salt-sea had inflamed them. The grocers’ hot pickles, Harvey’s
Sauce, Doctor Kitchener’s Zest, Anchovy Paste, Dundee Marmalade,
and the whole stock of luxurious helps to appetite, were
hybernating somewhere underground. The china-shop had no trifles
from anywhere. The Bazaar had given in altogether, and presented a
notice on the shutters that this establishment would re-open at
Whitsuntide, and that the proprietor in the meantime might be heard
of at Wild Lodge, East Cliff. At the Sea-bathing Establishment, a
row of neat little wooden houses seven or eight feet high, I SAW
the proprietor in bed in the shower-bath. As to the bathingmachines,
they were (how they got there, is not for me to say) at
the top of a hill at least a mile and a half off. The library,
which I had never seen otherwise than wide open, was tight shut;
and two peevish bald old gentlemen seemed to be hermetically sealed
up inside, eternally reading the paper. That wonderful mystery,
the music-shop, carried it off as usual (except that it had more
cabinet pianos in stock), as if season or no season were all one to
it. It made the same prodigious display of bright brazen windinstruments,
horribly twisted, worth, as I should conceive, some
thousands of pounds, and which it is utterly impossible that
anybody in any season can ever play or want to play. It had five
triangles in the window, six pairs of castanets, and three harps;
likewise every polka with a coloured frontispiece that ever was
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
published; from the original one where a smooth male and female
Pole of high rank are coming at the observer with their arms akimbo,
to the Ratcatcher’s Daughter. Astonishing establishment,
amazing enigma! Three other shops were pretty much out of the
season, what they were used to be in it. First, the shop where
they sell the sailors’ watches, which had still the old collection
of enormous timekeepers, apparently designed to break a fall from
the masthead: with places to wind them up, like fire-plugs.
Secondly, the shop where they sell the sailors’ clothing, which
displayed the old sou’-westers, and the old oily suits, and the old
pea-jackets, and the old one sea-chest, with its handles like a
pair of rope ear-rings. Thirdly, the unchangeable shop for the
sale of literature that has been left behind. Here, Dr. Faustus
was still going down to very red and yellow perdition, under the
superintendence of three green personages of a scaly humour, with
excrescential serpents growing out of their blade-bones. Here, the
Golden Dreamer, and the Norwood Fortune Teller, were still on sale
at sixpence each, with instructions for making the dumb cake, and
reading destinies in tea-cups, and with a picture of a young woman
with a high waist lying on a sofa in an attitude so uncomfortable
as almost to account for her dreaming at one and the same time of a
conflagration, a shipwreck, an earthquake, a skeleton, a churchporch,
lightning, funerals performed, and a young man in a bright
blue coat and canary pantaloons. Here, were Little Warblers and
Fairburn’s Comic Songsters. Here, too, were ballads on the old
ballad paper and in the old confusion of types; with an old man in
a cocked hat, and an arm-chair, for the illustration to Will Watch
the bold Smuggler; and the Friar of Orders Grey, represented by a
little girl in a hoop, with a ship in the distance. All these as
of yore, when they were infinite delights to me!
It took me so long fully to relish these many enjoyments, that I
had not more than an hour before bedtime to devote to Madame
Roland. We got on admirably together on the subject of her convent
education, and I rose next morning with the full conviction that
the day for the great chapter was at last arrived.
It had fallen calm, however, in the night, and as I sat at
breakfast I blushed to remember that I had not yet been on the
Downs. I a walker, and not yet on the Downs! Really, on so quiet
and bright a morning this must be set right. As an essential part