the newspaper with which I had been occupied, and surveyed the
fellow-man in question with astonishment. Whether he had been
sitting to any painter as a frontispiece for a new edition of
‘Sartor Resartus;’ whether ‘the husk or shell of him,’ as the
esteemed Herr Teufelsdroch might put it, were founded on a jockey,
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
on a circus, on General Garibaldi, on cheap porcelain, on a toy
shop, on Guy Fawkes, on waxwork, on gold-digging, on Bedlam, or on
all, – were doubts that greatly exercised my mind. Meanwhile, my
fellow-man stumbled and slided, excessively against his will, on
the slippery stones of my Covent-garden street, and elicited
shrieks from several sympathetic females, by convulsively
restraining himself from pitching over his horse’s head. In the
very crisis of these evolutions, and indeed at the trying moment
when his charger’s tail was in a tobacconist’s shop, and his head
anywhere about town, this cavalier was joined by two similar
portents, who, likewise stumbling and sliding, caused him to
stumble and slide the more distressingly. At length this Gilpinian
triumvirate effected a halt, and, looking northward, waved their
three right hands as commanding unseen troops, to ‘Up, guards! and
at ’em.’ Hereupon a brazen band burst forth, which caused them to
be instantly bolted with to some remote spot of earth in the
direction of the Surrey Hills.
Judging from these appearances that a procession was under way, I
threw up my window, and, craning out, had the satisfaction of
beholding it advancing along the streets. It was a Teetotal
procession, as I learnt from its banners, and was long enough to
consume twenty minutes in passing. There were a great number of
children in it, some of them so very young in their mothers’ arms
as to be in the act of practically exemplifying their abstinence
from fermented liquors, and attachment to an unintoxicating drink,
while the procession defiled. The display was, on the whole,
pleasant to see, as any good-humoured holiday assemblage of clean,
cheerful, and well-conducted people should be. It was bright with
ribbons, tinsel, and shoulder-belts, and abounded in flowers, as if
those latter trophies had come up in profusion under much watering.
The day being breezy, the insubordination of the large banners was
very reprehensible. Each of these being borne aloft on two poles
and stayed with some half-dozen lines, was carried, as polite books
in the last century used to be written, by ‘various hands,’ and the
anxiety expressed in the upturned faces of those officers, –
something between the anxiety attendant on the balancing art, and
that inseparable from the pastime of kite-flying, with a touch of
the angler’s quality in landing his scaly prey, – much impressed
me. Suddenly, too, a banner would shiver in the wind, and go about
in the most inconvenient manner. This always happened oftenest
with such gorgeous standards as those representing a gentleman in
black, corpulent with tea and water, in the laudable act of
summarily reforming a family, feeble and pinched with beer. The
gentleman in black distended by wind would then conduct himself
with the most unbecoming levity, while the beery family, growing
beerier, would frantically try to tear themselves away from his
ministration. Some of the inscriptions accompanying the banners
were of a highly determined character, as ‘We never, never will
give up the temperance cause,’ with similar sound resolutions
rather suggestive to the profane mind of Mrs. Micawber’s ‘I never
will desert Mr. Micawber,’ and of Mr. Micawber’s retort, ‘Really,
my dear, I am not aware that you were ever required by any human
being to do anything of the sort.’
At intervals, a gloom would fall on the passing members of the
procession, for which I was at first unable to account. But this I
discovered, after a little observation, to be occasioned by the
coming on of the executioners, – the terrible official beings who
were to make the speeches by-and-by, – who were distributed in open
carriages at various points of the cavalcade. A dark cloud and a
sensation of dampness, as from many wet blankets, invariably
preceded the rolling on of the dreadful cars containing these