THE HOLLY TREE INN
AND
A CHRISTMAS TREE
THE WILLIAMS EDITION OF |
A CHRISTMAS CAROL and THE
CRICKET ON THE HEARTH
and MR. PICKWICK'S CHRISTMAS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR AND LINE BY
GEORGE ALFRED WILLIAMS
CXDMP ANION VOLUMES TO "THE HOLLY TREE INN"
$2.00 EACH
THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO.
PUBLISHERS _ - - _ NEW YORK
THE HOL'
A CHRI
A- WRITTEN
By e
WITH iir
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THE F
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THE HOLLY TREE INN
AND
A CHRISTMAS TREE
AS WRITTEN IN THE CHRISTMAS STORIES
By CHARLES DICKENS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR AND LINE BY
GEORGE ALFRED WILLIAMS
NEW YORK
THE BAKER ^ TAYLOR COMPANY
Copyright, 1907, by The Baker & Taylor Company
Published, October, 1907
t^'^A
LIBRARY of CONGRESS
Two Cooy R-icelved
NOV n 1907
Cepyrleht Entry
cuss A ' XXC. N^.
COPY E
It
01
•iiS't^
The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
...^....^ . jl
Jntrotiuction
SINCE his first writing of Christmas in
Pickwick, Charles Dickens has forever be-
come associated with that season. No other
writer ever succeeded better than he in covering
the earth with a mantle of snow. To the hearth
he brought the good-will and wholesome cheer of
the Christmas Tide, and his Christmas books and
short stories, alike, are forceful expressions of our
own feelings because, full of life and spirit, humor
and pathos, he made the fancies of the season his
own. The charity of diffusing good cheer among
both rich and poor has never been taught by a
more seasonable and thoughtful writer.
1
INTRODUCTION
Dickens was very fond of the old nursery tales
and believed he was giving expression to them in
a higher form in these Christmas writings. The
virtues, manly and social, which he desired to teach,
were to him the ghosts and goblins of his child-
hood's fairy fancies. The more formidable drag-
ons and giants to be conquered were aggressively
assembled in the shadow of the hearth. So it is
not to be wondered at, that with such source of
inspiration these writings should carry to numer-
ous firesides a sense of the obligations of Christ-
mas with its claim upon our better natures.
The childhood and early manhood of Dickens
were years of great importance with respect to
changes wrought in social history, and may be
said to mark the parting of the ways between the
ages, past and present. His life began when the
stage coach was the only means of quick travel,
but he lived to cross the Atlantic in a steamship,
and his writings are filled with charming and vivid
descriptions of these bygone manners and customs,
known so well because of his experience as a re-
[vi]
INTRODUCTION
porter, in which capacity he travelled extensively
and met the celebrated people of his time. He
was most successful in casting a charm upon the
wayside inn and because of him the doors are ever
open to the weary traveller and the bright light of
the fire casts its welcome on the snow.
The Holly-Tree Inn, which comprises the main
text of this volume, was written between the crea-
tion of "Hard Times" and ''Little Dorrit." It
was Dickens's contribution to "Household Words"
for Christmas, 1855, and gained great popularity
by being included in his readings. Writing from
Boston, Dickens states, — "Another extraordinary
success has been *Nickleby' and * Boots at the
Holly-Tree Inn' (appreciated here at Boston, by
the by, even more than Copperfield)." And what
wonder when we consider the delightful character
of the Boots and know the two wholesome, childish
children who live in this chapter!
The child characters of Dickens have ever been
a subject of contention, and some of his most pop-
ular juvenile creations have been declared most
[vii]
INTRODUCTION
unlifelike. If we do feel that ''Little Nell" and
"Paul Dombey" are not living children, there are
indeed, many to counterbalance them, such as
David Copperfield, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, and,
perhaps more than any of these, the children of
the Holly-Tree Inn. Where in all literature can
be found such delightful children?
From the moment we step out of the coach
with the traveller designated as "myself" on that
snowy Christmas Eve, and the waiter "whose
head became as white as King Lear's in a single
moment," replies to our question, "What Inn is
this?" "The Holly-Tree, Sir," we follow the
magician into its homely atmosphere. Our cu-
riosity is like that of the women of the house, who,
that they might get a glimpse of those dear chil-
dren, were "seven deep at the key hole." And this
curiosity is not the least abated as, thought after
thought, scene after scene relating to old inns, are
brought to the traveller's hearth.
When in a moment of desperation and loneli-
ness the traveller summons the Boots and we are
[ viii ]
II I INTRODUCTION
given the delightful romance of Mr. and Mrs.
Harry Walmers, Jr., we are sure to hold with
Boots in at least two opinions, ''firstly, that there
are not many couples on their way to be married
who are half as innocent of guile as those two
children; secondly, that it would be a jolly good
thing for a great many couples on their way to be
married, if they could be stopped in time, and
brought back separately."
Dickens once said, "Knowledge has a very
limited power when it informs the head only;
but, when it informs the heart as well, it has a
power over life and death, the body and the
soul, and dominates the universe." And so we
find all of Dickens's wonderful knowledge of
humanity and of English inns laid before us with
a warmth of heart upon which the cold, snowy
wastes, outside the "Holly-Tree" make but little
impression, and, indeed, we confess to delight at
being snowed up there for a whole week.
With our mind aglow with visions of Inns —
their romances and their tragedies — we eagerly
[ix]
INTRODUCTION
welcome — **A Christmas Tree," included in
this volume. Here is, indeed, a Christmas tree
to cheer the souls of all men. For each a gift
hangs in its branches; a message in its light, and
our imagination is so inspired that "all common
things become uncommon and enchanted. . . .
But, far above, I see the raiser of the dead girl,
and the widow's son; and God is good! If age
be hiding for me in the unseen portions of thy
downward growth, O may I, with a grey head,
turn a child's heart to that figure yet, and a child's
trustfulness and confidence! Now the tree is
decorated with bright merriment, and song, and
dance, and cheerfulness. And they are welcome.
Innocent and welcome be they ever held, beneath
the branches of the Christmas tree which cast no
gloomy shadow! But, as it sinks into the ground,
I hear a whisper going through the leaves, — * this
in commemoration of the law of love and kindness,
mercy and compassion. This, in remembrance
of Me!'"
In regard to the pictorial embellishment of the
INTRODUCTION
"Holly-Tree" there seems to be little of impor-
tance. This would certainly have pleased its
author who told Forster, his biographer, that he
preferred to have his works appear without illus-
trations. And this attitude is not difficult to
understand, for he had suffered much at the hands
of a school of caricaturists who saw only the
distorted side of his writings without recognizing
their more subtle and human phase. Dickens
was, undeniably, a caricaturist, but under this
mantle he drew for us a most human world. The
contention that all the old illustrations for Dickens
are irreproachable is absurd and, for proof, we
have only to summon before us the varied, mani-
fold and living personalities he has given us.
Mrs. Gamp is truly a caricature, but is Tiny Tim,
is Oliver Twist, are the Children in **The Holly-
Tree".^ To consider these as such would be like
assigning all of Shakespeare's characters to that
world of distortion, just because Falstaff, assuredly
as Mrs. Gamp, can be so classii5ed.
Every artist who approaches Dickens should
[xi]
INTRODUCTION
recognize this distinction through his subtle pene-
tration into the text.
In the early sixties there arose a school of illus-
trators who studied from life and were thus able
to mirror its manifold phases. They brought to
the art of illustrating all the pains and effort
usually bestowed upon a painting, with the result
that a series of illustrations beginning with those
memorable drawings for "Edwin Drood," by Sir
Luke Fildes, appeared. Following this came Fred-
erick Barnard's great pictorial characterizations
and the subtle and charming interpretations of
Charles Green. With these men began the true
pictorial understanding of Dickens, for their
penetration into the various characters was deep
and discerning. Caricature was recognized, but
it was not allowed, as in the earlier pictures, to
predominate all other traits. In place of the usual
puppets of the original illustrations, living men
and women greeted us as old friends.
And from this wholesome and novel achieve-
ment in illustration dating back some forty years,
[xii]
INTRODUCTION
we find the root of all such work, since become a
vital phase of our pictorial expression. But
these older men were sadly hindered by the in-
adequate methods of reproduction. To-day the
artist meets his public with a facsimile of the
original that may carry his meaning in a most
subtle manner.
To continue the aims of these men is to dis-
cern in Dickens those human traits by which he
is daily becoming better known. And the fact
that this phase of Dickens is appealing to us more
and more is the measure of his true worth.
So it is with delight that we turn to this pro-
foundly human document of the *' Holly-Tree,"
especially to the Boots's narration of that lovely
romance of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Jr.
Here no caricature veils the keen insight of
Dickens into all that is human.
A pleasing humor pervades the whole. Who
reads and does not look back upon those days of
childhood when clouds were castles and shadows
[ xiii ]
INTRODUCTION
were dragons; when with the first breath of Spring
we came out of the hearth's dreamland and saUied
forth into the green fields?
It has been the writer's aim to embody in the
pictures for this volume that human interest
exemplified in Dickens's closing words of the
"Holly-Tree," — ''I began at the Holly-Tree, by
idle accident, to associate the Christmas-time of
year with human interest, and with some inquiry
into, and some care for, the lives of those by whom
I find myself surrounded. I hope that I am none
the worse for it, and that no one near me or afar
off is the worse for it. And I say. May the green
Holly-Tree flourish, striking its roots deep into
our English ground, and having its germinating
qualities carried by the birds of Heaven all over the
world!"
George Alfred Williams.
Chatham, New Jersey.
[xiv]
Contents;
PART I
The Holly Tree Inn
PAGE
First Branch — Myself 21
Second Branch — The Boots 67
Third Branch — The Bill 92
PART II
A Christmas Tree 103
[XV]
I
I
IList of 3[Uu2ftration0
The Holly Tree Inn .... Frontispiece '
FACING PAGE
Angela Leathy whom I was shortly to have
married 22 *"
/ then discovered that, inside or out, I was the
only passenger 26
A lean dwarf man upon a little pony ... 48
I was taken, by quick association, to the Anglers'
Inns of England 60
Master Harry 68
Tucks hery in her little sky-blue mantle, under
his arm, and walks into the house, much
bolder than Brass 76
Cobbs 80
Mrs. Harry W aimers. Junior 86
''Edwin/' said I 94
[ xvii ]
THE HOLLY TREE
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 ac-
count 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
[21]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 mar-
ried, on making the dis-
covery 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
[22]
• '\ ^
Ingeia J^eath, whom S waA dhoxtlij to have maxxied.
THE HOLLY TREE INN
nor to Edwin, but resolving to write each of them
an affecting letter conveying my blessing and for-
giveness, which the steam-tender for shore should
cany 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 con-
soling myself as I could with the prospect of being
generous, I quietly left all I held dear, and started
on the desolate journey I have mentioned.
The dead winter-time was in full dreariness
when I left my chambers for ever, at five o'clock
in the morning. I had shaved by candle-light, of
course, and was miserably cold, and experienced
that general all-pervading sensation of getting
up to be hanged which I have usually found
inseparable from untimely rising under such
circumstances.
How well I remember the forlorn aspect of
Fleet-street when I came out of the Temple ! The
street-lamps flickering in the gusty northeast wind,
as if the very gas were contorted with cold; the
white-topped houses; the bleak, star-lighted sky;
[23]
"-^1
THE HOLLY TREE INN
the market people and other early stragglers, trot-
ting 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 Postoffice 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 ex-
patriation. I ought to explain, that, to avoid
being sought out before my resolution should have
[24]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
been rendered irrevocable by being carried into
full effect, I had written to Angela over night, 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,
[25]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 appear-
ance, 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 rarefied air; and we were rattling for Highgate
[26]
11=:
if?
^} m^f/
V\m- r /
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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
began to set in; but I know that we were changing
horses somewhere when I heard the guard remark,
"That the old lady up in the sky was picking her
geese pretty hard to-day." Then, indeed, I found
the white down falling fast and thick.
The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out, as a
lonely traveller does. I was warm and valiant after
eating and drinking, — particularly after dinner;
[27]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 coach-
man went stumping up and down the road, print-
ing 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 all day again.
[28]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 behind-
hand, 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 coach-
man and guard — who kept together on
the box, always in council, and looking well
about them — made out the track with astonish-
ing 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
[29]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
clocks all stopped, the dial-faces choked with snow,
and the inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as if the
whole place were overgrown with white moss.
As to the coach, it was a mere snowball; similarly,
the men and boys who ran along beside us to the
town's end, turning our clogged wheels and en-
couraging 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 wel-
come sound of talking, with a glimmering and
moving about of lanterns, roused me from my
drowsy state. I found that we were going to
change.
They helped me out, and I said to a waiter,
[30]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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, apologeti-
cally, 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 author-
ities, had already asked the coachman, to the
wide-eyed interest of all the rest of the establish-
ment, if he meant to go on. The coachman had
already replied, "Yes, he'd take her through it,"
— meaning by Her the coach, — "if so be as
George would stand by him." George was the
guard, and he had already sworn that he would
stand by him. So the helpers were already getting
the horses out.
My declaring myself beaten, after this parley,
was not an announcement without preparation.
Indeed, but for the way to the announcement
being smoothed by the parley, I more than doubt
whether, as an innately bashful man, I should
[31]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 humor-
ous helper as a joke at my expense, and was ex-
tremely well received), I saw my portmanteau got
out stiff, like a frozen body; did the handsome
thing by the guard and coachman; wished them
good-night, and a prosperous journey; and, a
little ashamed of myself, after all, for leaving them
to fight it out alone, followed the landlord, laud-
lady, and waiter of the Holly-Tree up-stairs.
I thought I had never seen such a large room
as that into which they showed me. It had five
windows, with dark red curtains that would have
absorbed the light of a general illumination; and
there were complications of drapery at the top
[32]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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, how-
ever, 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 oflf,
up a great staircase at the end of a long gallery;
and nobody knows what a misery this is to a bash-
ful 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
candlesticks, 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
[33]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
bad glass — what I may call a wavy glass —
above it, which, when I stood up, just showed
me my anterior phrenological developments, —
and these never look well, in any subject, cut short
off at the eyebrow. If I stood with my back to
the fire, a gloomy vault of darkness above and
beyond the screen insisted on being looked at;
and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery of the ten
curtains of the five windows went twisting and
creeping about, like a nest of gigantic worms.
I suppose that what I observe in myself must
be observed by some other men of similar char-
acter 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 oasis of nightmare, I thought of
[34]
L
THE HOLLY TREE INN
Angela, and felt more depressed than ever by the
reflection that I was on the shortest road to Gretna
Green. What had / to do with Gretna Green?
I was not going that way to the Devil, but by the I
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
[35]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
character, is to be observed. Like most bashful
men, I judge of other people as if they were bash-
ful 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 dis-
concerting 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 Senti-
ments, a little Jest-Book, an odd volume of Pere-
grine 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 advertise-
ments, a meeting about a county rate, and a high-
[36]
u
THE HOLLY TREE INN
way 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 specialty 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
[37]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 (op-
pressed with pie) had fallen asleep, this wicked
landlord would look softly in with a lamp in one
hand and a knife in the other, would cut his throat,
and would make him into pies; for which purpose
he had coppers, underneath a trap-door, always
boiling; and rolled out his pastry in the dead of
the night. Yet even he was not insensible to the
stings of conscience, for he never went to sleep
without being heard to mutter, "Too much pep-
per!" 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
housebreaking; 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
[38]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
herself). After several years, this brave and
lovely servant-maid was married to the landlord
of a country Inn; which landlord had this remark-
able 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
[39]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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
dearest relations and friends to my youthful mind
under circumstances of disparaging contrast. The
brother-in-law was riding once through a forest
on a magnificent horse (we had no magnificent
horse at our house), attended by a favourite and
valuable Newfoundland dog (we had no dog),
when he found himself benighted, and came to
an Inn. A dark woman opened the door, and he
asked her if he could have a bed there. She
answered yes, and put his horse in the stable, and
took him into a room where there were two dark
men. While he was at supper, a parrot in the
room began to talk, saying, ''Blood, blood! Wipe
up the blood!" Upon which one of the dark men
wrung the parrot's neck, and said he was fond of
roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one for
breakfast in the morning. After eating and drink-
ing heartily, the immensely rich, tall brother-in-
law went up to bed; but he was rather vexed,
[40]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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
II 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,
i [41]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
renowned in my time in a sixpenny book with a
folding-plate, representing in a central compart-
ment of oval form the portrait of Jonathan Brad-
ford, and in four corner compartments four
incidents of the tragedy with which the name is
associated, — coloured with a hand at once so
j 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 pro-
testation that he had indeed come there to kill the
traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been stricken
motionless on finding him already slain; and how
the ostler, years afterwards, owned the deed. By
this time I had made myself quite uncomfortable.
I stirred the fire, and stood with my back to it as
long as I could bear the heat, looking up at the
darkness beyond the screen, and at the wormy
[42]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 recollec-
tions 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
[43]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
1
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 here. 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,
[44]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
never in association with any approach to fear or
distress. It was at a lonely Inn in a wide moor-
land place, that I halted to pass the night. When
I had looked from my bedroom window over the
waste of snow on which the moon was shining, I
sat down by my jBre 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 circum-
stance, 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 jSgure 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,
[45]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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
[46]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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
behef in him that no one could count the stones
II 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 tre-
mendous 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
i pace, what he at first supposed to be a gig-um-
brella 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 re-
ceiving any answer, he pursued it for miles, and
miles when, at length coming up with it, he dis-
[47]
J
THE HOLLY TREE INN
covered 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 oS due west. This weird
man, at that stage of metempsychosis, may have
been a sleep-walker or an enthusiast or a robber;
but I awoke one night to find him in the dark at
my bedside, repeating the Athanasian Creed in a
terrific voice. I paid my bill next day, and retired
from the county with all possible precipitation.
That was not a commonplace story which worked
itself out at a little Inn in Switzerland, while I was
staying there. It was a very homely place, in a
village of one narrow, zigzag street, among moun-
tains, 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
[48]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 be-
longing to this Inn had disappeared eight weeks
before (it was dinner-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
[49]
J
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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
[50]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 sensibility, who had been,
within the knowledge of the murdered youth, an
embezzler of certain small moneys belonging to
his master, and who had taken this hopeful mode
of putting a possible accuser out of his way. All
of which he confessed next day, like a sulky
wretch who couldn't be troubled any more, now
that they had got hold of him, and meant to make
an end of him. I saw him once again, on the day
of my departure from the Inn. In that Canton
the headsman still does his office with a sword;
and I came upon this murderer sitting bound to a
chair, with his eyes bandaged, on a scaffold in a
little market-place. In that instant, a great sword
[51]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
(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
despatched, but that any head was left unreaped,
within a radius of fifty yards of that tremendous
sickle.
That was a good Inn, too, with the kind, cheerful
landlady and the honest landlord, where I lived
in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and where one of
the apartments has a zoological papering on the
walls, not so accurately joined but that the elephant
occasionally rejoices in a tiger's hind legs and tail,
while the lion puts on a trunk and tusks, and the
bear, moulting as it were, appears as to portions
of himself like a leopard. I made several American
friends at that Inn, who all called Mont Blanc
Mount Blank, — except one good-humoured gentle-
man, 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 con-
[52]
THE HOLLY TREE INN !
siderably 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 i
Blank in a couple of hours from first start — now ! i
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
[53]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
instrument of that name in a powerful orchestra.
Human prevision could not have foreseen the
result — but the waiter mended the pie. With
some effectual species of cement, he adroitly fitted
the triangle in again, and I paid my reckoning
and fled.
The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal. I
made an overland expedition beyond the screen,
and penetrated as far as the fourth window. Here
I was driven back by stress of weather. Arrived
at my winter-quarters once more, I made up the
fire, and took another Inn.
It was in the remotest part of Cromwell. A
great annual Miner's 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
[54]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
traces hanging about his legs, and will conduct
him by the bearing-rein into the heart of a country
dance of a hundred and fifty couples, that lady or
gentleman will then, and only then, form an
adequate idea of the extent to which that post-
horse will tread on his conductor's toes. Over
and above which, the post-horse, finding three
hundred people whirling about him, will probably
rear, and also lash out with his hind legs, in a
manner incompatible with dignity or self-respect
on his conductor's part. With such little draw-
backs 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-travel-
lers 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 wheel-
wright would be in a condition to go out on the
morass and mend the coach, an honest man stepped
[55]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 ab-
surdest 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 !
[56]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
There was a story with a singular idea in it,
connected with an Inn I once passed a night at
in a picturesque old town on the Welsh border.
In a large double-bedded room of this Inn there
had been a suicide committed by poison, in one
bed, while a tired traveller slept unconscious in
the other. After that time, the suicide bed was
never used, but the other constantly was; the
disused bedstead remaining in the room empty,
though as to all other respects in its old state.
The story ran, that whosoever slept in this room,
though never so entire a stranger, from never so
far off, was invariably observed to come down in
the morning with an impression that he smelt
Laudanum, and that his mind always turned upon
the subject of suicide; to which, whatever kind of
man he might be, he was certain to make some
reference if he conversed with any one. This
went on for years, until it at length induced the
landlord to take the disused bedstead down, and
bodily burn it, — bed, hangings, and all. The
strange influence (this was the story) now changed
[57]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 mention-
ing his perplexity, would suggest various common-
place 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 whiskey, and
perhaps (having the materials so temptingly at
hand) the Athol brose. Once was I coming
[58]
L.,_
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 in-
numerable feats of angling by lying in the bottom
of the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing
with the greatest perseverance; which I have
generally found to be as effectual towards the
taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost
science), and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-
pot-decorated bedrooms of those inns, overlooking
the river, and the ferry, and the green ait, and the
church-spire, and the country bridge; and to the
peerless Emma with the bright eyes and the pretty
smile, who waited, bless her! with a natural grace
that would have converted Blue-Beard. Casting
[59]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 wan-
derers bivouacking in the outhouses ; grass growing
in the yards; the rooms, where erst so many hun-
dred 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 re-
ceived 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
[60]
I was taken, by quick association, to the Anglers' Inns of England.
THE HOLLY TREE INN
times near the dismal country station ; with nothing
particular on draught but cold air and damp,
nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new
mortar, and no business doing beyond a conceited
affectation of luggage in the hall? Then I came
to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment of
four pieces up one hundred and seventy-five
waxed stairs, the privilege of ringing the bell all
day long without influencing anybody's mind or
body but your own, and the not-too-much-for-
dinner, considering the price. Next to the pro-
vincial 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
[61]
I
I
!i I
THE HOLLY TREE INN
in summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter;
where you get what you can, and forget what you
can't; where I should again like to be boiling my
tea in a pocket-handkerchief dumpling, for want
of a teapot. So to the old palace Inns and old
monastery Inns, in towns and cities of the same
bright country; with their massive quadrangular
staircases, whence you may look from among
clustering pillars high into the blue vault of heaven;
with their stately banqueting-rooms, and vast
refectories; with their labyrinths of ghostly bed-
chambers, 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 im-
mense 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
[62]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
I put up for a minute at the restless Inns upon the
Rhine, where your going to bed, no matter at
what hour, appears to be the tocsin for everybody
else's getting up; and where, in the table-d'hote
room at the end of the long table (with several
Towers of Babel on it at the other end, all made
of white plates), one knot of stoutish men, entirely
dressed in jewels and dirt, and having nothing
else upon them, will remain all night, clinking
glasses, and singing about the river that flows,
and the grape that grows, and Rhine wine that
beguiles, and Rhine woman that smiles and hi
drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my
brother, and all the rest of it. I departed thence,
as a matter of course, to other German Inns,
where all the eatables are soddened down to the
same flavour, and where the mind is disturbed
by the apparition of hot puddings, and boiled
cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully unexpected
periods of the repast. After a draught of spark-
ling beer from a foaming glass jug, and a glance
of recognition through the windows of the student
[63]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 hun-
dred ladies and gentlemen at dinner every day.
Again I stood in the bar-rooms thereof, taking
my evening cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail.
Again I listened to my friend the General, —
whom I had known for five minutes, in the course
of which period he had made me intimate for life
with two Majors, who again had made me in-
timate 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' morn-
ing-room, sir; gentlemen's evening-room, sir; ladies'
evening-room, sir; ladies' and gentlemen's evening
reuniting-room, sir; music-room, sir; reading-room,
sir; over four hundred sleeping-rooms, sir; and
the entire planned and finished within twelve
calendar months from the first clearing off of the
old encumbrances on the plot, at a cost of five
[64]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
hundred thousand dollars, sir. Again I found,
as to my individual way of thinking, that the
greater, the more gorgeous, and the more doUarous
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
I [65]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
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 some-
thing in a liquid form, — and talk to me.^ I
could. I would. I did.
[66]
SECOND BRANCH
THE BOOTS
Where had he been in his time? he repeated,
when I asked him the question. Lord, he had
been everywhere! And what had he been?
Bless you, he had been everything you could
mention a'most!
Seen a good deal? Why, of course he had.
I should say so, he could assure me, if I only knew
about a twentieth part of what had come in his
way. Why, it would be easier for him, he ex-
pected, to tell what he hadn't seen than what he
had. Ah! A deal, it would.
What was the curiousest thing he had seen?
Well! He didn't know. He couldn't momently
name what was the curiousest thing he had seen,
— unless it was a Unicorn, — and he see him
once at a Fair. But supposing a young gentle-
man not eight year old was to run away with a
[67]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
fine young woman of seven, might I think tliat a
queer start? Certainly. Then that was a start as
he himself had had his blessed eyes on, and he had
cleaned the shoes they run away in — and they
was so little that he couldn't get his hand into 'em.
Master Harry Walmers' father, you see, he lived
at the Elmses, down away by Shooter's Hill there,
six or seven miles from Lunnon. He was a
gentleman of spirit, and good-looking, and held
his head up when he walked, and had what you
may call Fire about him. He wrote poetry, and
he rode, and he ran, and he cricketed, and he
danced, and he acted, and he done it all equally
beautiful. He was uncommon proud of Master
Harry as was his only child; but he didn't spoil
him neither. He was a gentleman that had a will
of his own and a eye of his own, and that would
be minded. Consequently, though he made quite
a companion of the fine bright boy, and was de-
lighted to see him so fond of reading his fairy
books, and was never tired of hearing him say
my name is Norval, or hearing him sing his songs
[68]
"c^l^aMcr R'^cirri/."
THE HOLLY TREE INN
about Young May Moons is beaming love, and
When he as adores thee has left but the name,
and that; still he kept the command over the
child, and the child was sl child, and it's to be
wished more of 'em was!
How did Boots happen to know all this ? Why,
through being under-gardener. Of course he
couldn't be under-gardener, and be always about,
in the summer-time, near the windows on the lawn,
a mowing, and sweeping, and weeding, and prun-
ing, and this and that, without getting acquainted
with the ways of the family. Even supposing
Master Harry hadn't come to him one morning
early, and said, "Cobbs, how should you spell
Norah, if you was asked ?" and then began cutting
it in print all over the fence.
He couldn't say he had taken particular notice
of children before that; but really it was pretty to
see them two mites a going about the place to-
gether, deep in love. And the courage of the
boy! Bless your soul, he'd have thro wed off his
little hat, and tucked up his little sleeves, and gone
[69]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
in at a Lion, he would, if they had happened to
meet one, and she had been frightened of him.
One day he stops, along with her, where Boots
was hoeing weeds in the gravel and says, speaking
up, *'Cobbs," he says, *'I like you'' "Do you,
sir? I'm proud to hear it." "Yes, I do, Cobbs.
Why, do I like you do you think, Cobbs ?" "Don't
know. Master Harry, I am sure." "Because
Nor ah likes you, Cobbs." "Indeed, sir.^ That's
very gratifying." "Gratifying, Cobbs .^ It's
better than millions of the brightest diamonds to
be liked by Norah." "Certainly, sir." "You're
going away, ain't you, Cobbs .^" "Yes, sir."
"Would you like another situation, Cobbs?"
"Well, sir, I shouldn't object, if it was a good
'un." "Then, Cobbs," says he, "you shall be
our Head Gardener when we are married." And
he tucks her, in her little sky-blue mantle, under
his arm, and walks away.
Boots could assure me that it was better than a
picter, and equal to a play, to see them babies,
with their long, bright, curling hair, their spark-
[70]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
ling eyes, and their beautiful light tread, a ram-
bling about the garden, deep in love. Boots was
of opinion that the birds believed they was birds,
and kept up with 'em, singing to please 'em.
Sometimes they would creep under the Tulip-tree,
and would sit there with their arms round one
another's necks, and their soft cheeks touching,
a reading about the Prince and the Dragon, and
the good and bad enchanters, and the king's fair
daughter. Sometimes he would hear them plan-
ning about having a house in a forest, keeping
bees and a cow, and living entirely on milk and
honey. Once he came upon them by the pond,
II and heard Master Harry say, ''Adorable Norah,
kiss me, and say you love me to distraction, or
I'll jump in head-foremost." And Boots made no
question he would have done it if she hadn't com-
plied. On the whole. Boots said it had a tendency
to make him feel as if he was in love himself —
only he didn't exactly know who with.
**Cobbs," said Master Harry, one evening,
when Cobbs was watering the flowers, "I am
[71]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
going on a visit, this present Midsummer, to my
grandmamma's at York."
"Are you indeed, sir? I hope you'll have a
pleasant time. I am going into Yorkshire, my-
self, when I leave here."
"Are you going to your grandmamma's,
Cobbs.?"
"No, sir. I haven't got such a thing."
"Not as a grandmamma, Cobbs.^"
"No, sir."
The boy looked on at the watering of the flowers
for a little while, and then said, "I shall be very
glad indeed to go, Cobbs, — Norah's going."
"You'll be all right then, sir," says Cobbs,
"with your beautiful sweetheart by your side."
"Cobbs," returned the boy, flushing, "I never let
anybody joke about it, when I can prevent them."
"It wasn't a joke, sir," says Cobbs, with humility,
— "wasn't so meant."
"I am glad of that, Cobbs, because I like you,
you know, and you're going to live with us. —
Cobbs!"
[72]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
"Sir."
"What do you think my grandmamma gives
me when I go down there?"
"I couldn't so much as make a guess, sir."
"A Bank of England five-pound note, Cobbs."
"Whew!" says Cobbs, "that's a spanking sum
of money. Master Harry."
"A person could
do a good deal with
such a sum of money
as that, — couldn't a
person, Cobbs .^"
"I believe you,
sir!"
"Cobbs," said the
boy, "I'll tell you a secret. At Norah's house,
they have been joking her about me, and pre-
tending to laugh at our being engaged, —
pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!"
"Such, sir," says Cobbs, "is the depravity of
human natur."
The boy, looking exactly like his father, stood
[73]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
for a few minutes with his glowing face towards
the sunset, and then departed with, "Good-night,
Cobbs. I'm going in."
If I was to ask Boots how it happened that he
was a going to leave that place just at that present
time, well, he couldn't rightly answer me. He
did suppose he might have stayed there till now if
he had been anyways inclined. But, you see, he
was younger then, and he wanted change. That's
what he wanted, — change. Mr. Walmers, he
said to him when he gave him notice of his inten-
tions to leave, *' Cobbs," he says, "have you
anythink to complain of.^ I make the inquiry
because if I find that any of my people really has
anythink to complain of, I wish to make it right if
I can." "No, sir," says Cobbs; "thanking you,
sir, I find myself as well sitiwated here as I could
hope to be anywheres. The truth is, sir, that
I'm a-going to seek my fortun'." "O, indeed,
Cobbs!" he says; "I hope you may find it." And
Boots could assure me — which he did, touching
his hair with his bootjack, as a salute in the way
[74]
L
THE HOLY TREE INN
of his present calling — that he hadn't found
it yet.
Well, sir! Boots left the Elmses when his time
was up, and Master Harry, he went down to the
old lady's at York, which old lady would have
given that child the teeth out of her head (if she
had had any), she was so wrapped up in him.
What does that Infant do, — for Infant you
may call him and be within the mark, — but
cut away from that old lady's with his Norah,
on a expedition to go to Gretna Green and be
married !
Sir, Boots was at this identical Holly-Tree Inn
(having left it several times since to better himself,
but always come back through one thing or an-
other), when, one summer afternoon, the coach
drives up, and out of the coach gets them two
children. The Guard says to our Governor, "I
don't quite make out these little passengers, but
the young gentleman's words was, that they was
to be brought here." The young gentleman gets
out; hands his lady out; gives the Guard something
[75]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
for himself; says to our Governor, ** We're to stop
here to-night, please. Sitting-room and two bed-
rooms will be required. Chops and cherry-pud-
ding for two!" and tucks her, in her little sky-blue
mantle, under his arm, and walks into the house,
much bolder than Brass.
Boots leaves me to
judge what the amaze-
ment of that establish-
ment was, when these two
tiny creatures all alone by
themselves was marched
into the Angel, — much
more so, when he, who
had seen them without
their seeing him, give the
Governor his views of the expedition they was
upon. *'Cobbs," says the Governor, "if this is
so, I must set off myself to York, and quiet their
friends' minds. In which case you must keep
your eye upon 'em, and humour 'em, till I come
back. But before I take these measures, Cobbs,
[76]
Tucks her in her little shj-hhie mantle, under his arm, and walks
into the house much bolder than brass.
.u 1.1.1 TREE INN
i; says to our Governor, ** We're to stop
night, please. Sitting-room and two bed-
will be required. Chops and cherry-pud-
Tig for two!" and tucks her, in her little sky-blue
antle, under his arm, and walks into the house,
ch bolder than Brass.
Boots leaves me to
judge what the amaze-
ment of that establish-
ment was, when these two
tiny creatures all alone by
themselves was marched
into the Ang much
more so. when he, wh*)
them without
their seeing him, give the
Gk)vernor his views of the expxhtion they was
upon, "Cobbs," says the Governor, **if this is
,nist set off myself to York, and quiet their
In which case you must keep
ve upon 'em, and humour 'em, till I come
efore I take these measures, Cobbs,
.^%Vi^6 nfi^\ •x'iMod A-^vrw %«.\rc»A ^\ o^V
THE HOLY TREE INN
I should wish you to find from themselves whether
your opinion is correct. ''Sir, to you," says
Cobbs, *'that shall be done directly."
So Boots goes up-stairs to the Angel, and there
he finds Master Harry on a e-normous sofa, —
immense at any time, but looking like the Great
Bed of Ware, compared with him, — a drying the
eyes of Miss Norah with his pocket-hankecher.
Their little legs was entirely off the ground, of
course, and it really is not possible for Boots to
express to me how small them children looked.
"It's Cobbs! It's Cobbs!" cried Master Harry,
and comes running to him, and catching hold of
his hand. Miss Norah comes running to him on
t'other side and catching hold of his t'other hand,
and they both jump for joy.
"I see you a getting out, sir," says Cobbs. **I
thought it was you. I thought I couldn't be mis-
taken in your height and figure. What's the
object of your journey, sir ? — Matrimonial .?"
"We are going to be married, Cobbs, at Gretna
Green," returned the boy. *'We have run away
[77]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
on purpose. Norah has been in rather low spirits,
Cobbs; but she'll be happy, now we have found
you to be our friend."
"Thank you, sir, and thank you, miss," says
Cobbs, ''for your good opinion. Did you bring
any luggage with you, sir.?"
If I will believe Boots when he gives me his
word and honour upon it, the lady had got a
parasol, a smelling-bottle, a round and a half of
cold buttered toast, eight peppermint drops, and
a hair-brush, — seemingly a doll's. The gentle-
man had got about half a dozen yards of string, a
knife, three or four sheets of writing-paper folded
up surprising small, a orange, and a Chaney mug
with his name upon it.
"What may be the exact natur of your plans,
sir.?" says Cobbs.
"To go on," replied the boy, — which the cour-
age of that boy was something wonderful! — "in
the morning, and be married to-morrow."
"Just so, sir," says Cobbs. "Would it meet
your views, sir, if I was to accompany you.?"
[78]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
When Cobbs said this, they both jumped for joy
again, and cried out, "Oh, yes, yes, Cobbs! Yes!"
"Well, sir," says Cobbs. "If you will excuse
my having the freedom to give an opinion, what I
should recommend would be this. I'm acquainted
with a pony, sir, which, put in a pheayton that I
could borrow, would take you and Mrs. Harry
Walmers, Junior, (myself driving, if you approved,)
to the end of your journey in a very short space of
time. I am not altogether sure, sir, that this
pony will be at liberty to-morrow, but even if you
had to wait over to-morrow for him, it might be
worth your while. As to the small account here,
sir, in case you was to find yourself running at all
short, that don't signify; because I'm a part pro-
prietor of this Inn, and it could stand over."
Boots assures me that when they clapped their
hands, and jumped for joy again, and called him
"Good Cobbs!" and "Dear Cobbs!" and bent
across him to kiss one another in the delight of
their confiding hearts, he felt himself the meanest
rascal for deceiving 'em that ever was born.
[79]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
"Is there anything you want just at pres-
ent, sir?" says Cobbs, mortally ashamed of
himself.
"We should like some cakes after dinner,"
answered Master Harry, folding his arms, putting
out one leg, and looking straight at him, "and two
apples, — and jam. With dinner we should like
to have toast-and-water. But Norah has always
been accustomed to half a glass of currant wine at
dessert, i^nd so have I."
"It shall be ordered at the bar, sir," says Cobbs;
and away he went.
Boots has the feeling as fresh upon him at this
minute of speaking as he had then, that he would
far rather have had it out in half a dozen rounds
with the Governor than have combined with him;
and that he wished with all his heart there was any
impossible place where those two babies could
make an impossible marriage, and live impossibly
happy ever afterwards. However, as it couldn't
be, he went into the Governor's plans, and the
Governor set off for York in half an hour.
[80]
^"%
./]
^\
\.
II
\l
II
f
M
^.
Ln>A/>j."
THE HOLLY TREE INN
The way in which the women of that house —
without exception — every one of 'em — married
and single — took to that boy when they heard the
story, Boots considers surprising. It was as much
as he could do to keep 'em from dashing into the
room and kissing him. They climbed up all sorts
of places, at the risk of their lives, to look at him
through a pane of glass. They was seven deep
at the keyhole. They was out of their minds
about him and his bold spirit.
In the evening. Boots went into the room to
see how the runaway couple was getting on. The
gentleman was on the window-seat, supporting
[81]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
the lady in his arms. She had tears upon her
face, and was lying, very tired and half asleep,
with her head upon his shoulder.
"Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, fatigued, sir.^"
says Cobb.
"Yes, she is tired, Cobbs; but she is not used to
be away from home, and she has been in low
spirits again. Cobbs, do you think you could
bring a biffin, please.^"
"I ask your pardon, sir," says Cobbs. "What
was it you .^"
"I think a Norfolk biffin would rouse her,
Cobbs. She is very fond of them."
Boots withdrew in search of the required restor-
ative, and, when he brought it in, the gentleman
handed it to the lady, and fed her with a spoon,
and took a little himself; the lady being heavy
with sleep, and rather cross. "What should you
think, sir," says Cobbs, "of a chamber candle-
stick.^" The gentleman approved; the chamber-
maid went first, up the great staircase; the lady,
in her sky-blue mantle, followed, gallantly escorted
[82]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
by the gentleman; the gentleman embraced her
at her door, and retired to his own apartment,
where Boots softly locked him up.
Boots couldn't but feel with increased acuteness
what a base deceiver he was, when they consulted
him at breakfast (they had ordered sweet milk-
and-water, and toast and currant jelly, overnight)
about the pony. It really was as much as he
could do, he don't mind confessing to me, to look
them two young things in the face, and think
what a wicked old father of lies he had grown up
to be. Howsomever, he went on a lying like a
Trojan about the pony. He told 'em that it did
so unfort'nately happen that the pony was half
clipped, you see, and that he couldn't be taken
out in that state, for fear it should strike to his
inside. But that he'd be finished clipping in the
course of the day, and that to-morrow morning
at eight o'clock the pheayton would be ready.
Boots's view of the whole case, looking back on it
in my room, is, that Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior,
was beginning to give in. She hadn't had her
[83]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
hair curled when she went to bed, and she didn't
seem quite up to brushing it herself, and its getting
in her eyes put her out. But nothing put out
Master Hariy. He sat behind his breakfast-cup^
a tearing away at the jelly, as if he had been his
own father.
After breakfast, Boots is inclined to consider
that they drawed soldiers, — at least, he knows
that many such was found in the fireplace, all on
horseback. In the course of the morning. Master
Harry rang the bell, — it was surprising how that
there boy did carry on, — and said, in a sprightly
way, **Cobbs, is there any good walks in this
neighbourhood ?''
"Yes, sir," says Cobbs. "There's Love-lane."
"Get out with you, Cobbs!" — that was that
there boy's expression, — "you're joking."
"Begging your pardon, sir," says Cobbs, "there
really is Love-lane. And a pleasant walk it is,
and proud shall I be to show it to yourself and
Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior."
"Norah, dear," said Master Harry, "this is
[84]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
curious. We really ought to see Love-lane. Put
on your bonnet, my sweetest darling, and we will
go there with Cobbs."
Boots leaves me to judge what a Beast he felt
himself to be, when that young pair told him, as
they all three jogged along together, that they had
made up their minds to give him two thousand
guineas a year as head-gardener, on account of
his being so true a friend to 'em. Boots could
have wished at the moment that the earth would
have opened and swallowed him up, he felt so
mean, with their beaming eyes a looking at him,
and believing him. Well, sir, he turned the con-
versation as well as he could, and he took 'em
down Love-lane to the water-meadows, and there
Master Harry would have drowned himself in
half a moment more, a getting out a water-lily for
her, — but nothing daunted that boy. Well, sir,
they was tired out. All being so new and strange
to 'em, they was tired as tired could be. And they
laid down on a bank of daisies, like the children
in the wood, leastways meadows, and fell asleep.
[85]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
Boots don't know — perhaps I do, — but never
mind, it don't signify either way — why it made a
man fit to make a fool of himself to see them two
pretty babies a lying there in the clear, still, sunny
day, not dreaming half so hard when they was
asleep as they done when they was awake. But
Lord! when you come to think of yourself, you
know, and what a game you have been up to ever
since you was in your own cradle, and what a
poor sort of a chap you are, and how it's always
either Yesterday with you, or else To-morrow,
and never To-day, that's where it is!
Well, sir, they woke up at last, and then one
thing was getting pretty clear to Boots, namely,
that Mrs. Harry Walmerses, Junior's, temper was
on the move. \Mien Master Harry took her round
the waist, she said he ''teased her so"; and he
says, "Norah, my young May Moon, your Harry
tease you.^" she tells him, "Yes; and I want to
go home!"
A biled fowl, and baked bread-and-butter pud-
ding, brought Mrs. Walmers up a little; but Boots
[86]
( "6 v.^. FrSaxxii ^Va ImcrA, ^jti n toi
THE HOLLY TREE INN
I could have wished, he must privately own to
me, to have seen her more sensible of the
woice of love, and less abandoning of herself
to currants. However, Master Harry, he kept
up, and his noble heart was as fond as ever.
Mrs. Walmers turned very sleepy about dusk, and
began to cry. Therefore, Mrs. Walmers went off
to bed as per yesterday; and Master Harry ditto
repeated.
About eleven or twelve at night comes back the
Governor in a chaise, along with Mr. Walmers
and a elderly lady. Mr. Walmers looks amused
and very serious, both at once, and says to our
missis, "We are much indebted to you, ma'am,
for your kind care of our little children, which we
can never sufficiently acknowledge. Pray, ma'am,
where is my boy.^" Our missis says, ''Cobbs
has the dear child in charge, sir. Cobbs, show
Forty!" Then he says to Cobbs, "Ah, Cobbs, I
am glad to see you! I understood you was here!"
And Cobbs says, "Yes, sir. Your most obedient.
sir."
[87]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
I may be surprised to hear Boots say it, per-
haps; but Boots assures me that his heart beat
Hke a hammer, going up-stairs. "I beg your
pardon, sir," says he, while unlocking the door;
'*I hope you are not angry with Master Harry.
For Master Harry is a fine boy, sir, and
will do you credit and honour." And Boots
signifies to me, that, if the fine boy's father
had contradicted him in the daring state of
mind in which he then was, he thinks he should
have ** fetched him a crack," and taken the con-
sequences.
But Mr. Walmers only says, "No, Cobbs. No,
my good fellow. Thank you!" And, the door
being opened, goes in.
Boots goes in too, holding the light, and he sees
Mr. Walmers go up to the bedside, bend gently
down, and kiss the little sleeping face. Then he
stands looking at it for a minute, looking wonder-
fully like it (they do say he ran away with Mrs.
Walmers); and then he gently shakes the little
shoulder.
[88]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
'* Harry, my dear boy! Harry!"
Master Harry starts up and looks at him.
Looks at Cobbs too. Such is the honour of that
mite, that he looks at Cobbs, to see whether he
has brought him into trouble.
''I am not angry, my child. I only want you
to dress yourself and come home."
''Yes, pa."
Master Harry dresses himself quickly. His
breast begins to swell when he has nearly
finished, and it swells more and more as he
stands, at last, a looking at his father: his
father standing a looking at him, the quiet image
of him.
*' Please may I" — the spirit of that little creatur,
and the way he kept his rising tears down ! —
"please, dear pa — may I — kiss Norah before
I go?"
"You may, my child."
So he takes Master Harry in his hand, and
Boots leads the way with the candle, and they
come to that other bedroom, where the elderly
[89]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
lady is seated by the bed, and poor little Mrs.
Harry Walmers, Junior, is fast asleep. There
the father lifts the child up to the pillow, and he i
lays his little face down for an instant by the little
warm face of poor unconscious little Mrs. Harry
Walmers, Junior, and gently draws it to him, —
a sight so touching to the chambermaids who are
peeping through the door, that one of them calls I
out, "It's a shame to part 'em!" But this cham-
bermaid was always, as Boots informs me, a soft-
hearted one. Not that there was any harm in
that girl. Far from it.
Finally, Boots says, that's all about it. Mr.
Walmers drove away in the chaise, having hold
of Master Harry's hand. The elderly lady and
Mrs. Harry Walmers, Junior, that was never to
be (she married a Captain long afterwards, and
died in India), went off next day. In conclusion,
Boots put it to me whether I hold with him in two
opinions: firstly, that there are not many couples
on their way to be married who are half as inno-
cent of guile as those two children; secondly, that
[90]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
it would be a jolly good thing for a great many
couples on their way to be married, if they could
only be stopped in time, and brought back sep-
arately.
[91]
THIRD BRANCH
THE BILL
I HAD been snowed up a whole week. The time
had hung so lightly on my hands, that I should
have been in great doubt of the fact but for a piece
of documentary evidence that lay upon my table.
The road had been dug out of the snow on the
previous day, and the document in question was
my bill. It testified emphatically to my having
eaten and drunk, and warmed myself, and slept
among the sheltering branches of the Holly-Tree,
seven days and nights.
I had yesterday allowed the road twenty-four
hours to improve itself, finding that I required
that additional margin of time for the completion
of my task. I had ordered my Bill to be upon
the table, and a chaise to be at the door, '*at eight
[92]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
o'clock to-morrow evening." It was eight o'clock
to-morrow evening when I buckled up my travel-
ling writing desk in its leather case, paid my Bill,
and got on my warm coats and wrappers. Of
course, no time now remained for my travelling
on to add a frozen tear to the icicles which were
doubtless hanging plentifully about the farmhouse
where I had first seen Angela. What I had to do
was to get across to Liverpool by the shortest open
road, there to meet my heavy baggage and em-
bark. It was quite enough to do, and I had not
an hour too much time to do it in.
I had taken leave of all my Holly-Tree friends
— almost, for the time being, of my bashfulness
too — and was standing for half a minute at the
Inn door watching the ostler as he took another
turn at the cord which tied my portmanteau on
the chaise, when I saw lamps coming down towards
the Holly-Tree. The road was so padded with
snow that no wheels were audible; but all of us
who were standing at the Inn door saw lamps
coming on, and at a lively rate too, between the
[93]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
walls of snow that had been heaped up on either
side of the track. The chambermaid instantly-
divined how the ease stood, and called to the ostler,
"Tom, this is a Gretna job!" The ostler, knowing
ji that her sex instinctively scented a marriage,
or anything in that direction, rushed up the yard
bawling, "Next four out!" and in a moment the
whole establishment was thrown into commotion.
I had a melancholy interest in seeing the happy
man who loved and was beloved; and therefore,
instead of driving oflF at once, I remained at the
Inn door when the fugitives drove up. A bright-
eyed fellow, muffled in a mantle, jumped out so
briskly that he almost overthrew me. He turned
to apologise, and, by Heaven, it was Edwin!
"Charley!" said he, recoiling. "Gracious
powers, what do you do here.^"
"Edwin," said I, recoiling, "gracious powers,
what do you do here.?" I struck my forehead as
I said it, and an insupportable blaze of light
seemed to shoot before my eyes.
He hurried me into the little parlour (always
1 [94]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
kept with a slow fire in it and no poker), where
posting company waited while their horses were
putting to, and, shutting the door, said:
"Charley, forgive me!"
''Edwin!" I returned. ''Was this well ? TMien
I loved her so dearly! \Mien I had garnered up
my heart so long!" I could say no more.
He was shocked when he saw how moved I was,
and made the cruel observation, that he had not
thought I should have taken it so much to heart.
I looked at him. I reproached him no more.
But I looked at him.
"My dear, dear Charley," said he, "don't
think ill of me, I beseech you! I know you have
a right to my utmost confidence, and, believe me,
you have ever had it until now. I abhor secrecy.
Its meanness is intolerable to me. But I and my
dear girl have observed it for your sake."
He and his dear girl! It steeled me.
"You have observed it for my sake, sir .?" said I,
wondering how his frank face could face it out so.
"Yes! — and Angela's," said he.
[95]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
I found the room reeling round in an uncertain
way, like a labouring humming-top. "Explain
yourself," said I, holding on by one hand to an
arm-chair.
"Dear old darling Charley!" returned Edwin,
in his cordial manner, "consider! When you
were going on so happily with Angela, why should
I compromise you with the old gentleman by mak-
ing you a party to our engagement, and (after he
had declined my proposals) to our secret inten-
tion.? Surely it was better that you should be
able honourably to say, *He never took counsel
with me, never told me, never breathed a word
of it.' If Angela suspected it, and showed me all
the favour and support she could — God bless
her for a precious creature and a priceless wife ! —
I couldn't help that. Neither I nor Emmeline
ever told her, any more than we told you. And
for the same good reason, Charley; trust me,
for the same good reason, and no other upon
earth!"
Emmeline was Angela's cousin. Lived with
[96]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
her. Had been brought up with her. Was her
father's ward. Had property.
**Emmeline is in the chaise, my dear Edwin!"
said I, embracing him with the greatest affection.
"My good fellow!" said he, "do you suppose
I should be going to Gretna Green without her.?"
I ran out with Edwin, I opened the chaise door,
I took Emmeline in my arms, I folded her to my
heart. She was wrapped in soft white fur, like
the snowy landscape: but was warm, and young,
and lovely. I put their leaders to with my own
hands, I gave the boys a five-pound note apiece, I
cheered them as they drove away, I drove the other
way myself as hard as I could pelt.
I never went to Liverpool, I never went to
America, I went straight back to London, and I
married Angela. I have never until this time,
even to her, disclosed the secret of my character,
and the mistrust and the mistaken journey into
which it led me. When she, and they, and our
eight children and their seven — I mean Edwin's
and Emmeline's whose eldest girl is old enough
[97]
THE HOLLY TREE INN
now to wear white for herself, and to look very
like her mother in it — come to read these pages,
as of course they will, I shall hardly fail to be
found out at last. Never mind! I can bear it.
I began at the Holly-Tree, by idle accident, to
associate the Christmas-time of year with human
interest, and with some inquiry into, and some
care for, the lives of those by whom I find myself
surrounded. I hope that I am none the worse
for it, and that no one near me or afar off is the
worse for it. And I say. May the green Holly-
Tree flourish, striking its roots deep into our Eng-
lish ground, and having its germinating qualities
carried by the birds of Heaven all over the world!
LOfCo
[98]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
I HAVE been looking on, this evening, at a
merry company of children assembled round
that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The
tree was planted in the middle of a great round
table, and towered high above their heads. It
was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little
tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered
with bright objects. There were rosy-cheeked
dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there
were real watches (with movable hands, at least,
and an endless capacity of being wound up)
dangling from innumerable twigs; there were
French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, ward-
robes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles
of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at
[103]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as
if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping;
there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much
more agreeable in appearance than many real men
— and no wonder, for their heads took off, and
showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there
were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines,
books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes,
peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes ; there were
trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any
grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets and
pincushions in all devices ; there were guns, swords,
and banners; there were witches standing in en-
chanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes;
there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases,
pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards,
bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially daz-
zling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and
walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a
pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to
another pretty child, her bosom friend, ''There
was everything, and more." This motley collec-
[104]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
tion of odd objects, clustering on the tree like
magic fruit, and flashing back the bright looks
directed towards it from every side — some of the
diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level
with the table, and a few were languishing in timid
wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers, aunts,
and nurses — made a lively realisation of the
fancies of childhood; and set me thinking how all
the trees that grow, and all the things that come
into existence on the earth, have their wild adorn-
ments at that well-remembered time.
Being now at home again, and alone, the only
person in the house awake, my thoughts are
drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care
to resist, to my own childhood. I begin to con-
sider, what do we all remember best upon the
branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young
Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life,
Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in
the freedom of its growth by no encircling walls
or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises;
and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its
[105]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
top — for I observe in this tree the singular
property that it appears to grow downward towards
the earth — I look into my youngest Christmas
recollections !
All toys at first, I find. Up yonder, among the
green holly and red berries, is the Tumbler with
his hands in his pockets, who wouldn't lie down,
but whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted
in rolling his fat body about, until he rolled him-
self still, and brought those lobster eyes of his to
bear upon me — when I affected to laugh very
much, but in my heart of hearts was extremely
doubtful of him. Close beside him is that infernal
snuff-box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal
Counsellor in a black gown, with an obnoxious
head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide open,
who was not to be endured on any terms, but could
not be put away either; for he used suddenly, in a
highly magnified state, to fly out of Mammoth
Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected. Nor
is the frog with cobbler's wax on his tail, far off;
for there was no knowing where he wouldn't
[106]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
jump ; and when he flew over the candle, and came
upon one's hand with that spotted back — red
on a green ground — he was horrible. The card-
board lady in a blue-silk skirt, who was stood up
against the candlestick to dance, and whom I see
on the same branch, was milder, and was beautiful ;
but I can't say as much for the larger cardboard
man, who used to be hung against the wall and
pulled by a string; there was a sinister expression
in that nose of his ; and when he got his legs round
his neck (which he very often did), he was ghastly,
and not a creature to be alone with.
When did that dreadful Mask first look at me ?
Who put it on, and why was I so frightened that
the sight of it is an era in my life.^ It is not a
hideous visage in itself; it is even meant to be
droll; why then were its stolid features so in-
tolerable ? Surely not because it hid the wearer's
face. An apron would have done as much; and
though I should have preferred even the apron
away, it would not have been absolutely insup-
portable, like the mask. Was it the immovability
[107]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
of the mask? The doll's face was immovable,
but I was not afraid of her. Perhaps that fixed
and set change coming over a real face, infused
into my quickened heart some remote suggestion
and dread of the universal change that is to come
on every face, and make it still. Nothing recon-
ciled me to it. No drummers, from whom pro-
ceeded a melancholy chirping on the turning of
a handle; no regiment of soldiers, with a mute
band, taken out of a box, and fitted, one by one,
upon a stiff and lazy little set of lazy-tongs; no old
woman, made of wires and a brown-paper com-
position, cutting up a pie for two small children;
could give me a permanent comfort, for a long time.
Nor was it any satisfaction to be shown the Mask,
and see that it was made of paper, or to have
it locked up and be assured that no one wore it.
The mere recollection of that fixed face, the mere
knowledge of its existence anywhere, was sufficient
to awake me in the night all perspiration and horror,
with, '*0 I know it's coming! O the mask!"
I never wondered what the dear old donkey
[108]
A CHRIST^L\S TREE
with the panniers — there he is I was made of,
then I His hide was real to the touch, I recollect.
And the great black horse with the round red spots
all over him — the horse that I could even get
upon — I never wondered what had brought him
to that strange condition, or thought that such a
horse was not commonly seen at Newmarket.
The four horses of no colour, next to him, that
went into the waggon of cheeses, and could be
taken out and stabled under the piano, appear
to have bits of fur-tippet for their tails, and other
bits for their manes, and to stand on pegs instead
of legs, but it was not so when they were brought
home for a Christmas present. They were all
right, then; neither was their harness uncere-
moniously nailed into their chests, as appears
to be the case now. The tinkling works of the
music-cart, I did find out, to be made of quill
tooth-picks and wire; and I always thought that
little tumbler in his shirt sleeves, perpetually
swarming up one side of a wooden frame, and
coming down, head foremost, on the other, rather
[109]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
a weak-minded person — though good-natured ;
but the Jacob's Ladder, next him, made of little
squares of red wood, that went flapping and clat-
tering over one another, each developing a dif-
ferent picture, and the whole enlivened by small
bells, was a mighty marvel and a great delight.
Ah ! The Doll's house ! — of which I was not
proprietor, but where I visited. I don't admire
the Houses of Parliament half so much as that
stone-fronted mansion with real glass windows,
and door-steps, and a real balcony — greener
than I ever see now, except at watering places;
and even they afford but a poor imitation. And
though it did open all at once, the entire house-
front (which was a blow, I admit, as cancelling
the fiction of a staircase), it was but to shut it up
again, and I could believe. Even open, there
were three distinct rooms in it: a sitting-room and
bedroom, elegantly furnished, and best of all, a
kitchen, with uncommonly soft fire-irons, a plenti-
ful assortment of diminutive utensils — oh, the
warming-pan ! — and a tin man-cook in profile,
[110]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
who was always going to fry two fish. WTiat Bar-
mecide justice have I done to the noble feasts
wherein the set of wooden platters figured, each
with its own peculiar delicacy, as a ham or turkey,
glued tight on to it, and garnished with something
green, which I recollect as moss! Could all the
Temperance Societies of these later days, united,
give me such a tea-drinking as I have had through
the means of yonder little set of blue crockery,
which really would hold liquid (it ran out of the
small wooden cask, I recollect, and tasted of
matches), and which made tea, nectar. And if
the two legs of the ineffectual little sugar-tongs did
tumble over one another, and want purpose, like
Punch's hands, what does it matter? And if I
did once shriek out, as a poisoned child, and strike
the fashionable company with consternation, by
reason of having drunk a little teaspoon, inadver-
tently dissolved in too hot tea, I was never the
worse for it, except by a powder!
Upon the next branches of the tree, lower down,
hard by the green roller and miniature gardening-
[111]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
tools, how thick the books begin to hang. Thin
books, in themselves, at first, but many of them,
and with delieiously smooth covers of bright red
or green. What fat black letters to begin with!
*' A was an archer, and shot at a frog." Of course
he was. He was an apple-pie also, and there he
is ! He was a good many things in his time, was A,
and so were most of his friends, except X, who
had so little versatilitv, that I never knew him
to get beyond Xerxes or Xantippe — like Y,
who was always confined to a Yacht or a Yew
Tree; and Z condemned for ever to be a Zebra or
a Zany. But, now, the very tree itself changes,
and becomes a bean-stalk — the marvellous bean-
stalk up which Jack climbed to the Giant's house!
And now, those dreadfully interesting, double-
headed giants, with their clubs over their shoulders,
begin to stride along the boughs in a perfect
throng, dragging knights and ladies home for
dinner by the hair of their heads. And Jack —
how noble, with his sword of sharpness, and his
shoes of swiftness! Again those old meditations
[112]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
come upon me as I gaze up at him; and I debate
within myself whether there was more than one
Jack (which I am loath to believe possible), or only
one genuine original admirable Jack, who achieved
all the recorded exploits.
Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour
of the cloak, in which — the tree making a forest
of itself for her to trip through, with her basket —
Little Red Riding Hood comes to me one Christ-
mas Eve to give me information of the cruelty and
treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her
grandmother, without making any impression on
his appetite, and then ate her, after making that
ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first
love. I felt that if I could have married Little
Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect
bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing
for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's Ark
there, and put him late in the procession on the
table, as a monster who was to be degraded. O
the wonderful Noah's Ark! It was not found
seaworthy when put in a washing-tub, and the
[113]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
animals were crammed in at the roof, and needed
to have their legs well shaken down before they
could be got in, even there — and then, ten to one
but they began to tumble out at the door, which
was but imperfectly fastened with a wire latch —
but what was that against it! Consider the noble
fly, a size or two smaller than the elephant: the
lady-bird, the butterfly — all triumphs of art !
Consider the goose, whose feet were so small,
and whose balance was so indifferent, that he
usually tumbled forward, and knocked down all
the animal creation. Consider Noah and his
family, like idiotic tobacco-stoppers; and how the
leopard stuck to warm little fingers; and how the
tails of the larger animals used gradually to resolve
themselves into frayed bits of string!
Hush! Again a forest, and somebody up in a
tree — not Robin Hood, not Valentine, not the
Yellow Dwarf (I have passed him and all Mother
Bunch's wonders, without mention), but an Eastern
King with a glittering scimitar and turban. By
Allah! two Eastern Kings, for I see another,
[114]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
looking over his shoulder! Down upon the grass,
at the tree's foot, lies the full length of a coal-
black Giant, stretched asleep, with his head in a
lady's lap; and near them is a glass box, fastened
with four locks of shining steel, in which he keeps
the lady prisoner when he is awake. I see the
four keys at his girdle now. The lady makes
signs to the two kings in the tree, who softly
descend. It is the setting-in of the bright Arabian
Nights.
Oh, now all common things become uncommon
and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful;
all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are
full of treasure, with a little earth scattered on the
top; trees are for Ali Baba to hide in; beef -steaks
are to throw down into the Valley of Diamonds,
that the precious stones may stick to them, and be
carried by the eagles to their nests, whence the
traders, with loud cries, will scare them. Tarts
are made, according to the recipe of the Vigier's
son of Bussorah, who turned pastrycook after he
was set down in his drawers at the gate of Damas-
[115]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
cus; cobblers are all Mustaphas, and in the habit
of sewing up people cut into four pieces, to whom
they are taken blindfold.
Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a
cave which only waits for the magician, and the
little fire, and the necromancy, that will make
the earth shake. All the dates imported come
from the same tree as that unlucky date, with
whose shell the merchant knocked out the eye of
the genie's invisible son. All olives are of the stock
of that fresh fruit, concerning which the Com-
mander of the Faithful overheard the boy conduct
the fictitious trial of the fraudulent olive merchant;
all apples are akin to the apple purchased (with
two others) from the Sultan's gardener for three
sequins, and which the tall black slave stole from
the child. All dogs are associated with the dog,
really a transformed man, who jumped upon the
baker's counter, and put his paw on the piece of
bad money. All rice recalls the rice which the
awful lady, who was a ghoul, could only peck by
grains, because of her nightly feasts in the burial-
[116]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
place. My very rocking-horse, — there he is,
with his nostrils turned completely inside-out, in-
dicative of Blood ! — should have a peg in his
neck, by virtue thereof to fly away with me, as the
wooden horse did with the Prince of Persia, in the
sight of all his father's Court.
Yes, on every object that I recognise among
those upper branches of my Christmas Tree, I
see this fairy light! When I awake in bed, at
daybreak, on the cold, dark, winter mornings,
the white snow dimly beheld, outside, through
the frost on the window-pane, I hear Dinarzade.
"Sister, sister, if you are yet awake, I pray you
finish the history of the Young King of the Black
Islands." Scheherazade replies, *'If my lord the
Sultan will suffer me to live another day, sister,
I will not only finish that, but tell you a more
wonderful story yet." Then, the gracious Sultan
goes out, giving no orders for the execution, and
we all three breathe again.
At this height of my tree I begin to see, cower-
ing among the leaves — it may be born of turkey,
[117]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
or of pudding, or mince pie, or of these many
fancies, jumbled with Robinson Crusoe on his
desert island, Philip Quarll among the monkeys,
Sandford and Merton with Mr. Barlow, Mother
Bunch, and the Mask — or it may be the result of
indigestion, assisted by imagination and over-
doctoring — a prodigious nightmare. It is so
exceedingly indistinct, that I don't know why it's
frightful — but I know it is. I can only make
out that it is an immense array of shapeless things,
which appear to be planted on a vast exaggeration
of the lazy-tongs that used to bear the toy soldiers,
and to be slowly coming close to my eyes, and
receding to an immeasurable distance. When it
comes closest, it is worse. In connection with it
I descry remembrances of winter nights incredibly
long; of being sent early to bed, as a punishment
for some small offence, and waking in two hours,
with a sensation of having been asleep two nights;
of the laden hopelessness of morning ever dawn-
ing; and the oppression of a weight of remorse.
And now, I see a wonderful row of little lights
[118]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
rise smoothly out of the ground, before a vast
green curtain. Now, a bell rings — a magic bell,
which still sounds in my ears unlike all other bells
— and music plays, amidst a buzz of voices, and
a fragrant smell of orange-peel and oil. Anon,
the magic bell commands the music to cease, and
the great green curtain rolls itself up majestically,
and The Play begins! The devoted dog of Mon-
targis avenges the death of his master, foully
murdered in the Forest of Bondy; and a humorous
Peasant with a red nose and a very little hat,
whom I take from this hour forth to my bosom
as a friend (I think he was a Waiter or an Hostler
at a village Inn, but many years have passed
since he and I have met), remarks that the sas-
sigassity of that dog is indeed surprising; and
evermore this jocular conceit will live in my remem-
brance fresh and unfading, overtopping all pos-
sible jokes, unto the end of time. Or now, I learn
with bitter tears how poor Jane Shore, dressed
all in white, and with her brown hair hanging
down, went starving through the streets; or how
[119]
I A CHRISTMAS TREE
George Barnwell killed the worthiest uncle that
|i ever man had, and was afterwards so sorry for it
i! that he ought to have been let off. Comes swift
I to comfort me, the Pantomime — stupendous
t Phenomonen! — when clowns are shot from loaded
I mortars into the great chandelier, bright constella-
IJ tion that it is; when Harlequins, covered all over
i with scales of pure gold, twist and sparkle, like
;| amazing fish; when Pantaloon (whom I deem it
I no irreverence to compare in my own mind to my
I I grandfather) puts red-hot pokers in his pocket,
i{
j| and cries "Here's somebody coming!" or taxes
li the Clown with petty larceny, by saying, "Now, I
j| sawed you do it!" when Everything is capable,
11 with the greatest ease, of being changed into Any-
thing; and "Nothing is, but thinking makes it so."
Now, too, I perceive my first experience of the
dreary sensation — often to return in after-life —
of being unable, next day, to get back to the dull,
settled world; of wanting to live for ever in the
bright atmosphere I have quitted ; of doting on the
little Fairy with the wand like a celestial barber's
[120]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
pole, and pining for a Fairy immortality along with
her. Ah, she comes back, in many shapes, as my eye
wanders down the branches of my Christmas Tree,
and go§s as often, and has never yet stayed by me !
Out of this delight springs the toy-theatre, —
there it is, with its familiar proscenium, and ladies
in feathers, in the boxes ! — and all its attendant
occupation with paste and glue, and gum, and
water colours, in the getting-up of The Miller
and his Men, and Elizabeth, or the Exile of Siberia.
In spite of a few besetting accidents and failures
(particularly an unreasonable disposition in the
respectable Kelmar, and some others, to become
faint in the legs, and double up, at exciting points
of the drama), a teeming world of fancies so sug-
gestive and all-embracing, that, far below it on my
Christmas Tree, I see dark, dirty, real Theatres
in the day-time, adorned with these associations
as with the freshest garlands of the rarest flowers,
and charming me yet.
But hark! The Waits are playing, and they
break my childish sleep! What images do I
[121]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
associate with the Christmas music as I see them
set forth on the Christmas Tree ? Known before
all the others, keeping far apart from all the others,
they gather round my little bed. An angel, speak-
ing to a group of shepherds in a field ; some travel-
lers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a baby
in a manger; a child in a spacious temple, talking
with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and
beautiful face, raising a dead girl by the hand;
again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a
widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people
looking through the opened roof of a chamber
where he sits, and letting down a sick person on a
bed, with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking
on the water to a ship ; again, on a sea-shore, teach-
ing a great multitude; again, with a child upon his
knee, and other children round; again, restoring
sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing
to the deaf, health to the sick, strength to the
lame, knowledge to the ignorant; again, dying
upon a Cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick
darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake,
[ U2 ]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
and only one voice heard, " Forgive them, for they
know not what they do."
Still, on the lower and maturer branches of the
Tree, Christmas associations cluster thick. School-
books shut up; Ovid and Virgil silenced; the Rule
of Three, with its cool impertinent inquiries, long
disposed of; Terence and Plautus acted no more,
in an arena of huddled desks and forms, all
chipped, and notched, and inked; cricket-bats,
stumps, and balls, left higher up, with the smell
of trodden grass and the softened noise of shouts
in the evening air; the tree is still fresh, still gay.
If I no more come home at Christmas-time, there
will be boys and girls (thank Heaven!) while the
World lasts; and they do! Yonder they dance
and play upon the branches of my Tree, God bless
them, merrily, and my heart dances and plays too!
And I do come home at Christmas. We all do,
or we all should. We all come home, or ought to
come home, for a short holiday — the longer, the
better — from the great boarding-school, where
we are for ever working at our arithmetical slates,
[US]
A CHRIST^VIAS TREE
to take, and give a rest. As to going a visiting,
where can we not go, if we will; where have we
not been, when we would; starting our fancy from
our Christmas Tree!
Away into the winter prospect. There are
many such upon the tree! On, by low-lying,
misty grounds, through fens and fogs, up long
hills, winding dark as caverns between thick
plantations, almost shutting out the sparkling
stars; so, out on broad heights, until we stop at
last, with sudden silence, at an avenue. The
gate-bell has a deep, half -awful sound in the
frosty air ; the gate swings open on its hinges ; and,
as we drive up to a great house, the glancing
lights grow larger in the windows, and the oppos-
ing rows of trees seem to fall solemnly back on
either side, to give us place. At intervals, all day^
a frightened hare has shot across this whitened
turf; or the distant clatter of a herd of deer tramp-
ling the hard frost, has, for the minute, crushed
the silence too. Their watchful eyes beneath the
fern may be shining now, if we could see them,
[124]
A christ:\ias tree
like the icy dewdrops on the leaves; but they are
still, and all is still. And so, the lights growing
larger, and the trees falling back before us, and
closing up again behind us, as if to forbid retreat,
we come to the house.
There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts
and other good comfortable things all the time,
for we are telling Winter Stories — Ghost Stories,
or more shame for us — round the Christmas fire ;
and we have never stirred, except to draw a little
nearer to it. But, no matter for that. We came
to the house, and it is an old house, full of great
chimneys, where wood is burnt on ancient dogs
upon the hearth, and grim portraits (some of them
with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from
the oaken panels of the walls. We are a middle-
aged nobleman, and we make a generous supper
with our host and hostess and their guests — it
being Christmas-time, and the old house full of
company — and then we go to bed. Our room
is a very old room. It is hung with tapestr}'. We
don't like the portrait of a cavalier in green, over
[125]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
the fireplace. There are great black beams in
the ceiling, and there is a great black bedstead,
supported at the foot by two great black figures,
who seem to have come off a couple of tombs in
the old baronial church in the park, for our par-
ticular accommodation. But, we are not a super-
stitious nobleman, and we don't mind. Well!
we dismiss our servant, lock the door, and sit
before the fire in our dressing-gown, musing about
a great many things. At length we go to bed.
Well! we can't sleep. We toss and tumble, and
can't sleep. The embers on the hearth burn fit-
fully and make the room look ghostly. We can't
help peeping out over the counterpane, at the two
black figures and the cavalier — that wicked-
looking cavalier — in green. In the flickering
light they seem to advance and retire: which,
though we are not by any means a superstitious
nobleman, is not agreeable. Well ! we get nervous
— more and more nervous. We say ''This is
very foolish, but we can't stand this ; we'll pretend
to be ill, and knock up somebody." Well! we
[126]
r
A CHRIST]MAS TREE
are just going to do it, when the locked door opens,
and there comes in a young woman, deadly pale,
and with long fair hair, who glides to the fire, and
sits down in the chair we have left there, wringing
her hands. Then, we notice that her clothes are
wet. Our tongue cleaves to the roof of our mouth,
and we can't speak; but, we observe her accurately.
Her clothes are wet; her long hair is dabbled with
moist mud; she is dressed in the fashion of two
hundred years ago; and she has at her girdle a
bunch of rusty keys. Well! there she sits, and we
can't even faint, we are in such a state about it.
Presently she gets up, and tries all the locks in the
room with the rusty keys, which won't fit one of
them; then, she fixes her eyes on the portrait of
the cavalier in green, and says, in a low, terrible
voice, "The stags know it!" Mier that, she
wrings her hands again, passes the bedside, and
goes out at the door. We hurry on our dressing-
gown, seize our pistols (we always travel with
pistols), and are following, when we find the door
locked. We turn the key, look out into the dark
[127]
=J
A CHRISTMAS TREE
gallery; no one there. We wander away, and try
to find our servant. Can't be done. We pace the
gallery till daybreak; then return to our deserted
room, fall asleep, and are awakened by our ser-
vant (nothing ever haunts him) and the shining
sun. Well! we make a wretched breakfast, and
all the company say we look queer. After break-
fast, we go over the house with our host, and then
we take him to the portrait of the cavalier in
green, and then it all comes out. He was false
to a young housekeeper once attached to that
family, and famous for her beauty, who drowned
herself in a pond, and whose body was discovered,
after a long time, because the stags refused to
drink of the water. Since which, it has been
whispered that she traverses the house at midnight
(but goes especially to that room where the cava-
lier in green was wont to sleep), trying the old
locks with the rusty keys. Well! we tell our host
of what we have seen, and a shade comes over his
features, and he begs it may be hushed up; and so
it is. But, it's all true; and we said so, before
[128]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
we died (we are dead now) to many responsible
people.
There is no end to the old houses, with resound-
ing galleries, and dismal state-bedchambers, and
haunted wings shut up for many years, through
which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping
up our back, and encounter any number of ghosts,
but (it is worthy of remark perhaps) reducible to
a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts
have little originality, and *' walk" in a beaten track.
Thus, it comes to pass, that a certain room in a
certain old hall, where a certain bad lord, baronet,
knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain
planks in the floor from which the blood will not
be taken out. You may scrape and scrape, as
the present owner has done, or plane and plane,
as his father did, or scrub and scrub, as his grand-
father did, or burn and burn with strong acids, as
his great-grandfather did, but, there the blood
will still be — no redder and no paler — no more
and no less — always just the same. Thus, in
such another house there is a haunted door, that
[129]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
never will keep open; or another door that never
will keep shut; or a haunted sound of a spinning-
wheel, or a hammer, or a footstep, or a cry, or a
sigh, or a horse's tramp, or the rattling of a chain.
Or else, there is a turret-clock, which, at the mid-
night hour, strikes thirteen when the head of the
family is going to die; or a shadowy, immovable
black carriage which at such a time is always seen
by somebody, waiting near the great gates in the
stable-yard. Or thus, it came to pass how Lady
Mary went to pay a visit at a large wild house in
the Scottish Highlands, and, being fatigued with
her long journey, retired to bed early, and inno-
cently said, next morning, at the breakfast-table,
"How odd, to have so late a party last night, in
this remote place, and not to tell me of it, before I
went to bed!" Then, every one asked Lady
Mary what she meant? Then, Lady Mary re-
plied, "Why, all night long, the carriages were
driving round and round the terrace, underneath
my window!" Then, the owner of the house
turned pale, and so did his Lady, and Charles
[130]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
Macdoodle of Macdoodle signed to Lady Mary
to say no more, and every one was silent. After
breakfast, Charles Macdoodle told Lady Mary
that it was a tradition in the family that those
rumbling carriages on the terrace betokened death.
And so it proved, for, two months afterwards, the
Lady of the mansion died. And Lady Mary,
who was a Maid of Honour at Court, often told
this story to the old Queen Charlotte; by this
token that the old King always said, ''Eh, eh.^
What, what? Ghosts, ghosts.^ No such thing,
no such thing!" And never left off saying so,
until he went to bed.
Or, a friend of somebody's whom most of us
know, when he was a young man at college, had a
particular friend, with whom he made the com-
pact that, if it were possible for the Spirit to return
to this earth after its separation from the body,
he of the twain who first died, should reappear to
the other. In course of time, this compact was
forgotten by our friend; the two young men hav-
ing progressed in life, and taken diverging paths
[131]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
that were wide asunder. But, one night, many
years afterwards, our friend being in the North of
England, and staying for the night in an inn, on
the Yorkshire Moors, happened to look out of
bed; and there, in the moonlight, leaning on a
bureau near the window, steadfastly regarding
him, saw his old college friend! The appearance
being solemnly addressed, replied, in a kind of
whisper, but very audibly, *'Do not come near me.
I am dead. I am here to redeem my promise. I
come from another world, but may not disclose
its secrets!" Then, the whole form becoming
paler, melted, as it were, into the moonlight, and
faded away.
Or, there was the daughter of the first occupier
of the picturesque Elizabethan house, so famous
in our neighbourhood. You have heard about
her.? No! Why, She went out one summer
evening at twilight, when she was a beautiful
girl, just seventeen years of age, to gather flowers
in the garden; and presently came running, terri-
fied, into the hall to her father, saying, **Oh, dear
[132]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
father, I have met myself!" He took her in his
arms, and told her it was fancy, but she said, "Oh
no! I met myself in the broad walk, and I was
pale and gathering withered flowers, and I turned
my head, and held them up!" And, that night, she
died ; and a picture of her story was begun, though
never finished, and they say it is somewhere in
the house to this day, with its face to the wall.
Or, the uncle of my brother's wife was riding
home on horseback, one mellow evening at sunset,
when, in a green lane close to his own house, he
saw a man standing before him, in the very centre
of a narrow way. "Why does that man in the
cloak stand there!" he thought. "Does he want
me to ride over him?" But the figure never
moved. He felt a strange sensation at seeing it so
still, but slackened his trot and rode forward.
When he was so close to it, as almost to touch it
with his stirrup, his horse shied, and the figure
glided up the bank, in a curious, unearthly manner
— backward, and without seeming to use its feet
— and was gone. The uncle of my brother's
[133]
I A CHRISTMAS TREE
wife, exclaiming, "Good Heaven! It's my cousin
Harry, from Bombay!" put spurs to his horse, i
which was suddenly in a profuse sweat, and,
wondering at such strange behaviour, dashed :
round to the front of his house. There, he saw ;i
the same figure, just passing in at the long French
window of the drawing-room, opening on the
ground. He threw his bridle to a servant, and ,
hastened in after it. His sister was sitting there, j jl
alone. " Alice, where's my Cousin Harry .^ "" Your ' '
cousin Harry, John.^" "Yes. From Bombay. I
met him in the lane just now, and saw him enter
here, this instant." Not a creature had been seen
by any one; and in that hour and minute, as it
afterwards appeared, this cousin died in India.
Or, it was a certain sensible old maiden lady,
who died at ninety-nine, and retained her faculties
to the last, who really did see the Orphan Boy; a
story which has often been incorrectly told, but,
of which the real truth is this — because it is, in
fact, a story belonging to our family — and she
was a connexion of our family. When she was '
[ 134 ]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
about forty years of age, and still an uncommonly
fine woman (her lover died young, which was the
reason why she never married, though she had
many offers), she went to stay at a place in Kent,
which her brother, an Indian-Merchant, had
newly bought. There was a story that this place
had once been held in trust by the guardian of a
young boy ; who was himself the next heir, and who
killed the young boy by harsh and cruel treatment.
She knew nothing of that. It has been said that
there was a Cage in her bedroom in which the
guardian used to put the boy. There was no such
thing. There was only a closet. She went to
bed, made no alarm whatever in the night, and in
the morning said composedly to her maid when
she came in, "Who is the pretty forlorn-looking
child who has been peeping out of that closet all
night .^" The maid replied by giving a loud
scream, and instantly decamping. She was sur-
prised; but she was a woman of remarkable
strength of mind, and she dressed herself and went
down-stairs, and closeted herself with her brother.
[135]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
''Now, Walter," she said, "I have been disturbed
all night by a pretty, forlorn-looking boy, who has
been constantly peeping out of that closet in my
room, which I can't open. This is some trick."
"I am afraid not, Charlotte," said he, *'for it is
the legend of the house. It is the Orphan Boy.
What did he do .^" "He opened the door softly,"
said she, '*and peeped out. Sometimes, he came
a step or two into the room. Then, I called to him.,
to encourage him, and he shrunk, and shuddered,
and crept in again, and shut the door." "The
closet has no communication, Charlotte," said her
brother, "with any other part of the house, and
it's nailed up." This was undeniably true, and
it took two carpenters a whole forenoon to get it
open, for examination. Then, she was satisfied
that she had seen the Orphan Boy. But, the
wild and terrible part of the story is, that he was
also seen by three of her brother's sons, in succes-
sion, who all died young. On the occasion of
each child being taken ill, he came home in a
heat, twelve hours before, and said, "Oh, Mamma,
[ 136 ]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
he had been playing under a particular oak-tree,
in a certain meadow, with a strange boy — a
pretty, forlorn-looking boy, who was very timid,
and made signs! From fatal experience, the
parents came to know that this was the Orphan
Boy, and that the course of that child whom he
chose for his little playmate was surely run.
Legion is the name of the German castles,
where we sit up alone to wait for the Spectre —
where we are shown into a room, made compara-
tively cheerful for our reception — where we
glance round at the shadows, thrown on the blank
walls by the crackling fire — where we feel very
lonely when the village innkeeper and his pretty
daughter have retired, after laying down a fresh
store of wood upon the hearth, and setting forth
on the small table such supper-cheer as a cold
roast capon, bread, grapes, and a flask of old
Rhine wine — where the reverberating doors close
on their retreat, one after another, like so many
peals of sullen thunder — and where, about the
small hours of the night, we come into the knowl-
[137]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
edge of divers supernatural mysteries. Legion is
the name of the haunted German students, in
whose society we draw yet nearer to the fire, while
the schoolboy in the corner opens his eyes wide
and round, and flies off the footstool he has chosen
for his seat, when the door accidentally blows open.
Vast is the crop of such fruit, shining on our
Christmas Tree; in blossom, almost at the very
top; ripening all down the boughs!
Among the later toys and fancies hanging there
— as idle often and less pure — be the images
once associated with the sweet old Waits, the
softened music in the night, ever unalterable!
Encircled by the social thoughts of Christmas-
time, still let the benignant figure of my childhood
stand unchanged! In every cheerful image and
suggestion that the season brings, may the bright
star that rested above the poor roof, be the star
of all the Christian World! A moment's pause,
O vanishing tree, of which the lower boughs are
dark to me as yet, and let me look once more! I
know there are blank spaces on thy branches,
[138]
A CHRISTMAS TREE
where eyes that I have loved have shone and
smiled; from which they are departed. But, far
above, I see the raiser of the dead girl, and the
Widow's Son ; and God is good ! If Age be hiding
for me in the unseen portion of thy downward
growth, O may I, with a grey head, turn a child's
heart to that figure yet, and a child's trustfulness
and confidence!
Now, the tree is decorated with bright merri-
ment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness.
And they are welcome. Innocent and welcome
be they ever held, beneath the branches of the
Christmas Tree, which cast no gloomy shadow!
But, as it sinks into the ground, I hear a whisper
going through the leaves. "This, in commemora-
tion of the law of love and kindness, mercy and
compassion. This, in remembrance of Me!"
[139]
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