since I went from Westminster to the Temple, one Thursday
afternoon, in a cheap steamboat. The sky was black, when I
imprudently walked on board. It began to thunder and lighten
immediately afterwards, and the rain poured down in torrents. The
deck seeming to smoke with the wet, I went below; but so many
passengers were there, smoking too, that I came up again, and
buttoning my pea-coat, and standing in the shadow of the paddlebox,
stood as upright as I could, and made the best of it.
It was at this moment that I first beheld the terrible Being, who
is the subject of my present recollections.
Standing against the funnel, apparently with the intention of
drying himself by the heat as fast as he got wet, was a shabby man
in threadbare black, and with his hands in his pockets, who
fascinated me from the memorable instant when I caught his eye.
Where had I caught that eye before? Who was he? Why did I connect
him, all at once, with the Vicar of Wakefield, Alfred the Great,
Gil Blas, Charles the Second, Joseph and his Brethren, the Fairy
Queen, Tom Jones, the Decameron of Boccaccio, Tam O’Shanter, the
Marriage of the Doge of Venice with the Adriatic, and the Great
Plague of London? Why, when he bent one leg, and placed one hand
upon the back of the seat near him, did my mind associate him
wildly with the words, ‘Number one hundred and forty-two, Portrait
of a gentleman’? Could it be that I was going mad?
I looked at him again, and now I could have taken my affidavit that
he belonged to the Vicar of Wakefield’s family. Whether he was the
Vicar, or Moses, or Mr. Burchill, or the Squire, or a
conglomeration of all four, I knew not; but I was impelled to seize
him by the throat, and charge him with being, in some fell way,
connected with the Primrose blood. He looked up at the rain, and
then – oh Heaven! – he became Saint John. He folded his arms,
resigning himself to the weather, and I was frantically inclined to
address him as the Spectator, and firmly demand to know what he had
done with Sir Roger de Coverley.
The frightful suspicion that I was becoming deranged, returned upon
me with redoubled force. Meantime, this awful stranger,
inexplicably linked to my distress, stood drying himself at the
funnel; and ever, as the steam rose from his clothes, diffusing a
mist around him, I saw through the ghostly medium all the people I
have mentioned, and a score more, sacred and profane.
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I am conscious of a dreadful inclination that stole upon me, as it
thundered and lightened, to grapple with this man, or demon, and
plunge him over the side. But, I constrained myself – I know not
how – to speak to him, and in a pause of the storm, I crossed the
deck, and said:
‘What are you?’
He replied, hoarsely, ‘A Model.’
‘A what?’ said I.
‘A Model,’ he replied. ‘I sets to the profession for a bob ahour.’
(All through this narrative I give his own words, which are
indelibly imprinted on my memory.)
The relief which this disclosure gave me, the exquisite delight of
the restoration of my confidence in my own sanity, I cannot
describe. I should have fallen on his neck, but for the
consciousness of being observed by the man at the wheel.
‘You then,’ said I, shaking him so warmly by the hand, that I wrung
the rain out of his coat-cuff, ‘are the gentleman whom I have so
frequently contemplated, in connection with a high-backed chair
with a red cushion, and a table with twisted legs.’
‘I am that Model,’ he rejoined moodily, ‘and I wish I was anything
else.’
‘Say not so,’ I returned. ‘I have seen you in the society of many
beautiful young women;’ as in truth I had, and always (I now
remember) in the act of making the most of his legs.
‘No doubt,’ said he. ‘And you’ve seen me along with warses of
flowers, and any number of table-kivers, and antique cabinets, and