The Old Curiosity Shop | Page 3

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The Old Curiosity Shop
By Charles Dickens

CHAPTER 1
Night is generally my time for walking. In the summer I often leave
home early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day, or
even escape for days or weeks together; but, saving in the country, I
seldom go out until after dark, though, Heaven be thanked, I love its
light and feel the cheerfulness it sheds upon the earth, as much as any
creature living.
I have fallen insensibly into this habit, both because it favours my
infirmity and because it affords me greater opportunity of speculating

on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. The
glare and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to idle pursuits like mine;
a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop
window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the
daylight; and, if I must add the truth, night is kinder in this respect than
day, which too often destroys an air-built castle at the moment of its
completion, without the least ceremony or remorse.
That constant pacing to and fro, that never-ending restlessness, that
incessant tread of feet wearing the rough stones smooth and glossy--is
it not a wonder how the dwellers in narrows ways can bear to hear it!
Think of a sick man in such a place as Saint Martin's Court, listening to
the footsteps, and in the midst of pain and weariness obliged, despite
himself (as though it were a task he must perform) to detect the child's
step from the man's, the slipshod beggar from the booted exquisite, the
lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the sauntering outcast from the
quick tread of an expectant pleasure-seeker--think of the hum and noise
always being present to his sense, and of the stream of life that will not
stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his restless dreams, as if he were
condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had
no hope of rest for centuries to come.
Then, the crowds for ever passing and repassing on the bridges (on
those which are free of toil at last), where many stop on fine evenings
looking listlessly down upon the water with some vague idea that by
and by it runs between green banks which grow wider and wider until
at last it joins the broad vast sea--where some halt to rest from heavy
loads and think as they look over the parapet that to smoke and lounge
away one's life, and lie sleeping in the sun upon a hot tarpaulin, in a
dull, slow, sluggish barge, must be happiness unalloyed--and where
some, and a very different class, pause with heaver loads than they,
remembering to have heard or read in old time that drowning was not a
hard death, but of all means of suicide the easiest and best.
Covent Garden Market at sunrise too, in the spring or summer, when
the fragrance of sweet flowers is in the air, over-powering even the
unwholesome streams of last night's debauchery, and driving the dusky

thrust, whose cage has hung outside a garret window all night long, half
mad with joy! Poor bird! the only neighbouring thing at all akin to the
other little captives, some of whom, shrinking from the hot hands of
drunken purchasers, lie drooping on the path already, while others,
soddened by close contact, await the time when they shall be watered
and freshened up to please more sober company, and make old clerks
who pass them on their road to business, wonder what has filled their
breasts with visions of the country.
But my present purpose is not to expatiate upon my walks. The story I
am about to relate, and to which I shall recur at intervals, arose out of
one of these rambles; and thus I have been led to speak of them by way
of preface.
One night I had roamed into