top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!’
‘You admire that house?’ said I.
‘Bless you, sir,’ said the very queer small boy, ‘when I was not
more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be
brought to look at it. And now, I am nine, I come by myself to
look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me
so fond of it, has often said to me, “If you were to be very
persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live
in it.” Though that’s impossible!’ said the very queer small boy,
drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window
with all his might.
I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy;
for that house happens to be MY house, and I have reason to believe
that what he said was true.
Well! I made no halt there, and I soon dropped the very queer
small boy and went on. Over the road where the old Romans used to
march, over the road where the old Canterbury pilgrims used to go,
over the road where the travelling trains of the old imperious
priests and princes used to jingle on horseback between the
continent and this Island through the mud and water, over the road
where Shakespeare hummed to himself, ‘Blow, blow, thou winter
wind,’ as he sat in the saddle at the gate of the inn yard noticing
the carriers; all among the cherry orchards, apple orchards, cornfields,
and hop-gardens; so went I, by Canterbury to Dover. There,
the sea was tumbling in, with deep sounds, after dark, and the
revolving French light on Cape Grinez was seen regularly bursting
out and becoming obscured, as if the head of a gigantic lightkeeper
in an anxious state of mind were interposed every halfminute,
to look how it was burning.
Early in the morning I was on the deck of the steam-packet, and we
were aiming at the bar in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar
was aiming at us in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar got
by far the best of it, and we got by far the worst – all in the
usual intolerable manner.
But, when I was clear of the Custom House on the other side, and
when I began to make the dust fly on the thirsty French roads, and
when the twigsome trees by the wayside (which, I suppose, never
will grow leafy, for they never did) guarded here and there a dusty
soldier, or field labourer, baking on a heap of broken stones,
sound asleep in a fiction of shade, I began to recover my
travelling spirits. Coming upon the breaker of the broken stones,
in a hard, hot, shining hat, on which the sun played at a distance
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
as on a burning-glass, I felt that now, indeed, I was in the dear
old France of my affections. I should have known it, without the
well-remembered bottle of rough ordinary wine, the cold roast fowl,
the loaf, and the pinch of salt, on which I lunched with
unspeakable satisfaction, from one of the stuffed pockets of the
chariot.
I must have fallen asleep after lunch, for when a bright face
looked in at the window, I started, and said:
‘Good God, Louis, I dreamed you were dead!’
My cheerful servant laughed, and answered:
‘Me? Not at all, sir.’
‘How glad I am to wake! What are we doing Louis?’
‘We go to take relay of horses. Will you walk up the hill?’
‘Certainly.’
Welcome the old French hill, with the old French lunatic (not in
the most distant degree related to Sterne’s Maria) living in a
thatched dog-kennel half-way up, and flying out with his crutch and
his big head and extended nightcap, to be beforehand with the old
men and women exhibiting crippled children, and with the children
exhibiting old men and women, ugly and blind, who always seemed by
resurrectionary process to be recalled out of the elements for the