A Tale of Two Cities | Page 4

cut off, his
tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had
not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of
monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or
sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and
Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,
already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into
boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife
in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses
of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered
from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire,
snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer,
Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But
that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work
silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread:
the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were
awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to
justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and
highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families
were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their
furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman in
the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and
challenged by his fellow- tradesman whom he stopped in his character
of "the Captain," gallantly shot him through the head and rode away;
the mall was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead,
and then got shot dead himself by the other four, "in consequence of the
failure of his ammunition:" after which the mall was robbed in peace;

that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to
stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who
despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in
London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the
law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and
ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords
at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search for
contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the
musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these
occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the
hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant
requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals;
now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on
Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen,
and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day,
taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched
pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close
upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked
unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain
and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights
with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small
creatures--the creatures of this chronicle among the rest--along the
roads that lay before them.

II
The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The
Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up
Shooter's Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as

the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for
walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the
harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses
had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach
across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to
Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in
combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose
otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals
are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to
their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way
through the thick mud, floundering