and dry them and burn them in the fire, they will go off like in
these thirteen words as plain as plain can be:
‘A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I’ve got Chips!’
The same female bard – descended, possibly, from those terrible old
Scalds who seem to have existed for the express purpose of addling
the brains of mankind when they begin to investigate languages –
made a standing pretence which greatly assisted in forcing me back
to a number of hideous places that I would by all means have
avoided. This pretence was, that all her ghost stories had
occurred to her own relations. Politeness towards a meritorious
family, therefore, forbade my doubting them, and they acquired an
air of authentication that impaired my digestive powers for life.
There was a narrative concerning an unearthly animal foreboding
death, which appeared in the open street to a parlour-maid who
‘went to fetch the beer’ for supper: first (as I now recall it)
assuming the likeness of a black dog, and gradually rising on its
hind-legs and swelling into the semblance of some quadruped greatly
surpassing a hippopotamus: which apparition – not because I deemed
it in the least improbable, but because I felt it to be really too
large to bear – I feebly endeavoured to explain away. But, on
Mercy’s retorting with wounded dignity that the parlour-maid was
her own sister-in-law, I perceived there was no hope, and resigned
myself to this zoological phenomenon as one of my many pursuers.
There was another narrative describing the apparition of a young
woman who came out of a glass-case and haunted another young woman
Page 99
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
until the other young woman questioned it and elicited that its
bones (Lord! To think of its being so particular about its bones!)
were buried under the glass-case, whereas she required them to be
interred, with every Undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound
ten, in another particular place. This narrative I considered – I
had a personal interest in disproving, because we had glass-cases
at home, and how, otherwise, was I to be guaranteed from the
intrusion of young women requiring ME TO bury them up to twentyfour
pound ten, when I had only twopence a week? But my
remorseless nurse cut the ground from under my tender feet, by
informing me that She was the other young woman; and I couldn’t say
‘I don’t believe you;’ it was not possible.
Such are a few of the uncommercial journeys that I was forced to
make, against my will, when I was very young and unreasoning. And
really, as to the latter part of them, it is not so very long ago –
now I come to think of it – that I was asked to undertake them once
again, with a steady countenance.
CHAPTER XVI – ARCADIAN LONDON
Being in a humour for complete solitude and uninterrupted
meditation this autumn, I have taken a lodging for six weeks in the
most unfrequented part of England – in a word, in London.
The retreat into which I have withdrawn myself, is Bond-street.
From this lonely spot I make pilgrimages into the surrounding
wilderness, and traverse extensive tracts of the Great Desert. The
first solemn feeling of isolation overcome, the first oppressive
consciousness of profound retirement conquered, I enjoy that sense
of freedom, and feel reviving within me that latent wildness of the
original savage, which has been (upon the whole somewhat
frequently) noticed by Travellers.
My lodgings are at a hatter’s – my own hatter’s. After exhibiting
no articles in his window for some weeks, but sea-side wide-awakes,
shooting-caps, and a choice of rough waterproof head-gear for the
moors and mountains, he has put upon the heads of his family as
much of this stock as they could carry, and has taken them off to
the Isle of Thanet. His young man alone remains – and remains
alone in the shop. The young man has let out the fire at which the
irons are heated, and, saving his strong sense of duty, I see no
reason why he should take the shutters down.
Happily for himself and for his country the young man is a