dress, the deficiencies and improprieties of which have caused her
great uneasiness. I, in my degree, have suffered unspeakable
agitation of mind from taking the chair at a public dinner at the
London Tavern in my night-clothes, which not all the courtesy of my
kind friend and host MR. BATHE could persuade me were quite adapted
to the occasion. Winking Charley has been repeatedly tried in a
worse condition. Her Majesty is no stranger to a vault or
firmament, of a sort of floorcloth, with an indistinct pattern
distantly resembling eyes, which occasionally obtrudes itself on
her repose. Neither am I. Neither is Winking Charley. It is
quite common to all three of us to skim along with airy strides a
little above the ground; also to hold, with the deepest interest,
dialogues with various people, all represented by ourselves; and to
be at our wit’s end to know what they are going to tell us; and to
be indescribably astonished by the secrets they disclose. It is
probable that we have all three committed murders and hidden
bodies. It is pretty certain that we have all desperately wanted
to cry out, and have had no voice; that we have all gone to the
play and not been able to get in; that we have all dreamed much
more of our youth than of our later lives; that – I have lost it!
The thread’s broken.
And up I go. I, lying here with the night-light before me, up I
go, for no reason on earth that I can find out, and drawn by no
links that are visible to me, up the Great Saint Bernard! I have
lived in Switzerland, and rambled among the mountains; but, why I
should go there now, and why up the Great Saint Bernard in
preference to any other mountain, I have no idea. As I lie here
broad awake, and with every sense so sharpened that I can
distinctly hear distant noises inaudible to me at another time, I
make that journey, as I really did, on the same summer day, with
the same happy party – ah! two since dead, I grieve to think – and
there is the same track, with the same black wooden arms to point
the way, and there are the same storm-refuges here and there; and
there is the same snow falling at the top, and there are the same
frosty mists, and there is the same intensely cold convent with its
menagerie smell, and the same breed of dogs fast dying out, and the
same breed of jolly young monks whom I mourn to know as humbugs,
and the same convent parlour with its piano and the sitting round
the fire, and the same supper, and the same lone night in a cell,
and the same bright fresh morning when going out into the highly
rarefied air was like a plunge into an icy bath. Now, see here
what comes along; and why does this thing stalk into my mind on the
top of a Swiss mountain!
It is a figure that I once saw, just after dark, chalked upon a
door in a little back lane near a country church – my first church.
How young a child I may have been at the time I don’t know, but it
horrified me so intensely – in connexion with the churchyard, I
suppose, for it smokes a pipe, and has a big hat with each of its
ears sticking out in a horizontal line under the brim, and is not
in itself more oppressive than a mouth from ear to ear, a pair of
goggle eyes, and hands like two bunches of carrots, five in each,
can make it – that it is still vaguely alarming to me to recall (as
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
I have often done before, lying awake) the running home, the
looking behind, the horror, of its following me; though whether
disconnected from the door, or door and all, I can’t say, and
perhaps never could. It lays a disagreeable train. I must resolve
to think of something on the voluntary principle.
The balloon ascents of this last season. They will do to think