them in the churchyard, and is seen to return with a meditative
countenance, making believe that nothing of the sort has happened.
The aunt and nephew in this City church are much disturbed by the
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
sniggering boys. The nephew is himself a boy, and the sniggerers
tempt him to secular thoughts of marbles and string, by secretly
offering such commodities to his distant contemplation. This young
Saint Anthony for a while resists, but presently becomes a
backslider, and in dumb show defies the sniggerers to ‘heave’ a
marble or two in his direction. Here in he is detected by the aunt
(a rigorous reduced gentlewoman who has the charge of offices), and
I perceive that worthy relative to poke him in the side, with the
corrugated hooked handle of an ancient umbrella. The nephew
revenges himself for this, by holding his breath and terrifying his
kinswoman with the dread belief that he has made up his mind to
burst. Regardless of whispers and shakes, he swells and becomes
discoloured, and yet again swells and becomes discoloured, until
the aunt can bear it no longer, but leads him out, with no visible
neck, and with his eyes going before him like a prawn’s. This
causes the sniggerers to regard flight as an eligible move, and I
know which of them will go out first, because of the over-devout
attention that he suddenly concentrates on the clergyman. In a
little while, this hypocrite, with an elaborate demonstration of
hushing his footsteps, and with a face generally expressive of
having until now forgotten a religious appointment elsewhere, is
gone. Number two gets out in the same way, but rather quicker.
Number three getting safely to the door, there turns reckless, and
banging it open, flies forth with a Whoop! that vibrates to the top
of the tower above us.
The clergyman, who is of a prandial presence and a muffled voice,
may be scant of hearing as well as of breath, but he only glances
up, as having an idea that somebody has said Amen in a wrong place,
and continues his steady jog-trot, like a farmer’s wife going to
market. He does all he has to do, in the same easy way, and gives
us a concise sermon, still like the jog-trot of the farmer’s wife
on a level road. Its drowsy cadence soon lulls the three old women
asleep, and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out at window, and
the married tradesman sits looking at his wife’s bonnet, and the
lovers sit looking at one another, so superlatively happy, that I
mind when I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a City
church on account of a shower (by this special coincidence that it
was in Huggin-lane), and when I said to my Angelica, ‘Let the
blessed event, Angelica, occur at no altar but this!’ and when my
Angelica consented that it should occur at no other – which it
certainly never did, for it never occurred anywhere. And O,
Angelica, what has become of you, this present Sunday morning when
I can’t attend to the sermon; and, more difficult question than
that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your side!
But, we receive the signal to make that unanimous dive which surely
is a little conventional – like the strange rustlings and settlings
and clearings of throats and noses, which are never dispensed with,
at certain points of the Church service, and are never held to be
necessary under any other circumstances. In a minute more it is
all over, and the organ expresses itself to be as glad of it as it
can be of anything in its rheumatic state, and in another minute we
are all of us out of the church, and Whity-brown has locked it up.
Another minute or little more, and, in the neighbouring churchyard
– not the yard of that church, but of another – a churchyard like a
great shabby old mignonette box, with two trees in it and one tomb
– I meet Whity-brown, in his private capacity, fetching a pint of
beer for his dinner from the public-house in the corner, where the