a spring-cart.
As I took a parting look at First Witch in turning away, the red
marks round her eyes seemed to have already grown larger, and she
hungrily and thirstily looked out beyond me into the dark doorway,
to see if Jack was there. For, Jack came even here, and the
mistress had got into jail through deluding Jack.
When I at last ended this night of travel and got to bed, I failed
to keep my mind on comfortable thoughts of Seaman’s Homes (not
overdone with strictness), and improved dock regulations giving
Jack greater benefit of fire and candle aboard ship, through my
mind’s wandering among the vermin I had seen. Afterwards the same
vermin ran all over my sleep. Evermore, when on a breezy day I see
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
Poor Mercantile Jack running into port with a fair wind under all
sail, I shall think of the unsleeping host of devourers who never
go to bed, and are always in their set traps waiting for him.
CHAPTER VI – REFRESHMENTS FOR TRAVELLERS
In the late high winds I was blown to a great many places – and
indeed, wind or no wind, I generally have extensive transactions on
hand in the article of Air – but I have not been blown to any
English place lately, and I very seldom have blown to any English
place in my life, where I could get anything good to eat and drink
in five minutes, or where, if I sought it, I was received with a
welcome.
This is a curious thing to consider. But before (stimulated by my
own experiences and the representations of many fellow-travellers
of every uncommercial and commercial degree) I consider it further,
I must utter a passing word of wonder concerning high winds.
I wonder why metropolitan gales always blow so hard at Walworth. I
cannot imagine what Walworth has done, to bring such windy
punishment upon itself, as I never fail to find recorded in the
newspapers when the wind has blown at all hard. Brixton seems to
have something on its conscience; Peckham suffers more than a
virtuous Peckham might be supposed to deserve; the howling
neighbourhood of Deptford figures largely in the accounts of the
ingenious gentlemen who are out in every wind that blows, and to
whom it is an ill high wind that blows no good; but, there can
hardly be any Walworth left by this time. It must surely be blown
away. I have read of more chimney-stacks and house-copings coming
down with terrific smashes at Walworth, and of more sacred edifices
being nearly (not quite) blown out to sea from the same accursed
locality, than I have read of practised thieves with the appearance
and manners of gentlemen – a popular phenomenon which never existed
on earth out of fiction and a police report. Again: I wonder why
people are always blown into the Surrey Canal, and into no other
piece of water! Why do people get up early and go out in groups,
to be blown into the Surrey Canal? Do they say to one another,
‘Welcome death, so that we get into the newspapers’? Even that
would be an insufficient explanation, because even then they might
sometimes put themselves in the way of being blown into the
Regent’s Canal, instead of always saddling Surrey for the field.
Some nameless policeman, too, is constantly, on the slightest
provocation, getting himself blown into this same Surrey Canal.
Will SIR RICHARD MAYNE see to it, and restrain that weak-minded and
feeble-bodied constable?
To resume the consideration of the curious question of Refreshment.
I am a Briton, and, as such, I am aware that I never will be a
slave – and yet I have latent suspicion that there must be some
slavery of wrong custom in this matter.
I travel by railroad. I start from home at seven or eight in the
morning, after breakfasting hurriedly. What with skimming over the
open landscape, what with mining in the damp bowels of the earth,
what with banging, booming and shrieking the scores of miles away,
I am hungry when I arrive at the ‘Refreshment’ station where I am