The Holly Tree
Three Branches

by Charles Dickens
(1812-1870)

First Branch: Myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the year. The
Post-office packet for the United States was to depart from Liverpool,
weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month, and I had the
intervening time on my hands. I had taken this into consideration, and
had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot (which I need not name)
on the farther borders of Yorkshire. It was endeared to me by my having
first seen Angela at a farmhouse in that place, and my melancholy was
gratified by the idea of taking a wintry leave of it before my
expatriation. I ought to explain, that, to avoid being sought out before
my resolution should have been rendered irrevocable by being carried
into full effect, I had written to Angela overnight, in my usual manner,
lamenting that urgent business, of which she should know all particulars
by-and-by-took me unexpectedly away from her for a week or ten days.
There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place there were
stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common with some
other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody dreaded as a
very serious penance then. I had secured the box-seat on the fastest of
these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get into a cab with my
portmanteau, so to make the best of my way to the Peacock at Islington,
where I was to join this coach. But when one of our Temple watchmen, who
carried my portmanteau into Fleet Street for me, told me about the huge
blocks of ice that had for some days past been floating in the river,
having closed up in the night, and made a walk from the Temple Gardens
over to the Surrey shore, I began to ask myself the question, whether
the box-seat would not be likely to put a sudden and a frosty end to my
unhappiness. I was heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so
far gone as to wish to be frozen to death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This reminiscence brought the Welsh Inns in general before me; with the
women in their round hats, and the harpers with their white beards
(venerable, but humbugs, I am afraid), playing outside the door while I
took my dinner. The transition was natural to the Highland Inns, with
the oatmeal bannocks, the honey, the venison steaks, the trout from the
loch, the whisky, and perhaps (having the materials so temptingly at
hand) the Athol brose. Once was I coming south from the Scottish
Highlands in hot haste, hoping to change quickly at the station at the
bottom of a certain wild historical glen, when these eyes did with
mortification see the landlord come out with a telescope and sweep the
whole prospect for the horses; which horses were away picking up their
own living, and did not heave in sight under four hours. Having thought
of the loch-trout, I was taken by quick association to the Anglers' Inns
of England (I have assisted at innumerable feats of angling by lying in
the bottom of th e boat, whole summer days, doing nothing with the
greatest perseverance; which I have generally found to be as effectual
towards the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost science),
and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated bedrooms of those
inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and the green ait, and the
church-spire, and the country bridge; and to the pearless Emma with the
bright eyes and the pretty smile, who waited, bless her! with a natural
grace that would have converted Blue-Beard. Casting my eyes upon my
Holly-Tree fire, I next discerned among the glowing coals the pictures
of a score or more of those wonderful English posting-inns which we are
all so sorry to have lost, which were so large and so comfortable, and
which were such monuments of British submission to rapacity and
extortion. He who would see these houses pining away, let him walk from
Basingstoke, or even Windsor, to London, by way of Hounslow, and
moralise on their perishing remains ; the stables crumbling to dust;
unsettled labourers and wanderers bivouacking in the outhouses; grass
growing in the yards; the rooms, where erst so many hundred beds of down
were made up, let off to Irish lodgers at eighteenpence a week; a little
ill-looking beer-shop shrinking in the tap of former days, burning
coach-house gates for firewood, having one of its two windows bunged up,
as if it had received punishment in a fight with the Railroad; a low,
bandy-legged, brick-making bulldog standing in the doorway. What could I
next see in my fire so naturally as the new railway-house of these times
near the dismal country station; with nothing particular on draught but
cold air and damp, nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new
mortar, and no business doing beyond a conceited affectation of luggage
in the hall? Then I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment
of four pieces up one hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs, the
privilege of ringing the bell all day long with out influencing
anybody's mind or body but your own, and the not-too-much-fordinner,
considering the price. Next to the provincial Inns of France, with the
great church-tower rising above the courtyard, the horse-bells jingling
merrily up and down the street beyond, and the clocks of all
descriptions in all the rooms, which are never right, unless taken at
the precise minute when, by getting exactly twelve hours too fast or too
slow, they unintentionally become so. Away I went, next, to the lesser
roadside Inns of Italy; where all the dirty clothes in the house (not in
wear) are always lying in your anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a
raisin pudding of your face in summer, and the cold bites it blue in
winter; where you get what you can, and forget what you can't: where I
should again like to be boiling my tea in a pocket-handkerchief
dumpling, for want of a teapot. So to the old palace Inns and old
monastery Inns, in towns and cities of the same bright country; with
their massive qu adrangular staircases, whence you may look from among
clustering pillars high into the blue vault of heaven; with their
stately banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with their labyrinths of
ghostly bedchambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous streets that have
no appearance of reality or possibility. So to the close little Inns of
the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants, and their peculiar
smell of never letting in the air. So to the immense fantastic Inns of
Venice, with the cry of the gondolier below, as he skims the corner; the
grip of the watery odours on one particular little bit of the bridge of
your nose (which is never released while you stay there); and the great
bell of St. Mark's Cathedral tolling midnight. Next I put up for a
minute at the restless Inns upon the Rhine, where your going to bed, no
matter at what hour, appears to be the tocsin for everybody else's
getting up; and where, in the table-d'hote room at the end of the long
table (with several Towers o f Babel on it at the other end, all made of
white plates), one knot of stoutish men, entirely dressed in jewels and
dirt, and having nothing else upon them, will remain all night, clinking
glasses, and singing about the river that flows, and the grape that
grows, and Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine woman that smiles and hi
drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my brother, and all the rest of
it. I departed thence, as a matter of course, to other German Inns,
where all the eatables are soddened down to the same flavour, and where
the mind is disturbed by the apparition of hot puddings, and boiled
cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully unexpected periods of the repast.
After a draught of sparkling beer from a foaming glass jug, and a glance
of recognition through the windows of the student beer-houses at
Heidelberg and elsewhere, I put out to sea for the Inns of America, with
their four hundred beds apiece, and their eight or nine hundred ladies
and gentlemen at dinner every day. Ag ain I stood in the bar-rooms
thereof, taking my evening cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail. Again I
listened to my friend the General,--whom I had known for five minutes,
in the course of which period he had made me intimate for life with two
Majors, who again had made me intimate for life with three Colonels, who
again had made me brother to twenty-two civilians,--again, I say, I
listened to my friend the General, leisurely expounding the resources of
the establishment, as to gentlemen's morning-room, sir; ladies'
morning-room, sir; gentlemen's evening-room, sir; ladies' evening-room,
sir; ladies' and gentlemen's evening reuniting-room, sir; music-room,
sir; reading-room, sir; over four hundred sleepingrooms, sir; and the
entire planned and finited within twelve calendar months from the first
clearing off of the old encumbrances on the plot, at a cost of five
hundred thousand dollars, sir. Again I found, as to my individual way of
thinking, that the greater, the more gorgeous, and the more dollarous
the establishment was, the less desirable it was. Nevertheless, again I
drank my cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail, in all good-will, to my
friend the General, and my friends the Majors, Colonels, and civilians
all; full well knowing that, whatever little motes my beamy eyes may
have descried in theirs, they belong to a kind, generous, large-hearted,
and great people.

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

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