‘You think so, do you? Indeed, my Prince? – Tape!’ Thereupon he
directly forgot what he was thinking of, and cried out lamentably
to the old servants, ‘O, do come and hire your poor old master!
Pray do! On any terms!’
And this, for the present, finishes the story of Prince Bull. I
wish I could wind it up by saying that he lived happy ever
afterwards, but I cannot in my conscience do so; for, with Tape at
his elbow, and his estranged children fatally repelled by her from
coming near him, I do not, to tell you the plain truth, believe in
the possibility of such an end to it.
A PLATED ARTICLE
PUTTING up for the night in one of the chiefest towns of
Staffordshire, I find it to be by no means a lively town. In fact,
it is as dull and dead a town as any one could desire not to see.
It seems as if its whole population might be imprisoned in its
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
Railway Station. The Refreshment Room at that Station is a vortex
of dissipation compared with the extinct town-inn, the Dodo, in the
dull High Street.
Why High Street? Why not rather Low Street, Flat Street, Low-
Spirited Street, Used-up Street? Where are the people who belong
to the High Street? Can they all be dispersed over the face of the
country, seeking the unfortunate Strolling Manager who decamped
from the mouldy little Theatre last week, in the beginning of his
season (as his play-bills testify), repentantly resolved to bring
him back, and feed him, and be entertained? Or, can they all be
gathered to their fathers in the two old churchyards near to the
High Street – retirement into which churchyards appears to be a
mere ceremony, there is so very little life outside their confines,
and such small discernible difference between being buried alive in
the town, and buried dead in the town tombs? Over the way,
opposite to the staring blank bow windows of the Dodo, are a little
ironmonger’s shop, a little tailor’s shop (with a picture of the
Fashions in the small window and a bandy-legged baby on the
pavement staring at it) – a watchmakers shop, where all the clocks
and watches must be stopped, I am sure, for they could never have
the courage to go, with the town in general, and the Dodo in
particular, looking at them. Shade of Miss Linwood, erst of
Leicester Square, London, thou art welcome here, and thy retreat is
fitly chosen! I myself was one of the last visitors to that awful
storehouse of thy life’s work, where an anchorite old man and woman
took my shilling with a solemn wonder, and conducting me to a
gloomy sepulchre of needlework dropping to pieces with dust and age
and shrouded in twilight at high noon, left me there, chilled,
frightened, and alone. And now, in ghostly letters on all the dead
walls of this dead town, I read thy honoured name, and find that
thy Last Supper, worked in Berlin Wool, invites inspection as a
powerful excitement!
Where are the people who are bidden with so much cry to this feast
of little wool? Where are they? Who are they? They are not the
bandy-legged baby studying the fashions in the tailor’s window.
They are not the two earthy ploughmen lounging outside the
saddler’s shop, in the stiff square where the Town Hall stands,
like a brick and mortar private on parade. They are not the
landlady of the Dodo in the empty bar, whose eye had trouble in it
and no welcome, when I asked for dinner. They are not the turnkeys
of the Town Jail, looking out of the gateway in their uniforms, as
if they had locked up all the balance (as my American friends would
say) of the inhabitants, and could now rest a little. They are not
the two dusty millers in the white mill down by the river, where
the great water-wheel goes heavily round and round, like the
monotonous days and nights in this forgotten place. Then who are
they, for there is no one else? No; this deponent maketh oath and