Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/380

306 i306 POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF

on which the goblins had played at leap frog with the grave-stones, hut he speedily accounted for this circunastance 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 it, and his reformation disbelieved. He hesitated for a few moments ; and then turned away to wander where he might, and seek his bread elsewhere.

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.
 * ^ The lantern, the spade, and the wicker bottle, were found that day

" Unfortunately these stories were somewhat disturbed by the un- looked-for re-appearance of Gabriel Grub himself, some ten years after- wards, 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 con- tinued 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's 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 say- ing 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 turns sulky and drinks by himself at Christmas time, he may make up his mind to be not a bit the better for it, let the spirits be ever so good, or let them be even as many degrees beyond proof, as those which Gabriel Grub saw, in the goblin's cavern."