As there had been no bid at all, everybody looked about and grinned at everybody, while I touched little Sophy’s face and asked her if she felt faint, or giddy. “Not very, father. It will soon be over.” Then turning from the pretty patient eyes, which were opened now, and seeing nothing but grins across my lighted grease-pot, I went on again in my Cheap Jack style. “Where’s the butcher?” (My sorrowful eye had just caught sight of a fat young butcher on the outside of the crowd.) “She says the good luck is the butcher’s. Where is he?” Everybody handed on the blushing butcher to the front, and there was a roar, and the butcher felt himself obliged to put his hand in his pocket, and take the lot. The party so picked out, in general, does feel obliged to take the lot–good four times out of six. Then we had another lot, the counterpart of that one, and sold it sixpence cheaper, which is always wery much enjoyed. Then we had the spectacles. It ain’t a special profitable lot, but I put ’em on, and I see what the Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to take off the taxes, and I see what the sweetheart of the young woman in the shawl is doing at home, and I see what the Bishops has got for dinner, and a deal more that seldom fails to fetch em ‘up in their spirits; and the better their spirits, the better their bids. Then we had the ladies’ lot–the teapot, tea- caddy, glass sugar-basin, half-a-dozen spoons, and caudle-cup–and all the time I was making similar excuses to give a look or two and say a word or two to my poor child. It was while the second ladies’ lot was holding ’em enchained that I felt her lift herself a little on my shoulder, to look across the dark street. “What troubles you, darling?” “Nothing troubles me, father. I am not at all troubled. But don’t I see a pretty churchyard over there?” “Yes, my dear.” “Kiss me twice, dear father, and lay me down to rest upon that churchyard grass so soft and green.” I staggered back into the cart with her head dropped on my shoulder, and I says to her mother, “Quick. Shut the door! Don’t let those laughing people see!” “What’s the matter?” she cries. “O woman, woman,” I tells her, “you’ll never catch my little Sophy by her hair again, for she has flown away from you!”
Maybe those were harder words than I meant ’em; but from that time forth my wife took to brooding, and would sit in the cart or walk beside it, hours at a stretch, with her arms crossed, and her eyes looking on the ground. When her furies took her (which was rather seldomer than before) they took her in a new way, and she banged herself about to that extent that I was forced to hold her. She got none the better for a little drink now and then, and through some years I used to wonder, as I plodded along at the old horse’s head, whether there was many carts upon the road that held so much dreariness as mine, for all my being looked up to as the King of the Cheap Jacks. So sad our lives went on till one summer evening, when, as we were coming into Exeter, out of the farther West of England, we saw a woman beating a child in a cruel manner, who screamed, “Don’t beat me! O mother, mother, mother!” Then my wife stopped her ears, and ran away like a wild thing, and next day she was found in the river.
Me and my dog were all the company left in the cart now; and the dog learned to give a short bark when they wouldn’t bid, and to give another and a nod of his head when I asked him, “Who said half a crown? Are you the gentleman, sir, that offered half a crown?” He attained to an immense height of popularity, and I shall always believe taught himself entirely out of his own head to growl at any person in the crowd that bid as low as sixpence. But he got to be well on in years, and one night when I was conwulsing York with the spectacles, he took a conwulsion on his own account upon the very footboard by me, and it finished him.