Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

rough medley dress of homespun stuff and hairy skins of beasts,

the powerful frame attenuated by spare living, and the sullen and

desperate compression of the lips in sleep, inspired the mender of

roads with awe. The traveller had travelled far, and his feet were

footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes,

stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the

many long leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he

himself was into sores. Stooping down beside him, the road

mender tried to get a peep at secret weapons in his breast or

where not; but, in vain, for he slept with his arms crossed upon

him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified towns with their

stockades, guardhouses, gates, trenches, and drawbridges, seemed

to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against this figure.

And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and looked

around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no

obstacle, tending to centres all over France.

The man slept on indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of

brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the pattering

lumps of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun

changed them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was

glowing. Then, the mender of roads having got his tools together

and all things ready to go down into the village, roused him.

“Good!” said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. “Two leagues

beyond the summit of the hill?”

“About.”

“About. Good!”

The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before

him according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain,

squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink,

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

and appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all the

village. When the village had taken its poor supper, it did not

creep to bed, as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and

remained there. A curious contagion of whispering was upon it,

and also, when it gathered together at the fountain in the dark,

another curious contagion of looking expectantly at the sky in one

direction only. Monsieur Gabelle, chief functionary of the place,

became uneasy; went out on his house-top alone, and looked in

that direction too; glanced down from behind his chimneys at the

darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to the

sacristan who kept the keys of the church, that there might be

need to ring the tocsin by-and-by.

The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau,

keeping its solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though

they threatened the pile of building massive and dark in the

gloom. Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and

beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within;

uneasy rushes of wind went through the hall, among the old

spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook