Bleak House No. XVIII: Electronic Edition.

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870


Funding from the E. S. P. Das Educational Foundation supported the electronic publication of this title.


Illustrated by  Browne, H. K. (Hablot Knight), 1815-1882
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First edition, 2002
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Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

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Source Description

Title (from title page): Bleak House No. XVIII. August.
Author: Charles Dickens
Extent: 58 p., ill.
London:
Bradbury & Evans, Bouverie Street.
1853
Dickens 21 c.2 (Rare Book Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

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No. XVIII.

AUGUST.

Price 1s.

BLEAK
HOUSE

BY

CHARLES DICKENS.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. K. BROWNE

LONDON:

BRADBURY & EVANS, BOUVERIE STREET.

AGENTS: J. MENZIES, EDINBURGH; MURRAY AND SON, GLASGOW; J. M'GLASHAN, DUBLIN.
The Author of this Work notifies that it is his intention to reserve the
right of translating it.



page [ii]

          


           The Night.



page [iii]

          


           The Morning.



page [3]
In Weekly Numbers, price 2d., or stamped for post, 3d.; in Monthly Parts, and in Half-yearly Volumes,

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

           A Weekly Journal, conducted by CHARLES DICKENS.

           DESIGNED FOR THE INSTRUCTION AND AMUSEMENT OF ALL CLASSES OF READERS, AND TO ASSIST
IN THE DISCUSSION OF THE SOCIAL QUESTIONS OF THE TIME.

           SIX VOLUMES are published, price 5s. 6d. each, in cloth boards, and are always on sale.

Also, published at the end of every Month, at the same Office, price 2d., or stamped for post, 3d.,

THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE OF
CURRENT EVENTS;

           Which being declared, by the Judgment of the Court of Exchequer, a Legal Publication, not coming
within the provisions of the Stamp Act, will be regularly continued and much improved.

           The First, Second, and Third Volumes, being a Record of the Public Events of 1850, 1851, and 1852, may always be had, price 3s. each, neatly bound in cloth. Each Volume contains copious Index.

OFFICE, No. 16, WELLINGTON STREET NORTH. Sold by all Booksellers and Newsmen.



page 545

CHAPTER LVII.
ESTHER'S NARRATIVE.

           I HAD gone to bed and fallen asleep, when my guardian knocked at the door of my room and begged me to get up directly. On my hurrying to speak to him and learn what had happened, he told me, after a word or two of preparation, that there had been a discovery at Sir Leicester Dedlock's. That my mother had fled; that a person was now at our door who was empowered to convey to her the fullest assurances of affectionate protection and forgiveness, if he could possibly find her; and that I was sought for to accompany him, in the hope that my entreaties might prevail upon her, if his failed. Something to this general purpose, I made out; but I was thrown into such a tumult of alarm, and hurry and distress, that in spite of every effort I could make to subdue my agitation, I did not seem, to myself, fully to recover my right mind until hours had passed.

           But, I dressed and wrapped up expeditiously without waking Charley, or any one; and went down to Mr. Bucket, who was the person entrusted with the secret. In taking me to him my guardian told me this, and also explained how it was that he had come to think of me. Mr. Bucket, in a low voice, by the light of my guardian's candle, read to me, in the hall, a letter that my mother had left upon her table; and, I suppose within ten minutes of my having been aroused, I was sitting beside him, rolling swiftly through the streets.

           His manner was very keen, and yet considerate when he explained to me that a great deal might depend on my being able to answer, without confusion, a few questions that he wished to ask me. These were, chiefly, whether I had had much communication with my mother (to whom he only referred as Lady Dedlock); when and where I had spoken with her last; and how she had become possessed of my handkerchief. When I had satisfied him on these points, he asked me particularly to consider — taking time to think—whether, within my knowledge, there was any one, no matter where, in whom she might be at all likely to confide, under circumstances of the last necessity. I could think of no one but my guardian. But, bye and bye, I mentioned Mr. Boythorn. He came into my mind, as connected with his old chivalrous manner of mentioning my mother's name; and with what my guardian had informed me of his engagement to her sister, and his unconscious connexion with her unhappy story.

           My companion had stopped the driver while we held this conversation, that we might the better hear each other. He now told him to go on again; and said to me, after considering within himself for a few moments, that he had made up his mind how to proceed. He was quite willing to tell me what his plan was; but I did not feel clear enough to understand it.

           We had not driven very far from our lodgings, when we stopped in a



page 546 bye street, at a public-looking place lighted up with gas. Mr. Bucket took me in and sat me in an arm-chair, by a bright fire. It was now past one, as I saw by the clock against the wall. Two police officers, looking in their perfectly neat uniform not at all like people who were up all night, were quietly writing at a desk; and the place seemed very quiet altogether, except for some beating and calling out at distant doors underground, to which nobody paid any attention.

           A third man in uniform, whom Mr. Bucket called and to whom he whispered his instructions, went out; and then the two others advised together, while one wrote from Mr. Bucket's subdued dictation. It was a description of my mother that they were busy with; for Mr. Bucket brought it to me when it was done, and read it in a whisper. It was very accurate indeed.

           The second officer, who had attended to it closely, then copied it out, and called in another man in uniform (there were several in an outer room) who took it up and went away with it. All this was done with the greatest dispatch, and without the waste of a moment; yet nobody was at all hurried. As soon as the paper was sent out upon its travels, the two officers resumed their former quiet work of writing with neatness and care. Mr. Bucket thoughtfully came and warmed the soles of his boots, first one and then the other, at the fire.

           “Are you well wrapped up, Miss Summerson?” he asked me, as his eyes met mine. “It's a desperate sharp night for a young lady to be out in.”

           I told him I cared for no weather, and was warmly clothed.

           “It may be a long job,” he observed; “but so that it ends well, never mind, miss.”

           “I pray to Heaven it may end well!” said I.

           He nodded comfortingly. “You see, whatever you do, don't you go and fret yourself. You keep yourself cool, and equal for anything that may happen; and it'll be the better for you, the better for me, the better for Lady Dedlock, and the better for Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.”

           He was really very kind and gentle; and as he stood before the fire warming his boots, and rubbing his face with his forefinger, I felt a confidence in his sagacity which re-assured me. It was not yet a quarter to two, when I heard horses' feet and wheels outside. “Now, Miss Summerson,” said he, “we are off, if you please!”

           He gave me his arm, and the two officers courteously bowed me out, and we found at the door a phaeton or barouche, with a postilion and post horses. Mr. Bucket handed me in, and took his own seat on the box. The man in uniform whom he had sent to fetch this equipage, then handed him up a dark lantern at his request; and when he had given a few directions to the driver, we rattled away.

           I was far from sure that I was not in a dream. We rattled with great rapidity through such a labyrinth of streets, that I soon lost all idea where we were; except that we had crossed and re-crossed the river, and still seemed to be traversing a low-lying, water-side, dense neighbourhood of narrow thoroughfares, chequered by docks and basins, high piles of warehouses, swing-bridges, and masts of ships. At length we stopped at the corner of a little slimy turning, which the wind from the river, rushing up it, did not purify; and I saw my companion, by the



page 547 light of his lantern, in conference with several men, who looked like a mixture of police and sailors. Against the mouldering wall by which they stood, there was a bill, on which I could discern the words, “FOUND DROWNED;” and this, and an inscription about Drags, possessed me with the awful suspicion shadowed forth in our visit to that place.

           I had no need to remind myself that I was not there, by the indulgence of any feeling of mine, to increase the difficulties of the search, or to lessen its hopes, or enhance its delays. I remained quiet; but what I suffered in that dreadful spot, I never can forget. And still it was like the horror of a dream. A man yet dark and muddy, in long swollen sodden boots and a hat like them, was called out of a boat, and whispered with Mr. Bucket, who went away with him down some slippery steps—as if to look at something secret that he had to show. They came back, wiping their hands upon their coats, after turning over something wet; but thank God it was not what I feared!

           After some further conference, Mr. Bucket (whom everybody seemed to know and defer to) went in with the others at a door, and left me in the carriage; while the driver walked up and down by his horses, to warm himself. The tide was coming in, as I judged from the sound it made; and I could hear it break at the end of the alley, with a little rush towards me. It never did so—and I thought it did so, hundreds of times, in what can have been at the most a quarter of an hour, and probably was less—but the thought shuddered through me that it would cast my mother at the horses' feet.

           Mr. Bucket came out again, exhorting the others to be vigilant, darkened his lantern, and once more took his seat. “Don't you be alarmed, Miss Summerson, on account of our coming down here,” he said, turning to me. “I only want to have everything in train, and to know that it is in train by looking after it myself. Get on, my lad!”

           We appeared to retrace the way we had come. Not that I had taken note of any particular objects in my perturbed state of mind, but judging from the general character of the streets. We called at another office or station for a minute, and crossed the river again. During the whole of this time, and during the whole search, my companion, wrapped up on the box, never relaxed in his vigilance a single moment; but, when we crossed the bridge he seemed, if possible, to be more on the alert than before. He stood up to look over the parapet; he alighted, and went back after a shadowy female figure that flitted past us; and he gazed into the profound black pit of water, with a face that made my heart die within me. The river had a fearful look, so overcast and secret, creeping away so fast between the low flat lines of shore: so heavy with indistinct and awful shapes, both of substance and shadow: so deathlike and mysterious. I have seen it many times since then, by sunlight and by moonlight, but never free from the impressions of that journey. In my memory, the lights upon the bridge are always burning dim; the cutting wind is eddying round the homeless woman whom we pass; the monotonous wheels are whirling on; and the light of the carriage lamps reflected back, looks palely in upon me—a face, rising out of the dreaded water.

           Clattering and clattering through the empty streets, we came at length from the pavement on to dark smooth roads, and began to leave the houses behind us. After a while, I recognised the familiar way to



page 548 St. Albans. At Barnet, fresh horses were ready for us, and we changed and went on. It was very cold indeed; and the open country was white with snow, though none was falling then.

           “An old acquaintance of yours, this road, Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Bucket, cheerfully.

           “Yes,” I returned. “Have you gathered any intelligence?”

           “None that can be quite depended on as yet,” he answered; “but it's early times as yet.”

           He had gone into every late or early public-house where there was a light (they were not a few at that time, the road being then much frequented by drovers), and had got down to talk to the turnpike-keepers. I had heard him ordering drink, and chinking money, and making himself agreeable and merry everywhere; but whenever he took his seat upon the box again, his face resumed its watchful steady look, and he always said to the driver in the same business tone, “Get on, my lad!”

           With all these stoppages, it was between five and six o'clock and we were yet a few miles short of Saint Albans, when he came out of one of these houses and handed me in a cup of tea.

           “Drink it, Miss Summerson, it'll do you good. You're beginning to get more yourself now, ain't you?”

           I thanked him, and said I hoped so.

           “You was what you may call stunned at first,” he returned; “and Lord! no wonder. Don't speak loud, my dear. It's all right. She's on a-head.”

           I don't know what joyful exclamation I made, or was going to make, but he put up his finger, and I stopped myself.

           “Passed through here on foot, this evening, about eight or nine. I heard of her first at the archway toll, over at Highgate, but couldn't make quite sure. Traced her all along, on and off. Picked her up at one place, and dropped her at another; but she's before us now, safe. Take hold of this cup and saucer, Ostler. Now, if you wasn't brought up to the butter trade, look out and see if you can catch half-a-crown in your t'other hand. One, two, three, and there you are! Now, my lad, try a gallop!”

           We were soon in Saint Albans, and alighted a little before day, when I was just beginning to arrange and comprehend the occurrences of the night, and really to believe that they were not a dream. Leaving the carriage at the posting-house, and ordering fresh horses to be ready, my companion gave me his arm, and we went towards home.

           “As this is your regular abode, Miss Summerson, you see,” he observed, “I should like to know whether you've been asked for by any stranger answering the description, or whether Mr. Jarndyce has. I don't much expect it, but it might be.”

           As we ascended the hill, he looked about him with a sharp eye—the day was now breaking—and reminded me that I had come down it one night, as I had reason for remembering with my little servant and poor Jo: whom he called Toughey.

           I wondered how he knew that.

           “When you passed a man upon the road, just yonder, you know,” said Mr. Bucket.

           Yes, I remembered that too, very well.



page 549

           “That was me,” said Mr. Bucket.

           Seeing my surprise, he went on:

           “I drove down in a gig that afternoon, to look after that boy. You might have heard my wheels when you came out to look after him yourself, for I was aware of you and your little maid going up, when I was walking the horse down. Making an inquiry or two about him in the town, I soon heard what company he was in; and was coming among the brick-fields to look for him, when I observed you bringing him home here.”

           “Had he committed any crime?” I asked.

           “None was charged against him,” said Mr. Bucket, coolly lifting off his hat; “but I suppose he wasn't over-particular. No. What I wanted him for, was in connexion with keeping this very matter of Lady Dedlock quiet. He had been making his tongue more free than welcome, as to a small accidental service he had been paid for by the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn; and it wouldn't do, at any sort of price, to have him playing those games. So having warned him out of London, I made an afternoon of it to warn him to keep out of it now he was away, and go farther from it, and maintain a bright look out that I didn't catch him coming back again.”

           “Poor creature!” said I.

           “Poor enough,” assented Mr. Bucket, “and trouble enough, and well enough away from London, or anywhere else. I was regularly turned on my back when I found him taken up by your establishment, I do assure you.”

           I asked him why? “Why, my dear?” said Mr. Bucket. “Naturally there was no end to his tongue then. He might as well have been born with a yard and a half of it, and a remnant over.”

           Although I remember this conversation now, my head was in confusion at the time, and my power of attention hardly did more than enable me to understand that he entered into these particulars to divert me. With the same kind intention, manifestly, he often spoke to me of indifferent things, while his face was busy with the one object that we had in view. He still pursued this subject, as we turned in at the garden gate.

           “Ah!” said Mr. Bucket. “Here we are, and a nice retired place it is. Puts a man in mind of the country house in the Woodpecker tapping, that was known by the smoke which so gracefully curled. They're early with the kitchen fire, and that denotes good servants. But what you've always got to be careful of with servants, is, who comes to see 'em; you never know what they're up to, if you don't know that. And another thing, my dear. Whenever you find a young man behind the kitchen door, you give that young man in charge on suspicion of being secreted in a dwelling-house with an unlawful purpose.”

           We were now in front of the house; he looked attentively and closely at the gravel for footprints, before he raised his eyes to the windows.

           “Do you generally put that elderly young gentleman in the same room, when he's on a visit here, Miss Summerson?” he inquired, glancing at Mr. Skimpole's usual chamber.

           “You know Mr. Skimpole!” said I.

           “What do you call him again?” returned Mr. Bucket, bending down



page 550 his ear. “Skimpole, is it? I've often wondered what his name might be. Skimpole. Not John, I should say, nor yet Jacob?”

           “Harold,” I told him.

           “Harold. Yes. He's a queer bird is Harold,” said Mr. Bucket, eyeing me with great expression.

           “He is a singular character,” said I.

           “No idea of money,” observed Mr. Bucket.—“He takes it though!”

           I involuntarily returned for answer, that I perceived Mr. Bucket knew him.

           “Why, now I'll tell you, Miss Summerson,” he rejoined. “Your mind will be all the better for not running on one point too continually, and I'll tell you for a change. It was him as pointed out to me where Toughey was. I made up my mind, that night, to come to the door and ask for Toughey, if that was all; but, willing to try a move or so first, if any such was on the board, I just pitched up a morsel of gravel at that window where I saw a shadow. As soon as Harold opens it and I have had a look at him, thinks I, you're the man for me. So I smoothed him down a bit, about not wanting to disturb the family after they was gone to bed, and about its being a thing to be regretted that charitable young ladies should harbor vagrants; and then, when I pretty well understood his ways, I said, I should consider a fypunnote well bestowed if I could relieve the premises of Toughey without causing any noise or trouble. Then says he, lifting up his eyebrows in the gayest way, ‘it's no use mentioning a fypunnote to me, my friend, because I'm a mere child in such matters, and have no idea of money.’ Of course I understood what his taking it so easy meant; and being now quite sure he was the man for me, I wrapped the note round a little stone and threw it up to him. Well! He laughs and beams, and looks as innocent as you like, and says, ‘But I don't know the value of these things. What am I to do with this?’ ‘Spend it, sir,’ says I. ‘But I shall be taken in,’ he says, ‘they won't give me the right change, I shall lose it, it's no use to me.’ Lord, you never saw such a face as he carried it with! Of course he told me where to find Toughey, and I found him.”

           I regarded this as very treacherous on the part of Mr. Skimpole towards my guardian, and as passing the usual bounds of his childish innocence.

           “Bounds, my dear?” returned Mr. Bucket. “Bounds? Now, Miss Summerson, I'll give you a piece of advice that your husband will find useful when you are happily married, and have got a family about you. Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as can be in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it, if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you ‘In worldly matters I'm a child,’ you consider that that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and that you have got that person's number, and it's Number One. Now I am not a poetical man myself except in a vocal way when it goes round a company, but I'm a practical one, and that's my experience. So's this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one. With which caution to the unwary, my dear, I take the liberty of pulling this here bell, and so go back to our business.”

           I believe it had not been for a moment out of his mind, any more



page 551 than it had been out of my mind, or out of his face. The whole household were amazed to see me, without any notice, at that time in the morning, and so accompanied; and their surprise was not diminished by my inquiries. No one, however, had been there. It could not be doubted that this was the truth.

           “Then, Miss Summerson,” said my companion, “we can't be too soon at the cottage where those brickmakers are to be found. Most inquiries there I leave to you, if you'll be so good as to make 'em. The naturalest way is the best way, and the naturalest way is your own way.”

           We set off again immediately. On arriving at the cottage, we found it shut up, and apparently deserted; but one of the neighbours who knew me, and who came out when I was trying to make some one hear, informed me that the two women and their husbands now lived together in another house, made of loose rough bricks, which stood on the margin of the piece of ground where the kilns were, and where the long rows of bricks were drying. We lost no time in repairing to this place, which was within a few hundred yards; and as the door stood ajar, I pushed it open.

           There were only three of them sitting at breakfast; the child lying asleep on a bed in the corner. It was Jenny, the mother of the dead child, who was absent. The other woman rose on seeing me; and the men, though they were, as usual, sulky and silent, each gave me a morose nod of recognition. A look passed between them when Mr. Bucket followed me in, and I was surprised to see that the woman evidently knew him.

           I had asked leave to enter, of course. Liz (the only name by which I knew her) rose to give me her own chair, but I sat down on a stool near the fire, and Mr. Bucket took a corner of the bedstead. Now that I had to speak, and was among people with whom I was not familiar, I became conscious of being hurried and giddy. It was very difficult to begin, and I could not help bursting into tears.

           “Liz,” said I, “I have come a long way in the night and through the snow, to inquire after a lady—”

           “Who has been here, you know,” Mr. Bucket struck in, addressing the whole group, with a composed propitiatory face; “that's the lady the young lady means. The lady that was here last night, you know.”

           “And who told you as there was anybody here?” inquired Jenny's husband, who had made a surly stop in his eating, to listen, and now measured him with his eye.

           “A person of the name of Michael Jackson, in a blue welveteen waistcoat with a double row of mother of pearl buttons,” Mr. Bucket immediately answered.

           “He had as good mind his own business, whoever he is,” growled the man.

           “He's out of employment, I believe,” said Mr. Bucket, apologetically for Michael Jackson, “and so gets talking.”

           The woman had not resumed her chair, but stood faltering with her hand upon its broken back, looking at me. I thought she would have spoken to me privately, if she had dared. She was still in this attitude of uncertainty, when her husband, who was eating with a lump of bread and fat in one hand, and his clasp-knife in the other, struck the handle



page 552 of his knife violently on the table, and told her with an oath to mind her business at any rate, and sit down.

           “I should like to have seen Jenny very much,” said I, “for I am sure she would have told me all she could about this lady, whom I am very anxious indeed—you cannot think how anxious—to overtake. Will Jenny be here soon? Where is she?”

           The woman had a great desire to answer, but the man, with another oath, openly kicked at her foot with his heavy boot. He left it to Jenny's husband to say what he chose, and after a dogged silence the latter turned his shaggy head towards me.

           “I'm not partial to gentlefolks coming into my place, as you've heerd me say afore now, I think, miss. I let their places be, and it's curous they can't let my place be. There'd be a pretty shine made if I was to go a wisitin them, I think. Howsever, I don't so much complain of you as of some others; and I'm agreeable to make you a civil answer, though I give notice that I'm not a going to be drawed like a badger. Will Jenny be here soon? No she won't. Where is she? She's gone up to Lunnun.”

           “Did she go last night?” I asked.

           “Did she go last night? Ah! she went last night,” he answered, with a sulky jerk of his head.

           “But was she here when the lady came? And what did the lady say to her? And where is the lady gone? I beg and pray you to be so kind as to tell me,” said I, “for I am in great distress to know.”

           “If my master would let me speak, and not say a word of harm—” the woman timidly began.

           “Your master,” said her husband, muttering an imprecation with slow emphasis, “will break your neck if you meddle with wot don't concern you.”

           After another silence, the husband of the absent woman, turning to me again, answered me with his usual grumbling unwillingness.

           “Wos Jenny here when the lady come? Yes, she wos here when the lady come. Wot did the lady say to her? Well, I'll tell you wot the lady said to her. She said ‘You remember me as come one time to talk to you about the young lady as had been a wisiting of you? You remember me as give you somethink handsome for a hankecher wot she had left?’ Ah, she remembered. So we all did. Well, then, wos that young lady up at the house now? No, she warn't up at the house now. Well, then, lookee here. The lady was upon a journey all alone, strange as we might think it, and could she rest herself where you're a setten, for a hour or so. Yes she could, and so she did. Then she went—it might be at twenty minutes past eleven, and it might be at twenty minutes past twelve; we ain't got no watches here to know the time by, nor yet clocks. Where did she go? I don't know where she go'd. She went one way, and Jenny went another; one went right to Lunnun, and t'other went right from it. That's all about it. Ask this man. He heerd it all, and see it all. He knows.”

           The other man repeated, “That's all about it.”

           “Was the lady crying?” I inquired.

           “Devil a bit,” returned the first man. “Her shoes was the worse, and her clothes was the worse, but she warn't—not as I see.”



page 553

           The woman sat with her arms crossed, and her eyes upon the ground. Her husband had turned his seat a little, so as to face her; and kept his hammer-like hand upon the table, as if it were in readiness to execute his threat if she disobeyed him.

           “I hope you will not object to my asking your wife,” said I, “how the lady looked?”

           “Come then!” he gruffly cried to her. “You hear wot she says. Cut it short, and tell her.”

           “Bad,” replied the woman. “Pale and exhausted. Very bad.”

           “Did she speak much?”

           “Not much, but her voice was hoarse.”

           She answered, looking all the while at her husband for leave.

           “Was she faint?” said I. “Did she eat or drink here?”

           “Go on!” said the husband, in answer to her look. “Tell her, and cut it short.”

           “She had a little water, Miss, and Jenny fetched her some bread and tea. But she hardly touched it.”

           “And when she went from here”—I was proceeding, when Jenny's husband impatiently took me up.

           “When she went from here, she went right away Nor'ard by the high road. Ask on the road if you doubt me, and see if it warn't so. Now, there's the end. That's all about it.”

           I glanced at my companion; and finding that he had already risen and was ready to depart, thanked them for what they had told me, and took my leave. The woman looked full at Mr. Bucket as he went out, and he looked full at her.

           “Now, Miss Summerson,” he said to me, as we walked quickly away. “They've got her ladyship's watch among 'em. That's a positive fact.”

           “You saw it?” I exclaimed.

           “Just as good as saw it,” he returned. “Else why should he talk about his ‘twenty minutes past,’ and about his having no watch to tell the time by? Twenty minutes! He don't usually cut his time so fine as that. If he comes to half hours, it's as much as he does. Now, you see, either her ladyship gave him that watch, or he took it. I think she gave it him. Now, what should she give it him for? What should she give it him for?”

           He repeated this question to himself several times, as we hurried on; appearing to balance between a variety of answers that arose in his mind.

           “If time could be spared,” said Mr. Bucket—“which is the only thing that can't be spared in this case—I might get it out of that woman; but it's too doubtful a chance to trust to, under present circumstances. They are up to keeping a close eye upon her, and any fool knows that a poor creetur like her, beaten and kicked and scarred and bruised from head to foot, will stand by the husband that ill uses her, through thick and thin. There's something kept back. It's a pity but what we had seen the other woman.”

           I regretted it exceedingly; for she was very grateful, and I felt sure would have resisted no entreaty of mine.

           “It's possible, Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Bucket, pondering on it, “that her ladyship sent her up to London with some word for you, and it's possible that her husband got the watch to let her go. It don't



page 554 come out altogether so plain as to please me, but it's on the cards. Now I don't take kindly to laying out the money of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, on these Roughs, and I don't see my way to the usefulness of it at present. No! So far, our road, Miss Summerson, is for'ard—straight ahead—and keeping everything quiet!”

           We called at home once more, that I might send a hasty note to my guardian, and then we hurried back to where we had left the carriage. The horses were brought out as soon as we were seen coming, and we were on the road again in a few minutes.

           It had set in snowing at daybreak, and it now snowed hard. The air was so thick with the darkness of the day and the density of the fall, that we could see but a very little way in any direction. Although it was extremely cold, the snow was but partially frozen, and it churned—with a sound as if it were a beach of small shells—under the hoofs of the horses, into mire and water. They sometimes slipped and floundered for a mile together, and we were obliged to come to a standstill to rest them. One horse fell three times in this first stage, and trembled so, and was so shaken, that the driver had to dismount from his saddle and lead him at last.

           I could eat nothing, and could not sleep; and I grew so nervous under these delays, and the slow pace at which we travelled, that I had an unreasonable desire upon me to get out and walk. Yielding to my companion's better sense, however, I remained where I was. All this time, kept fresh by a certain enjoyment of the work in which he was engaged, he was up and down at every house we came to; addressing people whom he had never beheld before, as old acquaintances; running in to warm himself at every fire he saw; talking and drinking and shaking hands, at every bar and tap; friendly with every waggoner, wheelwright, blacksmith, and toll-taker; yet never seeming to lose time, and always mounting to the box again with his watchful, steady face, and his business-like “Get on, my lad!”

           When we were changing horses the next time, he came from the stable yard, with the wet snow encrusted upon him, and dropping off him—plashing and crashing through it to his wet knees, as he had been doing frequently since we left Saint Albans—and spoke to me at the carriage side.

           “Keep up your spirits. It's certainly true that she came on here, Miss Summerson. There's not a doubt of the dress by this time, and the dress has been seen here.”

           “Still on foot?” said I.

           “Still on foot. I think the gentleman you mentioned must be the point she's aiming at; and yet I don't like his living down in her own part of the country, neither.”

           “I know so little,” said I. “There may be some one else nearer here, of whom I never heard.”

           “That's true. But whatever you do, don't you fall a crying, my dear; and don't you worry yourself no more than you can help. Get on my lad!”

           The sleet fell all that day unceasingly, a thick mist came on early, and it never rose or lightened for a moment. Such roads I had never seen. I sometimes feared we had missed the way, and got into the



page 555 ploughed grounds, or the marshes. If I ever thought of the time I had been out, it presented itself as an indefinite period of great duration; and I seemed, in a strange way, never to have been free from the anxiety under which I then labored.

           As we advanced, I began to feel misgivings that my companion lost confidence. He was the same as before with all the roadside people, but he looked graver when he sat by himself on the box. I saw his finger uneasily going across and across his mouth, during the whole of one long weary stage. I overheard that he began to ask the drivers of coaches and other vehicles coming towards us, what passengers they had seen in other coaches and vehicles that were in advance. Their replies did not encourage him. He always gave me a re-assuring beck of his finger, and lift of his eyelid as he got upon the box again; but he seemed perplexed now, when he said, “Get on my lad!”

           At last, when we were changing, he told me that he had lost the track of the dress so long that he began to be surprised. It was nothing, he said, to lose such a track for one while, and to take it up for another while, and so on; but it had disappeared here in an unaccountable manner, and we had not come upon it since. This corroborated the apprehensions I had formed, when he began to look at direction-posts, and to leave the carriage at cross roads for a quarter of an hour at a time, while he explored them. But, I was not to be down-hearted, he told me, for it was as likely as not that the next stage might set us right again.

           The next stage, however, ended as that one ended; we had no new clue. There was a spacious inn here, solitary, but a comfortable substantial building, and as we drove in under a large gateway, before I knew it, where a landlady and her pretty daughters came to the carriage door, entreating me to alight and refresh myself while the horses were making ready, I thought it would be uncharitable to refuse. They took me up stairs to a warm room, and left me there.

           It was at the corner of the house, I remember, looking two ways. On one side, to a stable-yard open to a bye-road, where the ostlers were unharnessing the splashed and tired horses from the muddy carriage; and beyond that, to the bye-road itself, across which the sign was heavily swinging: on the other side, to a wood of dark pine trees. Their branches were encumbered with snow, and it silently dropped off in wet heaps while I stood at the window. Night was setting in, and its bleakness was enhanced by the contrast of the pictured fire glowing and gleaming in the window-pane. As I looked among the stems of the trees, and followed the discolored marks in the snow where the thaw was sinking into it and undermining it, I thought of the motherly face brightly set off by daughters that had just now welcomed me, and of my mother lying down in such a wood to die.

           I was frightened when I found them all about me, but I remembered that before I fainted I tried very hard not to do it; and that was some little comfort. They cushioned me up, on a large sofa by the fire; and then the comely landlady told me that I must travel no further to-night, but must go to bed. But, this put me into such a tremble lest they should detain me there, that she soon recalled her words, and compromised for a rest of half-an-hour.

           A good endearing creature she was. She, and her three fair girls all



page 556 so busy about me. I was to take hot soup and broiled fowl, while Mr. Bucket dried himself and dined elsewhere; but I could not do it, when a snug round table was presently spread by the fireside, though I was very unwilling to disappoint them. However, I could take some toast and some hot negus; and as I really enjoyed that refreshment, it made some recompense.

           Punctual to the time, at the half-hour's end the carriage came rumbling under the gateway, and they took me down, warmed, refreshed, comforted by kindness, and safe (I assured them) not to faint any more. After I had got in and had taken a grateful leave of them all, the youngest daughter—a blooming girl of nineteen, who was to be the first married, they had told me—got upon the carriage step, reached in, and kissed me. I have never seen her from that hour, but I think of her to this hour as my friend.

           The transparent windows with the fire and light, looking so bright and warm from the cold darkness out of doors, were soon gone, and again we were crushing and churning the loose snow. We went on with toil enough; but the dismal roads were not much worse than they had been, and the stage was only nine miles. My companion smoking on the box—I had thought at the last inn of begging him to do so, when I saw him standing at a great fire in a comfortable cloud of tobacco—was as vigilant as ever; and as quickly down and up again, when we came to any human abode or any human creature. He had lighted his little dark lantern, which seemed to be a favourite with him, for we had lamps to the carriage; and every now and then he turned it upon me, to see that I was doing well. There was a folding-window to the carriage-head, but I never closed it, for it seemed like shutting out hope.

           We came to the end of the stage, and still the lost trace was not recovered. I looked at him anxiously when we stopped to change; but I knew by his yet graver face, as he stood watching the ostlers, that he had heard nothing. Almost in an instant afterwards, as I leaned back in my seat, he looked in, with his lighted lantern in his hand, an excited and quite different man.

           “What is it?” said I, starting. “Is she here?”

           “No, no. Don't deceive yourself, my dear. Nobody's here. But I've got it!”

           The crystallised snow was in his eyelashes, in his hair, lying in ridges on his dress. He had to shake it from his face, and get his breath, before he spoke to me.

           “Now, Miss Summerson,” said he, beating his finger on the apron, “don't you be disappointed at what I'm a going to do. You know me. I'm Inspector Bucket, and you can trust me. We've come a long way; never mind. Four horses out there for the next stage up! Quick!”

           There was a commotion in the yard, and a man came running out of the stables to know “if he meant up or down?”

           “Up, I tell you! Up! An't it English? Up!”

           “Up?” said I, astonished. “To London! Are we going back?”

           “Miss Summerson,” he answered, “back. Straight back as a die. You know me. Don't be afraid. I'll follow the other, by G—.”

           “The other?” I repeated. “Who?”



page 557

           “You called her Jenny, didn't you? I'll follow her. Bring those two pair out here, for a crown a man. Wake up, some of you!”

           “You will not desert this lady we are in search of; you will not abandon her on such a night, and in such a state of mind as I know her to be in!” said I, in an agony, and grasping his hand.

           “You are right, my dear, I won't. But I'll follow the other. Look alive here with them horses. Send a man for'ard in the saddle to the next stage, and let him send another for'ard again, and order four on, up, right through. My darling, don't you be afraid!”

           These orders, and the way in which he ran about the yard, urging them, caused a general excitement that was scarcely less bewildering to me than the sudden change. But, in the height of the confusion, a mounted man galloped away to order the relays, and our horses were put to with great speed.

           “My dear,” said Mr. Bucket, jumping to his seat, and looking in again—“you'll excuse me if I'm too familiar—don't you fret and worry yourself no more than you can help. I say nothing else at present; but you know me, my dear; now, don't you?”

           I endeavoured to say that I knew he was far more capable than I of deciding what we ought to do; but was he sure that this was right? Could I not go forward by myself in search of—I grasped his hand again in my distress, and whispered it to him—of my own mother.

           “My dear,” he answered, “I know, I know, and would I put you wrong do you think? Inspector Bucket. Now you know me, don't you?”

           What could I say but yes!

           “Then you keep up as good a heart as you can, and you rely upon me for standing by you, no less than by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Now, are you right there?”

           “All right, sir!”

           “Off she goes, then. And get on my lads!”

           We were again upon the melancholy road by which we had come; tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow, as if they were torn up by a waterwheel.

CHAPTER LVIII.
A WINTRY DAY AND NIGHT.

           STILL impassive, as behoves its breeding, the Dedlock town house carries itself as usual towards the street of dismal grandeur. There are powdered heads from time to time in the little windows of the hall, looking out at the untaxed powder falling all day from the sky; and, in the same conservatory, there is peach blossom turning itself exotically to the great hall fire from the nipping weather out of doors. It is given out that my Lady has gone down into Lincolnshire, but is expected to return presently.

           Rumour, busy overmuch, however, will not go down into Lincolnshire.



page 558 It persists in flitting and chattering about town. It knows that that poor unfortunate man, Sir Leicester, has been sadly used. It hears, my dear child, all sorts of shocking things. It makes the world of five miles round, quite merry. Not to know that there is something wrong at the Dedlocks' is to augur yourself unknown. One of the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats, is already apprised of all the principal circumstances that will come out before the Lords, on Sir Leicester's application for a bill of divorce.

           At Blaze and Sparkle's the jewellers, and at Sheen and Gloss's the mercers, it is and will be for several hours the topic of the age, the feature of the century. The patronesses of those establishments, albeit so loftily inscrutable, being as nicely weighed and measured there as any other article of the stock-in-trade, are perfectly understood in this new fashion by the rawest hand behind the counter. “Our people, Mr. Jones,” said Blaze and Sparkle to the hand in question on engaging him, “our people, sir, are sheep—mere sheep. Where two or three marked ones go, all the rest follow. Keep those two or three in your eye, Mr. Jones, and you have the flock.” So, likewise, Sheen and Gloss to their Jones, in reference to knowing where to have the fashionable people, and how to bring what they (Sheen and Gloss) choose, into fashion. On similar unerring principles, Mr. Sladdery the librarian, and indeed the great farmer of gorgeous sheep, admits this very day, “Why yes, sir, there certainly are reports concerning Lady Dedlock, very current indeed among my high connection, sir. You see, my high connection must talk about something, sir; and it's only to get a subject into vogue with one or two ladies I could name, to make it go down with the whole. Just what I should have done with those ladies, sir, in the case of any novelty you had left to me to bring in, they have done of themselves in this case through knowing Lady Dedlock, and being perhaps a little innocently jealous of her too, sir. You'll find, sir, that this topic will be very popular among my high connection. If it had been a speculation, sir, it would have brought money. And when I say so, you may trust to my being right, sir; for I have made it my business to study my high connection, and to be able to wind it up like a clock, sir.”

           Thus rumour thrives in the capital, and will not go down into Lincolnshire. By half-past five, post meridian, Horse Guards' time, it has even elicited a new remark from the Honorable Mr. Stables, which bids fair to outshine the old one, on which he has so long rested his colloquial reputation. This sparkling sally is to the effect that although he always knew she was the best groomed woman in the stud, he had no idea she was a bolter. It is immensely received in turf-circles.

           At feasts and festivals also: in firmaments she has often graced, and among constellations she outshone but yesterday, she is still the prevalent subject. What is it? Who is it? When was it? Where was it? How was it? She is discussed by her dear friends with all the genteelest slang in vogue, with the last new word, the last new manner, the last new drawl, and the perfection of polite indifference. A remarkable feature of the theme is, that it is found to be so inspiring that several people come out upon it who never came out before—positively say things! William Buffy carries one of these smartnesses from the place where he dines, down to the House, where the Whip for his party hands it about with his snuffbox,



page 559 to keep men together who want to be off, with such effect that the Speaker (who has had it privately insinuated into his own ear under the corner of his wig) cries “Order at the bar!” three times without making an impression.

           And not the least amazing circumstance connected with her being vaguely the town talk, is, that people hovering on the confines of Mr. Sladdery's high connection, people who know nothing and ever did know nothing about her, think it essential to their reputation to pretend that she is their topic too; and to retail her at second-hand with the last new word and the last new manner, and the last new drawl, and the last new polite indifference, and all the rest of it, all at second-hand but considered equal to new, in inferior systems and to fainter stars. If there be any man of letters, art, or science, among these little dealers, how noble in him to support the feeble sisters on such majestic crutches!

           So goes the wintry day outside the Dedlock mansion. How within it?

           Sir Leicester lying in his bed can speak a little, though with difficulty and indistinctness. He is enjoined to silence and to rest, and they have given him some opiate to lull his pain; for his old enemy is very hard with him. He is never asleep, though sometimes he seem to fall into a dull waking doze. He caused his bedstead to be moved out nearer to the window, when he heard it was such inclement weather; and his head to be so adjusted, that he could see the driving snow and sleet. He watches it as it falls, throughout the whole wintry day.

           Upon the least noise in the house, which is kept hushed, his hand is at the pencil. The old housekeeper, sitting by him, knows what he would write, and whispers “No, he has not come back yet, Sir Leicester. It was late last night when he went. He has been but a little time gone yet.”

           He withdraws his hand, and falls to looking at the sleet and snow again, until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick and fast, that he is obliged to close his eyes for a minute on the giddy whirl of white flakes and icy blots.

           He began to look at them as soon as it was light. The day is not yet far spent, when he conceives it to be necessary that her rooms should be prepared for her. It is very cold and wet. Let there be good fires. Let them know that she is expected. Please see to it yourself. He writes to this purpose on his slate, and Mrs. Rouncewell with a heavy heart obeys.

           “For I dread, George,” the old lady says to her son, who waits below to keep her company when she has a little leisure; “I dread, my dear, that my Lady will never more set foot within these walls.”

           “That's a bad presentiment, mother.”

           “Nor yet within the walls of Chesney Wold, my dear.”

           “That's worse. But why mother!”

           “When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me—and I may say at me too—as if the step on the Ghost's Walk had almost walked her down.”

           “Come, come! You alarm yourself with old-story fears, mother.”

           “No I don't, my dear. No I don't. It's going on for sixty year that I have been in this family, and I never had any fears for it before. But it's breaking up, my dear; the great old Dedlock family is breaking up.”



page 560

           “I hope not, mother.”

           “I am thankful I have lived long enough to be with Sir Leicester in this illness and trouble, for I know I am not too old, nor too useless, to be a welcomer sight to him than anybody else in my place would be. But the step on the Ghost's Walk will walk my lady down, George; it has been many a day behind her, and now it will pass her, and go on.”

           “Well, mother dear, I say again, I hope not.”

           “Ah, so do I, George,” the old lady returns, shaking her head, and parting her folded hands. “But if my fears come true, and he has to know it, who will tell him!”

           “Are these her rooms?”

           “These are my lady's rooms, just as she left them.”

           “Why, now,” says the trooper, glancing round him, and speaking in a lower voice, “I begin to understand how you come to think as you do think, mother. Rooms get an awful look about them when they are fitted up, like these, for one person you are used to see in them, and that person is away under any shadow: let alone being God knows where.”

           He is not far out. As all partings foreshadow the great final one,—so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. My lady's state has a hollow look, thus gloomy and abandoned; and in the inner apartment, where Mr. Bucket last night made his secret perquisition, the traces of her dresses and her ornaments, even the mirrors accustomed to reflect them when they were a portion of herself, have a desolate and vacant air. Dark and cold as the wintry day is, it is darker and colder in these deserted chambers than in many a hut that will barely exclude the weather; and though the servants heap fires in the grates, and set the couches and the chairs within the warm glass screens that let their ruddy light shoot through to the furthest corners, there is a heavy cloud upon the rooms which no light will dispel.

           The old housekeeper and her son remain until the preparations are complete, and then she returns upstairs. Volumnia has taken Mrs. Rouncewell's place in the meantime: though pearl necklaces and rouge pots, however calculated to embellish Bath, are but indifferent comforts to the invalid under present circumstances. Volumnia not being supposed to know (and indeed not knowing) what is the matter, has found it a ticklish task to offer appropriate observations; and consequently has supplied their place with distracting smoothings of the bed-linen, elaborate locomotion on tiptoe, vigilant peeping at her kinsman's eyes, and one exasperating whisper to herself of “He is asleep.” In disproof of which superfluous remark, Sir Leicester has indignantly written on the slate “I am not.”

           Yielding, therefore, the chair at the bedside to the quaint old housekeeper, Volumnia sits at a table a little removed, sympathetically sighing. Sir Leicester watches the sleet and snow, and listens for the returning steps that he expects. In the ears of his old servant, looking as if she had stepped out of an old picture-frame to attend a summoned Dedlock to another world, the silence is fraught with echoes of her own words, “Who will tell him!”

           He has been under his valet's hands this morning, to be made presentable; and is as well got up as the circumstances will allow. He



page 561 is propped with pillows, his grey hair is brushed in its usual manner, his linen is arranged to a nicety, and he is wrapped in a responsible dressing gown. His eye-glass and his watch are ready to his hand. It is necessary—less to his own dignity now perhaps, than for her sake—that he should be seen as little disturbed, and as much himself, as may be. Women will talk, and Volumnia, though a Dedlock, is no exceptional case. He keeps her here, there is little doubt, to prevent her talking somewhere else. He is very ill; but he makes his present stand against distress of mind and body, most courageously.

           The fair Volumnia being one of those sprightly girls who cannot long continue silent without imminent peril of seizure by the dragon Boredom, soon indicates the approach of that monster with a series of undisguisable yawns. Finding it impossible to suppress those yawns by any other process than conversation, she compliments Mrs. Rouncewell on her son; declaring that he positively is one of the finest figures she ever saw, and as soldierly a looking person she should think, as what's his name, her favourite Life Guardsman—the man she doats on—the dearest of creatures—who was killed at Waterloo.

           Sir Leicester hears this tribute with so much surprise, and stares about him in such a confused way, that Mrs. Rouncewell feels it necessary to explain.

           “Miss Dedlock don't speak of my eldest son, Sir Leicester, but my youngest. I have found him. He has come home.”

           Sir Leicester breaks silence with a harsh cry. “George? Your son George come home, Mrs. Rouncewell?”

           The old housekeeper wipes her eyes. “Thank God. Yes, Sir Leicester.”

           Does this discovery of some one lost, this return of some one so long gone, come upon him as a strong confirmation of his hopes? Does he think, “Shall I not, with the aid I have, recal her safely after this; there being fewer hours in her case than there are years in his?”

           It is of no use entreating him; he is determined to speak now, and he does. In a thick crowd of sounds, but still intelligibly enough to be understood.

           “Why did you not tell me, Mrs. Rouncewell?”

           “It happened only yesterday, Sir Leicester, and I doubted your being well enough to be talked to of such things.”

           Besides, the giddy Volumnia now remembers with her little scream that nobody was to have known of his being Mrs. Rouncewell's son, and that she was not to have told. But Mrs. Rouncewell protests, with warmth enough to swell the stomacher, that of course she would have told Sir Leicester as soon as he got better.

           “Where is your son George, Mrs. Rouncewell?” asks Sir Leicester.

           Mrs. Rouncewell, not a little alarmed by his disregard of the doctor's injunctions, replies, in London.

           “Where in London?”

           Mrs. Rouncewell is constrained to admit that he is in the house.

           “Bring him here to my room. Bring him directly.”

           The old lady can do nothing but go in seach of him. Sir Leicester, with such power of movement as he has, arranges himself a little, to receive him. When he has done so, he looks out again at the falling



page 562 sleet and snow, and listens again for the returning steps. A quantity of straw has been tumbled down in the street to deaden the noises there, and she might be driven to the door perhaps without his hearing wheels.

           He is lying thus, apparently forgetful of his newer and minor surprise, when the housekeeper returns, accompanied by her trooper son. Mr. George approaches softly to the bedside, makes his bow, squares his chest, and stands, with his face flushed, very heartily ashamed of himself.

           “Good Heaven, and it is really George Rouncewell!” exclaims Sir Leicester. “Do you remember me, George?”

           The trooper needs to look at him, and to separate this sound from that sound, before he knows what he has said; but doing this, and being a little helped by his mother, he replies:

           “I must have a very bad memory, indeed, Sir Leicester, if I failed to remember you.”

           “When I look at you, George Rouncewell,” Sir Leicester observes with difficulty, “I see something of a boy at Chesney Wold—I remember well—very well.”

           He looks at the trooper until tears come into his eyes, and then he looks at the sleet and snow again.

           “I ask your pardon, Sir Leicester,” says the trooper, “but would you accept of my arms to raise you up. You would lie easier, Sir Leicester, if you would allow me to move you.”

           “If you please, George Rouncewell; if you will be so good.”

           The trooper takes him in his arms like a child, lightly raises him, and turns him with his face more towards the window. “Thank you. You have your mother's gentleness,” returns Sir Leicester, “and your own strength. Thank you.”

           He signs to him with his hand not to go away. George quietly remains at the bedside, waiting to be spoken to.

           “Why did you wish for secresy?” It takes Sir Leicester some time to ask this.

           “Truly I am not much to boast of, Sir Leicester, and I—I should still, Sir Leicester, if you was not so indisposed—which I hope you will not be long—I should still hope for the favor of being allowed to remain unknown in general. That involves explanations not very hard to be guessed at, not very well timed here, and not very creditable to myself. However opinions may differ on a variety of subjects, I should think it would be universally agreed, Sir Leicester, that I am not much to boast of.”

           “You have been a soldier,” observes Sir Leicester, “and a faithful one.”

           George makes his military bow. “As far as that goes, Sir Leicester, I have done my duty under discipline, and it was the least I could do.”

           “You find me,” says Sir Leicester, whose eyes are much attracted towards him “far from well, George Rouncewell.”

           “I am very sorry both to hear it and to see it, Sir Leicester.”

           “I am sure you are. No. In addition to my older malady, I have had a sudden and bad attack. Something that deadens—” making an endeavour to pass one hand down one side; “and confuses—” touching his lips.



page 563

           George, with a look of assent and sympathy, makes another bow. The different times when they were both young men (the trooper much the younger of the two), and looked at one another down at Chesney Wold, arise before them both, and soften both.

           Sir Leicester, evidently with a great determination to say, in his own manner, something that is on his mind before relapsing into silence, tries to raise himself among his pillows a little more. George, observant of the action, takes him in his arms again and places him as he desires to be. “Thank you, George. You are another self to me. You have often carried my spare gun at Chesney Wold, George. You are familiar to me in these strange circumstances, very familiar.” He has put Sir Leicester's sounder arm over his shoulder in lifting him up, and Sir Leicester is slow in drawing it away again, as he says these words.

           “I was about to add,” he presently goes on, “I was about to add, respecting this attack, that it was unfortunately simultaneous with a slight misunderstanding between my Lady and myself. I do not mean that there was any difference between us (for there has been none), but that there was a misunderstanding of certain circumstances important only to ourselves, which deprives me, for a little while, of my Lady's society. She has found it necessary to make a journey,—I trust will shortly return. Volumnia, do I make myself intelligible? The words are not quite under my command, in the manner of pronouncing them.”

           Volumnia understands him perfectly; and in truth he delivers himself with far greater plainness than could have been supposed possible a minute ago. The effort by which he does so, is written in the anxious and labouring expression of his face. Nothing but the strength of his purpose enables him to make it.

           “Therefore, Volumnia, I desire to say in your presence—and in the presence of my old retainer and friend, Mrs. Rouncewell, whose truth and fidelity no one can question—and in the presence of her son George, who comes back like a familiar recollection of my youth in the home of my ancestors at Chesney Wold—in case I should relapse, in case I should not recover, in case I should lose both my speech and the power of writing, though I hope for better things—”

           The old housekeeper weeping silently; Volumnia in the greatest agitation, with the freshest bloom on her cheeks; the trooper with his arms folded and his head a little bent, respectfully attentive.

           “Therefore I desire to say, and to call you all to witness—beginning, Volumnia, with yourself, most solemnly—that I am on unaltered terms with Lady Dedlock. That I assert no cause whatever of complaint against her. That I have ever had the strongest affection for her, and that I retain it undiminished. Say this to herself, and to every one. If you ever say less than this, you will be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me.”

           Volumnia tremblingly protests that she will observe his injunctions to the letter.

           “My Lady is too high in position, too handsome, too accomplished, too superior in most respects to the best of those by whom she is surrounded, not to have her enemies and traducers, I dare say. Let it be known to them, as I make it known to you, that being of sound mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I have made in her



page 564 favor. I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon her. I am on unaltered terms with her, and I recal—having the full power to do it if I were so disposed, as you see — no act I have done for her advantage and happiness.”

           His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has often had, something ludicrous in it; but at this time it is serious and affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honorable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.

           Overpowered by his exertions, he lays his head back on his pillows, and closes his eyes; for not more than a minute; when he again resumes his watching of the weather, and his attention to the muffled sounds. In the rendering of those little services, and in the manner of their acceptance, the trooper has become installed as necessary to him. Nothing has been said, but it is quite understood. He falls a step or two backward to be out of sight, and mounts guard a little behind his mother's chair.

           The day is now beginning to decline. The mist, and the sleet into which the snow has all resolved itself, are darker, and the blaze begins to tell more vividly upon the room walls and furniture. The gloom augments; the bright gas springs up in the streets; and the pertinacious oil lamps which yet hold their ground there, with their source of life half frozen and half thawed, twinkle gaspingly, like fiery fish out of water—as they are. The world, which has been rumbling over the straw and pulling at the bell “to inquire,” begins to go home, begins to dress, to dine, to discuss its dear friend, with all the last new modes, as already mentioned.

           Now, does Sir Leicester become worse; restless, uneasy, and in great pain. Volumnia lighting a candle (with a predestined aptitude for doing something objectionable) is bidden to put it out again, for it is not yet dark enough. Yet it is very dark too; as dark as it will be all night. By and by she tries again. No! Put it out. It is not dark enough yet.

           His old housekeeper is the first to understand that he is striving to uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late.

           “Dear Sir Leicester, my honored master,” she softly whispers, “I must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of begging and praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness, watching and waiting, and dragging through the time. Let me draw the curtains and light the candles, and make things more comfortable about you. The church-clocks will strike the hours just the same, Sir Leicester, and the night will pass away just the same. My Lady will come back, just the same.”

           “I know it, Mrs. Rouncewell, but I am weak—and he has been so long gone.”

           “Not so very long, Sir Leicester. Not twenty-four hours yet.”

           “But that is a long time. O it is a long time!”



page 565

           He says it with a groan that wrings her heart.

           She knows that this is not a period for bringing the rough light upon him; she thinks his tears too sacred to be seen, even by her. Therefore, she sits in the darkness for a while, without a word; then gently begins to move about; now stirring the fire, now standing at the dark window looking out. Finally he tells her, with recovered self-command, “As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for being confessed. It is getting late, and they are not come. Light the room!” When it is lighted, and the weather shut out, it is only left to him to listen.

           But they find that, however dejected and ill he is, he brightens when a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms, and being sure that everything is ready to receive her. Poor pretence as it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up hope within him.

           Midnight comes, and with it the same blank. The carriages in the streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement. Upon this wintry night it is so still, that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness. If any distant sound be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble light in that, and all is heavier than before.

           The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room. As the night lags tardily on—or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between two and three o'clock—they find a restless craving on him to know more about the weather, now he cannot see it. Hence George, patrolling regularly every half hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about him, and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights; the sleet still falling, and even the stone footways lying ankle-deep in icy sludge.

           Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the staircase—the second turning past the end of the carving and gilding—a cousinly room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester, banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard, planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black tea—is a prey to horrors of many kinds. Not last nor least among them, possibly, is a horror of what may befal her little income, in the event, as she expresses it, “of anything happening” to Sir Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only, and that the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any baronet in the known world.

           An effect of these horrors is, that Volumnia finds she cannot go to bed in her own room, or sit by the fire in her own room, but must come forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and her fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a ghost: particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious, prepared for one who still does not return. Solitude under such circumstances being not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by her maid, who, impressed from her own bed for that purpose, extremely cold, very sleepy, and generally an injured



page 566 maid as condemned by circumstances to take office with a cousin, when she had resolved to be maid to nothing less than ten thousand a year, has not a sweet expression of countenance.

           The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the course of his patrolling, is an assurance of protection and company, both to mistress and maid, which renders them very acceptable in the small hours of the night. Whenever he is heard advancing, they both make some little decorative preparation to receive him; at other times, they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion, and dialogues, not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock, sitting with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into the fire when rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid.

           “How is Sir Leicester, now, Mr. George?” inquires Volumnia, adjusting her cowl over her head.

           “Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss. He is very low and ill, and he even wanders a little sometimes.”

           “Has he asked for me?” inquires Volumnia tenderly.

           “Why no, I can't say he has, miss. Not within my hearing, that is to say.”

           “This is a truly sad time, Mr. George.”

           “It is indeed, miss. Hadn't you better go to bed?”

           “You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock,” quoth the maid, sharply.

           But Volumnia answers No! No! She may be asked for, she may be wanted at a moment's notice. She never should forgive herself “if anything was to happen” and she was not on the spot. She declines to enter on the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to be there, and not in her own room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester's); but staunchly declares that on the spot she will remain. Volumnia further makes a merit of not having “closed an eye”—as if she had twenty or thirty—though it is hard to reconcile this statement with her having most indisputably opened two within five minutes.

           But when it comes to four o'clock, and still the same blank, Volumnia's constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to strengthen; for she now considers that it is her duty to be ready for the morrow, when much may be expected of her; that, in fact, howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it may be required of her, as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot. So, when the trooper reappears with his “Hadn't you better go to bed, miss?” and when the maid protests, more sharply than before, “You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock!” she meekly rises and says, “Do with me what you think best!”

           Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to the door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly thinks it best to hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony. Accordingly, these steps are taken; and now the trooper, in his rounds, has the house to himself.

           There is no improvement in the weather. From the portico, from the eaves, from the parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar, drips the thawed snow. It has crept, as if for shelter, into the lintels of the great door—under it, into the corners of the windows, into every chink and crevice of retreat, and there wastes and dies. It is falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight; even through the skylight,



page 567 and drip, drip, drip, with the regularity of the Ghost's Walk, on the stone floor below.

           The trooper, his old recollections awakened by the solitary grandeur of a great house—no novelty to him once at Chesney Wold—goes up the stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his light at arm's length. Thinking of his varied fortunes within the last few weeks, and of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods of his life so strangely brought together across the wide intermediate space; thinking of the murdered man whose image is fresh in his mind; thinking of the lady who has disappeared from these very rooms, and the tokens of whose recent presence are all here; thinking of the master of the house up-stairs, and of the foreboding “Who will tell him!” he looks here and looks there, and reflects how he might see something now, which it would tax his boldness to walk up to, lay his hand upon, and prove to be a fancy. But it is all blank; blank as the darkness above and below, while he goes up the great staircase again; blank as the oppressive silence.

           “All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?”

           “Quite orderly and right, Sir Leicester.”

           “No word of any kind?”

           The trooper shakes his head.

           “No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?”

           But he knows there is no such hope as that, and lays his head down without looking for an answer.

           Very familiar to him, as he said himself some hours ago, George Rouncewell well lifts him into easier positions through the long remainder of the blank wintry night; and, equally familiar with his unexpressed wish, extinguishes the light, and undraws the curtains at the first late break of day. The day comes like a phantom. Cold, colorless, and vague, it sends a warning streak before it of a deathlike hue, as if it cried out, “Look what I am bringing you, who watch there! Who will tell him!”

CHAPTER LIX.
ESTHER'S NARRATIVE.

           IT was three o'clock in the morning when the houses outside London did at last begin to exclude the country, and to close us in with streets. We had made our way along roads in a far worse condition than when we had traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the thaw having lasted ever since; but the energy of my companion had never slackened. It had only been, as I thought, of less assistance than the horses in getting us on, and it had often aided them. They had stopped exhausted halfway up hills, they had been driven through streams of turbulent water, they had slipped down and become entangled with the harness; but he and his little lantern had been always ready, and when the mishap was set right, I had never heard any variation in his cool “Get on, my lads!”



page 568

           The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our journey back, I could not account for. Never wavering, he never even stopped to make an inquiry until we were within a few miles of London. A very few words, here and there, were then enough for him; and thus we came, at between three and four o'clock in the morning, into Islington.

           I will not dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected all this time, that we were leaving my mother farther and farther behind every minute. I think I had some strong hope that he must be right, and could not fail to have a satisfactory object in following this woman; but I tormented myself with questioning it, and discussing it, during the whole journey. What was to ensue when we found her, and what could compensate us for this loss of time, were questions also that I could not possibly dismiss; my mind was quite tortured by long dwelling on such reflections, when we stopped.

           We stopped in a high-street, where there was a coach-stand. My companion paid our two drivers, who were as completely covered with splashes as if they had been dragged along the roads like the carriage itself; and giving them some brief direction where to take it, lifted me out of it, and into a hackney-coach he had chosen from the rest.

           “Why, my dear!” he said, as he did this. “How wet you are!”

           I had not been conscious of it. But the melted snow had found its way into the carriage; and I had got out two or three times when a fallen horse was plunging and had to be got up; and the wet had penetrated my dress. I assured him it was no matter; but the driver, who knew him, would not be dissuaded by me from running down the street to his stable, whence he brought an armful of clean dry straw. They shook it out and strewed it well about me, and I found it warm and comfortable.

           “Now, my dear,” said Mr. Bucket, with his head in at the window after I was shut up. “We're a going to mark this person down. It may take a little time, but you don't mind that. You're pretty sure that I've got a motive. Ain't you?”

           I little thought what it was—little thought in how short a time I should understand it better; but I assured him that I had confidence in him.

           “So you may have, my dear,” he returned. “And I tell you what! If you only repose half as much confidence in me as I repose in you, after what I've experienced of you, that'll do. Lord! you're no trouble at all. I never see a young woman in any station of society—and I've seen many elevated ones too—conduct herself like you have conducted yourself, since you was called out of your bed. You're a pattern, you know, that's what you are,” said Mr. Bucket, warmly; “you're a pattern.”

           I told him I was very glad, as indeed I was, to have been no hindrance to him; and that I hoped I should be none now.

           “My dear,” he returned, “when a young lady is as mild as she's game, and as game as she's mild, that's all I ask, and more than I expect. She then becomes a Queen, and that's about what you are yourself.”

           With these encouraging words—they really were encouraging to me under those lonely and anxious circumstances—he got upon the box, and we once more drove away. Where we drove, I neither knew then, nor



page 569 have ever known since; but we appeared to seek out the narrowest and worst streets in London. Whenever I saw him directing the driver, I was prepared for our descending into a deeper complication of such streets, and we never failed to do so.

           Sometimes we emerged upon a wider thoroughfare, or came to a larger building than the generality, well lighted. Then we stopped at offices like those we had visited when we began our journey, and I saw him in consultation with others. Sometimes he would get down by an archway, or at a street corner, and mysteriously shew the light of his little lantern. This would attract similar lights from various dark quarters, like so many insects, and a fresh consultation would be held. By degrees we appeared to contract our search within narrower and easier limits. Single police officers on duty could now tell Mr. Bucket what he wanted to know, and point to him where to go. At last we stopped for a rather long conversation between him and one of these men, which I supposed to be satisfactory from his manner of nodding from time to time. When it was finished he came to me, looking very busy and very attentive.

           “Now, Miss Summerson,” he said to me, “you won't be alarmed whatever comes off, I know. It's not necessary for me to give you any further caution, than to tell you that we have marked this person down, and that you may be of use to me before I know it myself. I don't like to ask such a thing, my dear, but would you walk a little way?”

           Of course I got out directly, and took his arm.

           “It ain't so easy to keep your feet,” said Mr. Bucket; “but take time.”

           Although I looked about me confusedly and hurriedly, as we crossed a street, I thought I knew the place. “Are we in Holborn?” I asked him.

           “Yes,” said Mr. Bucket. “Do you know this turning?”

           “It looks like Chancery Lane.”

           “And was christened so, my dear,” said Mr. Bucket.

           We turned down it; and as we went, shuffling through the sleet, I heard the clocks strike half-past five. We passed on in silence, and as quickly as we could with such a foothold; when some one coming towards us on the narrow pavement, wrapped in a cloak, stopped and stood aside to give me room. In the same moment I heard an exclamation of wonder, and my own name, from Mr. Woodcourt. I knew his voice very well.

           It was so unexpected, and so—I don't know what to call it, whether pleasant or painful—to come upon it after my feverish wandering journey, and in the midst of the night, that I could not keep back the tears from my eyes. It was like hearing his voice in a strange country.

           “My dear Miss Summerson, that you should be out at this hour, and in such weather!”

           He had heard from my guardian of my having been called away on some uncommon business, and said so to dispense with any explanation. I told him that we had but just left a coach, and were going—but then I was obliged to look at my companion.

           “Why, you see, Mr. Woodcourt;” he had caught the name from me; “we are a going at present into the next street.—Inspector Bucket.”

           Mr. Woodcourt, disregarding my remonstrances, had hurriedly taken



page 570 off his cloak, and was putting it about me. “That's a good move, too,” said Mr. Bucket, assisting, “a very good move.”

           “May I go with you?” said Mr. Woodcourt. I don't know whether to me or my companion.

           “Why, lord!” exclaimed Mr. Bucket, taking the answer on himself. “Of course you may.”

           It was all said in a moment, and they took me between them, wrapped in the cloak.

           “I have just left Richard,” said Mr. Woodcourt. “I have been sitting with him since ten o'clock last night.”

           “O dear me, he is ill!”

           “No, no, believe me; not ill, but not quite well. He was depressed and faint—you know he gets so worried and so worn sometimes—and Ada sent to me of course; and when I came home I found her note, and came straight here. Well! Richard revived so much after a little while, and Ada was so happy, and so convinced of its being my doing, though God knows I had little enough to do with it, that I remained with him until he had been fast asleep some hours. As fast asleep as she is now, I hope!”

           His friendly and familiar way of speaking of them, his unaffected devotion to them, the grateful confidence with which I knew he had inspired my darling, and the comfort he was to her; could I separate all this from his promise to me? How thankless I must have been if it had not recalled the words he said to me, when he was so moved by the change in my appearance: “I will accept him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!”

           We now turned into another narrow street. “Mr. Woodcourt,” said Mr. Bucket, who had eyed him closely as we came along, “our business takes us to a law-stationer's here; a certain Mr. Snagsby's. What, you know him, do you?” He was so quick that he saw it in an instant.

           “Yes, I know a little of him, and have called upon him at this place.”

           “Indeed, sir?” said Mr. Bucket. “Then will you be so good as to let me leave Miss Summerson with you for a moment, while I go and have half a word with him?”

           The last police officer with whom he had conferred was standing silently behind us. I was not aware of it until he struck in, on my saying I heard some one crying.

           “Don't be alarmed, miss,” he returned. “It's Snagsby's servant.”

           “Why, you see,” said Mr. Bucket, “the girl's subject to fits, and has 'em bad upon her to-night. A most contrairy circumstance it is, for I want certain information out of that girl, and she must be brought to reason somehow.”

           “At all events, they wouldn't be up yet, if it wasn't for her, Mr. Bucket,” said the other man. “She's been at it pretty well all night, sir.”

           “Well, that's true,” he returned. “My light's burnt out. Show your's a moment.”

           All this passed in a whisper, a door or two from the house in which I could faintly hear crying and moaning. In the little round of light



page 571 produced for the purpose, Mr. Bucket went up to the door and knocked. The door was opened, after he had knocked twice; and he went in, leaving us standing in the street.

           “Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Woodcourt; “if, without obtruding myself on your confidence, I may remain near you, pray let me do so.”

           “You are truly kind,” I answered. “I need wish to keep no secret of my own from you; if I keep any, it is another's.”

           “I quite understand. Trust me, I will remain near you only so long as I can fully respect it.”

           “I trust implicitly to you,” I said. “I know and deeply feel how sacredly you keep your promise.”

           After a short time the little round of light shone out again, and Mr. Bucket advanced towards us in it with his earnest face. “Please to come in, Miss Summerson,” he said, “and sit down by the fire. Mr. Woodcourt, from information I have received I understand you are a medical man. Would you look to this girl and see if anything can be done to bring her round. She has a letter somewhere that I particularly want. It's not in her box, and I think it must be about her; but she is so twisted and clenched up, that she is difficult to handle without hurting.”

           We all three went into the house together; although it was cold and raw, it smelt close too from being up all night. In the passage, behind the door, stood a scared, sorrowful-looking little man in a grey coat, who seemed to have a naturally polite manner and spoke meekly.

           “Down-stairs, if you please, Mr. Bucket,” said he. “The lady will excuse the front kitchen; we use it as our workaday sitting-room. The back is Guster's bed-room, and in it she's a carrying on, poor thing, to a frightful extent!”

           We went down-stairs, followed by Mr. Snagsby, as I soon found the little man to be. In the front kitchen, sitting by the fire, was Mrs. Snagsby, with very red eyes and a very severe expression of face.

           “My little woman,” said Mr. Snagsby, entering behind us, “to wave—not to put too fine a point upon it, my dear—hostilities, for one single moment, in the course of this prolonged night, here is Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady.”

           She looked very much astonished, as she had reason for doing, and looked particularly hard at me.

           “My little woman,” said Mr. Snagsby, sitting down in the remotest corner by the door, as if he were taking a liberty, “it is not unlikely that you may inquire of me why Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady, call upon us in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, at the present hour. I don't know. I have not the least idea. If I was to be informed, I should despair of understanding, and I'd rather not be told.”

           He appeared so miserable, sitting with his head upon his hand, and I appeared so unwelcome, that I was going to offer an apology, when Mr. Bucket took the matter on himself.

           “Now, Mr. Snagsby,” said he, “the best thing you can do, is to go along with Mr. Woodcourt to look after your Guster—”

           “My Guster, Mr. Bucket!” cried Mr. Snagsby. “Go on, sir, go on. I shall be charged with that next.”

           “And to hold the candle,” pursued Mr. Bucket without correcting



page 572 himself, “or hold her, or make yourself useful in any way you're asked. Which there's not a man alive more ready to do; for you're a man of urbanity and suavity, you know, and you've got the sort of heart that can feel for another. (Mr. Woodcourt, would you be so good as see to her, and if you can get that letter from her, to let me have it as soon as ever you can?)”

           As they went out, Mr. Bucket made me sit down in a corner by the fire, and take off my wet shoes, which he turned up to dry upon the fender; talking all the time.

           “Don't you be at all put out, miss, by the want of a hospitable look from Mrs. Snagsby there, because she's under a mistake altogether. She'll find that out, sooner than will be agreeable to a lady of her generally correct manner of forming her thoughts, because I'm a going to explain it to her.” Here, standing on the hearth with his wet hat and shawls in his hand, himself a pile of wet, he turned to Mrs. Snagsby. “Now, the first thing that I say to you, as a married woman possessing what you may call charms, you know—‘Believe me, if all those endearing, and cetrer’—you're well acquainted with the song, because it's in vain for you to tell me that you and good society are strangers—charms—attractions, mind you, that ought to give you confidence in yourself—is, that you've done it.”

           Mrs. Snagsby looked rather alarmed, relented a little, and faltered, what did Mr. Bucket mean?

           “What does Mr. Bucket mean?” he repeated; and I saw, by his face, that all the time he talked he was listening for the discovery of the letter—to my own great agitation; for I knew then how important it must be; “I'll tell you what he means, ma'am. Go and see Othello acted. That's the tragedy for you.”

           Mrs. Snagsby consciously asked why.

           “Why?” said Mr. Bucket. “Because you'll come to that, if you don't look out. Why, at the very moment while I speak, I know what your mind's not wholly free from, respecting this young lady. But shall I tell you who this young lady is? Now, come, you're what I call an intellectual woman—with your soul too large for your body, if you come to that, and chafing it—and you know me, and you recollect where you saw me last, and what was talked of in that circle. Don't you? Yes! Very well. This young lady is that young lady.”

           Mrs. Snagsby appeared to understand the reference better than I did at the time.

           “And Toughey—him as you call Jo—was mixed up in the same business, and no other; and the law-writer that you know of, was mixed up in the same business, and no other; and your husband, with no more knowledge of it than your great grandfather, was mixed up (by Mr. Tulkinghorn deceased, his best customer) in the same business, and no other; and the whole bileing of people was mixed up in the same business, and no other. And yet a married woman, possessing your attractions, shuts her eyes (and sparklers too), and goes and runs her delicate-formed head against a wall. Why, I am ashamed of you! (I expected Mr. Woodcourt might have got it, by this time.)”

           Mrs. Snagsby shook her head, and put her handkerchief to her eyes.

           “Is that all?” said Mr. Bucket, excitedly. “No. See what happens.



page 573 Another person mixed up in that business and no other, a person in a wretched state, comes here to-night, and is seen a speaking to your maid-servant; and between her and your maid-servant there passes a paper that I would give a hundred pound for, down. What do you do? You hide and you watch 'em, and you pounce upon that maid-servant—knowing what she's subject to, and what a little thing will bring 'em on—in that surprising manner, and with that severity, that, by the Lord, she goes off and keeps off, when a Life may be hanging upon that girl's words!”

           He so thoroughly meant what he said now, that I involuntarily clasped my hands, and felt the room turning away from me. But it stopped. Mr. Woodcourt came in, put a paper into his hand, and went away again.

           “Now Mrs. Snagsby, the only amends you can make,” said Mr. Bucket, rapidly glancing at it, “is to let me speak a word to this young lady in private here. And if you know of any help that you can give to that gentleman in the next kitchen there, or can think of any one thing that's likelier than another to bring the girl round, do your swiftest and best!” In an instant she was gone, and he had shut the door. “Now, my dear, you're steady, and quite sure of yourself?”

           “Quite,” said I.

           “Whose writing is that?”

           It was my mother's. A pencil-writing, on a crushed and torn piece of paper, blotted with wet. Folded roughly like a letter, and directed to me, at my guardian's.

           “You know the hand,” he said; “and if you are firm enough to read it to me, do! But be particular to a word.”

           It had been written in portions, at different times. I read what follows:

           “I came to the cottage with two objects. First, to see the dear one, if I could, once more—but only to see her—not to speak to her, or let her know that I was near. The other object, to elude pursuit, and to be lost. Do not blame the mother for her share. The assistance that she rendered me, she rendered on my strongest assurance that it was for the dear one's good. You remember her dead child. The men's consent I bought, but her help was freely given.”

           “ ‘I came.’ That was written,” said my companion, “when she rested there. It bears out what I made of it. I was right.”

           The next was written at another time.

           “I have wandered a long distance, and for many hours, and I know that I must soon die. These streets! I have no purpose but to die. When I left, I had a worse; but I am saved from adding that guilt to the rest. Cold, wet, and fatigue, are sufficient causes for my being found dead; but I shall die of others, though I suffer from these. It was right that all that had sustained me should give way at once, and that I should die of terror and my conscience.”

           “Take courage,” said Mr. Bucket. “There's only a few words more.”

           Those, too, were written at another time. To all appearance, almost in the dark.

           “I have done all I could to be lost. I shall be soon forgotten so, and shall disgrace him least. I have nothing about me by which I can be recognised. This paper I part with now. The place where I shall lie down, if I can yet get so far, has been often in my mind. Farewell. Forgive.”



page 574

           Mr. Bucket, supporting me with his arm, lowered me gently into my chair. “Cheer up! Don't think me hard with you, my dear, but, as soon as ever you feel equal to it, get your shoes on and be ready.”

           I did as he required; but I was left there a long time, praying for my unhappy mother. They were all occupied with the poor girl, and I heard Mr. Woodcourt directing them, and speaking to her often. At length he came in with Mr. Bucket; and said that as it was important to address her gently, he thought it best that I should ask her for whatever information we desired to obtain. There was no doubt that she could now reply to questions, if she were soothed, and not alarmed. The questions, Mr. Bucket said, were, how she came by the letter, what passed between her and the person who gave her the letter, and where the person went. Holding my mind as steadily as I could to these points, I went into the next room with them. Mr. Woodcourt would have remained outside, but at my solicitation went in with us.

           The poor girl was sitting on the floor where they had laid her down. They stood around her, though at a little distance, that she might have air. She was not pretty, and looked weak and poor; but she had a plaintive and a good face, though it was still a little wild. I kneeled on the ground beside her, and put her poor head on my shoulder; whereupon she drew her arm round my neck, and burst into tears.

           “My poor girl,” said I, laying my face against her forehead; for indeed I was crying too, and trembling; “it seems cruel to trouble you now, but more depends on our knowing something about this letter, than I could tell you in an hour.”

           She began piteously declaring that she didn't mean any harm, she didn't mean any harm, Mrs. Snagsby!

           “We are all sure of that,” said I. “But pray tell me how you got it.”

           “Yes, dear lady, I will, and tell you true. I'll tell true, indeed, Mrs. Snagsby.”

           “I am sure of that,” said I. “And how was it?”

           “I had been out on an errand, dear lady—long after it was dark—quite late; and when I came home, I found a common-looking person, all wet and muddy, looking up at our house. When she saw me coming in at the door, she called me back, and said did I live here? and I said yes, and she said she knew only one or two places about here, but had lost her way, and couldn't find them. O what shall I do, what shall I do! They won't believe me! She didn't say any harm to me, and I didn't say any harm to her, indeed, Mrs. Snagsby!”

           It was necessary for her mistress to comfort her: which she did, I must say, with a good deal of contrition: before she could be got beyond this.

           “She could not find those places,” said I.

           “No!” cried the girl, shaking her head. “No! Couldn't find them. And she was so faint, and lame, and miserable, O so wretched! that if you had seen her, Mr. Snagsby, you'd have given her half-a-crown, I know!”

           “Well, Guster, my girl,” said he, at first not knowing what to say. “I hope I should.”

           “And yet she was so well spoken,” said the girl, looking at me with wide-open eyes, “that it made a person's heart bleed. And



page 575 so she said to me, did I know the way to the burying-ground? And I asked her which burying-ground? And she said, the poor burying-ground. And so I told her I had been a poor child myself, and it was according to parishes. But she said she meant a poor burying-ground not very far from here, where there was an archway, and a step, and an iron gate.”

           As I watched her face, and soothed her to go on, I saw that Mr. Bucket received this with a look which I could not separate from one of alarm.

           “O dear, dear!” cried the girl, pressing her hair back with her hands, “what shall I do, what shall I do! She meant the burying-ground where the man was buried that took the sleeping-stuff—that you came home and told us of, Mr. Snagsby—that frightened me so, Mrs. Snagsby. O I am frightened again. Hold me!”

           “You are so much better now,” said I. “Pray, pray tell me more.”

           “Yes I will, yes I will! But don't be angry with me, that's a dear lady, because I have been so ill.”

           Angry with her, poor soul!

           “There! Now I will, now I will. So she said, could I tell her how to find it, and I said yes, and I told her; and she looked at me with eyes like almost as if she was blind, and herself all waving back. And so she took out the letter, and showed it me, and said if she was to put that in the post-office, it would be rubbed out and not minded and never sent; and would I take it from her, and send it, and the messenger would be paid at the house? And so I said yes, if it was no harm, and she said no—no harm. And so I took it from her, and she said she had nothing to give me, and I said I was poor myself and consequently wanted nothing. And so she said God bless you! and went.”

           “And did she go—?”

           “Yes,” cried the girl, anticipating the inquiry, “yes! she went the way I had shown her. Then I came in, and Mrs. Snagsby came behind me from somewhere, and laid hold of me, and I was frightened.”

           Mr. Woodcourt took her kindly from me. Mr. Bucket wrapped me up, and immediately we were in the street. Mr. Woodcourt hesitated, but I said, “Don't leave me now!” and Mr. Bucket added, “You'll be better with us, we may want you; don't lose time!”

           I have the most confused impressions of that walk. I recollect that it was neither night nor day; that morning was dawning, but the streetlamps were not yet put out; that the sleet was still falling, and that all the ways were deep with it. I recollect a few chilled people passing in the streets. I recollect the wet housetops, the clogged and bursting gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of blackened ice and snow over which we passed, the narrowness of the courts by which we went. At the same time I remember, that the poor girl seemed to be yet telling her story audibly and plainly in my hearing; that I could feel her resting on my arm; that the stained house fronts put on human shapes and looked at me; that great water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head, or in the air; and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real.

           At last we stood under a dark and miserable covered way, where one lamp was burning over an iron gate, and where the morning faintly struggled



page 576 in. The gate was closed. Beyond it, was a burial-ground—a dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring; but where I could dimly see heaps of dishonored graves and stones, hemmed in by filthy houses, with a few dull lights in their windows, and on whose walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease. On the step at the gate, drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed and splashed down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a woman lying—Jenny, the mother of the dead child.

           I ran forward, but they stopped me, and Mr. Woodcourt entreated me, with the greatest earnestness, even with tears, before I went up to the figure to listen for an instant to what Mr. Bucket said. I did so, as I thought. I did so, as I am sure.

           “Miss Summerson, you'll understand me, if you think a moment. They changed clothes at the cottage.”

           They changed clothes at the cottage. I could repeat the words in my mind, and I knew what they meant of themselves; but I attached no meaning to them in any other connection.

           “And one returned,” said Mr. Bucket, “and one went on. And the one that went on, only went on a certain way agreed upon to deceive, and then turned across country, and went home. Think a moment!”

           I could repeat this in my mind too, but I had not the least idea what it meant. I saw before me, lying on the step, the mother of the dead child. She lay there, with one arm creeping round a bar of the iron gate, and seeming to embrace it. She lay there, who had so lately spoken to my mother. She lay there, a distressed, unsheltered, senseless creature. She who had brought my mother's letter, who could give me the only clue to where my mother was; she, who was to guide us to rescue and save her whom we had sought so far, who had come to this condition by some means connected with my mother that I could not follow, and might be passing beyond our reach and help at that moment; she lay there, and they stopped me! I saw, but did not comprehend, the solemn and compassionate look in Mr. Woodcourt's face. I saw, but did not comprehend, his touching the other on the breast to keep him back. I saw him stand uncovered in the bitter air, with a reverence for something. But my understanding for all this was gone.

           I even heard it said between them:

           “Shall she go?”

           “She had better go. Her hands should be the first to touch her. They have a higher right than ours.”

           I passed on to the gate, and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head, put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my mother, cold and dead.

          


TREASURES OF THE DESERT.

THESE TREASURES CONSIST OF THE FOLLOWING INVALUABLE
REMEDIES.
ALI AHMED'S ANTIBILIOUS PILL.
ALI AHMED'S COUGH PILL.
ALI AHMED'S HEALING PLAISTER.
THE PILLS ARE SILVERED IN THE ORIENTAL STYLE, WHEREBY
ALL DISAGREEABLE TASTE IS REMOVED.

In Boxes, 1s. 1½d., 2s. 9d., 4s. 6d. & 10s. 6d.
CENTRAL DEPOT.
Nos. 9 & 10, St. Bride's Avenue, Fleet Street,
LONDON.
AND SOLD BY EVERY RESPECTABLE MEDICINE VENDOR AND
CHEMIST IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
EYRE AND WILLIAMS, PRINTERS. 91, FLEET STREET.




page 2

ALI AHMED'S ANTIBILIOUS PILL.

           This is an invaluable medicine. It is entirely composed of vegetable extracts, and will be found a mild and effectual remedy in all cases of Indigestion, Habitual Costiveness, and all Complaints of the Liver, for which mercurials are so generally and prejudicially administered. It will also be found efficacious in the removal of all disagreeable sensations arising from the disarrangement of the digestive organs such as Palpitation of the Heart, Heartburn, Sickness, Swimming in the Head, Flatulency, Spasms, and Nervous Debility of every kind.

           In Boxes, at 1s.d., 2s. 9d., 4s. 6d., and 10s. 6d.

           From the numerous Testimonials to their beneficial effects we have selected the following:—

           Gentlemen,—For many years I have suffered much from giddiness of the head, attended with a violent headache sufficient to lay me up from my business for several days at a time; but fortunately I was recommended by a Chemist, a neighbour of mine, to try your Antibilious Pills, from which I found an immediate relief, as I have ever done when I have had the slightest return. I feel a pleasure in mentioning this for the benefit of any one who may be similarly afflicted. Yours obediently,

THOMAS WALLER.

Leeds, April 19th.
Leamington, April 12th.

           Sir,—In justice to your Ali Ahmed's Antibilious Pills, I feel desirous to inform you, that I have been a great sufferer from various bilious attacks, which, I must confess, I believe arose from my free mode of living; but having made a trial of your Pills, I found so much relief after taking them, that I now always keep them by me, and invariably take two or three after being in company, which secures me from the accustomed punishment of next morning.

Your obedient servant,

R. LOCKLEY.

19, Shaftesbury-street, Kensington New Town.

           Sir,—I have much pleasure in giving my opinion with regard to the efficacy of your valuable Antibilious Pills. Previous to their introduction into my family, I continually had a medical man in my house, which, I am happy to say, is not the case now, and I believe chiefly owing to the use of your Pills; therefore I have much pleasure in recommending them to the use of other families. Yours, etc.,

SARAH KELLETT.
January 10th.
Leigh, January 14th.

           Gentlemen,—I have much pleasure in according my high estimation of Ali Ahmed's Antibilious Pills, having found them a most safe and efficacious medicine.

           To the Proprietors of Ali Ahmed's Treasures. R. HUMPHREY.

Knaresborough, February 19th.

           Dear Sir,—Having suffered from indigestion for a great number of years, and tried all remedies without any permanent benefit, I was induced, through a friend, to try your Digestive and Antibilious Pills, and am happy to bear testimony to the very great improvement which they have made in my general health. Your obliged servant,
JANE MERRYWEATHER.

           P.S. Please send me two boxes at 2s. 9d., for which I enclose postage-stamps. You are at liberty to make what use you please of this.



page 3

ALI AHMED'S COUGH PILL.

           An infallible remedy for Coughs, Asthma, Incipient Consumption, and every other Disease of the Lungs. This medicine never causes that nausea invariably attendant upon Cough Medicines where Ipecacuanha or some baneful drugs are used, and is equally valuable from its simplicity as for its efficacy.

           In Boxes, at 1s.d., 2s. 9d., 4s. 6d., and 10s. 6d.

           Ali Ahmed's Cough Pill has afforded immediate relief and ultimate cure in cases where every other means have failed, as the following Testimonials from well-known individuals will fully certify:—

           Sir,—Having heard of your Pills for Asthma, and being afflicted upwards of eight years, after being attended by the faculty to no purpose, and being exposed greatly to weather and much injury from my employment, induced me to try your Pills, which, after taking a few boxes, completely restored me to my usual health.

Your humble servant,

CLEMM. MARTIN.

Strood, near Rochester, November 19th.

           I, Thomas Newman, certify that I was troubled with an incessant Cough, attended with laborious respiration and great debility, which rendered me unable to leave my bed, as the least motion excited my cough. I was attended by four of the faculty, but found no benefit; but having taken a few boxes of your Pills, I became so well as to resume my usual avocation.

           Frindsbury. (Signed) THOMAS NEWMAN.

Banwill Mills, near Bristol, Somersetshire.

           Sir,—My daughter was taken ill last December with a violent cold, attended with much cough and great difficulty of breathing, excessive heat, and great pain in the chest. I gave her two pills at night, two in the morning, and repeated two the next night, and one the following day, when she quite recovered. This proves the necessity of having recourse to medicine immediately; as, if the Pills had not been given, these alarming symptoms must have been greatly aggravated, and medical assistance must have been called in.

Yours obediently,

JOHN NICHOLLS.

April 2nd.

Case of a Distressing Cough Cured.

8, Arthur-street Gray's Inn.

           Sir,—It is with feelings of extreme pleasure I have to inform you of the perfect cure effected on me by using Ali Ahmed's Cough Pill. I can with certainty speak of its qualities, as, in the early stages of my cough, it was the opinion of my medical men that I was consumptive, it being hereditary; but chance having thrown your Pills in my way during the winter, and having taken a few of them, I found myself so relieved as to induce me to continue till I was completely cured, and I am now free from my annual annoyance, viz., coughs and oppression. Under these circumstances, should you intend giving the public the benefit of your valuable Pills, any way in which I can be of service you may command.

Your obliged servant,

O. I. KELLY.

To the Proprietors of Ali Ahmed's Treasures.
4, Ivy Lane, Hoxton.

           Gentlemen,—I should consider myself neglecting a duty to the public at large were I to neglect acknowledging the—I may say, miraculous—effects of your Cough Pills. My father has been troubled with a severe cough for upwards of forty years' standing, and has been under several physicians of note, beside trying every known remedy but without success; during the last winter he was, however, induced to try your Pills, and after taking two boxes, and applying the Plaister to the chest, to his great surprise found that the cough had entirely left him.

To the Proprietors of Ali Ahmed's Treasures of the Desert.

W. BOULTON.

           The Proprietors invite attention to the brilliancy of the silver which both the Antibilious and Cough Pills retain, which will afford a convincing proof that no mercurial preparation is present in their composition; as it is well known that it would immediately destroy every particle of that brilliant appearance. The silvering has also the effect of rendering them entirely tasteless—thus overcoming the natural repugnance which so many have to take medicines under the form of a pill.



page 4

ALI AHMED'S HEALING PLAISTER.

           This is a most invaluable Plaister. Its healing powers exceed any remedy that has hitherto been brought into use, and will prove the readiest and most effectual Cure for Ulcers, Cancers, Boils, Contused Wounds, Varicose Veins, Gangrene, Whitlows, Chilblains, etc.

           The Proprietors particularly invite the attention of any who may be afflicted with Varicose Veins, and confidently assure them that they will find instant relief and a certain cure for that very distressing malady.

           In Boxes, at 1s.d., 2s. 9d.

           Charitable persons who may require these remedies for the relief of the distressed poor, may obtain them at a reduced price.

           Attention is called to the following cases, where this Plaister has proved invaluable to the parties who have made use of it; and also to the Testimonials as to its merits given by the first Surgeons of the day:—

           I hereby certify that I have used your Plaister in various ways, and find it a very good application.

Greenwich.

WILLIAM J. WATTSFORD, Surgeon.

           This is to certify that I have tried your Plaister in a case of severe Whitlow, and in another case of contusion and laceration of the finger; in both cases I can certainly declare the effects of the said Plaister were surprising, bringing on a healthy action in the case of whitlow, which before its application appeared very unhealthy, and spreading to an alarming extent. It had a very beneficial effect on the lacerated finger, preventing sloughing, and materially adding to the healing process.

Blackheath-Hill, November 11th.

GEORGE E. F. HATCH, Surgeon.

           Also another from the same eminent Surgeon:—

           This is to certify that I have been continuing the use of your Plaister in indolent Ulcers, some of which have resisted every other means, but after the application of this Plaister, soon healed. I also find it very useful in repressing over-acting granulations, and in my opinion consider it a very useful Plaister for general purposes.

Blackheath-Hill.

GEORGE E. F. HATCH, Surgeon.

           Sir,—With respect to your Plaister, as far as I have had the opportunity of observing its effects, I can indeed bear testimony to its good effects when applied to Ulcers—the granulations being rapid and healthy, particularly when its use is accompanied by the Antibilious Pill; in fact, I am so far pleased with it, that I should feel obliged if you would send me half-a-dozen or a dozen yards, as I should much like to have some always by me.

I beg to remain, Sir, your obedient servant,

F. DIXON, Chemist and Druggist.

Ash, near Wingham, Kent.

           Dear Sir,—I feel much pleasure in adding my testimony to the very great utility of your Plaister, having tried it in numerous instances, with far greater effect than could have been produced by the usual applications—in two cases of incised wounds, where from neglect the edges had retracted to a considerable extent—in two cases of chronic ulcerations—and in one ease of rheumatism of the knee-joint. It will be found of particular benefit in the treatment of habitual ulcer in the lower extremities, by using it in preference to the adhesive strapping; also in the local vitiated ulcer, it will reduce the inflammatory symptoms and produce a healthy disposition far sooner than poultices.

I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully,

JAS. M. BENNETT.

Deptford-Bridge June 24th.

Extraordinary Cure of Ulcers in the Leg.

           Messrs. CLARKE and CRIPPS have great pleasure in informing the Proprietors of Ali Ahmed's Medicines, that they have had a case of Ulcerated Leg of long standing cured by the application of Ali Ahmed's Healing Plaister in the short space of ten days, the patient at the same time taking the Antibilious Pills, two at bed-time every other night. They are also happy to say that two cases of Varicose Veins, under treatment, are progressing favourably.

Notting-Hill April 23rd, 1853.


page 5

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

           “Amongst the numerous valuable discoveries of the present day, many of which have employed the life-time of their talented inventors, we must class in the first rank those which have a tendency to alleviate the sufferings of humanity. To render any one of them universally popular, simplicity ought, we think, to be the leading characteristic; and in no case, to our knowledge, has this been so well carried out as in the remedies just introduced to the public, by some philanthropic individual, under the title of Ali Ahmed's ‘Treasures of the Desert,’ which are composed entirely of simple vegetable compounds brought from the East. They do not profess to be one universal remedy for all diseases, but are of three kinds, viz., the Anti-bilious Pill, the Cough Pill, and the Healing Plaister.”—Morning Advertiser, April 23rd, 1853.

           “The celebrated Pills and Plaister of Ali Ahmed seem to be the general subject of conversation at this time. The Pills are of two kinds, the Antibilious and the Cough Pill. The efficacy of the former in cases of Liver Complaints, Constipation, Swimming in the Head, Palpitation of the Heart, etc.—and of the latter in cases of incipient Consumption, Asthma, and other diseases of the lungs—is now fully established. The Plaister, in cases of Ulcer, Cancer, Contused Wounds, Gangrene, Varicose Veins, Whitlows, Boils, Chilblains, etc., has received the highest testimonials as to its efficacy from the medical men of London and its vicinity.”—Britannia, March 5th, 1853.

           “EASTERN ORIGIN OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.—This well-known fact has just received another striking illustration by the introduction into England of the popular remedies of the celebrated Ali Ahmed of Aleppo; so efficacious have they proved, and so great has been the demand, that the proprietors have been compelled to disappoint hundreds of applicants for the same. These spirited gentlemen have also issued a clever pamphlet, treating on the subject of medical science in the East, with an original memoir of Ali Ahmed, which will prove of great interest to all our readers.”—County Herald, March 12th, 1853.

           “According to the latest accounts from London, the proprietors of the celebrated Pills and Plaister of Ali Ahmed, the Abernethy of Aleppo, have been completely deluged with applications for their celebrated remedies. The Antibilious Pill in cases of Liver Complaints, the Cough Pill, and the Healing Plaister (each composed of simple vegetable compounds), seem to have entirely superseded all the pernicious quackeries of the present day.”—Portsmouth Times, April 2nd, 1853.

           “Ali Ahmed's celebrated Pills and Plaister, although but recently introduced to this country, have acquired a lasting reputation—the Pills for their efficacy in curing all disorders of the Liver and Lungs, and the Plaister for cure of Ulcers, Varicose Veins, Contused Wounds, etc.”—Hampshire Telegraph, March 26th, 1853.

Directions for the Use of Ali Ahmed's Treasures.

ALI AHMED'S ANTIBILIOUS PILL.

           INDIGESTION.—One or two Pills an hour before dinner every day.

           PALPITATION.—Two or three Pills at bed-time.

           CONSTIPATION.—Three or four Pills when required.

           FLATULENCY.—Two or three Pills at bed-time.

           ERUPTION ON THE SKIN.—One Pill for times per day.

           SLEEPLESSNESS AND TREMOR.—Two Pills one hour before bed-time.

           ACIDITY AND HEARTBURN.—One, two, or three Pills when troublesome,

           BILE.—Two, three, or four Pills occasionally, when required.

           HEADACHE.—Two Pills occasionally.

ALI AHMED'S COUGH PILL.

           CONSUMPTION.—One Pill three times per day, and a dose of Cod Liver Oil, with Ali Ahmed's Plaister on the chest.

           ASTHMA.—Two or three Pills night and morning.

           COUGH.—Two Pills three times per day, with Ali Ahmed's Plaister on the chest.

           HOOPING COUGH.—Half a Pill while the Cough is troublesome.

ALI AHMED'S HEALING PLAISTER.

           For the cure of Ulcers, Cancers, Contused Wounds, Gangrene, Varicose Veins,
Whitlows, Boils, Chilblains, etc.

           In applying the Plaister, be careful not to warm it more than is sufficient to cause it to adhere well, and do not remove it oftener than is absolutely necessary; allowing one end to lap well over the other, at the same time protecting the wound with a good margin of the Plaister.



page 6

LONDON AGENTS.

  • Abrahams, London-road, Twickenham.
  • Ambrose and Son, 94, Whitechapel road.
  • Armitage, Church-street, Greenwich.
  • Arnold, Cambridge-terrace, Kingsland.
  • Atkins, High-street, Deptford
  • Ayling and Mason, Upper Marylebone-street.
  • Bainbridge and Pound, Leather-lane.
  • Balls, Hamilton place, Deptford.
  • Banes, 28, Blackman street.
  • Bancks, 5, Lamb's Conduit street.
  • Banks and Co., High street, Camden Town
  • Barnett, L H, Three Colts street, Limehouse.
  • Batley, Triangle, Kennington.
  • Baxter, 198, High Holborn.
  • Bellingham, Tachbrook street, Belgrave road
  • Bilton, Three Colts street, Limehouse.
  • Bird, A., 22, High street, Kensington.
  • Bird, A R., Queen's row, Pimlico.
  • Bockett, Shaftesbury place, Pimlico.
  • Botwright and Kemp, Upper street, Islington.
  • Bridge and Co., 270, Regent s Circus.
  • Bristow, 69, Edgware road.
  • Brooks, 168, Fleet street.
  • Brotherton, Clyde-terrace, Caledonian-road.
  • Brown, Admiral terrace, Vauxhall Bridge road.
  • Brunton, Waterloo place, Limehouse.
  • Burden, Duke street, Grosvenor square.
  • Burfield, 180, Strand.
  • Burnham, 9, Broadway, Hammersmith.
  • Bush, Dulwich.
  • Butler and Harding, 4, Cheapside.
  • Canning 173, Sloane street.
  • Carey, 4, Bridge street, Vauxhall.
  • Chanington, Hammersmith.
  • Charsley, Commercial place, Brixton.
  • Chase, 14, Holborn.
  • Clarke, Mare street, Hackney.
  • Clarke and Cripps, 8, Union terrace, Notting hill.
  • Cobb, Frederick place, Hampstead road.
  • Constance, 37, Leadenhall street.
  • Cook, Hoxton Old Town.
  • Corder, Edward s terrace, Kensington.
  • Cox, Rye-lane, Peckham.
  • Cross, Mare street, Hackney.
  • Crutcher, 226, High street, Shadwell.
  • Cullen, Beckford row, Walworth.
  • Dakin, High street, Poplar.
  • Davies, Claremont place, North Brixton.
  • Davies, 27, Aldgate, Within.
  • Davies, 2, Mile End road.
  • Delatouche, 147, Oxford street.
  • Dietrichsen and Hannay, 63, Oxford-street.
  • Dispensary, 16, Blackfriars road
  • Dobinson, 5, Brunswick-street, Blackwall.
  • Downes, Norwood.
  • Dyke, Northumberland place, Commercial road, East.
  • Eddy, Crown street, Finsbury.
  • Edwards, Great Russell street, Bermondsey.
  • Ellam, Old Dorset place, Clapham road.
  • Ellis, H., 140, High street, Poplar.
  • Ellis, S. W., 36, Lower Marsh, Lambeth.
  • Fells, Stockwell.
  • Foot and Co., Addington place, Camberwell.
  • France, 12, High street, Camden Town.
  • French, J., 18, Norton Folgate.
  • French, W. A., 309, High Holborn.
  • Gadd, Harleyford road, Vauxhall.
  • Gifford, 104, Strand.
  • Gigner, Sydney place, King's road, Chelsea.
  • Griffiths, Clerkenwell Green.
  • Griffiths, J., Grove road, Mile End road.
  • Goss, 130. High street, Shoreditch.
  • Groves, Broadway, Hammersmith.
  • Harris, 33. Beech street, Barbican.
  • Hart, 185, Church street, Shoreditch.
  • Hatfall, High street, Deptford.
  • Hawes, 406, Strand.
  • Haycock, Kingsland road.
  • Hazel, 7, Crawley street.
  • Hewitt, Wells street, Wellclose square.
  • Hodgkinson, H., Newland terrace, Kensington.
  • Holiday and Co., Snow hill.
  • Hooper, King William street, London Bridge.
  • Hucklebridge, Upper Ebury street, Pimlico.
  • Hughes, 171, Hoxton Old Town.
  • Humpage, Judd street Brunswick square.
  • Hunter, Ferdinand street, Haverstock hill.
  • Johnson, J., Upper street, Islington.
  • Johnson, W., High street, Southwark.
  • Jordan, T., 9. High street, Newington Butts.
  • Kay and Goff, Prospect place, Kingsland.
  • Kay, Upton place, Commercial road.
  • Kernot, G., Chrisp street, Poplar.
  • Killick, Park terrace, Hammersmith.
  • Kingsford, High street, Kensington.
  • Kirby, Hampton terrace, Hampstead road.
  • Lamacraft, Bentley place, Kingsland.
  • Large, 2, Holt place, Hoxton.
  • Leech, Lower Mitcham.
  • Lloyd, 68, Fleet street.
  • Lowe and Hornblower, 47, Blackfriars road.
  • Lucas, 63, Cheapside.
  • Luff, 85, Goswell street.
  • Martin, High street, Bow.
  • Martin, T., Upper Clapton.
  • Marshall, T., Clayland place, Clapham road.
  • Massingham, Green street, Bethnal green.
  • Masters, Nelson street, Greenwich.
  • Matland, Nassau place, Commercial road.
  • Matthews, Guildford street, Bussell square.
  • Merryweather, 72, Euston square.
  • Morris, 29, High street, Kensington.
  • Morton, Broadway, Stratford.
  • Niblett, Church street, Hackney.
  • Odling, Shards place, Peckham.
  • Owen, Stucley terrace, Camden Town.
  • Parkes and Son, Hare street, Woolwich.
  • Parkes, Henry, Greensend, Woolwich.
  • Peacock, High street, Poplar.
  • Pearce, Nelson street, Greenwich.
  • Penrose, Amwell street, Pentonville.
  • Pepper, 237, Tottenham Court Road.
  • Peppin Princes street, Leicester square.
  • Phillipps, Bagnigge Wells road.
  • Pinder, Oakley terrace, Old Kent road.
  • Prichard, 65, Charing oross.
  • Prior, 3, Ann's place, Upper Sydenham.
  • Prout, 229, Strand.
  • Readman Mortimer street, Cavendish square.
  • Richardson, G., 12. Norland place, Notting hill.
  • Richardson, J. 30, Blshopsgate street Without.
  • Richardson, J., High street, Marylebone.
  • Rogers, 36, High street, Woolwich.
  • Roper, C. R., Church street, Hackney.
  • Rowe, John street, St. John's Wood.
  • Sanger, 153, Oxford street.
  • Scatliff and Co., Haverstock hill.
  • Sleeman. Southwark Bridge road.
  • Smith, Thornton street, Horsleydown.
  • Spurgin, Churton street, Vauxhall Bridge road.
  • Steer, Church street, Hackney.
  • Stirling, Forest hill.
  • Stirling, High street, Whitechapel.
  • Strange, Queen s row, Pimlico.
  • Stuart, C., Powis street, Pimlico.
  • Tassell, Broadway Deptford.
  • Tickler, High street, Bow.
  • Todman, 37, Red Lion street, Holborn.
  • Tompkins, Bridge street, Vauxhall.
  • Tozer, 90, High street, Croydon.
  • Wallis, Vassal road Brixton.
  • Warrington, Artillery place, Woolwich.
  • Watkins, J., Broadway, Stratford.
  • Watkins, T. W., King street, Hammersmith.
  • Watts, 17, Strand.
  • Watts, High street, Hampstead.
  • White C. T., Patriot row, Bethnal green.
  • White and Son, Park terrace, Regent s park.
  • White, F., Gloucester terrace, Commercial road.
  • Wilkinson, 114, Lambeth walk.
  • Willmott, St. Margaret's hill, Borough.
  • Windus, 235, Strand.
  • Wooldridge, Bath place, New road.
  • Worger, 29, Chiswell street, Finsbury place.
  • Young, 120, Crawford street, Portman square.


page 7

COUNTRY AGENTS.

           Central Depôt, 9 and 10, St. Bride's Avenue, Fleet St., London.

          

Abingdon Goldsmith
Basingstoke Blunden
Bath Keene
Beaconsfield Allnutt and Co
Besborough Thorpe
Beverley Pipes
Bideford Dingle
  Hogg
Birmingham Snape
Billericay Ketcher
Bolton Scowcroft
Boston Morton
Braintree Downing
Brentford Farrant
Bristol Ponting
  Selfe
Brighton Barton
  Berry
  Blacklock
  Colby
  Cox
  Foster
  Gardner
  Gwatkin
  Kemp and Co.
  Noakes
  Paine
  Savage
  White
  Willmott
Bromsgrove Johnson
Brompton, Kent Death
  Attwood
Bury St. Edmunds Thompson
Cambridge Smith
Carlisle Thurnam
Chatham Crofts
  Foster
  Tribe
  Watts
Chelmsford Johnson
Cheltenham Gibbon
Chepstow Taylor
Chichester Phillipson
Cirencester Mason
Colchester Manthorpe
Coventry Hinds
  Rollason
Cranbrook H[one letter illegible: Did not print ] selar
Croydon Crafton
  Hunt
  Mears
  Tozer
Darlington Pease, Son and Co.
Dartford Edwards
  Furmiston
Devizes Randle
Devonport Colman
  Wood
Diss Abbott
  Cupiss
Dorchester Davies
  Froud
Dover Elkington
Durham Monks
Dudley Gare
Easingwold Skaife
Edinburgh Baildon
  Raines
Eton Wyborn
  Drake Lewis
Exeter Cooper
  Evans and Hodgson
  Hibberd
  Passmore
  Pates
Gateshead Colman
Gravesend Briveau
  Butcher
  Edwards
  Rolfe
  Spencer
Gosport Glanfield
  Hunter
Hastings Amoore
Henley-in-Arden Hannett
Henley-on-Thames Kinch
Herne Bay Taylor
Hereford Hook
High Wycombe Butler
  Hall
Honiton Creak
Ingatestone Stuart
Kendal Atkinson
Kidderminster Gummery
Lancaster Clark
Leamington Harper
Leeds Heaton
Leicester Cooper and Pettifor
  Cooper
Lincoln Tomlinson
  Woodcock
Liverpool Jones
  Kirkus
  Rawle
Maidenhead Shackle
  Higgs and Walker
Maidstone Blott
  Cave
  Howard
  Rogers
Manchester Brown
  Mather
  Mottershead
Margate Guested
Newcastle Daglish and Ismay
Newport Jones
Norwich Cooke
Nuneaton Baraclough
Oxford Edwards
  Jones
  Purdue
  Slatter
  Withers
Peterborough Loal
Plaistow Phillips
Plymouth Balkwill
  Herron
  Jeffrey
Portsea Allnutt
  Gilbert
Portsmouth Dreweatt
  Persons
Preston Raw
Ramsgate Fisher
Rayleigh Pissey
Reading Hayward
  Hodson
  Poulton
  Short
  Timothy
  Withers
Richmond Thompson
  Clarke
  Harris
  Hopwood
Rochdale Leech
Rochester Buck
  King
  Tatum and Knight
Romford Ma[three letters illegible: did not print ] sley
Royston Matthews
Salisbury Atkins
  Brown
  Farrant
  Robson
  Roe
  Squarey and Reid
Sevenoaks Vincer
Sheffield Whitaker
Sherborne Hill
Spalding Gilbert
  Watkinson
Southampton Bartlett
  Belton
  Chipperfield
  Dowman
  Dutton



page 8

          

COUNTY AGENTS —continued.

Southampton Hall
  Manby
  Mordaunt
  Pearce
  Randall
Southsea Bentham
  Rastrick
Stamford Johnson
  Newcomb
Stowmarket Simpson
Stroud Bucknell
Sunderland Ritson
  Thompson
Tavistock Edgcumbe and Stannes
Thame Thorpe
Teignmouth Gould
Tenterden Bolton
  Smith
Thetford Cronshey
Uxbridge Chambers
  Chave
Wallingford Bartholomew
Wigan Kellett
Wisbeach Leech
  Walker
Wivelscombe Wood
Woodbridge Gall
York Bolton and Blanshard.
  Marsh

TO EMIGRANTS.

           At the present moment, when so many are leaving their native land for Australia and other distant climes, thereby exposing their health to the dangers inseparable from change of climate, the attention of such persons is earnestly drawn to the beneficial effects which they will experience from the occasional use of these Medicines whilst on their passage to those distant shores. They will also find them the best preventive and most efficacious relief to that most distressing accompaniment of a sea-voyage—Sea-Sickness. All persons, particularly the fathers of families, will feel the importance of providing themselves with such simple and effectual remedies as these Treasures before departing for a land where medical assistance is rarely if ever to be procured.

CAPTAINS AND MATES

           Will find them most useful as a general medicine whilst on ship-board; and their being silvered will prove a perfect security for their retaining their virtues during a voyage of any lengthened period, as it often happens, from the loss of their power, Drugs are rendered perfectly useless for the purpose intended.

           ALI AHMED'S ANTIBILIOUS PILL.

           ALI AHMED'S COUGH PILL.

           ALI AHMED'S HEALING PLAISTER.

           TO BE HAD AT THE CENTRAL DEPÔT,
Nos. 9 & 10, St. Bride's Avenue, Fleet Street, London,
And of every respectable Medicine Vendor in the United Kingdom,
in boxes 1s.d., 2s. 9d., 4s. 6d., and 10s. 6d.

           The Pills are silvered in the Oriental style, to destroy all disagreeable taste.