The Cricket on the Hearth

The Cricket on the Hearth

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cricket on the Hearth, by Charles
Dickens (#10 in our series by Charles Dickens)
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Title: The Cricket on the Hearth
Author: Charles Dickens
Release Date: October, 1996 [EBook #678] [This file was first posted

on September 25, 1996] [Most recently updated: September 8, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
CRICKET ON THE HEARTH ***

Transcribed from the Charles Scribner's Sons "Works of Charles
Dickens" edition by David Price, email [email protected]

THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH



CHAPTER I
--Chirp the First

The kettle began it! Don't tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know
better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that
she couldn't say which of them began it; but, I say the kettle did. I
ought to know, I hope! The kettle began it, full five minutes by the little
waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner, before the Cricket uttered a
chirp.
As if the clock hadn't finished striking, and the convulsive little
Haymaker at the top of it, jerking away right and left with a scythe in
front of a Moorish Palace, hadn't mowed down half an acre of
imaginary grass before the Cricket joined in at all!
Why, I am not naturally positive. Every one knows that. I wouldn't set
my own opinion against the opinion of Mrs. Peerybingle, unless I were

quite sure, on any account whatever. Nothing should induce me. But,
this is a question of act. And the fact is, that the kettle began it, at least
five minutes before the Cricket gave any sign of being in existence.
Contradict me, and I'll say ten.
Let me narrate exactly how it happened. I should have proceeded to do
so in my very first word, but for this plain consideration--if I am to tell
a story I must begin at the beginning; and how is it possible to begin at
the beginning, without beginning at the kettle?
It appeared as if there were a sort of match, or trial of skill, you must
understand, between the kettle and the Cricket. And this is what led to
it, and how it came about.
Mrs. Peerybingle, going out into the raw twilight, and clicking over the
wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough
impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard--Mrs.
Peerybingle filled the kettle at the water-butt. Presently returning, less
the pattens (and a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs.
Peerybingle was but short), she set the kettle on the fire. In doing which
she lost her temper, or mislaid it for an instant; for, the water being
uncomfortably cold, and in that slippy, slushy, sleety sort of state
wherein it seems to penetrate through every kind of substance, patten
rings included-- had laid hold of Mrs. Peerybingle's toes, and even
splashed her legs. And when we rather plume ourselves (with reason
too) upon our legs, and keep ourselves particularly neat in point of
stockings, we find this, for the moment, hard to bear.
Besides, the kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It wouldn't allow
itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it wouldn't hear of accommodating
itself kindly to the knobs of coal; it WOULD lean forward with a
drunken air, and dribble, a very Idiot of a kettle, on the hearth. It was
quarrelsome, and hissed and spluttered morosely at the fire. To sum up
all, the lid, resisting Mrs. Peerybingle's fingers, first of all turned
topsy-turvy, and then, with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a
better cause, dived sideways in--down to the very bottom of the kettle.
And the hull of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous
resistance to coming out of the water, which the lid of that kettle
employed against Mrs. Peerybingle,