among the hair, and the tow-rope had caught and turned the head,
before our cry of horror took him to the bridle. At which sound
the steering woman looked up at us on the bridge, with contempt
unutterable, and then looking down at the body with a similar
expression – as if it were made in another likeness from herself,
had been informed with other passions, had been lost by other
chances, had had another nature dragged down to perdition – steered
a spurning streak of mud at it, and passed on.
A better experience, but also of the Morgue kind, in which chance
happily made me useful in a slight degree, arose to my remembrance
as I took my way by the Boulevard de Sebastopol to the brighter
scenes of Paris.
The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a modest
young uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. Many suns
and winds have browned me in the line, but those were my pale days.
Having newly taken the lease of a house in a certain distinguished
metropolitan parish – a house which then appeared to me to be a
frightfully first-class Family Mansion, involving awful
responsibilities – I became the prey of a Beadle. I think the
Beadle must have seen me going in or coming out, and must have
observed that I tottered under the weight of my grandeur. Or he
may have been in hiding under straw when I bought my first horse
(in the desirable stable-yard attached to the first-class Family
Mansion), and when the vendor remarked to me, in an original
manner, on bringing him for approval, taking his cloth off and
smacking him, ‘There, Sir! THERE’S a Orse!’ And when I said
gallantly, ‘How much do you want for him?’ and when the vendor
said, ‘No more than sixty guineas, from you,’ and when I said
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smartly, ‘Why not more than sixty from ME?’ And when he said
crushingly, ‘Because upon my soul and body he’d be considered cheap
at seventy, by one who understood the subject – but you don’t.’ – I
say, the Beadle may have been in hiding under straw, when this
disgrace befell me, or he may have noted that I was too raw and
young an Atlas to carry the first-class Family Mansion in a knowing
manner. Be this as it may, the Beadle did what Melancholy did to
the youth in Gray’s Elegy – he marked me for his own. And the way
in which the Beadle did it, was this: he summoned me as a Juryman
on his Coroner’s Inquests.
In my first feverish alarm I repaired ‘for safety and for succour’
– like those sagacious Northern shepherds who, having had no
previous reason whatever to believe in young Norval, very prudently
did not originate the hazardous idea of believing in him – to a
deep householder. This profound man informed me that the Beadle
counted on my buying him off; on my bribing him not to summon me;
and that if I would attend an Inquest with a cheerful countenance,
and profess alacrity in that branch of my country’s service, the
Beadle would be disheartened, and would give up the game.
I roused my energies, and the next time the wily Beadle summoned
me, I went. The Beadle was the blankest Beadle I have ever looked
on when I answered to my name; and his discomfiture gave me courage
to go through with it.
We were impanelled to inquire concerning the death of a very little
mite of a child. It was the old miserable story. Whether the
mother had committed the minor offence of concealing the birth, or
whether she had committed the major offence of killing the child,
was the question on which we were wanted. We must commit her on
one of the two issues.
The Inquest came off in the parish workhouse, and I have yet a
lively impression that I was unanimously received by my brother
Jurymen as a brother of the utmost conceivable insignificance.
Also, that before we began, a broker who had lately cheated me
fearfully in the matter of a pair of card-tables, was for the