in the glass above them.

An hour and a half limped heavily away in the thief-and-rascal

crowded passages below, even though assisted off with mutton

pies and ale. The hoarse messenger, uncomfortably seated on a

form after taking that refection, had dropped into a doze, when a

loud murmur and a rapid tide of people setting up the stairs that

led to the court, carried him along with them.

“Jerry! Jerry!” Mr. Lorry was already calling at the door when

he got there.

“Here, sir! It’s a fight to get back again. Here I am, sir!”

Mr. Lorry handed him a paper through the throng. “Quick!

Have you got it?”

“Yes, sir!”

Hastily written on the paper was the word “ACQUITTED.”

“If you had sent the message, ‘Recalled to Life,’ again,”

muttered Jerry, as he turned, “I should have known what you

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

meant, this time.”

He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking,

anything else, until he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd

came pouring out with a vehemence that nearly took him off his

legs, and a loud buzz swept into the street as if the baffled blueflies

were dispersing in search of other carrion.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

Chapter X

CONGRATULATORY

F

rom the dimly-lighted passages of the court, the last

sediment of the human stew that had been boiling there all

day, was straining off, when Doctor Manette, Lucie

Manette, his daughter, Mr. Lorry, the solicitor for the defence, and

its counsel, Mr. Stryver, stood gathered round Mr. Charles

Darnayjust releasedcongratulating him on his escape from

death.

It would have been difficult by a far brighter light, to recognize

in Doctor Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the

shoemaker of the garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked at

him twice, without looking again: even though the opportunity of

observation had not extended to the mournful cadence of his low

grave voice, and to the abstraction that overclouded him fitfully,

without any apparent reason. While one external cause, and that a

reference to his long lingering agony, would alwaysas on the

trialevoke this condition from the depths of his soul, it was also

in its nature to arise of itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as

incomprehensible to those unacquainted with his story as if they

had seen the shadow of the actual Bastille thrown upon him by a

summer sun, when the substance was three hundred miles away.

Only his daughter had the power of charming this black

brooding from his mind. She was the golden thread that united

him to a Past beyond his misery, and to a Present beyond his