Dickens's Christmas Books - complete online versions

The Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Cricket On the Hearth, Battle Of Life
& The Haunted Man & the Ghosts's Bargain with Illustrations.

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THE CHIMES.
133
chandelier. As much as to say, " Of course ! I told you so. The common cry ! Lord bless you, we are up to all this sort of thing —myself and human nature."
" Now, gentlemen," said Will Fern, holding out his hands, and flushing for an instant in his haggard face, "see how your laws are made to trap and hunt us when we're brought to this. I tries to live elsewhere. And I'm a vagabond. To jail with him ! I comes back here. I goes a-nutting in your woods, and breaks— who don't ?—a limber branch or two. To jail with him ! One of your keepers sees me in the broad day, near my own patch of garden, with a gun. To jail with him ! I has a nat'ral angry word with that man, when I'm free again. To jail with him ! I cuts a stick. To jail with him ! I eats a rotten apple or a turnip. To jail with him! It's twenty mile away; and coming back, I begs a trifle on the road. To jail with him! At last, the constable, the keeper—anybody—finds me anywhere, a-doing any­thing. To jail with him, for he's a vagrant, and a jail-bird known; and the jail's the only home he's got."
The Alderman nodded sagaciously, as who should say, "A very good home too ! "
"Do I say this to serve my cause ! " cried Fern. "Who can give me back my liberty, who can give me back my good name, who can give me back my innocent niece ? Not all the Lords and Ladies in wide England. But gentlemen, gentlemen, dealing with other men like me, begin at the right end. Give us, in mercy, better homes when we're a-lying in our cradles; give us better food when we're a-working for our lives; give us kinder laws to bring us back when we're a-going wrong; and don't set Jail, Jail, Jail, afore us, everywhere we turn. There an't a condescension you can show the Labourer then, that he won't take, as ready and as grateful as a man can be ; for, he has a patient, peaceful, willing heart. But you must put his rightful spirit in him first; for, whether he's a wreck and ruin such as me, or is like one of them that stand here now, his spirit is divided from you at this time. Bring it back, gentlefolks, bring it back! Bring it back, afore the day comes when even his Bible changes in his altered mind, and the words seem to him to read, as they have sometimes read in my own eyes—in Jail: ' Whither thou goest, I can Not go; where thou lodgest, I do Not lodge ; thy people are Not my people ; Nor thy God my God !' "
A sudden stir and agitation took place in the Hall. Trotty thought at first, that several had risen to eject the man ; and hence this change in its appearance. But another moment showed him that the room and all the company had vanished from his sight,
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