Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of the

two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I have

come to the conclusion that their opinions are represented by the

leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I judge, an aged

personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of

quill, that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office pens.

When a railway goods van that would crush an elephant comes round

the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from

under the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a

passing property in the air, which may have left something to eat

behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and

saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric

discharge, for fowls to peck at. Peg-tops and hoops they account,

I think, as a sort of hail; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew.

Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I

have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the

early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. I have

established it as a certain fact, that they always begin to crow

when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down, and that

they salute the potboy, the instant he appears to perform that

duty, as if he were Phoebus in person.

CHAPTER XI – TRAMPS

The chance use of the word ‘Tramp’ in my last paper, brought that

numerous fraternity so vividly before my mind’s eye, that I had no

sooner laid down my pen than a compulsion was upon me to take it up

again, and make notes of the Tramps whom I perceived on all the

summer roads in all directions.

Whenever a tramp sits down to rest by the wayside, he sits with his

legs in a dry ditch; and whenever he goes to sleep (which is very

often indeed), he goes to sleep on his back. Yonder, by the high

road, glaring white in the bright sunshine, lies, on the dusty bit

of turf under the bramble-bush that fences the coppice from the

highway, the tramp of the order savage, fast asleep. He lies on

the broad of his back, with his face turned up to the sky, and one

of his ragged arms loosely thrown across his face. His bundle

(what can be the contents of that mysterious bundle, to make it

worth his while to carry it about?) is thrown down beside him, and

the waking woman with him sits with her legs in the ditch, and her

back to the road. She wears her bonnet rakishly perched on the

front of her head, to shade her face from the sun in walking, and

she ties her skirts round her in conventionally tight tramp-fashion

with a sort of apron. You can seldom catch sight of her, resting

thus, without seeing her in a despondently defiant manner doing

something to her hair or her bonnet, and glancing at you between

her fingers. She does not often go to sleep herself in the

daytime, but will sit for any length of time beside the man. And

his slumberous propensities would not seem to be referable to the

fatigue of carrying the bundle, for she carries it much oftener and

further than he. When they are afoot, you will mostly find him

slouching on ahead, in a gruff temper, while she lags heavily

behind with the burden. He is given to personally correcting her,

too – which phase of his character develops itself oftenest, on

benches outside alehouse doors – and she appears to become strongly

attached to him for these reasons; it may usually be noticed that

when the poor creature has a bruised face, she is the most

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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

affectionate. He has no occupation whatever, this order of tramp,

and has no object whatever in going anywhere. He will sometimes

call himself a brickmaker, or a sawyer, but only when he takes an

imaginary flight. He generally represents himself, in a vague way,

as looking out for a job of work; but he never did work, he never

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