Pross could not hear him. “So I’ll nod my head,” thought Mr.

Cruncher, amazed, “at all events she’ll see that.” And she did.

“Is there any noise in the streets now?” asked Miss Pross again,

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

presently.

Again Mr. Cruncher nodded his head.

“I don’t hear it.”

“Gone deaf in a hour?” said Mr. Cruncher, ruminating, with his

mind much disturbed; “wot’s come to her?”

“I feel,” said Miss Pross, “as if there had been a flash and a

crash, and that crash was the last thing I should ever hear in this

life.”

“Blest if she ain’t in a queer condition!” said Mr. Cruncher,

more and more disturbed. “Wot can she have been a takin’, to

keep her courage up? Hark! There’s the roll of them dreadful

carts! You can hear that, Miss?”

“I can hear,” said Miss Pross, seeing that he spoke to her,

“nothing. O, my good man, there was first a great crash, and then

a great stillness, and that stillness seems to be fixed and

unchangeable, never to be broken any more as long as my life

lasts.”

“If she don’t hear the roll of those dreadful carts, now very nigh

their journey’s end,” said Mr. Cruncher, glancing over his

shoulder, “it’s my opinion that indeed she never will hear anything

else in this world.”

And indeed she never did.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

Chapter XLV

THE FOOTSTEPS DIE OUT FOR EVER

A

long the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and

harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine.

All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since

imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation,

Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of

soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn,

which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than

those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of

shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself

into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious

license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same

fruit according to its kind.

Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to

what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be

seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of

feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that

are not my Father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions

of starving peasants! No; the great magician who majestically

works out the appointed order of the Creator, never reverses his

transformations. “If thou be changed into this shape by the will of