it to account was to read these sermons and these poems, enclosed,
and written and issued by my correspondent! I beg it may be
understood that I relate facts of my own uncommercial experience,
and no vain imaginings. The documents in proof lie near my hand.
Another odd entry on the fly-leaf, of a more entertaining
character, was the wonderful persistency with which kind
sympathisers assumed that I had injuriously coupled with the so
suddenly relinquished pursuit, those personal habits of mine most
obviously incompatible with it, and most plainly impossible of
being maintained, along with it. As, all that exercise, all that
cold bathing, all that wind and weather, all that uphill training –
all that everything else, say, which is usually carried about by
express trains in a portmanteau and hat-box, and partaken of under
a flaming row of gas-lights in the company of two thousand people.
This assuming of a whole case against all fact and likelihood,
struck me as particularly droll, and was an oddity of which I
certainly had had no adequate experience in life until I turned
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
that curious fly-leaf.
My old acquaintances the begging-letter writers came out on the
fly-leaf, very piously indeed. They were glad, at such a serious
crisis, to afford me another opportunity of sending that Postoffice
order. I needn’t make it a pound, as previously insisted
on; ten shillings might ease my mind. And Heaven forbid that they
should refuse, at such an insignificant figure, to take a weight
off the memory of an erring fellow-creature! One gentleman, of an
artistic turn (and copiously illustrating the books of the
Mendicity Society), thought it might soothe my conscience, in the
tender respect of gifts misused, if I would immediately cash up in
aid of his lowly talent for original design – as a specimen of
which he enclosed me a work of art which I recognized as a tracing
from a woodcut originally published in the late Mrs. Trollope’s
book on America, forty or fifty years ago. The number of people
who were prepared to live long years after me, untiring benefactors
to their species, for fifty pounds apiece down, was astonishing.
Also, of those who wanted bank-notes for stiff penitential amounts,
to give away:- not to keep, on any account.
Divers wonderful medicines and machines insinuated recommendations
of themselves into the fly-leaf that was to have been so blank. It
was specially observable that every prescriber, whether in a moral
or physical direction, knew me thoroughly – knew me from head to
heel, in and out, through and through, upside down. I was a glass
piece of general property, and everybody was on the most
surprisingly intimate terms with me. A few public institutions had
complimentary perceptions of corners in my mind, of which, after
considerable self-examination, I have not discovered any
indication. Neat little printed forms were addressed to those
corners, beginning with the words: ‘I give and bequeath.’
Will it seem exaggerative to state my belief that the most honest,
the most modest, and the least vain-glorious of all the records
upon this strange fly-leaf, was a letter from the self-deceived
discoverer of the recondite secret ‘how to live four or five
hundred years’? Doubtless it will seem so, yet the statement is
not exaggerative by any means, but is made in my serious and
sincere conviction. With this, and with a laugh at the rest that
shall not be cynical, I turn the Fly-leaf, and go on again.
CHAPTER XXXVII – A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE
One day this last Whitsuntide, at precisely eleven o’clock in the
forenoon, there suddenly rode into the field of view commanded by
the windows of my lodging an equestrian phenomenon. It was a
fellow-creature on horseback, dressed in the absurdest manner. The
fellow-creature wore high boots; some other (and much larger)
fellow-creature’s breeches, of a slack-baked doughy colour and a
baggy form; a blue shirt, whereof the skirt, or tail, was puffily
tucked into the waist-band of the said breeches; no coat; a red
shoulder-belt; and a demi-semi-military scarlet hat, with a
feathered ornament in front, which, to the uninstructed human
vision, had the appearance of a moulting shuttlecock. I laid down