many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of the
two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I have
come to the conclusion that their opinions are represented by the
leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I judge, an aged
personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of
quill, that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office pens.
When a railway goods van that would crush an elephant comes round
the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from
under the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a
passing property in the air, which may have left something to eat
behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and
saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric
discharge, for fowls to peck at. Peg-tops and hoops they account,
I think, as a sort of hail; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew.
Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I
have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the
early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. I have
established it as a certain fact, that they always begin to crow
when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down, and that
they salute the potboy, the instant he appears to perform that
duty, as if he were Phoebus in person.
CHAPTER XI – TRAMPS
The chance use of the word ‘Tramp’ in my last paper, brought that
numerous fraternity so vividly before my mind’s eye, that I had no
sooner laid down my pen than a compulsion was upon me to take it up
again, and make notes of the Tramps whom I perceived on all the
summer roads in all directions.
Whenever a tramp sits down to rest by the wayside, he sits with his
legs in a dry ditch; and whenever he goes to sleep (which is very
often indeed), he goes to sleep on his back. Yonder, by the high
road, glaring white in the bright sunshine, lies, on the dusty bit
of turf under the bramble-bush that fences the coppice from the
highway, the tramp of the order savage, fast asleep. He lies on
the broad of his back, with his face turned up to the sky, and one
of his ragged arms loosely thrown across his face. His bundle
(what can be the contents of that mysterious bundle, to make it
worth his while to carry it about?) is thrown down beside him, and
the waking woman with him sits with her legs in the ditch, and her
back to the road. She wears her bonnet rakishly perched on the
front of her head, to shade her face from the sun in walking, and
she ties her skirts round her in conventionally tight tramp-fashion
with a sort of apron. You can seldom catch sight of her, resting
thus, without seeing her in a despondently defiant manner doing
something to her hair or her bonnet, and glancing at you between
her fingers. She does not often go to sleep herself in the
daytime, but will sit for any length of time beside the man. And
his slumberous propensities would not seem to be referable to the
fatigue of carrying the bundle, for she carries it much oftener and
further than he. When they are afoot, you will mostly find him
slouching on ahead, in a gruff temper, while she lags heavily
behind with the burden. He is given to personally correcting her,
too – which phase of his character develops itself oftenest, on
benches outside alehouse doors – and she appears to become strongly
attached to him for these reasons; it may usually be noticed that
when the poor creature has a bruised face, she is the most
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
affectionate. He has no occupation whatever, this order of tramp,
and has no object whatever in going anywhere. He will sometimes
call himself a brickmaker, or a sawyer, but only when he takes an
imaginary flight. He generally represents himself, in a vague way,
as looking out for a job of work; but he never did work, he never