at the window with no room for its branches, has seen them all out.
So with the tomb of the old Master of the old Company, on which it
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drips. His son restored it and died, his daughter restored it and
died, and then he had been remembered long enough, and the tree
took possession of him, and his name cracked out.
There are few more striking indications of the changes of manners
and customs that two or three hundred years have brought about,
than these deserted churches. Many of them are handsome and costly
structures, several of them were designed by WREN, many of them
arose from the ashes of the great fire, others of them outlived the
plague and the fire too, to die a slow death in these later days.
No one can be sure of the coming time; but it is not too much to
say of it that it has no sign in its outsetting tides, of the
reflux to these churches of their congregations and uses. They
remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them and
around them, Monuments of another age. They are worth a Sundayexploration,
now and then, for they yet echo, not unharmoniously,
to the time when the City of London really was London; when the
‘Prentices and Trained Bands were of mark in the state; when even
the Lord Mayor himself was a Reality – not a Fiction conventionally
be-puffed on one day in the year by illustrious friends, who no
less conventionally laugh at him on the remaining three hundred and
sixty-four days.
CHAPTER X – SHY NEIGHBOURHOODS
So much of my travelling is done on foot, that if I cherished
betting propensities, I should probably be found registered in
sporting newspapers under some such title as the Elastic Novice,
challenging all eleven stone mankind to competition in walking. My
last special feat was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day,
pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country
to breakfast. The road was so lonely in the night, that I fell
asleep to the monotonous sound of my own feet, doing their regular
four miles an hour. Mile after mile I walked, without the
slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming
constantly. It was only when I made a stumble like a drunken man,
or struck out into the road to avoid a horseman close upon me on
the path – who had no existence – that I came to myself and looked
about. The day broke mistily (it was autumn time), and I could not
disembarrass myself of the idea that I had to climb those heights
and banks of cloud, and that there was an Alpine Convent somewhere
behind the sun, where I was going to breakfast. This sleepy notion
was so much stronger than such substantial objects as villages and
haystacks, that, after the sun was up and bright, and when I was
sufficiently awake to have a sense of pleasure in the prospect, I
still occasionally caught myself looking about for wooden arms to
point the right track up the mountain, and wondering there was no
snow yet. It is a curiosity of broken sleep that I made immense
quantities of verses on that pedestrian occasion (of course I never
make any when I am in my right senses), and that I spoke a certain
language once pretty familiar to me, but which I have nearly
forgotten from disuse, with fluency. Of both these phenomena I
have such frequent experience in the state between sleeping and
waking, that I sometimes argue with myself that I know I cannot be
awake, for, if I were, I should not be half so ready. The
readiness is not imaginary, because I often recall long strings of
the verses, and many turns of the fluent speech, after I am broad
awake.
My walking is of two kinds: one, straight on end to a definite
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goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely
vagabond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater