Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/49

 says, turned from the door of a church some years ago by the beadle, who told him he was much too dirty to come in. "Perhaps what he said was true," observed Jack, when he told me the circumstance; "but I thought all the same, that I might have been allowed to go into a corner. Howsomever, I went away, and sat upon a tombstone to rest myself out of the beadle's sight, and hear the organ play, and thought that, maybe, when I was put under the mould, I might be as clean as Mr. Beadle or Mr. Parson, or any of the grand folks in the pews! And I think so still, though, as I said, it was a good many years ago, and I was not so near the mould as I am now." But though Jack avoids church in summer, he regularly attends the service in the Union during the winter months, and seems, from the manner in which he speaks of the sermons he hears, to be quite as good a Christian as his betters, who "fare sumptuously every day."

The last time I saw Jack he was on his way to the union workhouse for the winter, when he showed me the ticket of admission duly signed by the relieving officer.

"I am afraid," he said, "I shall not come out again; though I shall be glad to see the primroses and hear the cuckoo once more. I don't think I have been a very bad man, though once, and only once in my life, I had a pheasant for dinner."

I thought Jack was going to talk about that poaching business at last; but he hesitated, and pulled up suddenly.

"No! I have not been a very bad man; and if I have not worked as hard as other people, it is because I have not been able to work."

"Well, Jack!" I said, "your life has been a hard one, I have no doubt. But I never knew much harm of you; and I suppose that, like the rest of us, you have had your joys as well as your sorrows."

"There was a young woman," he said—but he did not wipe his eye with his cuff, nor whimper—"who was very fond of me, and she died when I was twenty and she was eighteen. Since that time the best things I have known in the world have been the sunshine and the warm weather. It is very hard to be poor, and lonely, and cold. Cold, as far as I know, is the worst of all—worse than hunger; at least I've found it so. And if it were not for the cold, I don't think I'd go to the Union at all, but would try and jog along in the winter as I do in the summer."

Poor Jack, it will be seen, though he has a certain amount of pride, has not a very high spirit—how could he have, with such a hopeless battle to fight?—and by no means despises the workhouse, or thinks it derogatory to his manly dignity as some of the hard-working poor do, to depend upon it for assistance. Without its kindly hand, however, he would doubtless die in the cold December—of "serum on the brain," as the parish doctors have lately taken to call starvation. So small blame be to him for going into it when he must, and for coming out of it when he can. In spite of his last fit of despondency, I hope to see the old fellow out again in the spring, along with his favourite primroses, listening to the cuckoo, gathering simples, and drawing such comfort out of the sunshine as Diogenes may have done, but without the misanthropy, that perhaps was not real, even with Diogenes.

in a phantom mail coach, the ghosts of four "spankers" whirl us along the great west road. The phantom guard blows a faint blast on his phantom horn as we dash down the long dingy street of Brentford, and sweep on with whizzing wheels between the broad nursery gardens. Here and there, a ladder reared against the fruit tree boughs, shows where the last russets and leather jackets have just been picked for all-devouring London. Faster, through Brentford, where the ghosts of Hogarth's time seem for ever grouped around the doorway of that quaint inn, The London Apprentice. On past the river almshouses and the little garden by which the dark barge sails flit; on between the rows of shops and the gables of the small town at the Duke's Gate, and we are at Hounslow and on legendary ground.

Were we magicians we should at once call together the dispersed atoms of the highwaymen who rattled in chains above the Hounslow furze bushes. From the roots of the fir trees, and the earth beneath the brambles, from the flints of the road side and the water of the rivulets, we would collect the fragments of the wicked bodies, until once more the "Captain" who swore "by the bones of Jerry Abershaw" should appear in his black mask, gold-laced cocked hat, and scarlet roquelaure, with his silver "pops" in his deep pockets, bestriding his chesnut mare, the bold and reckless rascal of the pleasant days when thirteen gibbets stood at one time near Bason Bridge on the road to Heston. Yes! Thirteen shapeless bundles, dangled at one time in view of the wayfarer across the terrible heath, in the beginning of this century. It was an old joke against Lord Islay, who once