The Period
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was
the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the
epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the
season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the
spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were
all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the
other way—in short, the period was so far like the present
period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative
degree of comparison only.
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a
plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king
with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the
throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than
crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and
fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven
hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were
conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this.
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Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-andtwentieth
blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in
the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by
announcing that arrangements were made for the
swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the
Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of
years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this
very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality)
rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of
events had lately come to the English Crown and People,
from a congress of British subjects in America: which,
strange to relate, have proved more important to the
human race than any communications yet received
through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
France, less favoured on the whole as to matters
spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled
with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper
money and spending it. Under the guidance of her
Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with
such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have
his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his
body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in
the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks
which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or
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sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of
France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that
sufferer was put to death, already marked by the
Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards,
to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a
knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the
rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent
to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very
day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about
by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer,
Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the
Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though
they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard
them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather,
forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were
awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and
protection to justify much national boasting. Daring
burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took
place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly
cautioned not to go out of town without removing their
furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the
highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light,
and, being recognised and challenged by his fellowA
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tradesman whom he stopped in his character of ‘the
Captain,’ gallantly shot him through the head and rode
away; the mall was waylaid by seven robbers, and the
guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by
the other four, ‘in consequence of the failure of his
ammunition:’ after which the mall was robbed in peace;
that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London,
was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one
highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in
sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought
battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired
blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot
and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the
necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers
went into St. Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and
the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired
on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences
much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the
hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in
constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of
miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on
Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning
people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now
burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; toA
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day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and tomorrow
of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s
boy of sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass
in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven
hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the
Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two
of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the
fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine
rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand
seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses,
and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of this
chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before
them.
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II
The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in
November, before the first of the persons with whom this
history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him,
beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill.
He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as
the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the
least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances,
but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the
mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times
already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach
across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back
to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard,
however, in combination, had read that article of war
which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of
the argument, that some brute animals are endued with
Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to
their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed
their way through the thick mud, floundering and
stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces
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at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and
brought them to a stand, with a wary ‘Wo-ho! so-hothen!’
the near leader violently shook his head and
everything upon it—like an unusually emphatic horse,
denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever
the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a
nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had
roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit,
seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely
cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples
that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the
waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense
enough to shut out everything from the light of the
coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards
of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into
it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding
up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped
to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots.
Not one of the three could have said, from anything he
saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was
hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of
the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two
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companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of
being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the
road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to
the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could
produce somebody in ‘the Captain’s’ pay, ranging from
the landlord to the lowest stable non-descript, it was the
likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover
mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November,
one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering
up Shooter’s Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch
behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a
hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded
blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horsepistols,
deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the
guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected
one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody
else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses;
as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have
taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not
fit for the journey.
‘Wo-ho!’ said the coachman. ‘So, then! One more pull
and you’re at the top and be damned to you, for I have
had trouble enough to get you to it!—Joe!’