“You speak like a Frenchman.”

“I am an old student here.”

“Aha, a perfect Frenchman! Good night, Englishman.”

“Good night, citizen.”

“But go and see that droll dog,” the little man persisted, calling

after him. “And take a pipe with you!”

Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the

middle of the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his

pencil on a scrap of paper. Then, traversing with the decided step

of one who remembered the way well, several dark and dirty

streetsmuch dirtier than usual, for the best public thoroughfares

remained uncleansed in those times of terrorhe stopped at a

chemist’s shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands.

A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill

thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.

Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his

counter, he laid the scrap of paper before him. “Whew”; the

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

chemist whistled softly, as he read it. “Hi! hi, hi!”

Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said:

“For you, citizen?”

“For me.”

“You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen. You know

the consequences of mixing them?”

“Perfectly.”

Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put

them, one by one, in the breast of his inner coat, counted out the

money for them, and deliberately left the shop. “There is nothing

more to do,” said he, glancing upward at the moon, “until

tomorrow. I can’t sleep.”

It was a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these

words aloud under the fast-sailing clouds. nor was it more

expressive of negligence than defiance. It was the settled manner

of a tired man, who had wandered and struggled and got lost, but

who at length struck into his road and saw its end.

Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest

competitors as a youth of great promise, he had followed his father

to the grave. His mother had died, years before. These solemn

words, which had been read at his father’s grave, arose in his mind

as he went down the dark streets, among the heavy shadows, with

the moon and the clouds sailing on high above him. “I am the

resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me,

though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and

believeth in me, shall never die.”

In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural

sorrow rising in him for the sixty-three who had been that day put

to death, and for tomorrow’s victims then awaiting their doom in

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the prisons, and still of tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s, the chain of

association that brought the words home, like a rusty old ship’s