Page:The world's show, 1851, or, The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family, who came up to London to "enjoy themselves", and to see the Great Exhibition (IA worldsshow1851or00mayh).pdf/41

 him, for he foresaw that the proprieties of life would compel him to keep between the sheets, until such time as he could venture to broach the subject of his denuded and destitute state to his better half. To lie in bed was his only resource; but to lie in bed was to make him more and more sensible of the utter destitution in which he was involved. He had received no newspapers for a fortnight, and of all things he loved his newspapers the dearest. The loss of them in such a state, at such a time, he felt more than all. He might, perhaps, have borne the absence of his pantaloons with all the pride of martyrdom; but to be cut off from connexion with the outer world of wickedness, in which he took such extreme interest, was more than human philosophy or mountain stoicism could bear—for what is solitude without a newspaper! Here was he, three hundred and one miles from London, in a lonely house, without a single "daring robbery" to comfort him, or a "diabolical murder" to put life into him! All the "successful swindling" of the metropolis was going on without his knowledge; and the excursionists from his native county were, he felt satisfied, being plundered, one and all, without his being, as he longed to be. in any way privy to it!

In this situation, thus contemplating, Mr. Sandboys passed the day—a Zimmerman between the blankets. At last, as the shades of night began to shut out Melbrake from before his bed-room window, and when Mrs. Sandboys came to his bedside for the basin which had contained his thin meal of gruel, as he sat up to receive her he humbly petitioned her, with a melancholy shake of the tuft on the top of his white cotton night-cap, to allow him one of the old newspapers and a light, so that he might relieve his mind by perusing some of the trials at the Central Criminal Court? if he might be allowed to choose, he would prefer that Observer and supplement which contained those charming twenty columns of the last frightful London murder.

But to make the request was to open afresh the vials of Mrs. Sandboys' wrath; for she gave him plainly to understand that, coal-less as they were below, Postlethwaite had been obliged to fell some of the trees, and that the holly was so green that she had been forced to burn every newspaper in the house in her struggles to make a fire. Indeed, were it not that they had mustered all hands, and taken turn and turn about at the bellows, every fifteen minutes, all the day through, the family would not have been able to have had a mouthful of anything warm to eat; and now that the last double Times had gone, she had left Postlethwaite and Ann and Elcy and poor Jobby seated round a fireless grate, in the circular drawing-room, partaking of oatmeal mixed in cold water by way of tea.

Bitterly conscious of his deficiency as regarded pantaloons, and feeling acutely the privation as well as the destruction of his newspapers, the otherwise benevolent soul of Sandboys reverted for a moment into the primitive selfishness of savage life; and, seeing no other sorrows but his own, he angrily glared on Mrs. Sandboys, and burst out, "How dar'sta, Aggy, burn t' papers?"