark red curtains that would

have absorbed the light of a general illumination; and there were

complications of drapery at the top of the curtains, that went

wandering about the wall in a most extraordinary manner.  I asked

for a smaller room, and they told me there was no smaller room.



They could screen me in, however, the landlord said.  They brought a

great old japanned screen, with natives (Japanese, I suppose)

engaged in a variety of idiotic pursuits all over it; and left me

roasting whole before an immense fire.



My bedroom was some quarter of a mile off, up a great staircase at

the end of a long gallery; and nobody knows what a misery this is to

a bashful man who would rather not meet people on the stairs.  It

was the grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the

furniture, from the four posts of the bed to the two old silver

candle-sticks, was tall, high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted.

Below, in my sitting-room, if I looked round my screen, the wind

rushed at me like a mad bull; if I stuck to my arm-chair, the fire

scorched me to the colour of a new brick.  The chimney-piece was

very high, and there was a bad glass--what I may call a wavy glass--

above it, which, when I stood up, just showed me my anterior

phrenological developments,--and these never look well, in any

subject, cut short off at the eyebrow.  If I stood with my back to

the fire, a gloomy vault of darkness above and beyond the screen

insisted on being looked at; and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery

of the ten curtains of the five windows went twisting and creeping

about, like a nest of gigantic worms.



I suppose that what I observe in myself must be observed by some

other men of similar character in themselves; therefore I am

emboldened to mention, that, when I travel, I never arrive at a

place but I immediately want to go away from it.  Before I had

finished my supper of broiled fowl and mulled port, I had impressed

upon the waiter in detail my arrangements for departure in the

morning.  Breakfast and bill at eight.  Fly at nine.  Two horses,

or, if needful, even four.



Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week long.  In cases

of nightmare, I thought of Angela, and felt more depressed than ever

by the reflection that I was on the shortest road to Gretna Green.

What had I to do with Gretna Green?  I was not going that way to the

Devil, but by the American route, I remarked in my bitterness.



In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it had snowed

all night, and that I was snowed up.  Nothing could get out of that

spot on the moor, or could come at it, until the road had been cut

out by labourers from the market-town.  When they might cut their

way to the Holly-Tree nobody could tell me.



It was now Christmas-eve.  I should have had a dismal Christmas-time

of it anywhere, and consequently that did not so much matter; still,

being snowed up was like dying of frost, a thing I had not bargained

for.  I felt very lonely.  Yet I could no more have proposed to the

landlord and landlady to admit me to their society (though I should

have liked it--very much) than I could have asked them to present me

with a piece of plate.  Here my great secret, the real bashfulness

of my character, is to be observed.  Like most bashful men, I judge

of other people as if they were bashful too.  Besides being far too

shamefaced to make the proposal myself, I really had a delicate

misgiving that it would be in the last degree disconcerting to them.



Trying to settle down, therefore, in my solitude, I first of all

asked what books there were in the house.  The waiter brought me a

Book of Roads, two or three old Newspapers, a little Song-Book,

terminating in a collection of Toasts and Sentiments, a little Jest-

Book, an odd volume of Peregrine Pickle, and the Sentimental

Journey.  I knew every word of the two last already, but I read them

through again, then tried to hum all the songs (Auld Lang Syne was

among them); went entirely through the jokes,--in which I found a

fund of melancholy adapted to my state of mind; proposed all the

toasts, enunciated all the sentiments, and mastered the papers.  The

latter had nothing in them but stock advertisements, a meeting about

a county rate, and a highway robbery.  As I am a greedy reader, I

could not make this supply hold out until night; it was exhausted by

tea-time.  Being then entirely cast upon my own resources, I got

through an hour in considering what to do next.  Ultimately, it came

into my head (from which I was anxious by any means to exclude

Angela and Edwin), that I would endeavour to recall my experience of

Inns, and would try how long it lasted me.  I stirred the fire,

moved my chair a little to one side of the screen,--not daring to go

far, for I knew the wind was waiting to make a rush at me, I could

hear it growling,--and began.



My first impressions of an Inn dated from the Nursery; consequently

I went back to the Nursery for a starting-point, and found myself at

the knee of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a

green gown, whose specially was a dismal narrative of a landlord by

the roadside, whose visitors unaccountably disappeared for many

years, until it was discovered that the pursuit of his life had been

to convert them into pies.  For the better devotion of himself to

this branch of industry, he had constructed a secret door behind the

head of the bed; and when the visitor (oppressed with pie) had

fallen asleep, this wicked landlord would look softly in with a lamp

in one hand and a knife in the other, would cut his throat, and

would make him into pies; for which purpose he had coppers,

underneath a trap-door, always boiling; and rolled out his pastry in

the dead of the night.  Yet even he was not insensible to the stings

of conscience, for he never went to sleep without being heard to

mutter, "Too much pepper!" which was eventually the cause of his

being brought to justice.  I had no sooner disposed of this criminal

than there started up another of the same period, whose profession

was originally house-breaking; in the pursuit of which art he had

had his right ear chopped off one night, as he was burglariously

getting in at a window, by a brave and lovely servant-maid (whom the

aquiline-nosed woman, though not at all answering the description,

always mysteriously implied to be herself).  After several years,

this brave and lovely servant-maid was married to the landlord of a

country Inn; which landlord had this remarkable characteristic, that

he always wore a silk nightcap, and never would on any consideration

take it off.  At last, one night, when he was fast asleep, the brave

and lovely woman lifted up his silk nightcap on the right side, and

found that he had no ear there; upon which she sagaciously perceived

that he was the clipped housebreaker, who had married her with the

intention of putting her to death.  She immediately heated the poker

and terminated his career, for which she was taken to King George

upon his throne, and received the compliments of royalty on her

great discretion and valour.  This same narrator, who had a Ghoulish

pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in terrifying me to the utmost

confines of my reason, had another authentic anecdote within her own

experience, founded, I now believe, upon Raymond and Agnes, or the

Bleeding Nun.  She said it happened to her brother-in-law, who was

immensely rich,--which my father was not; and immensely tall,--which

my father was not.  It was always a point with this Ghoul to present

my clearest relations and friends to my youthful mind under

circumstances of disparaging contrast.  The brother-in-law was

riding once through a forest on a magnificent horse (we had no

magnificent horse at our house), attended by a favourite and

valuable Newfoundland dog (we had no dog), when he found himself

benighted, and came to an Inn.  A dark woman opened the door, and he

asked her if he could have a bed there.  She answered yes, and put

his horse in the stable, and took him into a room where there were

two dark men.  While he was at supper, a parrot in the room began to

talk, saying, "Blood, blood!  Wipe up the blood!"  Upon which one of

the dark men wrung the parrot's neck, and said he was fond of

roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one for breakfast in the

morning.  After eating and drinking heartily, the immensely rich,

tall brother-in-law went up to bed; but he was rather vexed, because

they had shut his dog in the stable, saying that they never allowed

dogs in the house.  He sat very quiet for more than an hour,

thinking and thinking, when, just as his candle was burning out, he

heard a scratch at the door.  He opened the door, and there was the

Newfoundland dog!  The dog came softly in, smelt about him, went

straight to some straw in the corner which the dark men had said

covered apples, tore the straw away, and disclosed two sheets

steeped in blood.  Just at that moment the candle went out, and the

brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door, saw the two

dark men stealing up-stairs; one armed with a dagger that long

(about five feet); the other carrying a chopper, a sack, and a

spade.  Having no remembrance of the close of this adventure, I

suppose my faculties to have been always so frozen with terror at

this stage of it, that the power of listening stagnated within me

for some quarter of an hour.



These barbarous stories carried me, sitting there on the Holly-Tree

hearth, to the Roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny book

with a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval

form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner

compartments four incidents of the tragedy with which the name is

associated,--coloured with a hand at once so free and economical,

that the bloom of Jonathan's complexion passed without any pause

into the breeches of the ostler, and, smearing itself off into the

next division, became rum in a bottle.  Then I remembered how the

landlord was found at the murdered traveller's bedside, with his own

knife at his feet, and blood upon his hand; how he was hanged for

the murder, notwithstanding his protestation that he had indeed come

there to kill the traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been

stricken motionless on finding him already slain; and how the

ostler, years afterwards, owned the deed.  By this time I had made

myself quite uncomfortable.  I stirred the fire, and stood with my

back to it as long as I could bear the heat, looking up at the

darkness beyond the screen, and at the wormy curtains creeping in

and creeping out, like the worms in the ballad of Alonzo the Brave

and the Fair Imogene.



There was an Inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which

had pleasanter recollections about it than any of these.  I took it

next.  It was the Inn where friends used to put up, and where we

used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be

tipped.  It had an ecclesiastical sign,--the Mitre,--and a bar that

seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug.  I

loved the landlord's youngest daughter to distraction,--but let that

pass.  It was in this Inn that I was cried over by my rosy little

sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight.  And though

she had been, that Holly-Tree night, for many a long year where all

tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.



"To be continued to-morrow," said I, when I took my candle to go to

bed.  But my bed took it upon itself to continue the train of

thought that night.  It carried me away, like the enchanted carpet,

to a distant place (though still in England), and there, alighting

from a stage-coach at another Inn in the snow, as I had actually

done some years before, I repeated in my sleep a curious experience

I had really had there.  More than a year before I made the journey

in the course of which I put up at that Inn, I had lost a very near

and dear friend by death.  Every night since, at home or away from

home, I had dreamed of that friend; sometimes as still living;

sometimes as returning from the world of shadows to comfort me;

always as being beautiful, placid, and happy, never in association

with any approach to fear or distress.  It was at a lonely Inn in a

wide moorland place, that I halted to pass the night.  When I had

looked from my bedroom window over the waste of snow on which the

moon was shining, I sat down by my fire to write a letter.  I had

always, until that hour, kept it within my own breast that I dreamed

every night of the dear lost one.  But in the letter that I wrote I

recorded the circumstance, and added that I felt much interested in

proving whether the subject of my dream would still be faithful to

me, travel-tired, and in that remote place.  No.  I lost the beloved

figure of my vision in parting with the secret.  My sleep has never

looked upon it since, in sixteen years, but once.  I was in Italy,

and awoke (or seemed to awake), the well-remembered voice distinctly

in my ears, conversing with it.  I entreated it, as it rose above my

bed and soared up to the vaulted roof of the old room, to answer me

a question I had asked touching the Future Life.  My hands were

still outstretched towards it as it vanished, when I heard a bell

ringing by the garden wall, and a voice in the deep stillness of the

night calling on all good Christians to pray for the souls of the

dead; it being All Souls' Eve.



To return to the Holly-Tree.  When I awoke next day, it was freezing

hard, and the lowering sky threatened more snow.  My breakfast

cleared away, I drew my chair into its former place, and, with the

fire getting so much the better of the landscape that I sat in

twilight, resumed my Inn remembrances.



That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the

days of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness.

It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that

rattled my lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge.  There

was a hanger-on at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved

Druid I believe him to have been, and to be still), with long white

hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off; who claimed to

have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be ever watching for the

reappearance, on the verge of the horizon, of some ghostly flock of

sheep that had been mutton for many ages.  He was a man with a weird

belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge

twice, and make the same number of them; likewise, that any one who

counted them three times nine times, and then stood in the centre

and said, "I dare!" would behold a tremendous apparition, and be

stricken dead.  He pretended to have seen a bustard (I suspect him

to have been familiar with the dodo), in manner following:  He was

out upon the plain at the close of a late autumn day, when he dimly

discerned, going on before him at a curious fitfully bounding pace,

what he at first supposed to be a gig-umbrella that had been blown

from some conveyance, but what he presently believed to be a lean

dwarf man upon a little pony.  Having followed this object for some

distance without gaining on it, and having called to it many times

without receiving any answer, he pursued it for miles and miles,

when, at length coming up with it, he discovered it to be the last

bustard in Great Britain, degenerated into a wingless state, and

running along the ground.  Resolved to capture him or perish in the

attempt, he closed with the bustard; but the bustard, who had formed

a counter-resolution that he should do neither, threw him, stunned

him, and was last seen making off due west.  This weird main, at

that stage of metempsychosis, may have been a sleep-walker or an

enthusiast or a robber; but I awoke one night to find him in the

dark at my bedside, repeating the Athanasian Creed in a terrific

voice.  I paid my bill next day, and retired from the county with

all possible precipitation.



That was not a commonplace story which worked itself out at a little

Inn in Switzerland, while I was staying there.  It was a very homely

place, in a village of one narrow zigzag street, among mountains,

and you went in at the main door through the cow-house, and among

the mules and the dogs and the fowls, before ascending a great bare

staircase to the rooms; which were all of unpainted wood, without

plastering or papering,--like rough packing-cases.  Outside there

was nothing but the straggling street, a little toy church with a

copper-coloured steeple, a pine forest, a torrent, mists, and

mountain-sides.  A young man belonging to this Inn had disappeared

eight weeks before (it was winter-time), and was supposed to have

had some undiscovered love affair, and to have gone for a soldier.

He had got up in the night, and dropped into the village street from

the loft in which he slept with another man; and he had done it so

quietly, that his companion and fellow-labourer had heard no

movement when he was awakened in the morning, and they said, "Louis,

where is Henri?"  They looked for him high and low, in vain, and

gave him up.  Now, outside this Inn, there stood, as there stood

outside every dwelling in the village, a stack of firewood; but the

stack belonging to the Inn was higher than any of the rest, because

the Inn was the richest house, and burnt the most fuel.  It began to

be noticed, while they were looking high and low, that a Bantam

cock, part of the live stock of the Inn, put himself wonderfully out

of his way to get to the top of this wood-stack; and that he would

stay there for hours and hours, crowing, until he appeared in danger

of splitting himself.  Five weeks went on,--six weeks,--and still

this terrible Bantam, neglecting his domestic affairs, was always on

the top of the wood-stack, crowing the very eyes out of his head.

By this time it was perceived that Louis had become inspired with a

violent animosity towards the terrible Bantam, and one morning he

was seen by a woman, who sat nursing her goitre at a little window

in a gleam of sun, to catch up a rough billet of wood, with a great

oath, hurl it at the terrible Bantam crowing on the wood-stack, and

bring him down dead.  Hereupon the woman, with a sudden light in her

mind, stole round to the back of the wood-stack, and, being a good

climber, as all those women are, climbed up, and soon was seen upon

the summit, screaming, looking down the hollow within, and crying,

"Seize Louis, the murderer!  Ring the church bell!  Here is the

body!"  I saw the murderer that day, and I saw him as I sat by my

fire at the Holly-Tree Inn, and I see him now, lying shackled with

cords on the stable litter, among the mild eyes and the smoking

breath of the cows, waiting to be taken away by the police, and

stared at by the fearful village.  A heavy animal,--the dullest

animal in the stables,--with a stupid head, and a lumpish face

devoid of any trace of insensibility, who had been, within the

knowledge of the murdered youth, an embezzler of certain small

moneys belonging to his master, and who had taken this hopeful mode

of putting a possible accuser out of his way.  All of which he

confessed next day, like a sulky wretch who couldn't be troubled any

more, now that they had got hold of him, and meant to make an end of

him.  I saw him once again, on the day of my departure from the Inn.

In that Canton the headsman still does his office with a sword; and

I came upon this murderer sitting bound, to a chair, with his eyes

bandaged, on a scaffold in a little market-place.  In that instant,

a great sword (loaded with quicksilver in the thick part of the

blade) swept round him like a gust of wind or fire, and there was no

such creature in the world.  My wonder was, not that he was so

suddenly dispatched, but that any head was left unreaped, within a

radius of fifty yards of that tremendous sickle.



That was a good Inn, too, with the kind, cheerful landlady and the

honest landlord, where I lived in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and

where one of the apartments has a zoological papering on the walls,

not so accurately joined but that the elephant occasionally rejoices

in a tiger's hind legs and tail, while the lion puts on a trunk and

tusks, and the bear, moulting as it were, appears as to portions of

himself like a leopard.  I made several American friends at that

Inn, who all called Mont Blanc Mount Blank,--except one good-

humoured gentleman, of a very sociable nature, who became on such

intimate terms with it that he spoke of it familiarly as "Blank;"

observing, at breakfast, "Blank looks pretty tall this morning;" or

considerably doubting in the courtyard in the evening, whether there

warn't some go-ahead naters in our country, sir, that would make out

the top of Blank in a couple of hours from first start--now!



Once I passed a fortnight at an Inn in the North of England, where I

was haunted by the ghost of a tremendous pie.  It was a Yorkshire

pie, like a fort,--an abandoned fort with nothing in it; but the

waiter had a fixed idea that it was a point of ceremony at every

meal to put the pie on the table.  After some days I tried to hint,

in several delicate ways, that I considered the pie done with; as,

for example, by emptying fag-ends of glasses of wine into it;

putting cheese-plates and spoons into it, as into a basket; putting

wine-bottles into it, as into a cooler; but always in vain, the pie

being invariably cleaned out again and brought up as before.  At

last, beginning to be doubtful whether I was not the victim of a

spectral illusion, and whether my health and spirits might not sink

under the horrors of an imaginary pie, I cut a triangle out of it,

fully as large as the musical instrument of that name in a powerful

orchestra.  Human provision could not have foreseen the result--but

the waiter mended the pie.  With some effectual species of cement,

he adroitly fitted the triangle in again, and I paid my reckoning

and fled.



The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal.  I made an overland

expedition beyond the screen, and penetrated as far as the fourth

window.  Here I was driven back by stress of weather.  Arrived at my

winter-quarters once more, I made up the fire, and took another Inn.



It was in the remotest part of Cornwall.  A great annual Miners'

Feast was being holden at the Inn, when I and my travelling

companions presented ourselves at night among the wild crowd that

were dancing before it by torchlight.  We had had a break-down in

the dark, on a stony morass some miles away; and I had the honour of

leading one of the unharnessed post-horses.  If any lady or

gentleman, on perusal of the present lines, will take any very tall

post-horse with his traces hanging about his legs, and will conduct

him by the bearing-rein into the heart of a country dance of a

hundred and fifty couples, that lady or gentleman will then, and

only then, form an adequate idea of the extent to which that post-

horse will tread on his conductor's toes.  Over and above which, the

post-horse, finding three hundred people whirling about him, will

probably rear, and also lash out with his hind legs, in a manner

incompatible with dignity or self-respect on his conductor's part.

With such little drawbacks on my usually impressive aspect, I

appeared at this Cornish Inn, to the unutterable wonder of the

Cornish Miners.  It was full, and twenty times full, and nobody

could be received but the post-horse,--though to get rid of that

noble animal was something.  While my fellow-travellers and I were

discussing how to pass the night and so much of the next day as must

intervene before the jovial blacksmith and the jovial wheelwright

would be in a condition to go out on the morass and mend the coach,

an honest man stepped forth from the crowd and proposed his unlet

floor of two rooms, with supper of eggs and bacon, ale and punch.

We joyfully accompanied him home to the strangest of clean houses,

where we were well entertained to the satisfaction of all parties.

But the novel feature of the entertainment was, that our host was a

chair-maker, and that the chairs assigned to us were mere frames,

altogether without bottoms of any sort; so that we passed the

evening on perches.  Nor was this the absurdest consequence; for

when we unbent at supper, and any one of us gave way to laughter, he

forgot the peculiarity of his position, and instantly disappeared.

I myself, doubled up into an attitude from which self-extrication

was impossible, was taken out of my frame, like a clown in a comic

pantomime who has tumbled into a tub, five times by the taper's

light during the eggs and bacon.



The Holly-Tree was fast reviving within me a sense of loneliness.  I

began to feel conscious that my subject would never carry on until I

was dug out.  I might be a week here,--weeks!



There was a story with a singular idea in it, connected with an Inn

I once passed a night at in a picturesque old town on the Welsh

border.  In a large double-bedded room of this Inn there had been a

suicide committed by poison, in one bed, while a tired traveller

slept unconscious in the other.  After that time, the suicide bed

was never used, but the other constantly was; the disused bedstead

remaining in the room empty, though as to all other respects in its

old state.  The story ran, that whosoever slept in this room, though

never so entire a stranger, from never so far off, was invariably

observed to come down in the morning with an impression that he

smelt Laudanum, and that his mind always turned upon the subject of

suicide; to which, whatever kind of man he might be, he was certain

to make some reference if he conversed with any one.  This went on

for years, until it at length induced the landlord to take the

disused bedstead down, and bodily burn it,--bed, hangings, and all.

The strange influence (this was the story) now changed to a fainter

one, but never changed afterwards.  The occupant of that room, with

occasional but very rare exceptions, would come down in the morning,

trying to recall a forgotten dream he had had in the night.  The

landlord, on his mentioning his perplexity, would suggest various

commonplace subjects, not one of which, as he very well knew, was

the true subject.  But the moment the landlord suggested "Poison,"

the traveller started, and cried, "Yes!"  He never failed to accept

that suggestion, and he never recalled any more of the dream.



This reminiscence brought the Welsh Inns in general before me; with

the women in their round hats, and the harpers with their white

beards (venerable, but humbugs, I am afraid), playing outside the

door while I took my dinner.  The transition was natural to the

Highland Inns, with the oatmeal bannocks, the honey, the venison

steaks, the trout from the loch, the whisky, and perhaps (having the

materials so temptingly at hand) the Athol brose.  Once was I coming

south from the Scottish Highlands in hot haste, hoping to change

quickly at the station at the bottom of a certain wild historical

glen, when these eyes did with mortification see the landlord come

out with a telescope and sweep the whole prospect for the horses;

which horses were away picking up their own living, and did not

heave in sight under four hours.  Having thought of the loch-trout,

I was taken by quick association to the Anglers' Inns of England (I

have assisted at innumerable feats of angling by lying in the bottom

of the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing with the greatest

perseverance; which I have generally found to be as effectual

towards the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost

science), and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated

bedrooms of those inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and

the green ait, and the church-spire, and the country bridge; and to

the pearless Emma with the bright eyes and the pretty smile, who

waited, bless her! with a natural grace that would have converted

Blue-Beard.  Casting my eyes upon my Holly-Tree fire, I next

discerned among the glowing coals the pictures of a score or more of

those wonderful English posting-inns which we are all so sorry to

have lost, which were so large and so comfortable, and which were

such monuments of British submission to rapacity and extortion.  He

who would see these houses pining away, let him walk from

Basingstoke, or even Windsor, to London, by way of Hounslow, and

moralise on their perishing remains; the stables crumbling to dust;

unsettled labourers and wanderers bivouacking in the outhouses;

grass growing in the yards; the rooms, where erst so many hundred

beds of down were made up, let off to Irish lodgers at eighteenpence

a week; a little ill-looking beer-shop shrinking in the tap of

former days, burning coach-house gates for firewood, having one of

its two windows bunged up, as if it had received punishment in a

fight with the Railroad; a low, bandy-legged, brick-making bulldog

standing in the doorway.  What could I next see in my fire so

naturally as the new railway-house of these times near the dismal

country station; with nothing particular on draught but cold air and

damp, nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new mortar, and no

business doing beyond a conceited affectation of luggage in the

hall?  Then I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment

of four pieces up one hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs, the

privilege of ringing the bell all day long without influencing

anybody's mind or body but your own, and the not-too-much-for-

dinner, considering the price.  Next to the provincial Inns of

France, with the great church-tower rising above the courtyard, the

horse-bells jingling merrily up and down the street beyond, and the

clocks of all descriptions in all the rooms, which are never right,

unless taken at the precise minute when, by getting exactly twelve

hours too fast or too slow, they unintentionally become so.  Away I

went, next, to the lesser roadside Inns of Italy; where all the

dirty clothes in the house (not in wear) are always lying in your

anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a raisin pudding of your face in

summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter; where you get what you

can, and forget what you can't:  where I should again like to be

boiling my tea in a pocket-handkerchief dumpling, for want of a

teapot.  So to the old palace Inns and old monastery Inns, in towns

and cities of the same bright country; with their massive

quadrangular staircases, whence you may look from among clustering

pillars high into the blue vault of heaven; with their stately

banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with their labyrinths of

ghostly bedchambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous streets that

have no appearance of reality or possibility.  So to the close

little Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants,

and their peculiar smell of never letting in the air.  So to the

immense fantastic Inns of Venice, with the cry of the gondolier

below, as he skims the corner; the grip of the watery odours on one

particular little bit of the bridge of your nose (which is never

released while you stay there); and the great bell of St. Mark's

Cathedral tolling midnight.  Next I put up for a minute at the

restless Inns upon the Rhine, where your going to bed, no matter at

what hour, appears to be the tocsin for everybody else's getting up;

and where, in the table-d'hote room at the end of the long table

(with several Towers of Babel on it at the other end, all made of

white plates), one knot of stoutish men, entirely dressed in jewels

and dirt, and having nothing else upon them, will remain all night,

clinking glasses, and singing about the river that flows, and the

grape that grows, and Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine woman that

smiles and hi drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my brother,

and all the rest of it.  I departed thence, as a matter of course,

to other German Inns, where all the eatables are soddened down to

the same flavour, and where the mind is disturbed by the apparition

of hot puddings, and boiled cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully

unexpected periods of the repast.  After a draught of sparkling beer

from a foaming glass jug, and a glance of recognition through the

windows of the student beer-houses at Heidelberg and elsewhere, I

put out to sea for the Inns of America, with their four hundred beds

apiece, and their eight or nine hundred ladies and gentlemen at

dinner every day.  Again I stood in the bar-rooms thereof, taking my

evening cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail.  Again I listened to my

friend the General,--whom I had known for five minutes, in the

course of which period he had made me intimate for life with two

Majors, who again had made me intimate for life with three Colonels,

who again had made me brother to twenty-two civilians,--again, I

say, I listened to my friend the General, leisurely expounding the

resources of the establishment, as to gentlemen's morning-room, sir;

ladies' morning-room, sir; gentlemen's evening-room, sir; ladies'

evening-room, sir; ladies' and gentlemen's evening reuniting-room,

sir; music-room, sir; reading-room, sir; over four hundred sleeping-

rooms, sir; and the entire planned and finited within twelve

calendar months from the first clearing off of the old encumbrances

on the plot, at a cost of five hundred thousand dollars, sir.  Again

I found, as to my individual way of thinking, that the greater, the

more gorgeous, and the more dollarous the establishment was, the

less desirable it was.  Nevertheless, again I drank my cobbler,

julep, sling, or cocktail, in all good-will, to my friend the

General, and my friends the Majors, Colonels, and civilians all;

full well knowing that, whatever little motes my beamy eyes may have

descried in theirs, they belong to a kind, generous, large-hearted,

and great people.



I had been going on lately at a quick pace to keep my solitude out

of my mind; but here I broke down for good, and gave up the subject.

What was I to do?  What was to become of me?  Into what extremity

was I submissively to sink?  Supposing that, like Baron Trenck, I

looked out for a mouse or spider, and found one, and beguiled my

imprisonment by training it?  Even that might be dangerous with a

view to the future.  I might be so far gone when the road did come

to be cut through the snow, that, on my way forth, I might burst

into tears, and beseech, like the prisoner who was released in his

old age from the Bastille, to be taken back again to the five

windows, the ten curtains, and the sinuous drapery.



A desperate idea came into my head.  Under any other circumstances I

should have rejected it; but, in the strait at which I was, I held

it fast.  Could I so far overcome the inherent bashfulness which

withheld me from the landlord's table and the company I might find

there, as to call up the Boots, and ask him to take a chair,--and

something in a liquid form,--and talk to me?  I could, I would, I

did.







SECOND BRANCH--THE BOOTS







Where had he been in his time? he repeated, when I asked him the

question.  Lord, he had been everywhere!  And what had he been?

Bless you, he had been everything you could mention a'most!



Seen a good deal?  Why, of course he had.  I should say so, he could

assure me, if I only knew about a twentieth part of what had come in

his way.  Why, it would be easier for him, he expected, to tell what

he hadn't seen than what he had.  Ah!  A deal, it would.



What was the curiousest thing he had seen?  Well!  He didn't know.

He couldn't momently name what was the curiousest thing he had seen-

-unless it was a Unicorn, and he see him once at a Fair.  But

supposing a young gentleman not eight year old was to run away with

a fine young woman of seven, might I think that a queer start?

Certainly.  Then that was a start as he himself had had his blessed

eyes on, and he had cleaned the shoes they run away in--and they was

so little that he couldn't get his hand into 'em.



Master Harry Walmers' father, you see, he lived at the Elmses, down

away by Shooter's Hill there, six or seven miles from Lunnon.  He

was a gentleman of spirit, and good-looking, and held his head up

when he walked, and had what you may call Fire about him.  He wrote

poetry, and he rode, and he ran, and he cricketed, and he danced,

and he acted, and he done it all equally beautiful.  He was uncommon

proud of Master Harry as was his only child; but he didn't spoil him

neither.  He was a gentleman that had a will of his own and a eye of

his own, and that would be minded.  Consequently, though he made

quite a companion of the fine bright boy, and was delighted to see

him so fond of reading his fairy books, and was never tired of

hearing him say my name is Norval, or hearing him sing his songs

about Young May Moons is beaming love, and When he as adores thee

has left but the name, and that; still he kept the command over the

child, and the child was a child, and it's to be wished more of 'em

was!



How did Boots happen to know all this?  Why, through being under-

gardener.  Of course he couldn't be under-gardener, and be always

about, in the summer-time, near the windows on the lawn, a mowing,

and sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without

getting acquainted with the ways of the family.  Even supposing

Master Harry hadn't come to him one morning early, and said, "Cobbs,

how should you spell Norah, if you was asked?" and then began

cutting it in print all over the fence.



He couldn't say he had taken particular notice of children before

that; but really it was pretty to see them two mites a going about

the place together, deep in love.  And the courage of the boy!

Bless your soul, he'd have throwed off his little hat, and tucked up

his little sleeves, and gone in at a Lion, he would, if they had

happened to meet one, and she had been frightened of him.  One day

he stops, along with her, where Boots was hoeing weeds in the

gravel, and says, speaking up, "Cobbs," he says, "I like you."  "Do

you, sir?  I'm proud to hear it."  "Yes, I do, Cobbs.  Why do I like

you, do you think, Cobbs?"  "Don't know, Master Harry, I am sure."

"Because Norah likes you, Cobbs."  "Indeed, sir?  That's very

gratifying."  "Gratifying, Cobbs?  It's better than millions of the

brightest diamonds to be liked by Norah."  "Certainly, sir."

"You're going away, ain't you, Cobbs?"  "Yes, sir."  "Would you like

another situation, Cobbs?"  "Well, sir, I shouldn't object, if it

was a good Inn."  "Then, Cobbs," says he, "you shall be our Head

Gardener when we are married."  And he tucks her, in her little sky-

blue mantle, under his arm, and walks away.



Boots could assure me that it was better than a picter, and equal to

a play, to see them babies, with their long, bright, curling hair,

their sparkling eyes, and their beautiful light tread, a rambling

about the garden, deep in love.  Boots was of opinion that the birds

believed they was birds, and kept up with 'em, singing to please

'em.  Sometimes they would creep under the Tulip-tree, and would sit

there with their arms round one another's necks, and their soft

cheeks touching, a reading about the Prince and the Dragon, and the

good and bad enchanters, and the king's fair daughter.  Sometimes he

would hear them planning about having a house in a forest, keeping

bees and a cow, and living entirely on milk and honey.  Once he came

upon them by the pond, and heard Master Harry say, "Adorable Norah,

kiss me, and say you love me to distraction, or I'll jump in head-

foremost."  And Boots made no question he would have done it if she

hadn't complied.  On the whole, Boots said it had a tendency to make

him feel as if he was in love himself--only he didn't exactly know

who with.



"Cobbs," said Master Harry, one evening, when Cobbs was watering the

flowers, "I am going on a visit, this present Midsummer, to my

grandmamma's at York."



"Are you indeed, sir?  I hope you'll have a pleasant time.  I am

going into Yorkshire, myself, when I leave here."



"Are you going to your grandmamma's, Cobbs?"



"No, sir.  I haven't got such a thing."



"Not as a grandmamma, Cobbs?"



"No, sir."



The boy looked on at the watering of the flowers for a little while,

and then said, "I shall be very glad indeed to go, Cobbs,--Norah's

going."



"You'll be all right then, sir," says Cobbs, "with your beautiful

sweetheart by your side."



"Cobbs," returned the boy, flushing, "I never let anybody joke about

it, when I can prevent them."



"It wasn't a joke, sir," says Cobbs, with humility,--"wasn't so

meant."



"I am glad of that, Cobbs, because I like you, you know, and you're

going to live with us.--Cobbs!"



"Sir."



"What do you think my grandmamma gives me when I go down there?"



"I couldn't so much as make a guess, sir."



"A Bank of England five-pound note, Cobbs."



"Whew!" says Cobbs, "that's a spanking sum of money, Master Harry."



"A person could do a good deal with such a sum of money as that,--

couldn't a person, Cobbs?"



"I believe you, sir!"



"Cobbs," said the boy, "I'll tell you a secret.  At Norah's house,

they have been joking her about me, and pretending to laugh at our

being engaged,--pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!"



"Such, sir," says Cobbs, "is the depravity of human natur."



The boy, looking exactly like his father, stood for a few minutes

with his glowing face towards the sunset, and then departed with,

"Good-night, Cobbs.  I'm going in."



If I was to ask Boots how it happened that he was a-going to leave

that place just at that present time, well, he couldn't rightly

answer me.  He did suppose he might have stayed there till now if he

had been anyways inclined.  But, you see, he was younger then, and

he wanted change.  That's what he wanted,--change.  Mr. Walmers, he

said to him when he gave him notice of his intentions to leave,

"Cobbs," he says, "have you anythink to complain of?  I make the

inquiry because if I find that any of my people really has anythink

to complain of, I wish to make it right if I can."  "No, sir." says

Cobbs; "thanking you, sir, I find myself as well sitiwated here as I

could hope to be anywheres.  The truth is, sir, that I'm a-going to

seek my fortun'."  "O, indeed, Cobbs!" he says; "I hope you may find

it."  And Boots could assure me--which he did, touching his hair

with his bootjack, as a salute in the way of his present calling--

that he hadn't found it yet.



Well, sir!  Boots left the Elmses when his time was up, and Master

Harry, he went down to the old lady's at York, which old lady would

have given that child the teeth out of her head (if she had had

any), she was so wrapped up in him.  What does that Infant do,--for

Infant you may call him and be within the mark,--but cut away from

that old lady's with his Norah, on a expedition to go to Gretna

Green and be married!



Sir, Boots was at this identical Holly-Tree Inn (having left it

several times since to better himself, but always come back through

one thing or another), when, one summer afternoon, the coach drives

up, and out of the coach gets them two children.  The Guard says to

our Governor, "I don't quite make out these little passengers, but

the young gentleman's words was, that they was to be brought here."

The young gentleman gets out; hands his lady out; gives the Guard

something for himself; says to our Governor, "We're to stop here to-

night, please.  Sitting-room and two bedrooms will be required.

Chops and cherry-pudding for two!" and tucks her, in her sky-blue

mantle, under his arm, and walks into the house much bolder than

Brass.



Boots leaves me to judge what the amazement of that establishment

was, when these two tiny creatures all alone by themselves was

marched into the Angel,--much more so, when he, who had seen them

without their seeing him, give the Governor his views of the

expedition they was upon.  "Cobbs," says the Governor, "if this is

so, I must set off myself to York, and quiet their friends' minds.

In which case you must keep your eye upon 'em, and humour 'em, till

I come back.  But before I take these measures, Cobbs, I should wish

you to find from themselves whether your opinion is correct."  "Sir,

to you," says Cobbs, "that shall be done directly."



So Boots goes up-stairs to the Angel, and there he finds Master

Harry on a e-normous sofa,--immense at any time, but looking like

the Great Bed of Ware, compared with him,--a drying the eyes of Miss

Norah with his pocket-hankecher.  Their little legs was entirely off

the ground, of course, and it really is not possible for Boots to

express to me how small them children looked.



"It's Cobbs!  It's Cobbs!" cries Master Harry, and comes running to

him, and catching hold of his hand.  Miss Norah comes running to him

on t'other side and catching hold of his t'other hand, and they both

jump for joy.



"I see you a getting out, sir," says Cobbs.  "I thought it was you.

I thought I couldn't be mistaken in your height and figure.  What's

the object of your journey, sir?--Matrimonial?"



"We are going to be married, Cobbs, at Gretna Green," returned the

boy.  "We have run away on purpose.  Norah has been in rather low

spirits, Cobbs; but she'll be happy, now we have found you to be our

friend."



"Thank you, sir, and thank you, miss," says Cobbs, "for your good

opinion.  Did you bring any luggage with you, sir?"



If I will believe Boots when he gives me his word and honour upon

it, the lady had got a parasol, a smelling-bottle, a round and a

half of cold buttered toast, eight peppermint drops, and a hair-

brush,--seemingly a doll's.  The gentleman had got about half a

dozen yards of string, a knife, three or four sheets of writing-

paper folded up surprising small, a orange, and a Chaney mug with

his name upon it.



"What may be the exact natur of your plans, sir?" says Cobbs.



"To go on," replied the boy,--which the courage of that boy was

something wonderful!--"in the morning, and be married to-morrow."



"Just so, sir," says Cobbs.  "Would it meet your views, sir, if I

was to accompany you?"



When Cobbs said this, they both jumped for joy again, and cried out,

"Oh, yes, yes, Cobbs!  Yes!"



"Well, sir," says Cobbs.  "If you will excuse my having the freedom

to give an opinion, what I should recommend would be this.  I'm

acquainted with a pony, sir, which, put in a pheayton that I could

borrow, would take you and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, (myself

driving, if you approved,) to the end of your journey in a very

short space of time.  I am not altogether sure, sir, that this pony

will be at liberty to-morrow, but even if you had to wait over to-

morrow for him, it might be worth your while.  As to the small

account here, sir, in case you was to find yourself running at all

short, that don't signify; because I'm a part proprietor of this

inn, and it could stand over."



Boots assures me that when they clapped their hands, and jumped for

joy again, and called him "Good Cobbs!" and "Dear Cobbs!" and bent

across him to kiss one another in the delight of their confiding

hearts, he felt himself the meanest rascal for deceiving 'em that

ever was born.



"Is there anything you want just at present, sir?" says Cobbs,

mortally ashamed of himself.



"We should like some cakes after dinner," answered Master Harry,

folding his arms, putting out one leg, and looking straight at him,

"and two apples,--and jam.  With dinner we should like to have

toast-and-water.  But Norah has always been accustomed to half a

glass of currant wine at dessert.  And so have I."



"It shall be ordered at the bar, sir," says Cobbs; and away he went.



Boots has the feeling as fresh upon him at this minute of speaking

as he had then, that he would far rather have had it out in half-a-

dozen rounds with the Governor than have combined with him; and that

he wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where

those two babies could make an impossible marriage, and live

impossibly happy ever afterwards.  However, as it couldn't be, he

went into the Governor's plans, and the Governor set off for York in

half an hour.



The way in which the women of that house--without exception--every

one of 'em--married and single--took to that boy when they heard the

story, Boots considers surprising.  It was as much as he could do to

keep 'em from dashing into the room and kissing him.  They climbed

up all sorts of places, at the risk of their lives, to look at him

through a pane of glass.  They was seven deep at the keyhole.  They

was out of their minds about him and his bold spirit.



In the evening, Boots went into the room to see how the runaway

couple was getting on.  The gentleman was on the window-seat,

supporting the lady in his arms.  She had tears upon her face, and

was lying, very tired and half asleep, with her head upon his

shoulder.



"Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, fatigued, sir?" says Cobbs.



"Yes, she is tired, Cobbs; but she is not used to be away from home,

and she has been in low spirits again.  Cobbs, do you think you

could bring a biffin, please?"



"I ask your pardon, sir," says Cobbs.  "What was it you--?"



"I think a Norfolk biffin would rouse her, Cobbs.  She is very fond

of them."



Boots withdrew in search of the required restorative, and when he

brought it in, the gentleman handed it to the lady, and fed her with

a spoon, and took a little himself; the lady being heavy with sleep,

and rather cross.  "What should you think, sir," says Cobbs, "of a

chamber candlestick?"  The gentleman approved; the chambermaid went

first, up the great staircase; the lady, in her sky-blue mantle,

followed, gallantly escorted by the gentleman; the gentleman

embraced her at her door, and retired to his own apartment, where

Boots softly locked him up.



Boots couldn't but feel with increased acuteness what a base

deceiver he was, when they consulted him at breakfast (they had

ordered sweet milk-and-water, and toast and currant jelly, over-

night) about the pony.  It really was as much as he could do, he

don't mind confessing to me, to look them two young things in the

face, and think what a wicked old father of lies he had grown up to

be.  Howsomever, he went on a lying like a Trojan about the pony.

He told 'em that it did so unfortunately happen that the pony was

half clipped, you see, and that he couldn't be taken out in that

state, for fear it should strike to his inside.  But that he'd be

finished clipping in the course of the day, and that to-morrow

morning at eight o'clock the pheayton would be ready.  Boots's view

of the whole case, looking back on it in my room, is, that Mrs.

Harry Walmers, Junior, was beginning to give in.  She hadn't had her

hair curled when she went to bed, and she didn't seem quite up to

brushing it herself, and its getting in her eyes put her out.  But

nothing put out Master Harry.  He sat behind his breakfast-cup, a

tearing away at the jelly, as if he had been his own father.



After breakfast, Boots is inclined to consider that they drawed

soldiers,--at least, he knows that many such was found in the fire-

place, all on horseback.  In the course of the morning, Master Harry

rang the bell,--it was surprising how that there boy did carry on,--

and said, in a sprightly way, "Cobbs, is there any good walks in

this neighbourhood?"



"Yes, sir," says Cobbs.  "There's Love Lane."



"Get out with you, Cobbs!"--that was that there boy's expression,--

"you're joking."



"Begging your pardon, sir," says Cobbs, "there really is Love Lane.

And a pleasant walk it is, and proud shall I be to show it to

yourself and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior."



"Norah, dear," said Master Harry, "this is curious.  We really ought

to see Love Lane.  Put on your bonnet, my sweetest darling, and we

will go there with Cobbs."



Boots leaves me to judge what a Beast he felt himself to be, when

that young pair told him, as they all three jogged along together,

that they had made up their minds to give him two thousand guineas a

year as head-gardener, on accounts of his being so true a friend to

'em.  Boots could have wished at the moment that the earth would

have opened and swallowed him up, he felt so mean, with their

beaming eyes a looking at him, and believing him.  Well, sir, he

turned the conversation as well as he could, and he took 'em down

Love Lane to the water-meadows, and there Master Harry would have

drowned himself in half a moment more, a getting out a water-lily

for her,--but nothing daunted that boy.  Well, sir, they was tired

out.  All being so new and strange to 'em, they was tired as tired

could be.  And they laid down on a bank of daisies, like the

children in the wood, leastways meadows, and fell asleep.



Boots don't know--perhaps I do,--but never mind, it don't signify

either way--why it made a man fit to make a fool of himself to see

them two pretty babies a lying there in the clear still sunny day,

not dreaming half so hard when they was asleep as they done when

they was awake.  But, Lord! when you come to think of yourself, you

know, and what a game you have been up to ever since you was in your

own cradle, and what a poor sort of a chap you are, and how it's

always either Yesterday with you, or else To-morrow, and never To-

day, that's where it is!



Well, sir, they woke up at last, and then one thing was getting

pretty clear to Boots, namely, that Mrs. Harry Walmerses, Junior's,

temper was on the move.  When Master Harry took her round the waist,

she said he "teased her so;" and when he says, "Norah, my young May

Moon, your Harry tease you?" she tells him, "Yes; and I want to go

home!"



A biled fowl, and baked bread-and-butter pudding, brought Mrs.

Walmers up a little; but Boots could have wished, he must privately

own to me, to have seen her more sensible of the woice of love, and

less abandoning of herself to currants.  However, Master Harry, he

kept up, and his noble heart was as fond as ever.  Mrs. Walmers

turned very sleepy about dusk, and began to cry.  Therefore, Mrs.

Walmers went off to bed as per yesterday; and Master Harry ditto

repeated.



About eleven or twelve at night comes back the Governor in a chaise,

along with Mr. Walmers and a elderly lady.  Mr. Walmers looks amused

and very serious, both at once, and says to our missis, "We are much

indebted to you, ma'am, for your kind care of our little children,

which we can never sufficiently acknowledge.  Pray, ma'am, where is

my boy?"  Our missis says, "Cobbs has the dear child in charge, sir.

Cobbs, show Forty!"  Then he says to Cobbs, "Ah, Cobbs, I am glad to

see you!  I understood you was here!"  And Cobbs says, "Yes, sir.

Your most obedient, sir."



I may be surprised to hear Boots say it, perhaps; but Boots assures

me that his heart beat like a hammer, going up-stairs.  "I beg your

pardon, sir," says he, while unlocking the door; "I hope you are not

angry with Master Harry.  For Master Harry is a fine boy, sir, and

will do you credit and honour."  And Boots signifies to me, that, if

the fine boy's father had contradicted him in the daring state of

mind in which he then was, he thinks he should have "fetched him a

crack," and taken the consequences.



But Mr. Walmers only says, "No, Cobbs.  No, my good fellow.  Thank

you!"  And, the door being opened, goes in.



Boots goes in too, holding the light, and he sees Mr. Walmers go up

to the bedside, bend gently down, and kiss the little sleeping face.

Then he stands looking at it for a minute, looking wonderfully like

it (they do say he ran away with Mrs. Walmers); and then he gently

shakes the little shoulder.



"Harry, my dear boy!  Harry!"



Master Harry starts up and looks at him.  Looks at Cobbs too.  Such

is the honour of that mite, that he looks at Cobbs, to see whether

he has brought him into trouble.



"I am not angry, my child.  I only want you to dress yourself and

come home."



"Yes, pa."



Master Harry dresses himself quickly.  His breast begins to swell

when he has nearly finished, and it swells more and more as he

stands, at last, a looking at his father:  his father standing a

looking at him, the quiet image of him.



"Please may I"--the spirit of that little creatur, and the way he

kept his rising tears down!--"please, dear pa--may I--kiss Norah

before I go?"



"You may, my child."



So he takes Master Harry in his hand, and Boots leads the way with

the candle, and they come to that other bedroom, where the elderly

lady is seated by the bed, and poor little Mrs. Harry Walmers,

Junior, is fast asleep.  There the father lifts the child up to the

pillow, and he lays his little face down for an instant by the

little warm face of poor unconscious little Mrs. Harry Walmers,

Junior, and gently draws it to him,--a sight so touching to the

chambermaids who are peeping through the door, that one of them

calls out, "It's a shame to part 'em!"  But this chambermaid was

always, as Boots informs me, a soft-hearted one.  Not that there was

any harm in that girl.  Far from it.



Finally, Boots says, that's all about it.  Mr. Walmers drove away in

the chaise, having hold of Master Harry's hand.  The elderly lady

and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, that was never to be (she married a

Captain long afterwards, and died in India), went off next day.  In

conclusion, Boots put it to me whether I hold with him in two

opinions:  firstly, that there are not many couples on their way to

be married who are half as innocent of guile as those two children;

secondly, that it would be a jolly good thing for a great many

couples on their way to be married, if they could only be stopped in

time, and brought back separately.







THIRD BRANCH--THE BILL







I had been snowed up a whole week.  The time had hung so lightly on

my hands, that I should have been in great doubt of the fact but for

a piece of documentary evidence that lay upon my table.



The road had been dug out of the snow on the previous day, and the

document in question was my bill.  It testified emphatically to my

having eaten and drunk, and warmed myself, and slept among the

sheltering branches of the Holly-Tree, seven days and nights.



I had yesterday allowed the road twenty-four hours to improve

itself, finding that I required that additional margin of time for

the completion of my task.  I had ordered my Bill to be upon the

table, and a chaise to be at the door, "at eight o'clock to-morrow

evening."  It was eight o'clock to-morrow evening when I buckled up

my travelling writing-desk in its leather case, paid my Bill, and

got on my warm coats and wrappers.  Of course, no time now remained

for my travelling on to add a frozen tear to the icicles which were

doubtless hanging plentifully about the farmhouse where I had first

seen Angela.  What I had to do was to get across to Liverpool by the

shortest open road, there to meet my heavy baggage and embark.  It

was quite enough to do, and I had not an hour too much time to do it

in.



I had taken leave of all my Holly-Tree friends--almost, for the time

being, of my bashfulness too--and was standing for half a minute at

the Inn door watching the ostler as he took another turn at the cord

which tied my portmanteau on the chaise, when I saw lamps coming

down towards the Holly-Tree.  The road was so padded with snow that

no wheels were audible; but all of us who were standing at the Inn

door saw lamps coming on, and at a lively rate too, between the

walls of snow that had been heaped up on either side of the track.

The chambermaid instantly divined how the case stood, and called to

the ostler, "Tom, this is a Gretna job!"  The ostler, knowing that

her sex instinctively scented a marriage, or anything in that

direction, rushed up the yard bawling, "Next four out!" and in a

moment the whole establishment was thrown into commotion.



I had a melancholy interest in seeing the happy man who loved and

was beloved; and therefore, instead of driving off at once, I

remained at the Inn door when the fugitives drove up.  A bright-eyed

fellow, muffled in a mantle, jumped out so briskly that he almost

overthrew me.  He turned to apologise, and, by heaven, it was Edwin!



"Charley!" said he, recoiling.  "Gracious powers, what do you do

here?"



"Edwin," said I, recoiling, "gracious powers, what do you do here?"

I struck my forehead as I said it, and an insupportable blaze of

light seemed to shoot before my eyes.



He hurried me into the little parlour (always kept with a slow fire

in it and no poker), where posting company waited while their horses

were putting to, and, shutting the door, said:



"Charley, forgive me!"



"Edwin!" I returned.  "Was this well?  When I loved her so dearly!

When I had garnered up my heart so long!"  I could say no more.



He was shocked when he saw how moved I was, and made the cruel

observation, that he had not thought I should have taken it so much

to heart.



I looked at him.  I reproached him no more.  But I looked at him.

"My dear, dear Charley," said he, "don't think ill of me, I beseech

you!  I know you have a right to my utmost confidence, and, believe

me, you have ever had it until now.  I abhor secrecy.  Its meanness

is intolerable to me.  But I and my dear girl have observed it for

your sake."



He and his dear girl!  It steeled me.



"You have observed it for my sake, sir?" said I, wondering how his

frank face could face it out so.



"Yes!--and Angela's," said he.



I found the room reeling round in an uncertain way, like a

labouring, humming-top.  "Explain yourself," said I, holding on by

one hand to an arm-chair.



"Dear old darling Charley!" returned Edwin, in his cordial manner,

"consider!  When you were going on so happily with Angela, why

should I compromise you with the old gentleman by making you a party

to our engagement, and (after he had declined my proposals) to our

secret intention?  Surely it was better that you should be able

honourably to say, 'He never took counsel with me, never told me,

never breathed a word of it.'  If Angela suspected it, and showed me

all the favour and support she could--God bless her for a precious

creature and a priceless wife!--I couldn't help that.  Neither I nor

Emmeline ever told her, any more than we told you.  And for the same

good reason, Charley; trust me, for the same good reason, and no

other upon earth!"



Emmeline was Angela's cousin.  Lived with her.  Had been brought up

with her.  Was her father's ward.  Had property.



"Emmeline is in the chaise, my dear Edwin!" said I, embracing him

with the greatest affection.



"My good fellow!" said he, "do you suppose I should be going to

Gretna Green without her?"



I ran out with Edwin, I opened the chaise door, I took Emmeline in

my arms, I folded her to my heart.  She was wrapped in soft white

fur, like the snowy landscape:  but was warm, and young, and lovely.

I put their leaders to with my own hands, I gave the boys a five-

pound note apiece, I cheered them as they drove away, I drove the

other way myself as hard as I could pelt.



I never went to Liverpool, I never went to America, I went straight

back to London, and I married Angela.  I have never until this time,

even to her, disclosed the secret of my character, and the mistrust

and the mistaken journey into which it led me.  When she, and they,

and our eight children and their seven--I mean Edwin and Emmeline's,

whose oldest girl is old enough now to wear white for herself, and

to look very like her mother in it--come to read these pages, as of

course they will, I shall hardly fail to be found out at last.

Never mind!  I can bear it.  I began at the Holly-Tree, by idle

accident, to associate the Christmas time of year with human

interest, and with some inquiry into, and some care for, the lives

of those by whom I find myself surrounded.  I hope that I am none

the worse for it, and that no one near me or afar off is the worse

for it.  And I say, May the green Holly-Tree flourish, striking its

roots deep into our English ground, and having its germinating

qualities carried by the birds of Heaven all over the world!











End of the Project Gutenberg eText The Holly-Tree by Charles Dickens



