her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding

smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.

Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained

herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a

youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers,

and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in

the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed

within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely

enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there

were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already

marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into

boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a

knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough

outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris,

there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts,

bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in

by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be

his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that

Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one

heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather,

forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and

protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by

armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself

every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town

without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for

security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the

light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellowtradesman

whom he stopped in his character of “the Captain,”

gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was

waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then

got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the

failure of his ammunition”: after which the mail was robbed in

peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was

made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one

highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all

his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their

turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among

them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off

diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawingrooms;

musketeers went into St. Giles’s, to search for contraband

goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers

fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences

much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman,

ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant

requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous

criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had

been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at