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
On Wednesday morning, the morning of the great St. Leger, it becomes
apparent that there has been a great influx since yesterday, both of
Lunatics and Keepers. The families of the tradesmen over the way are no
longer within human ken; their places know them no more; ten, fifteen,
and twenty guinea-lodgers fill them. At the pastry-cook’s second-floor
window, a Keeper is brushing Mr. Thurtell’s hair—thinking it his own. In
the wax-chandler’s attic, another Keeper is putting on Mr. Palmer’s
braces. In the gunsmith’s nursery, a Lunatic is shaving himself. In the
serious stationer’s best sitting-room, three Lunatics are taking a
combination-breakfast, praising the (cook’s) devil, and drinking neat
brandy in an atmosphere of last midnight’s cigars. No family sanctuary
is free from our Angelic messengers—we put up at the Angel—who in the
guise of extra waiters for the grand Race-Week, rattle in and out of the
most secret chambers of everybody’s house, with dishes and tin covers,
decanters, soda-water bottles, and glasses. An hour later. Down the
street and up the street, as far as eyes can see and a good deal farther,
there is a dense crowd; outside the Betting Rooms it is like a great
struggle at a theatre door—in the days of theatres; or at the vestibule
of the Spurgeon temple—in the days of Spurgeon. An hour later. Fusing
into this crowd, and somehow getting through it, are all kinds of
conveyances, and all kinds of foot-passengers; carts, with brick-makers
and brick-makeresses jolting up and down on planks; drags, with the
needful grooms behind, sitting cross-armed in the needful manner, and
slanting themselves backward from the soles of their boots at the needful
angle; postboys, in the shining hats and smart jackets of the olden time,
when stokers were not; beautiful Yorkshire horses, gallantly driven by
their own breeders and masters. Under every pole, and every shaft, and
every horse, and every wheel as it would seem, the
Gong-donkey—metallically braying, when not struggling for life, or
whipped out of the way.
By one o’clock, all this stir has gone out of the streets, and there is
no one left in them but Francis Goodchild. Francis Goodchild will not be
left in them long; for, he too is on his way, ‘t’races.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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