damp Commandments, she, Comport, had taken him, Dowgate, in a flush
of youthful hope and joy, and perhaps it had not turned out in the
long run as great a success as was expected?
The opening of the service recalls my wandering thoughts. I then
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
find, to my astonishment, that I have been, and still am, taking a
strong kind of invisible snuff, up my nose, into my eyes, and down
my throat. I wink, sneeze, and cough. The clerk sneezes; the
clergyman winks; the unseen organist sneezes and coughs (and
probably winks); all our little party wink, sneeze, and cough. The
snuff seems to be made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone,
iron, earth, and something else. Is the something else, the decay
of dead citizens in the vaults below? As sure as Death it is! Not
only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead
citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got into
the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same. We stamp
our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds.
Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on the
sounding-board over the clergyman’s head, and, when a gust of air
comes, tumble down upon him.
In this first experience I was so nauseated by too much snuff, made
of the Dowgate family, the Comport branch, and other families and
branches, that I gave but little heed to our dull manner of ambling
through the service; to the brisk clerk’s manner of encouraging us
to try a note or two at psalm time; to the gallery-congregation’s
manner of enjoying a shrill duet, without a notion of time or tune;
to the whity-brown man’s manner of shutting the minister into the
pulpit, and being very particular with the lock of the door, as if
he were a dangerous animal. But, I tried again next Sunday, and
soon accustomed myself to the dead citizens when I found that I
could not possibly get on without them among the City churches.
Another Sunday.
After being again rung for by conflicting bells, like a leg of
mutton or a laced hat a hundred years ago, I make selection of a
church oddly put away in a corner among a number of lanes – a
smaller church than the last, and an ugly: of about the date of
Queen Anne. As a congregation, we are fourteen strong: not
counting an exhausted charity school in a gallery, which has
dwindled away to four boys, and two girls. In the porch, is a
benefaction of loaves of bread, which there would seem to be nobody
left in the exhausted congregation to claim, and which I saw an
exhausted beadle, long faded out of uniform, eating with his eyes
for self and family when I passed in. There is also an exhausted
clerk in a brown wig, and two or three exhausted doors and windows
have been bricked up, and the service books are musty, and the
pulpit cushions are threadbare, and the whole of the church
furniture is in a very advanced stage of exhaustion. We are three
old women (habitual), two young lovers (accidental), two tradesmen,
one with a wife and one alone, an aunt and nephew, again two girls
(these two girls dressed out for church with everything about them
limp that should be stiff, and VICE VERSA, are an invariable
experience), and three sniggering boys. The clergyman is, perhaps,
the chaplain of a civic company; he has the moist and vinous look,
and eke the bulbous boots, of one acquainted with ‘Twenty port, and
comet vintages.
We are so quiet in our dulness that the three sniggering boys, who
have got away into a corner by the altar-railing, give us a start,
like crackers, whenever they laugh. And this reminds me of my own
village church where, during sermon-time on bright Sundays when the
birds are very musical indeed, farmers’ boys patter out over the
stone pavement, and the clerk steps out from his desk after them,
and is distinctly heard in the summer repose to pursue and punch