First Branch--Myself

The Holly-Tree

by Charles Dickens

I have kept one secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful
man. Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody
ever did suppose it, but I am naturally a bashful man. This is the
secret which I have never breathed until now.

I might greatly move the reader by some account of the
innumerable places I have not been to, the innumerable people I have
not called upon or received, the innumerable social evasions I have
been guilty of, solely because I am by original constitution and
character a bashful man. But I will leave the reader unmoved, and
proceed with the object before me.

That object is to give a plain account of my travels and
discoveries in the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place of good
entertainment for man and beast I was once snowed up.

It happened in the memorable year when I parted for ever from
Angela Leath, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the
discovery that she preferred my bosom friend. From our school-days I
had freely admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior to
myself; and, though I was grievously wounded at heart, I felt the
preference to be natural, and tried to forgive them both. It was
under these circumstances that I resolved to go to America--on my way
to the Devil.

Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but
resolving to write each of them an affecting letter conveying my
blessing and forgiveness, which the steam-tender for shore should
carry to the post when I myself should be bound for the New World,
far beyond recall,--I say, locking up my grief in my own breast, and
consoling myself as I could with the prospect of being generous, I
quietly left all I held dear, and started on the desolate journey I
have mentioned.

The dead winter-time was in full dreariness when I left my
chambers for ever, at five o'clock in the morning. I had shaved by
candle- light, of course, and was miserably cold, and experienced
that general all-pervading sensation of getting up to be hanged which
I have usually found inseparable from untimely rising under such
circumstances.

How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I
came out of the Temple! The street-lamps flickering in the gusty
north- east wind, as if the very gas were contorted with cold; the
white- topped houses; the bleak, star-lighted sky; the market people
and other early stragglers, trotting to circulate their almost frozen
blood; the hospitable light and warmth of the few coffee-shops and
public-houses that were open for such customers; the hard, dry,
frosty rime with which the air was charged (the wind had already
beaten it into every crevice), and which lashed my face like a steel
whip.

It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the
year. The Post-office packet for the United States was to depart from
Liverpool, weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month, and
I had the intervening time on my hands. I had taken this into
consideration, and had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot
(which I need not name) on the farther borders of Yorkshire. It was
endeared to me by my having first seen Angela at a farmhouse in that
place, and my melancholy was gratified by the idea of taking a wintry
leave of it before my expatriation. I ought to explain, that, to
avoid being sought out before my resolution should have been rendered
irrevocable by being carried into full effect, I had written to
Angela overnight, in my usual manner, lamenting that urgent business,
of which she should know all particulars by-and-by- -took me
unexpectedly away from her for a week or ten days.

There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place
there were stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common
with some other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody
dreaded as a very serious penance then. I had secured the box-seat
on the fastest of these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get
into a cab with my portmanteau, so to make the best of my way to the
Peacock at Islington, where I was to join this coach. But when one
of our Temple watchmen, who carried my portmanteau into Fleet Street
for me, told me about the huge blocks of ice that had for some days
past been floating in the river, having closed up in the night, and
made a walk from the Temple Gardens over to the Surrey shore, I began
to ask myself the question, whether the box-seat would not be likely
to put a sudden and a frosty end to my unhappiness. I was
heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to
wish to be frozen to death.

When I got up to the Peacock,--where I found everybody drinking
hot purl, in self-preservation,--I asked if there were an inside seat
to spare. I then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only
passenger. This gave me a still livelier idea of the great
inclemency of the weather, since that coach always loaded
particularly well. However, I took a little purl (which I found
uncommonly good), and got into the coach. When I was seated, they
built me up with straw to the waist, and, conscious of making a
rather ridiculous appearance, I began my journey.

It was still dark when we left the Peacock. For a little while,
pale, uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished, and
then it was hard, black, frozen day. People were lighting their
fires; smoke was mounting straight up high into the rarified air; and
we were rattling for Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I have
ever heard the ring of iron shoes on. As we got into the country,
everything seemed to have grown old and gray. The roads, the trees,
thatched roofs of cottages and homesteads, the ricks in farmers'
yards. Out-door work was abandoned, horse-troughs at road- side inns
were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged about, doors were close shut,
little turnpike houses had blazing fires inside, and children (even
turnpike people have children, and seem to like them) rubbed the
frost from the little panes of glass with their chubby arms, that
their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of the solitary coach going
by. I don't know when the snow begin to set in; but I know that we
were changing horses somewhere when I heard the guard remark, "That
the old lady up in the sky was picking her geese pretty hard to-day."
Then, indeed, I found the white down falling fast and thick.

The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out, as a lonely
traveller does. I was warm and valiant after eating and drinking,--
particularly after dinner; cold and depressed at all other times. I
was always bewildered as to time and place, and always more or less
out of my senses. The coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus
Auld Lang Syne, without a moment's intermission. They kept the time
and tune with the greatest regularity, and rose into the swell at the
beginning of the Refrain, with a precision that worried me to death.
While we changed horses, the guard and coachman went stumping up and
down the road, printing off their shoes in the snow, and poured so
much liquid consolation into themselves without being any the worse
for it, that I began to confound them, as it darkened again, with two
great white casks standing on end. Our horses tumbled down in
solitary places, and we got them up,--which was the pleasantest
variety I had, for it warmed me. And it snowed and snowed, and still
it snowed, and never left off snowing. All night long we went on in
this manner. Thus we came round the clock, upon the Great North
Road, to the performance of Auld Lang Syne by day again. And it
snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off
snowing.

I forget now where we were at noon on the second day, and where
we ought to have been; but I know that we were scores of miles
behindhand, and that our case was growing worse every hour. The
drift was becoming prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting snowed
out; the road and the fields were all one; instead of having fences
and hedge-rows to guide us, we went crunching on over an unbroken
surface of ghastly white that might sink beneath us at any moment and
drop us down a whole hillside. Still the coachman and guard-- who
kept together on the box, always in council, and looking well about
them--made out the track with astonishing sagacity.

When we came in sight of a town, it looked, to my fancy, like a
large drawing on a slate, with abundance of slate-pencil expended on
the churches and houses where the snow lay thickest. When we came
within a town, and found the church clocks all stopped, the dial-
faces choked with snow, and the inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as
if the whole place were overgrown with white moss. As to the coach,
it was a mere snowball; similarly, the men and boys who ran along
beside us to the town's end, turning our clogged wheels and
encouraging our horses, were men and boys of snow; and the bleak wild
solitude to which they at last dismissed us was a snowy Sahara. One
would have thought this enough: notwithstanding which, I pledge my
word that it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left
off snowing.

We performed Auld Lang Syne the whole day; seeing nothing, out
of towns and villages, but the track of stoats, hares, and foxes, and
sometimes of birds. At nine o'clock at night, on a Yorkshire moor, a
cheerful burst from our horn, and a welcome sound of talking, with a
glimmering and moving about of lanterns, roused me from my drowsy
state. I found that we were going to change.

They helped me out, and I said to a waiter, whose bare head
became as white as King Lear's in a single minute, "What Inn is
this?"

"The Holly-Tree, sir," said he.

"Upon my word, I believe," said I, apologetically, to the guard
and coachman, "that I must stop here."

Now the landlord, and the landlady, and the ostler, and the
post- boy, and all the stable authorities, had already asked the
coachman, to the wide-eyed interest of all the rest of the
establishment, if he meant to go on. The coachman had already
replied, "Yes, he'd take her through it,"--meaning by Her the
coach,--"if so be as George would stand by him." George was the
guard, and he had already sworn that he would stand by him. So the
helpers were already getting the horses out.

My declaring myself beaten, after this parley, was not an
announcement without preparation. Indeed, but for the way to the
announcement being smoothed by the parley, I more than doubt whether,
as an innately bashful man, I should have had the confidence to make
it. As it was, it received the approval even of the guard and
coachman. Therefore, with many confirmations of my inclining, and
many remarks from one bystander to another, that the gentleman could
go for'ard by the mail to-morrow, whereas to-night he would only be
froze, and where was the good of a gentleman being froze--ah, let
alone buried alive (which latter clause was added by a humorous
helper as a joke at my expense, and was extremely well received), I
saw my portmanteau got out stiff, like a frozen body; did the
handsome thing by the guard and coachman; wished them good- night and
a prosperous journey; and, a little ashamed of myself, after all, for
leaving them to fight it out alone, followed the landlord, landlady,
and waiter of the Holly-Tree up-stairs.

I thought I had never seen such a large room as that into which
they showed me. It had five windows, with dark red curtains that
would have absorbed the light of a general illumination; and there
were complications of drapery at the top of the curtains, that went
wandering about the wall in a most extraordinary manner. I asked for
a smaller room, and they told me there was no smaller room.

They could screen me in, however, the landlord said. They
brought a great old japanned screen, with natives (Japanese, I
suppose) engaged in a variety of idiotic pursuits all over it; and
left me roasting whole before an immense fire.

My bedroom was some quarter of a mile off, up a great staircase
at the end of a long gallery; and nobody knows what a misery this is
to a bashful man who would rather not meet people on the stairs. It
was the grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the
furniture, from the four posts of the bed to the two old silver
candle-sticks, was tall, high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted. Below,
in my sitting-room, if I looked round my screen, the wind rushed at
me like a mad bull; if I stuck to my arm-chair, the fire scorched me
to the colour of a new brick. The chimney-piece was very high, and
there was a bad glass--what I may call a wavy glass-- above it,
which, when I stood up, just showed me my anterior phrenological
developments,--and these never look well, in any subject, cut short
off at the eyebrow. If I stood with my back to the fire, a gloomy
vault of darkness above and beyond the screen insisted on being
looked at; and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery of the ten
curtains of the five windows went twisting and creeping about, like a
nest of gigantic worms.

I suppose that what I observe in myself must be observed by some
other men of similar character in themselves; therefore I am
emboldened to mention, that, when I travel, I never arrive at a place
but I immediately want to go away from it. Before I had finished my
supper of broiled fowl and mulled port, I had impressed upon the
waiter in detail my arrangements for departure in the morning.
Breakfast and bill at eight. Fly at nine. Two horses, or, if
needful, even four.

Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week long. In
cases of nightmare, I thought of Angela, and felt more depressed than
ever by the reflection that I was on the shortest road to Gretna
Green. What had I to do with Gretna Green? I was not going that way
to the Devil, but by the American route, I remarked in my
bitterness.

In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it had
snowed all night, and that I was snowed up. Nothing could get out of
that spot on the moor, or could come at it, until the road had been
cut out by labourers from the market-town. When they might cut their
way to the Holly-Tree nobody could tell me.

It was now Christmas-eve. I should have had a dismal
Christmas-time of it anywhere, and consequently that did not so much
matter; still, being snowed up was like dying of frost, a thing I had
not bargained for. I felt very lonely. Yet I could no more have
proposed to the landlord and landlady to admit me to their society
(though I should have liked it--very much) than I could have asked
them to present me with a piece of plate. Here my great secret, the
real bashfulness of my character, is to be observed. Like most
bashful men, I judge of other people as if they were bashful too.
Besides being far too shamefaced to make the proposal myself, I
really had a delicate misgiving that it would be in the last degree
disconcerting to them.

Trying to settle down, therefore, in my solitude, I first of all
asked what books there were in the house. The waiter brought me a
Book of Roads, two or three old Newspapers, a little Song-Book,
terminating in a collection of Toasts and Sentiments, a little Jest-
Book, an odd volume of Peregrine Pickle, and the Sentimental Journey.
I knew every word of the two last already, but I read them through
again, then tried to hum all the songs (Auld Lang Syne was among
them); went entirely through the jokes,--in which I found a fund of
melancholy adapted to my state of mind; proposed all the toasts,
enunciated all the sentiments, and mastered the papers. The latter
had nothing in them but stock advertisements, a meeting about a
county rate, and a highway robbery. As I am a greedy reader, I could
not make this supply hold out until night; it was exhausted by
tea-time. Being then entirely cast upon my own resources, I got
through an hour in considering what to do next. Ultimately, it came
into my head (from which I was anxious by any means to exclude Angela
and Edwin), that I would endeavour to recall my experience of Inns,
and would try how long it lasted me. I stirred the fire, moved my
chair a little to one side of the screen,--not daring to go far, for
I knew the wind was waiting to make a rush at me, I could hear it
growling,--and began.

My first impressions of an Inn dated from the Nursery;
consequently I went back to the Nursery for a starting-point, and
found myself at the knee of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an
aquiline nose, and a green gown, whose specially was a dismal
narrative of a landlord by the roadside, whose visitors unaccountably
disappeared for many years, until it was discovered that the pursuit
of his life had been to convert them into pies. For the better
devotion of himself to this branch of industry, he had constructed a
secret door behind the head of the bed; and when the visitor
(oppressed with pie) had fallen asleep, this wicked landlord would
look softly in with a lamp in one hand and a knife in the other,
would cut his throat, and would make him into pies; for which purpose
he had coppers, underneath a trap-door, always boiling; and rolled
out his pastry in the dead of the night. Yet even he was not
insensible to the stings of conscience, for he never went to sleep
without being heard to mutter, "Too much pepper!" which was
eventually the cause of his being brought to justice. I had no
sooner disposed of this criminal than there started up another of the
same period, whose profession was originally house-breaking; in the
pursuit of which art he had had his right ear chopped off one night,
as he was burglariously getting in at a window, by a brave and lovely
servant-maid (whom the aquiline-nosed woman, though not at all
answering the description, always mysteriously implied to be
herself). After several years, this brave and lovely servant-maid
was married to the landlord of a country Inn; which landlord had this
remarkable characteristic, that he always wore a silk nightcap, and
never would on any consideration take it off. At last, one night,
when he was fast asleep, the brave and lovely woman lifted up his
silk nightcap on the right side, and found that he had no ear there;
upon which she sagaciously perceived that he was the clipped
housebreaker, who had married her with the intention of putting her
to death. She immediately heated the poker and terminated his
career, for which she was taken to King George upon his throne, and
received the compliments of royalty on her great discretion and
valour. This same narrator, who had a Ghoulish pleasure, I have long
been persuaded, in terrifying me to the utmost confines of my reason,
had another authentic anecdote within her own experience, founded, I
now believe, upon Raymond and Agnes, or the Bleeding Nun. She said
it happened to her brother-in-law, who was immensely rich,--which my
father was not; and immensely tall,--which my father was not. It was
always a point with this Ghoul to present my clearest relations and
friends to my youthful mind under circumstances of disparaging
contrast. The brother-in-law was riding once through a forest on a
magnificent horse (we had no magnificent horse at our house),
attended by a favourite and valuable Newfoundland dog (we had no
dog), when he found himself benighted, and came to an Inn. A dark
woman opened the door, and he asked her if he could have a bed there.
She answered yes, and put his horse in the stable, and took him into
a room where there were two dark men. While he was at supper, a
parrot in the room began to talk, saying, "Blood, blood! Wipe up the
blood!" Upon which one of the dark men wrung the parrot's neck, and
said he was fond of roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one
for breakfast in the morning. After eating and drinking heartily,
the immensely rich, tall brother-in-law went up to bed; but he was
rather vexed, because they had shut his dog in the stable, saying
that they never allowed dogs in the house. He sat very quiet for
more than an hour, thinking and thinking, when, just as his candle
was burning out, he heard a scratch at the door. He opened the door,
and there was the Newfoundland dog! The dog came softly in, smelt
about him, went straight to some straw in the corner which the dark
men had said covered apples, tore the straw away, and disclosed two
sheets steeped in blood. Just at that moment the candle went out,
and the brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door, saw the
two dark men stealing up-stairs; one armed with a dagger that long
(about five feet); the other carrying a chopper, a sack, and a spade.
Having no remembrance of the close of this adventure, I suppose my
faculties to have been always so frozen with terror at this stage of
it, that the power of listening stagnated within me for some quarter
of an hour.

These barbarous stories carried me, sitting there on the
Holly-Tree hearth, to the Roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a
sixpenny book with a folding plate, representing in a central
compartment of oval form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in
four corner compartments four incidents of the tragedy with which the
name is associated,--coloured with a hand at once so free and
economical, that the bloom of Jonathan's complexion passed without
any pause into the breeches of the ostler, and, smearing itself off
into the next division, became rum in a bottle. Then I remembered
how the landlord was found at the murdered traveller's bedside, with
his own knife at his feet, and blood upon his hand; how he was hanged
for the murder, notwithstanding his protestation that he had indeed
come there to kill the traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been
stricken motionless on finding him already slain; and how the ostler,
years afterwards, owned the deed. By this time I had made myself
quite uncomfortable. I stirred the fire, and stood with my back to
it as long as I could bear the heat, looking up at the darkness
beyond the screen, and at the wormy curtains creeping in and creeping
out, like the worms in the ballad of Alonzo the Brave and the Fair
Imogene.

There was an Inn in the cathedral town where I went to school,
which had pleasanter recollections about it than any of these. I
took it next. It was the Inn where friends used to put up, and where
we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be
tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign,--the Mitre,--and a bar that
seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I
loved the landlord's youngest daughter to distraction,--but let that
pass. It was in this Inn that I was cried over by my rosy little
sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight. And though
she had been, that Holly-Tree night, for many a long year where all
tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.

"To be continued to-morrow," said I, when I took my candle to go
to bed. But my bed took it upon itself to continue the train of
thought that night. It carried me away, like the enchanted carpet,
to a distant place (though still in England), and there, alighting
from a stage-coach at another Inn in the snow, as I had actually done
some years before, I repeated in my sleep a curious experience I had
really had there. More than a year before I made the journey in the
course of which I put up at that Inn, I had lost a very near and dear
friend by death. Every night since, at home or away from home, I had
dreamed of that friend; sometimes as still living; sometimes as
returning from the world of shadows to comfort me; always as being
beautiful, placid, and happy, never in association with any approach
to fear or distress. It was at a lonely Inn in a wide moorland
place, that I halted to pass the night. When I had looked from my
bedroom window over the waste of snow on which the moon was shining,
I sat down by my fire to write a letter. I had always, until that
hour, kept it within my own breast that I dreamed every night of the
dear lost one. But in the letter that I wrote I recorded the
circumstance, and added that I felt much interested in proving
whether the subject of my dream would still be faithful to me,
travel-tired, and in that remote place. No. I lost the beloved
figure of my vision in parting with the secret. My sleep has never
looked upon it since, in sixteen years, but once. I was in Italy,
and awoke (or seemed to awake), the well-remembered voice distinctly
in my ears, conversing with it. I entreated it, as it rose above my
bed and soared up to the vaulted roof of the old room, to answer me a
question I had asked touching the Future Life. My hands were still
outstretched towards it as it vanished, when I heard a bell ringing
by the garden wall, and a voice in the deep stillness of the night
calling on all good Christians to pray for the souls of the dead; it
being All Souls' Eve.

To return to the Holly-Tree. When I awoke next day, it was
freezing hard, and the lowering sky threatened more snow. My
breakfast cleared away, I drew my chair into its former place, and,
with the fire getting so much the better of the landscape that I sat
in twilight, resumed my Inn remembrances.

That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in
the days of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was
bitterness. It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight
wind that rattled my lattice window came moaning at me from
Stonehenge. There was a hanger-on at that establishment (a
supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to have been, and to be
still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking
afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be
ever watching for the reappearance, on the verge of the horizon, of
some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many ages. He
was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the
stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them;
likewise, that any one who counted them three times nine times, and
then stood in the centre and said, "I dare!" would behold a
tremendous apparition, and be stricken dead. He pretended to have
seen a bustard (I suspect him to have been familiar with the dodo),
in manner following: He was out upon the plain at the close of a
late autumn day, when he dimly discerned, going on before him at a
curious fitfully bounding pace, what he at first supposed to be a
gig-umbrella that had been blown from some conveyance, but what he
presently believed to be a lean dwarf man upon a little pony. Having
followed this object for some distance without gaining on it, and
having called to it many times without receiving any answer, he
pursued it for miles and miles, when, at length coming up with it, he
discovered it to be the last bustard in Great Britain, degenerated
into a wingless state, and running along the ground. Resolved to
capture him or perish in the attempt, he closed with the bustard; but
the bustard, who had formed a counter-resolution that he should do
neither, threw him, stunned him, and was last seen making off due
west. This weird main, at that stage of metempsychosis, may have
been a sleep-walker or an enthusiast or a robber; but I awoke one
night to find him in the dark at my bedside, repeating the Athanasian
Creed in a terrific voice. I paid my bill next day, and retired from
the county with all possible precipitation.

That was not a commonplace story which worked itself out at a
little Inn in Switzerland, while I was staying there. It was a very
homely place, in a village of one narrow zigzag street, among
mountains, and you went in at the main door through the cow-house,
and among the mules and the dogs and the fowls, before ascending a
great bare staircase to the rooms; which were all of unpainted wood,
without plastering or papering,--like rough packing-cases. Outside
there was nothing but the straggling street, a little toy church with
a copper-coloured steeple, a pine forest, a torrent, mists, and
mountain-sides. A young man belonging to this Inn had disappeared
eight weeks before (it was winter-time), and was supposed to have had
some undiscovered love affair, and to have gone for a soldier. He had
got up in the night, and dropped into the village street from the
loft in which he slept with another man; and he had done it so
quietly, that his companion and fellow-labourer had heard no movement
when he was awakened in the morning, and they said, "Louis, where is
Henri?" They looked for him high and low, in vain, and gave him up.
Now, outside this Inn, there stood, as there stood outside every
dwelling in the village, a stack of firewood; but the stack belonging
to the Inn was higher than any of the rest, because the Inn was the
richest house, and burnt the most fuel. It began to be noticed,
while they were looking high and low, that a Bantam cock, part of the
live stock of the Inn, put himself wonderfully out of his way to get
to the top of this wood-stack; and that he would stay there for hours
and hours, crowing, until he appeared in danger of splitting himself.
Five weeks went on,--six weeks,--and still this terrible Bantam,
neglecting his domestic affairs, was always on the top of the
wood-stack, crowing the very eyes out of his head. By this time it
was perceived that Louis had become inspired with a violent animosity
towards the terrible Bantam, and one morning he was seen by a woman,
who sat nursing her goitre at a little window in a gleam of sun, to
catch up a rough billet of wood, with a great oath, hurl it at the
terrible Bantam crowing on the wood-stack, and bring him down dead.
Hereupon the woman, with a sudden light in her mind, stole round to
the back of the wood-stack, and, being a good climber, as all those
women are, climbed up, and soon was seen upon the summit, screaming,
looking down the hollow within, and crying, "Seize Louis, the
murderer! Ring the church bell! Here is the body!" I saw the
murderer that day, and I saw him as I sat by my fire at the
Holly-Tree Inn, and I see him now, lying shackled with cords on the
stable litter, among the mild eyes and the smoking breath of the
cows, waiting to be taken away by the police, and stared at by the
fearful village. A heavy animal,--the dullest animal in the
stables,--with a stupid head, and a lumpish face devoid of any trace
of insensibility, who had been, within the knowledge of the murdered
youth, an embezzler of certain small moneys belonging to his master,
and who had taken this hopeful mode of putting a possible accuser out
of his way. All of which he confessed next day, like a sulky wretch
who couldn't be troubled any more, now that they had got hold of him,
and meant to make an end of him. I saw him once again, on the day of
my departure from the Inn. In that Canton the headsman still does his
office with a sword; and I came upon this murderer sitting bound, to
a chair, with his eyes bandaged, on a scaffold in a little
market-place. In that instant, a great sword (loaded with
quicksilver in the thick part of the blade) swept round him like a
gust of wind or fire, and there was no such creature in the world.
My wonder was, not that he was so suddenly dispatched, but that any
head was left unreaped, within a radius of fifty yards of that
tremendous sickle.

That was a good Inn, too, with the kind, cheerful landlady and
the honest landlord, where I lived in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and
where one of the apartments has a zoological papering on the walls,
not so accurately joined but that the elephant occasionally rejoices
in a tiger's hind legs and tail, while the lion puts on a trunk and
tusks, and the bear, moulting as it were, appears as to portions of
himself like a leopard. I made several American friends at that Inn,
who all called Mont Blanc Mount Blank,--except one good- humoured
gentleman, of a very sociable nature, who became on such intimate
terms with it that he spoke of it familiarly as "Blank;" observing,
at breakfast, "Blank looks pretty tall this morning;" or considerably
doubting in the courtyard in the evening, whether there warn't some
go-ahead naters in our country, sir, that would make out the top of
Blank in a couple of hours from first start--now!

Once I passed a fortnight at an Inn in the North of England,
where I was haunted by the ghost of a tremendous pie. It was a
Yorkshire pie, like a fort,--an abandoned fort with nothing in it;
but the waiter had a fixed idea that it was a point of ceremony at
every meal to put the pie on the table. After some days I tried to
hint, in several delicate ways, that I considered the pie done with;
as, for example, by emptying fag-ends of glasses of wine into it;
putting cheese-plates and spoons into it, as into a basket; putting
wine-bottles into it, as into a cooler; but always in vain, the pie
being invariably cleaned out again and brought up as before. At
last, beginning to be doubtful whether I was not the victim of a
spectral illusion, and whether my health and spirits might not sink
under the horrors of an imaginary pie, I cut a triangle out of it,
fully as large as the musical instrument of that name in a powerful
orchestra. Human provision could not have foreseen the result--but
the waiter mended the pie. With some effectual species of cement, he
adroitly fitted the triangle in again, and I paid my reckoning and
fled.

The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal. I made an overland
expedition beyond the screen, and penetrated as far as the fourth
window. Here I was driven back by stress of weather. Arrived at my
winter-quarters once more, I made up the fire, and took another
Inn.

It was in the remotest part of Cornwall. A great annual Miners'
Feast was being holden at the Inn, when I and my travelling
companions presented ourselves at night among the wild crowd that
were dancing before it by torchlight. We had had a break-down in the
dark, on a stony morass some miles away; and I had the honour of
leading one of the unharnessed post-horses. If any lady or
gentleman, on perusal of the present lines, will take any very tall
post-horse with his traces hanging about his legs, and will conduct
him by the bearing-rein into the heart of a country dance of a
hundred and fifty couples, that lady or gentleman will then, and only
then, form an adequate idea of the extent to which that post- horse
will tread on his conductor's toes. Over and above which, the
post-horse, finding three hundred people whirling about him, will
probably rear, and also lash out with his hind legs, in a manner
incompatible with dignity or self-respect on his conductor's part.
With such little drawbacks on my usually impressive aspect, I
appeared at this Cornish Inn, to the unutterable wonder of the
Cornish Miners. It was full, and twenty times full, and nobody could
be received but the post-horse,--though to get rid of that noble
animal was something. While my fellow-travellers and I were
discussing how to pass the night and so much of the next day as must
intervene before the jovial blacksmith and the jovial wheelwright
would be in a condition to go out on the morass and mend the coach,
an honest man stepped forth from the crowd and proposed his unlet
floor of two rooms, with supper of eggs and bacon, ale and punch. We
joyfully accompanied him home to the strangest of clean houses, where
we were well entertained to the satisfaction of all parties. But the
novel feature of the entertainment was, that our host was a
chair-maker, and that the chairs assigned to us were mere frames,
altogether without bottoms of any sort; so that we passed the evening
on perches. Nor was this the absurdest consequence; for when we
unbent at supper, and any one of us gave way to laughter, he forgot
the peculiarity of his position, and instantly disappeared. I myself,
doubled up into an attitude from which self-extrication was
impossible, was taken out of my frame, like a clown in a comic
pantomime who has tumbled into a tub, five times by the taper's light
during the eggs and bacon.

The Holly-Tree was fast reviving within me a sense of
loneliness. I began to feel conscious that my subject would never
carry on until I was dug out. I might be a week here,--weeks!

There was a story with a singular idea in it, connected with an
Inn I once passed a night at in a picturesque old town on the Welsh
border. In a large double-bedded room of this Inn there had been a
suicide committed by poison, in one bed, while a tired traveller
slept unconscious in the other. After that time, the suicide bed was
never used, but the other constantly was; the disused bedstead
remaining in the room empty, though as to all other respects in its
old state. The story ran, that whosoever slept in this room, though
never so entire a stranger, from never so far off, was invariably
observed to come down in the morning with an impression that he smelt
Laudanum, and that his mind always turned upon the subject of
suicide; to which, whatever kind of man he might be, he was certain
to make some reference if he conversed with any one. This went on
for years, until it at length induced the landlord to take the
disused bedstead down, and bodily burn it,--bed, hangings, and all.
The strange influence (this was the story) now changed to a fainter
one, but never changed afterwards. The occupant of that room, with
occasional but very rare exceptions, would come down in the morning,
trying to recall a forgotten dream he had had in the night. The
landlord, on his mentioning his perplexity, would suggest various
commonplace subjects, not one of which, as he very well knew, was the
true subject. But the moment the landlord suggested "Poison," the
traveller started, and cried, "Yes!" He never failed to accept that
suggestion, and he never recalled any more of the dream.

This reminiscence brought the Welsh Inns in general before me;
with the women in their round hats, and the harpers with their white
beards (venerable, but humbugs, I am afraid), playing outside the
door while I took my dinner. The transition was natural to the
Highland Inns, with the oatmeal bannocks, the honey, the venison
steaks, the trout from the loch, the whisky, and perhaps (having the
materials so temptingly at hand) the Athol brose. Once was I coming
south from the Scottish Highlands in hot haste, hoping to change
quickly at the station at the bottom of a certain wild historical
glen, when these eyes did with mortification see the landlord come
out with a telescope and sweep the whole prospect for the horses;
which horses were away picking up their own living, and did not heave
in sight under four hours. Having thought of the loch-trout, I was
taken by quick association to the Anglers' Inns of England (I have
assisted at innumerable feats of angling by lying in the bottom of
the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing with the greatest
perseverance; which I have generally found to be as effectual towards
the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost science), and
to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated bedrooms of those
inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and the green ait, and
the church-spire, and the country bridge; and to the pearless Emma
with the bright eyes and the pretty smile, who waited, bless her!
with a natural grace that would have converted Blue-Beard. Casting
my eyes upon my Holly-Tree fire, I next discerned among the glowing
coals the pictures of a score or more of those wonderful English
posting-inns which we are all so sorry to have lost, which were so
large and so comfortable, and which were such monuments of British
submission to rapacity and extortion. He who would see these houses
pining away, let him walk from Basingstoke, or even Windsor, to
London, by way of Hounslow, and moralise on their perishing remains;
the stables crumbling to dust; unsettled labourers and wanderers
bivouacking in the outhouses; grass growing in the yards; the rooms,
where erst so many hundred beds of down were made up, let off to
Irish lodgers at eighteenpence a week; a little ill-looking beer-shop
shrinking in the tap of former days, burning coach-house gates for
firewood, having one of its two windows bunged up, as if it had
received punishment in a fight with the Railroad; a low,
bandy-legged, brick-making bulldog standing in the doorway. What
could I next see in my fire so naturally as the new railway-house of
these times near the dismal country station; with nothing particular
on draught but cold air and damp, nothing worth mentioning in the
larder but new mortar, and no business doing beyond a conceited
affectation of luggage in the hall? Then I came to the Inns of
Paris, with the pretty apartment of four pieces up one hundred and
seventy-five waxed stairs, the privilege of ringing the bell all day
long without influencing anybody's mind or body but your own, and the
not-too-much-for- dinner, considering the price. Next to the
provincial Inns of France, with the great church-tower rising above
the courtyard, the horse-bells jingling merrily up and down the
street beyond, and the clocks of all descriptions in all the rooms,
which are never right, unless taken at the precise minute when, by
getting exactly twelve hours too fast or too slow, they
unintentionally become so. Away I went, next, to the lesser roadside
Inns of Italy; where all the dirty clothes in the house (not in wear)
are always lying in your anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a raisin
pudding of your face in summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter;
where you get what you can, and forget what you can't: where I
should again like to be boiling my tea in a pocket-handkerchief
dumpling, for want of a teapot. So to the old palace Inns and old
monastery Inns, in towns and cities of the same bright country; with
their massive quadrangular staircases, whence you may look from among
clustering pillars high into the blue vault of heaven; with their
stately banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with their labyrinths
of ghostly bedchambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous streets that
have no appearance of reality or possibility. So to the close little
Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants, and their
peculiar smell of never letting in the air. So to the immense
fantastic Inns of Venice, with the cry of the gondolier below, as he
skims the corner; the grip of the watery odours on one particular
little bit of the bridge of your nose (which is never released while
you stay there); and the great bell of St. Mark's Cathedral tolling
midnight. Next I put up for a minute at the restless Inns upon the
Rhine, where your going to bed, no matter at what hour, appears to be
the tocsin for everybody else's getting up; and where, in the
table-d'hote room at the end of the long table (with several Towers
of Babel on it at the other end, all made of white plates), one knot
of stoutish men, entirely dressed in jewels and dirt, and having
nothing else upon them, will remain all night, clinking glasses, and
singing about the river that flows, and the grape that grows, and
Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine woman that smiles and hi drink
drink my friend and ho drink drink my brother, and all the rest of
it. I departed thence, as a matter of course, to other German Inns,
where all the eatables are soddened down to the same flavour, and
where the mind is disturbed by the apparition of hot puddings, and
boiled cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully unexpected periods of the
repast. After a draught of sparkling beer from a foaming glass jug,
and a glance of recognition through the windows of the student
beer-houses at Heidelberg and elsewhere, I put out to sea for the
Inns of America, with their four hundred beds apiece, and their eight
or nine hundred ladies and gentlemen at dinner every day. Again I
stood in the bar-rooms thereof, taking my evening cobbler, julep,
sling, or cocktail. Again I listened to my friend the General,--whom
I had known for five minutes, in the course of which period he had
made me intimate for life with two Majors, who again had made me
intimate for life with three Colonels, who again had made me brother
to twenty-two civilians,--again, I say, I listened to my friend the
General, leisurely expounding the resources of the establishment, as
to gentlemen's morning-room, sir; ladies' morning-room, sir;
gentlemen's evening-room, sir; ladies' evening-room, sir; ladies' and
gentlemen's evening reuniting-room, sir; music-room, sir;
reading-room, sir; over four hundred sleeping- rooms, sir; and the
entire planned and finited within twelve calendar months from the
first clearing off of the old encumbrances on the plot, at a cost of
five hundred thousand dollars, sir. Again I found, as to my
individual way of thinking, that the greater, the more gorgeous, and
the more dollarous the establishment was, the less desirable it was.
Nevertheless, again I drank my cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail, in
all good-will, to my friend the General, and my friends the Majors,
Colonels, and civilians all; full well knowing that, whatever little
motes my beamy eyes may have descried in theirs, they belong to a
kind, generous, large-hearted, and great people.

I had been going on lately at a quick pace to keep my solitude
out of my mind; but here I broke down for good, and gave up the
subject. What was I to do? What was to become of me? Into what
extremity was I submissively to sink? Supposing that, like Baron
Trenck, I looked out for a mouse or spider, and found one, and
beguiled my imprisonment by training it? Even that might be
dangerous with a view to the future. I might be so far gone when the
road did come to be cut through the snow, that, on my way forth, I
might burst into tears, and beseech, like the prisoner who was
released in his old age from the Bastille, to be taken back again to
the five windows, the ten curtains, and the sinuous drapery.

A desperate idea came into my head. Under any other
circumstances I should have rejected it; but, in the strait at which
I was, I held it fast. Could I so far overcome the inherent
bashfulness which withheld me from the landlord's table and the
company I might find there, as to call up the Boots, and ask him to
take a chair,--and something in a liquid form,--and talk to me? I
could, I would, I did.