The Mystery of Edwin Drood | Page 8

it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was once possibly
known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by
another, and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another;
and a name more or less in the course of many centuries can be of little
moment to its dusty chronicles.
An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one
with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent city,
deriving an earthy flavour throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so
abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children
grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies
of nuns and friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders
to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like,
the attention which the Ogre in the story-book desired to render to his
unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his bread.
A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with
an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind
it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from
antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. So silent are the streets
of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest provocation), that
of a summer-day the sunblinds of its shops scarce dare to flap in the
south wind; while the sun-browned tramps, who pass along and stare,
quicken their limp a little, that they may the sooner get beyond the
confines of its oppressive respectability. This is a feat not difficult of
achievement, seeing that the streets of Cloisterham city are little more
than one narrow street by which you get into it and get out of it: the rest
being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them and no
thoroughfare--exception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved
Quaker settlement, in colour and general confirmation very like a
Quakeress's bonnet, up in a shady corner.
In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its
hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral
tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath.
Fragments of old wall, saint's chapel, chapter-house, convent and
monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively built into many of
its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become
incorporated into many of its citizens' minds. All things in it are of the

past. Even its single pawnbroker takes in no pledges, nor has he for a
long time, but offers vainly an unredeemed stock for sale, of which the
costlier articles are dim and pale old watches apparently in a slow
perspiration, tarnished sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd
volumes of dismal books. The most abundant and the most agreeable
evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham are the evidences of
vegetable life in many gardens; even its drooping and despondent little
theatre has its poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he
ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or
oyster- shells, according to the season of the year.
In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns' House: a venerable brick
edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend
of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is a
resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: 'Seminary for Young
Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.' The house- front is so old and worn, and the
brass plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has
reminded imaginative strangers of a battered old beau with a large
modern eye-glass stuck in his blind eye.
Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a
stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to
avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many
chambers of their House; whether they sat in its long low windows
telling their beads for their mortification, instead of making necklaces
of them for their adornment; whether they were ever walled up alive in
odd angles and jutting gables of the building for having some
ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them which has kept the
fermenting world alive ever since; these may be matters of interest to
its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute no item in Miss Twinkleton's
half-yearly accounts. They are neither of Miss Twinkleton's inclusive
regulars, nor of her extras. The lady who undertakes the poetical
department of the establishment at so much (or so little) a quarter has
no pieces in her list of recitals bearing on such unprofitable questions.
As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism,
there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of
which pursues its separate course as though