Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities (Illustrated)' portrays the complexities of love, sacrifice, and redemption against the backdrop of the French Revolution. The book is filled with rich historical detail and vivid characterizations, making it a compelling read for those interested in 19th-century literature. Dickens' signature style of social commentary is evident throughout the novel, providing readers with a profound insight into the societal issues of the time. The illustrations included in this edition enhance the overall reading experience, bringing the story to life in a visual manner. Charles Dickens, known for his iconic works such as 'Great Expectations' and 'Oliver Twist', drew inspiration for 'A Tale of Two Cities' from his observations of the inequities of the French Revolution and the contrasting landscapes of London and Paris. His personal experiences and keen observations of society are reflected in the intricate plot and diverse characters of the novel. I highly recommend 'A Tale of Two Cities (Illustrated)' to literature enthusiasts and history buffs alike. It is a timeless classic that explores themes of love, sacrifice, and the human spirit, making it a must-read for those seeking a profound and thought-provoking literary experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 3444
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
A Tale of Two Cities (Illustrated)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings A Tale of Two Cities into conversation with three illuminating companions: Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton, Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, and Dickens' London by M. F. Mansfield. Together they frame the novel through artistry, biography, and place. The unifying thread is transformation under moral and historical pressure, seen in characters, in the author’s evolving craft, and in the city itself. Our aim is to let narrative, reflection, and topography refract one another. Rather than presenting the novel alone, the gathering situates it within living context, resonance, and vantage.
At the heart of A Tale of Two Cities lies a dialectic of doubleness: London and Paris, private vows and public upheaval, memory and renewal. Chesterton’s volume explores Dickens’s habits of exaggeration, comedy, and moral clarity, clarifying how such doubleness becomes a method as well as a theme. Forster’s biographical narrative reveals the sustained energy behind the novels, connecting discipline, imagination, and social observation. Mansfield traces the lived atmosphere of London that undergirds Dickens’s settings, from thoroughfares to hidden corners. Assembled together, these perspectives contour a single question: how do cities shape conscience, and how does conscience remake cities?
The selection privileges breadth of angle over repetition. Chesterton supplies judgments about Dickens’s technique and purpose; Forster supplies the rhythms of a life devoted to storytelling; Mansfield supplies the city as participant rather than backdrop. A Tale of Two Cities gains depth when read beside this triangulation, not to explain it away but to thicken its textures. The curatorial intent is to stage a dialogue among narrative momentum, reflective evaluation, and urban study. The result is an integrated portrait of imagination under strain, illuminating how historical drama, personal vocation, and metropolitan detail converge without collapsing into a single viewpoint.
Presenting the novel on its own invites immersion in plot and prose; presenting it within this constellation invites orientation. Readers encounter not commentary tethered page by page, but distinct works that converse across distance and form. The biography gives a longitudinal arc to creative choices. The criticism articulates principles that the fiction enacts. The urban portrait supplies spatial and social texture. Collectively, they propose a way of seeing that a stand-alone novel cannot furnish: the entwining of art, life, and place, each illuminating the others while maintaining independence and offering multiple entry points to Dickens’s achievement.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
The novel’s recurring images of thresholds, crowds, and shared names resonate with Chesterton’s insistence that Dickens crafts types that are more than individuals without becoming abstractions. The effect is a choral vision: public feeling condensed into arresting figures. Forster’s portrait of Dickens at work underscores how such figures emerge from disciplined attention to daily scenes and voices. Mansfield then returns the reader to pavements and riverbanks, showing how streets become conductors of feeling. Across the four works, motifs of passage and recognition repeat, turning doors, bridges, and assemblies into ethical stages where private motives intersect with collective fate.
Contrasts in tone provoke productive tension. A Tale of Two Cities moves with concentrated urgency, compressing vast events into luminous images. Chesterton writes in a mode of genial yet decisive judgment, finding in Dickens a moral comedian whose laughter sharpens seriousness. Forster’s biography proceeds more steadily, valuing chronology and continuity. Mansfield favors evocation, cataloging moods of London that hover between observation and homage. Together, these registers prevent any single texture from dominating: urgency meets patience, evaluation meets evocation. The interplay enables readers to perceive how speed and steadiness, verdict and atmosphere, jointly make meaning in Dickens’s world.
Direct influence surfaces in obvious and subtle ways. Forster’s narrative of Dickens’s life and career clarifies the novel’s fascination with the movement of crowds and the pressure of duty. Chesterton’s critical categories—generosity of spirit, the romance of the everyday—offer a language for perceiving how scenes of peril also hold gratitude. Mansfield’s London, mapped through districts and thoroughfares, echoes the novel’s conviction that streets remember and transmit feeling. Each companion text, while autonomous, primes attention for particular images and cadences in the novel, turning isolated details into parts of a recurring and intelligible pattern.
Doubling, sacrifice, and renewal travel across these works as variations on a shared chord. The novel presents paired cities and intertwined destinies. Chesterton often treats Dickens’s characters as embodiments of competing impulses, staging magnanimity against hardness. Forster’s biographical attention to beginnings, setbacks, and returns mirrors a cycle of falling and rising. Mansfield’s London emerges as a place perpetually remade by footfall and story, where departures and arrivals fold into each other. The cumulative effect is an aesthetic of return: images recur, meanings re-gather, and the reader senses continuity not as repetition but as deepening recognition across forms.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
This collection remains vital because it assembles art, reflection, life-writing, and urban study to illuminate how literature engages turbulent public life. A Tale of Two Cities continues to prompt discussions of justice, vengeance, and mercy amid political convulsion. Chesterton’s assessments keep focus on ethical clarity without stripping away exuberance. Forster offers a human scale, reminding us that grand narratives arise from sustained labor. Mansfield anchors ideals in streets and neighborhoods, making civic feeling tangible. Together they model a way of reading that balances sympathy and judgment, capable of addressing present questions about belonging, memory, and responsibility.
Critical reception has long recognized the novel’s iconic images and its capacity to render history intimate. Rather than isolating that reputation, the present grouping situates it within an ecology of responses: admiration, appraisal, and contextual grounding. Chesterton’s volume exemplifies a tradition that praises Dickens’s inventiveness while debating his methods. Forster’s biography has shaped how many imagine the author’s trajectory. Mansfield has influenced how readers picture the city that sustains the fiction’s atmospheres. The resulting framework clarifies why the novel endures: it invites argument as much as affection, and it rewards fresh attention from multiple vantage points.
The afterlife of these works extends beyond scholarship into culture at large. Public memory has repeatedly drawn upon the novel’s scenes and phrases, while adaptations across media have reinterpreted its tensions for new moments. Chesterton’s formulations supply a vocabulary for citing Dickens as a moral touchstone. Forster’s portrait of a working life encourages depictions of the writer as citizen and craftsman. Mansfield’s evocation of London connects literary imagination to the textures of a city many still walk. Each component continues to furnish images, terms, and orientations that remain usable when communities debate justice, fear, hope, and change.
Today, the collection’s most urgent contribution may be its insistence that private conscience and public crisis cannot be separated. The novel dramatizes choices made under pressure; the criticism measures their resonance; the biography recalls the patient accumulation beneath sudden inspiration; the urban study ties aspirations to pavements and waterways. That composite vision resists both cynicism and sentimentality. It acknowledges terror without yielding to it, celebrates generosity without naiveté, and recognizes that cities both wound and heal. By bringing these works together, the collection presents not a single thesis but a durable resource for understanding character amid upheaval.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
A Tale of Two Cities frames the convulsions of the French Revolution against the comparative stability and anxieties of Victorian Britain. Written in 1859, the novel reflects a world in which hereditary privilege, commercial power, and urban crowds jostle for primacy. France’s ancien régime, revolutionary tribunals, and punitive prisons furnish a stark stage on which questions of justice and vengeance play out. Meanwhile, readers in London recognized their own debates about reform, order, and social responsibility. Life of Charles Dickens records the author’s persistent attention to institutions and public morality, while Dickens’ London supplies the urban cartography that anchors political abstractions to streets and thresholds.
Power in these works appears not only as royal decree or revolutionary chant but as the steady pressure of law, credit, and surveillance. The Old Bailey and the Bastille stand as complementary forms of judicial theater, each dramatizing the state’s claim over the body. Life of Charles Dickens traces the writer’s early encounters with debt, labor, and bureaucracy, experiences that matured into a politics of sympathy. Dickens’ London charts the arteries of authority—banks, courts, and alleys—where decisions made in counting houses and committee rooms cascade into everyday lives, allowing A Tale of Two Cities to juxtapose legal forms with the moral claims of the dispossessed.
The novel’s historical setting converses with mid-nineteenth-century anxieties after European upheavals and domestic agitation. British observers weighed the virtues of gradual reform against the specter of sudden violence. A Tale of Two Cities offers a parable of passion disciplined by conscience, speaking to readers wary of both stagnation and upheaval. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens interprets this balance as a signature moral energy, noting how Dickens’s indignation never quite divorces itself from civic restraint. In such debates, London plays the foil to Paris: a city priding itself on compromise, mindful that neglect can ripen into revolt when institutions harden into indifference.
War and diplomacy shadow the narrative’s horizons. Anglo-French rivalry, shifting alliances, and the mobilization of armies inform the novel’s atmosphere of siege and vigilance. A Tale of Two Cities compresses these international strains into intimate crises, where borders close, passports fail, and private loyalties become entangled with public allegiance. Life of Charles Dickens shows how the author cultivated a global awareness from within a resolutely local gaze, finding international meaning in domestic detail. Dickens’ London underscores the capital’s status as a world city, where rumors from continental battlefields register as changes in trade, prices, and the gossip of streets and clubs.
Social upheaval is rendered through grain shortages, crowded tenements, and the precarious dignity of labor. In France, hunger congeals into political will; in London, want tends to evaporate into everyday compromise. Life of Charles Dickens relates the biographical roots of this social vision, detailing burdens of work and family that catalyzed Dickens’s lifelong advocacy for humane institutions. Dickens’ London maps the geography of deprivation—workyards, taverns, and thoroughfares—making clear how proximity and distance become political facts. Thus the novel’s scenes of crowd justice find their counterpart in London’s quieter miseries, where neglect, rather than fury, exacts the larger toll.
Victorian reform discourses shape how the narrative reads the past. Debates over prison conditions, capital punishment, and the moral education of citizens set the frame within which readers encountered the novel’s tribunals and executions. A Tale of Two Cities thereby becomes a historical mirror for contemporary controversies, arguing that cruelty masquerading as order breeds its own nemesis. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens interprets this as a fusion of ethical protest and narrative economy, while Life of Charles Dickens situates such commitments within the author’s personal and civic routines. Dickens’ London supplies the physical texture that makes reform imaginable and urgent.
Print culture and the mechanics of serialization fostered a participatory politics of reading. Issued in parts, the narrative moved with the rhythms of public conversation, echoing parliamentary sessions and the daily press. Cliff-hangers coaxed household debate, while recognizably mapped streets let readers walk the argument after supper. Life of Charles Dickens attends to this professional discipline—the steady labor of pacing, revising, and gauging response—where political implication and entertainment meet. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens discerns in this method a democratic art, attentive to the judgment of a broad audience. Dickens’ London, finally, reminds us how place renders such discourse legible.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
These works inhabit a climate where moral philosophy competed with practical reform and religious pluralism. Utilitarian arithmetic, philanthropic sentiment, and appeals to conscience all sought authority in public life. A Tale of Two Cities translates these debates into felt experience, urging readers to measure consequences not only by totals but by souls. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens argues that this ethical imagination resists both cynicism and abstraction, preferring the theater of conduct to the classroom of theory. Life of Charles Dickens demonstrates how the writer’s habits—observation, walking, performance—mediated between principle and event, and Dickens’ London records the city as the curriculum.
Aesthetic currents favor a reanimation of historical romance within an urban realism. A Tale of Two Cities adopts the swiftness of melodrama—echo, recurrence, revelation—while maintaining a grounding in the ordinary. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens praises the largeness of this method, where emblem and anecdote work in tandem. Life of Charles Dickens documents the author’s fondness for the stage, his ear for cadence, and his disciplined rehearsal of scenes. Dickens’ London supplies the informal scenography: shopfronts as proscenium, alleys as wings, thoroughfares as chorus. The result is a city-made theater where conscience and chance meet under gaslight.
Technological and scientific changes sharpen the sense of time, speed, and mechanism in these texts. The era’s networks—post, rail, and print—create an appetite for swift reversals and news-like revelations. A Tale of Two Cities explores an earlier century while drawing on the Victorian grammar of momentum, rendering pursuit, arrest, and escape with engineered precision. The guillotine, as a device, condenses arguments about justice, efficiency, and spectacle. Life of Charles Dickens records the author’s fascination with systems and schedules, the discipline of the working writer. Dickens’ London notes how such systems reorganize space, cleaving the city into districts of velocity, delay, rumor, and proof.
Literary schools struggle for primacy between strict realism and romance. A Tale of Two Cities refuses the choice, building a hybrid architecture where symbolic patterns secure the scaffolding for observed detail. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens contends that this breadth preserves moral vision from narrowness, defending caricature as a tool of emphasis rather than evasion. Life of Charles Dickens shows how the author’s method matured through practice, not manifesto, while Dickens’ London demonstrates how mapping and memory can ground lyric intensity. The rivalry between styles thus becomes a creative motor, with the city functioning as both document and dream.
Narrative technique here is inseparable from medium. Serialization disciplines pacing; the illustrated imagination, even when images are absent, invites readers to picture thresholds, faces, and crowds. A Tale of Two Cities relies on recurrence, doubling, and delayed recognition to choreograph sympathy. Life of Charles Dickens observes the workroom rituals behind such structures—long walks, staged readings, collaborative routines. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens interprets these choices as hospitality to the common reader. Dickens’ London furnishes a complementary visual rhetoric: itineraries, vistas, and vantage points that nudge interpretation, suggesting how sightlines become storylines.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
The twentieth century’s shocks reframed the novel’s crowds and tribunals. After industrialized warfare, readers saw in A Tale of Two Cities not only revolutionary passion but the peril of mechanized punishment and mass psychology. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, written before the worst of that century, already warns against reducing Dickens to comfort, noting his appetite for danger within limits. Life of Charles Dickens helps anchor later anxieties by recovering the disciplined worker behind the myth, while Dickens’ London preserves a city both vanished and recognizable, offering a baseline against which later urban catastrophes could measure their deviations.
Mid-century culture found in the novel a vocabulary for show trials, purges, and ideological zeal. A Tale of Two Cities appeared prophetic in its depiction of how grievance may harden into ritualized accusation. Adaptations proliferated across stage, screen, and classroom, reshaping character emphasis and tonality to fit new fears and hopes while keeping the core moral inquiry intact. Life of Charles Dickens supplied interpretive ballast, reminding audiences that the narrative method grew from observation rather than dogma. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens continued to guide readers toward the generous, anti-cynical energies that animate even the novel’s darkest chambers.
As empires receded and cities diversified, London’s image complicated. Dickens’ London became a resource for understanding how the metropolis manufactures both invisibility and intimacy. In this light, A Tale of Two Cities suggested a cosmopolitan ethics: crossings, translations, and divided loyalties as facts of modern life. Critics debated whether the narrative privileges moderation over justice or vice versa, testing its positions against struggles for rights and recognition. Life of Charles Dickens offered a human-scale counterweight, insisting on the writer’s responsiveness to ordinary suffering. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens emphasized the fertility of his sympathies, resisting schematic political appropriation.
Late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century scholarship renovated method as much as conclusion. New historicist and archival approaches placed A Tale of Two Cities amid pamphlets, court records, and urban reforms, while digital mapping projects echoed Dickens’ London by plotting routes and scenes. Life of Charles Dickens yielded fresh readings of work habits as craft infrastructure. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, though earlier, anticipated this breadth by defending a capacious canon of feeling and form. Together, these works authorized a multi-modal pedagogy: to read is to walk, to compare documents, to weigh rhetoric against pavement, and memory against monument.
Ongoing debates turn on how the narrative balances pity with principle. Some readers prize its warnings against bloodlust; others stress its indictment of complacent privilege. The anthology itself supplies a forum for adjudication. Life of Charles Dickens clarifies the temperament that shaped choices; Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens articulates the virtues and dangers of moral spectacle; Dickens’ London secures the spatial imagination that keeps abstraction honest. A Tale of Two Cities, thus contextualized, remains a moving argument about the costs of justice and the dignity of mercy, read anew as political weather and urban experience continue to change.
Synopsis (Selection)
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Set between London and Paris during the French Revolution, the novel interweaves the fates of a wronged family, a reform-minded émigré, and a disenchanted lawyer as public upheaval collides with private loyalties. It builds from courtroom drama and long-buried secrets to a reckoning about justice, vengeance, and the possibility of renewal, in a tone that is both sweeping and somber. The collection’s critical, biographical, and topographical works illuminate the novel’s moral vision and the textures of the cities it contrasts.
APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENSby G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton surveys Dickens’s books and methods, highlighting his exuberant imagination, moral comedy, and gift for emblematic characters. Written in a brisk, paradox-friendly voice, the essays place A Tale of Two Cities within Dickens’s range—contrasting its historical gravitas with his more comic panoramas—and consider how his techniques serve a coherent ethical outlook. Read alongside the biography and city study, it frames the novel’s concerns with crowd, conscience, and civic life.
LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENSby John Forster
Forster chronicles Dickens’s upbringing, working life, and creative habits, tracing how lived experience and artistic ambition shaped the fiction. The tone is intimate and documentary, attentive to the pressures, enthusiasms, and routines behind the public career. In relation to A Tale of Two Cities, it clarifies the ethical preoccupations and narrative energies that drive the book’s portrait of turmoil and remembrance.
DICKENS' LONDONby M. F. Mansfield
Mansfield maps the city Dickens made emblematic, guiding readers through neighborhoods, institutions, and thoroughfares that anchor his narratives. The approach is part topography, part cultural portrait, evoking the rhythms and contrasts of Victorian urban life. Set against the trans-Channel scope of A Tale of Two Cities, it sharpens how London’s spaces shape character, mood, and ideas about law, crowd, and home.
A Tale of Two Cities (Illustrated)
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Table of Contents
Book the First. Recalled to Life
I. The Period
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of “the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:” after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of this chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before them.
II. The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it—like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in “the Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.
“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull and you’re at the top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to it!—Joe!”
“Halloa!” the guard replied.
“What o’clock do you make it, Joe?”
“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”
“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of Shooter’s yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”
The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative, made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of getting shot instantly as a highwayman.
The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.
“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his box.
“What do you say, Tom?”
They both listened.
“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.”
“I say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard, leaving his hold of the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen! In the king’s name, all of you!”
With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on the offensive.
The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in; the two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained in the road below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard, and from the guard to the coachman, and listened. The coachman looked back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and looked back, without contradicting.
The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.
The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.
“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “Yo there! Stand! I shall fire!”
The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering, a man’s voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”
“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”
“Is that the Dover mail?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want a passenger, if it is.”
“What passenger?”
“Mr. Jarvis Lorry.”
Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard, the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.
“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist, “because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in your lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight.”
“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jerry?”
(“I don’t like Jerry’s voice, if it is Jerry,” growled the guard to himself. “He’s hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.”)
“Yes, Mr. Lorry.”
“What is the matter?”
“A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.”
“I know this messenger, guard,” said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the road—assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and pulled up the window. “He may come close; there’s nothing wrong.”
“I hope there ain’t, but I can’t make so ‘Nation sure of that,” said the guard, in gruff soliloquy. “Hallo you!”
“Well! And hallo you!” said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.
“Come on at a footpace! d’ye mind me? And if you’ve got holsters to that saddle o’ yourn, don’t let me see your hand go nigh ‘em. For I’m a devil at a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So now let’s look at you.”
The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist, and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger a small folded paper. The rider’s horse was blown, and both horse and rider were covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of the man.
“Guard!” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.
The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horseman, answered curtly, “Sir.”
“There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson’s Bank. You must know Tellson’s Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown to drink. I may read this?”
“If so be as you’re quick, sir.”
He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read—first to himself and then aloud: “‘Wait at Dover for Mam’selle.’ It’s not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, Recalled to life.”
Jerry started in his saddle. “That’s a Blazing strange answer, too,” said he, at his hoarsest.
“Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.”
With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general pretence of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape the hazard of originating any other kind of action.
The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss in his arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and having looked to the supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt, looked to a smaller chest beneath his seat, in which there were a few smith’s tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For he was furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had only to shut himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in five minutes.
“Tom!” softly over the coach roof.
“Hallo, Joe.”
“Did you hear the message?”
“I did, Joe.”
“What did you make of it, Tom?”
“Nothing at all, Joe.”
“That’s a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it myself.”
Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not only to ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and shake the wet out of his hat-brim, which might be capable of holding about half a gallon. After standing with the bridle over his heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail were no longer within hearing and the night was quite still again, he turned to walk down the hill.
“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t trust your fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger, glancing at his mare. “‘Recalled to life.’ That’s a Blazing strange message. Much of that wouldn’t do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You’d be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!”
III. The Night Shadows
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London. So with the three passengers shut up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail coach; they were mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had been in his own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the breadth of a county between him and the next.
The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that assorted very well with that decoration, being of a surface black, with no depth in the colour or form, and much too near together—as if they were afraid of being found out in something, singly, if they kept too far apart. They had a sinister expression, under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over a great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended nearly to the wearer’s knees. When he stopped for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand, only while he poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as that was done, he muffled again.
“No, Jerry, no!” said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode. “It wouldn’t do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn’t suit your line of business! Recalled—! Bust me if I don’t think he’d been a drinking!”
His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.
While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of her private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.
What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.
Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.
But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach (in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was always with him, there was another current of impression that never ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one out of a grave.
Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by years, and they differed principally in the passions they expressed, and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt, defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one another; so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated hands and figures. But the face was in the main one face, and every head was prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this spectre:
“Buried how long?”
The answer was always the same: “Almost eighteen years.”
“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”
“Long ago.”
“You know that you are recalled to life?”
“They tell me so.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I can’t say.”
“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?”
The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes the broken reply was, “Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon.” Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, “Take me to her.” Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, “I don’t know her. I don’t understand.”
After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig, and dig, dig—now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his hands—to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the reality of mist and rain on his cheek.
Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train of the night shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the real business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express sent after him, and the real message returned, would all be there. Out of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would accost it again.
“Buried how long?”
“Almost eighteen years.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I can’t say.”
Dig—dig—dig—until an impatient movement from one of the two passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again slid away into the bank and the grave.
“Buried how long?”
“Almost eighteen years.”
“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”
“Long ago.”
The words were still in his hearing as just spoken—distinctly in his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life—when the weary passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the shadows of the night were gone.
He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.
“Eighteen years!” said the passenger, looking at the sun. “Gracious Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!”
IV. The Preparation
When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon, the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach-door as his custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous traveller upon.
By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left be congratulated: for the two others had been set down at their respective roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp and dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather like a larger dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out of it in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and muddy legs, was rather like a larger sort of dog.
“There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?”
“Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The tide will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed, sir?”
“I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber.”
“And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please. Show Concord! Gentleman’s valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off gentleman’s boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.) Fetch barber to Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!”
The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it, all kinds and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently, another drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady, were all loitering by accident at various points of the road between the Concord and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed along on his way to his breakfast.
The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the gentleman in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as he sat, with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still, that he might have been sitting for his portrait.
Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat, as though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and evanescence of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a fine texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his head: which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which looked far more as though it were spun from filaments of silk or glass. His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance with his stockings, was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea. A face habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost their owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and reserved expression of Tellson’s Bank. He had a healthy colour in his cheeks, and his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson’s Bank were principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait, Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him, and he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:
“I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at any time to-day. She may ask for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a gentleman from Tellson’s Bank. Please to let me know.”
“Yes, sir. Tellson’s Bank in London, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen in their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A vast deal of travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company’s House.”
“Yes. We are quite a French House, as well as an English one.”
“Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, I think, sir?”
“Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we—since I—came last from France.”
“Indeed, sir? That was before my time here, sir. Before our people’s time here, sir. The George was in other hands at that time, sir.”
“I believe so.”
“But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson and Company was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen years ago?”
“You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far from the truth.”
“Indeed, sir!”
Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left, dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watchtower. According to the immemorial usage of waiters in all ages.
When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on the beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.
As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry’s thoughts seemed to cloud too. When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging, digging, digging, in the live red coals.
A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work. Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out his last glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a fresh complexion who has got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling of wheels came up the narrow street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.
He set down his glass untouched. “This is Mam’selle!” said he.
In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss Manette had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the gentleman from Tellson’s.
“So soon?”
Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and required none then, and was extremely anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson’s immediately, if it suited his pleasure and convenience.
The gentleman from Tellson’s had nothing left for it but to empty his glass with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd little flaxen wig at the ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette’s apartment. It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if they were buried, in deep graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected from them until they were dug out.
The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his way over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for the moment, in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall candles, he saw standing to receive him by the table between them and the fire, a young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak, and still holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions—as his eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him, of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender—and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.
“Pray take a seat, sir.” In a very clear and pleasant young voice; a little foreign in its accent, but a very little indeed.
“I kiss your hand, miss,” said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an earlier date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat.
“I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that some intelligence—or discovery—”
“The word is not material, miss; either word will do.”
“—respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I never saw—so long dead—”
Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the hospital procession of negro cupids. As if they had any help for anybody in their absurd baskets!
