The Uncommercial Traveller

The Uncommercial Traveller, by Charles Dickens

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Title: The Uncommercial Traveller
Author: Charles Dickens
Release Date: May, 1997 [EBook #914] [This file was first posted on May 20, 1997] [Most recently updated: May 20, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER ***

Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected]

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
CHAPTER I
--HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS

Allow me to introduce myself--first negatively.
No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No round of beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally addressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with great-coats and railway wrappers is set apart for me, no house of public entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of its brandy or sherry. When I go upon my journeys, I am not usually rated at a low figure in the bill; when I come home from my journeys, I never get any commission. I know nothing about prices, and should have no idea, if I were put to it, how to wheedle a man into ordering something he doesn't want. As a town traveller, I am never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which a number of flat boxes are baking in layers. As a country traveller, I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station, quite a Druid in the midst of a light Stonehenge of samples.
And yet--proceeding now, to introduce myself positively--I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London--now about the city streets: now, about the country by-roads--seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.
These are my chief credentials as the Uncommercial Traveller.
CHAPTER II
--THE SHIPWRECK

Never had I seen a year going out, or going on, under quieter circumstances. Eighteen hundred and fifty-nine had but another day to live, and truly its end was Peace on that sea-shore that morning.
So settled and orderly was everything seaward, in the bright light of the sun and under the transparent shadows of the clouds, that it was hard to imagine the bay otherwise, for years past or to come, than it was that very day. The Tug-steamer lying a little off the shore, the Lighter lying still nearer to the shore, the boat alongside the Lighter, the regularly-turning windlass aboard the Lighter, the methodical figures at work, all slowly and regularly heaving up and down with the breathing of the sea, all seemed as much a part of the nature of the place as the tide itself. The tide was on the flow, and had been for some two hours and a half; there was a slight obstruction in the sea within a few yards of my feet: as if the stump of a tree, with earth enough about it to keep it from lying horizontally on the water, had slipped a little from the land--and as I stood upon the beach and observed it dimpling the light swell that was coming in, I cast a stone over it.
So orderly, so quiet, so regular--the rising and falling of the Tug-steamer, the Lighter, and the boat--the turning of the windlass--the coming in of the tide--that I myself seemed, to my own thinking, anything but new to the spot. Yet, I had never seen it in my life, a minute before, and had