Chapter I

Night is generally my time for walking. In the summer I often leave

home early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day,

or even escape for days or weeks together; but, saving in the country, I

seldom go out until after dark, though, Heaven be thanked, I love its

light and feel the cheerfulness it sheds upon the earth, as much as

any creature living.

I have fallen insensibly into this habit, both because it favours my

infirmity and because it affords me greater opportunity of speculating

on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. The

glare and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to idle pursuits like

mine; a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp

or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full

revelation in the daylight; and, if I must add the truth, night is kinder

in this respect than day, which too often destroys an air-built castle at

the moment of its completion, without the least ceremony or remorse.

That constant pacing to and fro, that never-ending restlessness, that

incessant tread of feet wearing the rough stones smooth and glossy -

is it not a wonder how the dwellers in narrows ways can bear to hear

it! Think of a sick man in such a place as Saint Martin's Court,

listening to the footsteps, and in the midst of pain and weariness

obliged, despite himself (as though it were a task he must perform) to

detect the child's step from the man's, the slipshod beggar from the

booted exquisite, the lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the

sauntering outcast from the quick tread of an expectant pleasure-

seeker - think of the hum and noise always being present to his sense,

and of the stream of life that will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through

all his restless dreams, as if he were condemned to lie, dead but

conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for

centuries to come.

Then, the crowds for ever passing and repassing on the bridges (on

those which are free of toil at last), where many stop on fine evenings

looking listlessly down upon the water with some vague idea that by

and by it runs between green banks which grow wider and wider until

at last it joins the broad vast sea - where some halt to rest from heavy

loads and think as they look over the parapet that to smoke and

lounge away one's life, and lie sleeping in the sun upon a hot

tarpaulin, in a dull, slow, sluggish barge, must be happiness

unalloyed - and where some, and a very different class, pause with

heaver loads than they, remembering to have heard or read in old time

that drowning was not a hard death, but of all means of suicide the

easiest and best.

The Old Curiosity Shop