bolt upright before him, and the grave at which he had worked, the

night before, was not far off. At first, he began to doubt the reality of

his adventures, but the acute pain in his shoulders when he

attempted to rise, assured him that the kicking of the goblins was

certainly not ideal. He was staggered again, by observing no traces of

footsteps in the snow on which the goblins had played at leap-frog

with the gravestones, but he speedily accounted for this circumstance

when he remembered that, being spirits, they would leave no visible

impression behind them. So, Gabriel Grub got on his feet as well as he

could, for the pain in his back; and, brushing the frost off his coat,

put it on, and turned his face towards the town.

'But he was an altered man, and he could not bear the thought of

returning to a place where his repentance would be scoffed at, and his

reformation disbelieved. He hesitated for a few moments; and then

turned away to wander where he might, and seek his bread elsewhere.

'The lantern, the spade, and the wicker bottle were found, that day, in

the churchyard. There were a great many speculations about the

sexton's fate, at first, but it was speedily determined that he had been

carried away by the goblins; and there were not wanting some very

credible witnesses who had distinctly seen him whisked through the

air on the back of a chestnut horse blind of one eye, with the hind-

quarters of a lion, and the tail of a bear. At length all this was

devoutly believed; and the new sexton used to exhibit to the curious,

for a trifling emolument, a good- sized piece of the church

weathercock which had been accidentally kicked off by the aforesaid

horse in his aerial flight, and picked up by himself in the churchyard,

a year or two afterwards.

'Unfortunately, these stories were somewhat disturbed by the

unlooked-for reappearance of Gabriel Grub himself, some ten years

afterwards, a ragged, contented, rheumatic old man. He told his story

to the clergyman, and also to the mayor; and in course of time it

began to be received as a matter of history, in which form it has

continued down to this very day. The believers in the weathercock

tale, having misplaced their confidence once, were not easily prevailed

upon to part with it again, so they looked as wise as they could,

shrugged their shoulders, touched their foreheads, and murmured

something about Gabriel Grub having drunk all the Hollands, and

then fallen asleep on the flat tombstone; and they affected to explain

what he supposed he had witnessed in the goblin's cavern, by saying

that he had seen the world, and grown wiser. But this opinion, which

was by no means a popular one at any time, gradually died off; and be

the matter how it may, as Gabriel Grub was afflicted with rheumatism

to the end of his days, this story has at least one moral, if it teach no

better one - and that is, that if a man turn sulky and drink by himself

at Christmas time, he may make up his mind to be not a bit the better

The Pickwick Papers