Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 31.djvu/473



THE SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS.

"The shrieking of horses, which, newly taken from the peaceful pursuits of life, could not endure the sight of the stragglers lying by the wayside." In the tenth book of the Iliad, Homer describes the terror of the horses of Rhesus, newly come to the war, at the sight of dead bodies. But Homer does not say that the horses shrieked—a thing very unusual on their part, and caused only, it is believed, by sudden and extreme pain. THE HOLLY-TREE. "Stage-coaches which I occasionally find myself  affecting to lament." This can scarcely have been affectation in Dickens. His best and mast congenial work is of the old coaching days; the romance and humour of the road.

"A secret door behind the head of the bed." An antiquarian friend informs me that he found such a secret door, in the panelling behind the bed, in an old house, at one time used as a kind of inn for poor travellers. This was in St. Andrew's, and a kind of passage down to the door from a room above, left little doubt as to the purpose of the arrangement. The ringing of a mysterious nocturnal bell every night lent confirmation to the most extreme theory! "Bravo and lovely servant-maid." This was Mercy, who had none on him Dickens's nurse of the fearsome tales, described in The Uncommercial Traveller.