The Lazy Tour of Two Idle ApprenticesDickens, Charles
General
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
Dickens, Charles
Apprentices -- Fiction; Cumbria (England) -- Description and travel -- Fiction; Walking -- England -- Cumbria -- Fiction
Breaks and barriers at Doncaster Station to keep the crowd off; temporary
wooden avenues of ingress and egress, to help the crowd on. Forty extra
porters sent down for this present blessed Race-Week, and all of them
making up their betting-books in the lamp-room or somewhere else, and
none of them to come and touch the luggage. Travellers disgorged into an
open space, a howling wilderness of idle men. All work but race-work at
a stand-still; all men at a stand-still. ‘Ey my word! Deant ask noon o’
us to help wi’ t’luggage. Bock your opinion loike a mon. Coom! Dang
it, coom, t’harses and Joon Scott!’ In the midst of the idle men, all
the fly horses and omnibus horses of Doncaster and parts adjacent,
rampant, rearing, backing, plunging, shying—apparently the result of
their hearing of nothing but their own order and John Scott.
Grand Dramatic Company from London for the Race-Week. Poses Plastiques
in the Grand Assembly Room up the Stable-Yard at seven and nine each
evening, for the Race-Week. Grand Alliance Circus in the field beyond
the bridge, for the Race-Week. Grand Exhibition of Aztec Lilliputians,
important to all who want to be horrified cheap, for the Race-Week.
Lodgings, grand and not grand, but all at grand prices, ranging from ten
pounds to twenty, for the Grand Race-Week!
Rendered giddy enough by these things, Messieurs Idle and Goodchild
repaired to the quarters they had secured beforehand, and Mr. Goodchild
looked down from the window into the surging street.
‘By Heaven, Tom!’ cried he, after contemplating it, ‘I am in the Lunatic
Asylum again, and these are all mad people under the charge of a body of
designing keepers!’
All through the Race-Week, Mr. Goodchild never divested himself of this
idea. Every day he looked out of window, with something of the dread of
Lemuel Gulliver looking down at men after he returned home from the
horse-country; and every day he saw the Lunatics, horse-mad, betting-mad,
drunken-mad, vice-mad, and the designing Keepers always after them. The
idea pervaded, like the second colour in shot-silk, the whole of Mr.
Goodchild’s impressions. They were much as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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