The Seven Poor Travellers | Page 5

handsomely laid out in Chancery, law expenses, collectorship,
receivership, poundage, and other appendages of management, highly complimentary to
the importance of the six Poor Travellers. In short, I made the not entirely new discovery
that it may be said of an establishment like this, in dear old England, as of the fat oyster
in the American story, that it takes a good many men to swallow it whole.
"And pray, ma'am," said I, sensible that the blankness of my face began to brighten as the
thought occurred to me, "could one see these Travellers?"
"Well!" she returned dubiously, "no!"
"Not to-night, for instance!" said I.
"Well!" she returned more positively, "no. Nobody ever asked to see them, and nobody
ever did see them."
As I am not easily balked in a design when I am set upon it, I urged to the good lady that
this was Christmas-eve; that Christmas comes but once a year,--which is unhappily too
true, for when it begins to stay with us the whole year round we shall make this earth a
very different place; that I was possessed by the desire to treat the Travellers to a supper
and a temperate glass of hot Wassail; that the voice of Fame had been heard in that land,
declaring my ability to make hot Wassail; that if I were permitted to hold the feast, I
should be found conformable to reason, sobriety, and good hours; in a word, that I could
be merry and wise myself, and had been even known at a pinch to keep others so,
although I was decorated with no badge or medal, and was not a Brother, Orator, Apostle,
Saint, or Prophet of any denomination whatever. In the end I prevailed, to my great joy. It
was settled that at nine o'clock that night a Turkey and a piece of Roast Beef should
smoke upon the board; and that I, faint and unworthy minister for once of Master Richard
Watts, should preside as the Christmas-supper host of the six Poor Travellers.
I went back to my inn to give the necessary directions for the Turkey and Roast Beef, and,
during the remainder of the day, could settle to nothing for thinking of the Poor
Travellers. When the wind blew hard against the windows,--it was a cold day, with dark
gusts of sleet alternating with periods of wild brightness, as if the year were dying

fitfully,--I pictured them advancing towards their resting-place along various cold roads,
and felt delighted to think how little they foresaw the supper that awaited them. I painted
their portraits in my mind, and indulged in little heightening touches. I made them
footsore; I made them weary; I made them carry packs and bundles; I made them stop by
finger-posts and milestones, leaning on their bent sticks, and looking wistfully at what
was written there; I made them lose their way; and filled their five wits with
apprehensions of lying out all night, and being frozen to death. I took up my hat, and
went out, climbed to the top of the Old Castle, and looked over the windy hills that slope
down to the Medway, almost believing that I could descry some of my Travellers in the
distance. After it fell dark, and the Cathedral bell was heard in the invisible steeple--quite
a bower of frosty rime when I had last seen it--striking five, six, seven, I became so full
of my Travellers that I could eat no dinner, and felt constrained to watch them still in the
red coals of my fire. They were all arrived by this time, I thought, had got their tickets,
and were gone in.--There my pleasure was dashed by the reflection that probably some
Travellers had come too late and were shut out.
After the Cathedral bell had struck eight, I could smell a delicious savour of Turkey and
Roast Beef rising to the window of my adjoining bedroom, which looked down into the
inn-yard just where the lights of the kitchen reddened a massive fragment of the Castle
Wall. It was high time to make the Wassail now; therefore I had up the materials (which,
together with their proportions and combinations, I must decline to impart, as the only
secret of my own I was ever known to keep), and made a glorious jorum. Not in a bowl;
for a bowl anywhere but on a shelf is a low superstition, fraught with cooling and
slopping; but in a brown earthenware pitcher, tenderly suffocated, when full, with a
coarse cloth. It being now upon the stroke of nine, I set out for Watts's Charity, carrying
my brown beauty in my arms. I would trust Ben, the waiter, with untold gold; but there
are strings in the human heart which must never be