A tale of two cities

No. Ever kicked downstairs?

"Mr. Jarvis Lorry."

Mr.
Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a
wigged gentleman, the prisoner's counsel, who had a great bundle of
papers before him: and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman with
his hands in his pockets, whose whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher
looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated on the
ceiling of the court.

It was an old-fashioned place,
moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were
proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,
proud of its incommodiousness.

Our relations were business relations, but confidential.

"I am very much put out about my Ladybird."

The people rudely pictured
as drinking in the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of
thin wine and beer, and were gloweringly confidential together.

They were
overclouded again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had
been there.

Outside Tellson's--never by any means in it, unless called in--was an
odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the
live sign of the house.

That, these lists could not be proved to be in the prisoner's
handwriting; but that it was all the same; that, indeed, it was
rather the better for the prosecution, as showing the prisoner to be
artful in his precautions.

He had now to attend while
Mr. Stryver fitted the prisoner's case on the jury, like a compact
suit of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy
and traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest
scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas--which he certainly did
look rather like.

The joker rapped it with his
own, took a nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic
dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot
into his hand, and held out.

As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note,
Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the
blotting-paper stage, remarked:

"I suppose they'll be trying Forgeries this morning?"

This had
been so very noticeable, so very powerfully and naturally shown, that
starers who had had no pity for him were touched by her; and the
whisper went about, "Who are they?"

"If so be as you're quick, sir."

VI

The Shoemaker


"Good day!" said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head
that bent low over the shoemaking.

The court was all bestrewn with herbs and
sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol
fever.

Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this course,
and in favour of one of them remaining.

The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other
learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was
Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative
practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the
drier parts of the legal race.

If your business
necessitated your seeing "the House," you were put into a species of
Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life,
until the House came with its hands in its pockets, and you could
hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight.

To go on--"

"But this is my father's story, sir; and I begin to think"
--the curiously roughened forehead was very intent upon him--"that
when I was left an orphan through my mother's surviving my father
only two years, it was you who brought me to England.

The
likeness passed away, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt
pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession
of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering
black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine
gender--and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.

Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms made of
kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their
parchments into the banking-house air.

II

A Sight


"You know the Old Bailey, well, no doubt?" said one of the oldest of
clerks to Jerry the messenger.

Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded
parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was
vile indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses.

Except on
the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair,
standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his
broad, blunt nose.

Except on
the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair,
standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his
broad, blunt nose.

But it's not worth
your while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it; what you want to
do, you do.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes unaccountably
realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable that nobody in the
neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.

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 fellow-
tradesman 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, ...

Her knitting was before her, but
she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick.

It was famous,
too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a
punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the
whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and
softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in
blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically
leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be
committed under Heaven.

As I was saying--"

Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:

"As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had
suddenly and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away;
if it had not been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though
no art could trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot who
could exercise a privilege that I in my own time have known the boldest
people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across the water there;...

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

B-u-u-ust me!" said Mr. Cruncher, who all
this time had been putting on his clothes, "if I ain't, what with
piety and one blowed thing and another, been choused this last week
into as bad luck as ever a poor devil of a honest tradesman met with!

Is it Jerry?"

The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty
drinking vessel and smacked his lips.

Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing
dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening out a short
supply of wine.

"Pray," said Mr. Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left hand
from the back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fingers that
clasped him in so violent a tremble: "pray control your agitation--a
matter of business.

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 Newgate by
the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall;
to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a
wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

A joker of an extremely, not to say
wolfishly practical character, he looked, under those circumstances.

Others,
men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated
earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which
were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-
embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by
lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off
little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others
devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask,
licking, and even champing...

There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left
last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
upon the trees.

The air among the
houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have
supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went
down to be dipped in the sea.

Whatever gloss
the various spectators put upon the interest, according to their
several arts and powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at the
root of it, Ogreish.

Between the eyebrows and just over the little feminine nose, the line
of which was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the
expression deepened itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the
chair by which she had hitherto remained standing.

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 Newgate by
the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall;
to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a
wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

"Gentlemen," said her husband, who had kept his bright eye
observantly upon her, "good day.

VI

Hundreds of People


The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner
not far from Soho-square.

Those who had been greedy with the
staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth;
and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid
bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger
dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.

He had that rather wild, strained, seared marking about the eyes,
which may be observed in all free livers of his class, from the portrait
of Jeffries downward, and which can be traced, under various disguises
of Art, through the portraits of every Drinking Age.

Yet,
work of that kind was being done in the garret; for, with his back
towards the door, and his face towards the window where the keeper of
the wine-shop stood looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a low
bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.

If I
had had any but a unnat'ral wife, and this poor boy had had any but
a unnat'ral mother, I might have made some money last week instead
of being counter-prayed and countermined and religiously circumwented
into the worst of luck.

As everything turned upon her, and revolved about
her, they went out under the plane-tree, and she carried the wine
down for the special benefit of Mr. Lorry.

He had eyes
that assorted very well with that decoration, being of a surface
black, with no depth in the colour or form, and much too near
together--as if they were afraid of being found out in something,
singly, if they kept too far apart.

His stock consisted
of a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which
stool, young Jerry, walking at his father's side, carried every
morning to beneath the banking-house window that was nearest Temple
Bar: where, with the addition of the first handful of straw that
could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to keep the cold and wet
from the odd-job-man's feet, it formed the encampment for the day.

"It's hard in the law to spile a man, I think.

II

The Mail


It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.

His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain,
several times, to take off his hat to scratch his head.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses,
in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was
patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the
man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and
started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse,
of anything to eat.

Show Concord!

II

A Sight


"You know the Old Bailey, well, no doubt?" said one of the oldest of
clerks to Jerry the messenger.

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.

Consequently,
another drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady,
were all loitering by accident at various points of the road between
the Concord and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally
dressed in a brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well
kept, with large square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed
along on his way to his breakfast.

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 fellow-
tradesman 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, ...

Only one soul was to be seen,
and that was Madame Defarge--who leaned against the door-post,
knitting, and saw nothing.

His hurried right hand parcelled
out the herbs before him into imaginary beds of flowers in a garden;
and his efforts to control and steady his breathing shook the lips
from which the colour rushed to his heart.

Then only was he
permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and
casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the
establishment.

Mr. Lorry reddened as if he were conscious of having debated the point
in his mind, and Mr. Carton made his way to the outside of the bar.

The three glided by, and went silently down.

What do you mean by
flopping yourself down and praying agin me?"

He wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very
close to his head: which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair,
but which looked far more as though it were spun from filaments of
silk or glass.

He had a good leg, and was a little
vain of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were
of a fine texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were
trim.

It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such a
peculiar Ear of a place, that as Mr. Lorry stood at the open window,
looking for the father and daughter whose steps he heard, he fancied
they would never approach.

Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated himself on
the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his
father had been chewing, and cogitated.

This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of
thirty, and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although
it was a bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his
shoulder.

The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled
them, leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the man whose
life was in his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope,
grind the axe, and hammer the nails into the scaffold.

All three were wrapped to the cheekbones
and over the ears, and wore jack-boots.

The object in hand
being to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter
untracked, in the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five
years ago, and got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a
place where he did not remain, but from which he travelled back some
dozen miles or more, to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected
information; a witness was called to identify him as having been at
the precise time required, in the coffee-room of an hotel in th...

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the
holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to
Death.

Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been hurriedly
pushed aside, and fell down over her neck.

It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many
naked feet, and many wooden shoes.

Noakes and Co.'s might, or Snooks Brothers' might;
but Tellson's, thank Heaven!--

"You speak collectedly, and you--_are_ collected.

Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the
table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left,
dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest
while he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watchtower.

So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature,
that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a
wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone
before lying down to die.

The
butcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat;
the baker, the coarsest of meagre loaves.

I dined, myself, while those
numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to--this,
or some other.

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.

At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll
and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky
hair looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons.

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a
party which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher
worried his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any
four-footed inmate of a menagerie.

The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the
mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from
head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of
the Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go
into it, all kinds and varieties of men came out of it.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue
with all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson's.

Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the
holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to
Death.

He had now to attend while
Mr. Stryver fitted the prisoner's case on the jury, like a compact
suit of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy
and traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest
scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas--which he certainly did
look rather like.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

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 fellow-
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was
waylaid by seven ro...

Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty
to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for
that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent,
and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on
divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the
French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious,
excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going,
between the dominions of our said serene, illust...

Consequently,
another drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady,
were all loitering by accident at various points of the road between
the Concord and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally
dressed in a brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well
kept, with large square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed
along on his way to his breakfast.

They had a sinister expression,
under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over a
great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended nearly to the
wearer's knees.

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 Newgate by
the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall;
to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a
wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

How the virtuous servant, Cly, was his friend and
partner, and was worthy to be; how the watchful eyes of those forgers
and false swearers had rested on the prisoner as a victim, because
some family affairs in France, he being of French extraction, did
require his making those passages across the Channel--though what
those affairs were, a consideration for others who were near and dear
to him, forbade him, even for his life, to disclose.

Between the eyebrows and just over the little feminine nose, the line
of which was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the
expression deepened itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the
chair by which she had hitherto remained standing.

"Ah!" returned the man, with a relish; "he'll be drawn on a hurdle
to be half hanged, and then he'll be taken down and sliced before
his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while
he looks on, and then his head will be chopped off, and he'll be
cut into quarters.

As I was saying--"

Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:

"As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had
suddenly and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away;
if it had not been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though
no art could trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot who
could exercise a privilege that I in my own time have known the boldest
people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across the water there;...

Both resorted to the drinking-table without
stint, but each in a different way; the lion for the most part
reclining with his hands in his waistband, looking at the fire, or
occasionally flirting with some lighter document; the jackal, with
knitted brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that his eyes did
not even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass--which often
groped about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass for his
lips.

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed
in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest
and finding none.

The words were still in his hearing as just spoken--distinctly in his
hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life--when the weary
passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that
the shadows of the night were gone.

Your money came out of,
or went into, wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up
your nose and down your throat when they were opened and shut.

The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes;
it had begun to echo so resoundingly to the tread of coming feet,
that it seemed as though the very mention of that weary pacing to and
fro had set it going.

The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other
learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was
Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative
practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the
drier parts of the legal race.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if
to be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his
hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of
folded rag attached to it.

He was a French
gentleman; a scientific gentleman; a man of great acquirements--a
Doctor."

But, there my Lord interposed (with as grave a face as if it had not
been true), saying that he could not sit upon that Bench and suffer
those allusions.

Looking his companion full in the face while he drank the toast,
Carton flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it
shivered to pieces; then, rang the bell, and ordered in another.

The more
business he got, the greater his power seemed to grow of getting at
its pith and marrow; and however late at night he sat carousing with
Sydney Carton, he always had his points at his fingers' ends in the
morning.

This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed
at more convenient places of business.

Those who had been greedy with the
staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth;
and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid
bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger
dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.

To go on--"

"But this is my father's story, sir; and I begin to think"
--the curiously roughened forehead was very intent upon him--"that
when I was left an orphan through my mother's surviving my father
only two years, it was you who brought me to England.

Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out
his last glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of
satisfaction as is ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a
fresh complexion who has got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling
of wheels came up the narrow street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.

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.

No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the
many windows; not even a chance passerby was in the street.

"Not much boiling down to be done to-night, Memory," said Mr. Stryver,
gaily, as he looked among his papers.

That
head Mr. Attorney-General concluded by demanding of them, in the name
of everything he could think of with a round turn in it, and on the
faith of his solemn asseveration that he already considered the
prisoner as good as dead and gone.

"That's quartering," said Jerry.

Those who had been greedy with the
staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth;
and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid
bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger
dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.

Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before
him was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night
did not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-
forty by years, and they differed principally in the passions they
expressed, and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state.

The guard, the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him
distrustfully.

The coachman looked back and the guard
looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and
looked back, without contradicting.

The hands of the man who sawed
the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the
woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag
she wound about her head again.

"You are not the gaoler's daughter?"

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

It clearly being incumbent on some one to say, "Much better," Mr. Lorry
said it; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the interested
object of squeezing himself back again.

All three were wrapped to the cheekbones
and over the ears, and wore jack-boots.

In the gloomy tile-
paved entry to the gloomy tile-paved staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent
down on one knee to the child of his old master, and put her hand to
his lips.

The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered
up Shooter's Hill.

Although the Doctor's daughter had known nothing of the country of
her birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability
to make much of little means, which is one of its most useful and
most agreeable characteristics.

He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the
mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the
least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but
because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were
all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop,
besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous
intent of taking it back to Blackheath.

"My blood!" ejaculated the vexed coachman, "and not atop of
Shooter's yet!

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting
chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in
every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some
reluctant drops of oil.

Reins and whip and coachman
and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war
which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument,
that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had
capitulated and returned to their duty.

Environed by them, while the Woodman and the
Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those
other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough,
and carried their divine rights with a high hand.

On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday
when the waves of four months had roiled over the trial for treason,
and carried it, as to the public interest and memory, far out to sea,
Mr. Jarvis Lorry walked along the sunny streets from Clerkenwell
where he lived, on his way to dine with the Doctor.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge,
picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough,
and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of
the spiked wall of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the
beery breath of a whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging
it to mingle with the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and
coffee, and what not, that flowed at him, and already broke upon the
great windows behind him in an impure mist and rain.

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 to be atheistical and traitorous.

Through the rusted
bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled
neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the
summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it
of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.

The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was
dim and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in
the roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores
from the street: unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces,
like any other door of French construction.

Madame
Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a
quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though not to the
concealment of her large earrings.

The object in hand
being to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter
untracked, in the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five
years ago, and got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a
place where he did not remain, but from which he travelled back some
dozen miles or more, to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected
information; a witness was called to identify him as having been at
the precise time required, in the coffee-room of an hotel in th...

They had a sinister expression,
under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over a
great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended nearly to the
wearer's knees.

A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed
to be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in
some extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a
most wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good
measure too, or a great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in
advance of the inn servants, and soon settled the question of his
detachment from the poor young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his
chest, and s...

Your plate was stowed away among the neighbouring
cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good polish in a day
or two.

The arrival of his breakfast roused
him, and he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:

"I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at
any time to-day.

"Mr. Jarvis Lorry."

Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing
dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening out a short
supply of wine.

The resemblance was not lessened by the
accidental circumstance, that the mature Jerry bit and spat out
straw, while the twinkling eyes of the youthful Jerry were as
restlessly watchful of him as of everything else in Fleet-street.

The scene was Mr. Cruncher's private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March
morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty.

This much, Jerry, with his head becoming more and more spiky as the
law terms bristled it, made out with huge satisfaction, and so
arrived circuitously at the understanding that the aforesaid, and
over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood there before him
upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in; and that
Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.

His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire,
and as he sat, with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal,
he sat so still, that he might have been sitting for his portrait.

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful.

Joe!" cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down
from his box.

Each of these
stoppages was made at a doleful grating, by which any languishing
good airs that were left uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all
spoilt and sickly vapours seemed to crawl in.

But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him
coherently, though slowly.

If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be
true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I
bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor
heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!"

Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses,
in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was
patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the
man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and
started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse,
of anything to eat.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

"Gentlemen!

He was on his way to dig some
one out of a grave.

The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged,
beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from
the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it.

Not one of the three
could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other
two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers
from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his
two companions.

The keeper of the wine-shop, always going
a little in advance, and always going on the side which Mr. Lorry
took, as though he dreaded to be asked any question by the young
lady, turned himself about here, and, carefully feeling in the
pockets of the coat he carried over his shoulder, took out a key.

There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his
joke, he called to him across the way:

"Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?"

Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the
holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to
Death.

When toned down again,
the unimpeachable patriot appeared in the witness-box.

"The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School," said Stryver,
nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the
past, "the old seesaw Sydney.

"There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?"

Like Monsieur Manette, your father,
the gentleman was of Beauvais.

"For gracious sake say something else besides `indeed,' or you'll
fidget me to death," said Miss Pross: whose character (dissociated
from stature) was shortness.

Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait,
Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep.

This time, a pair of haggard eyes
had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.

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 fellow-
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was
waylaid by seven ro...

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary
gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was
heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in
waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them;
but, most especially the last.

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 fellow-
tradesman 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, ...

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.

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary
gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was
heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in
waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them;
but, most especially the last.

Not one of the three
could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other
two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers
from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his
two companions.

When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge,
picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough,
and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

For, people then paid to
see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in
Bedlam--only the former entertainment was much the dearer.

The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts
were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson's, with all its
foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time.

Not only would the echoes die away,
as though the steps had gone; but, echoes of other steps that never
came would be heard in their stead, and would die away for good when
they seemed close at hand.

IV

The Preparation


When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the
forenoon, the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the
coach-door as his custom was.

In the gloomy tile-
paved entry to the gloomy tile-paved staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent
down on one knee to the child of his old master, and put her hand to
his lips.

Are you a subject for the mad hospital?" said the
wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with
a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it.

But, by this time she
trembled under such strong emotion, and her face expressed such deep
anxiety, and, above all, such dread and terror, that Mr. Lorry felt
it incumbent on him to speak a word or two of reassurance.

Even the Cock-lane
ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping
out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past
(supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs.

Thus
engaged, with her right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame
Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one
grain of cough.

It was so like Smith's work, so much more like
the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best
of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most
dangerous man in the world to go over.

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 Newgate by
the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall;
to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a
wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), with
a pretty desire to convey to him that she felt how much older and
wiser he was than she.

Each of these
stoppages was made at a doleful grating, by which any languishing
good airs that were left uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all
spoilt and sickly vapours seemed to crawl in.

"That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the
identification.

You were always
driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that restless
degree that I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose.

That Providence, however, had put it into the heart of a person who
was beyond fear and beyond reproach, to ferret out the nature of the
prisoner's schemes, and, struck with horror, to disclose them to his
Majesty's Chief Secretary of State and most honourable Privy Council.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

It was
appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when
the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the
shore.

The doorway of the staircase
gives on the little courtyard close to the left here," pointing with
his hand, "near to the window of my establishment.

Towards nine o'clock he smoothed
his ruffled aspect, and, presenting as respectable and business-like
an exterior as he could overlay his natural self with, issued forth
to the occupation of the day.

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.

In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss
Manette had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the
gentleman from Tellson's.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five.

Not one of the three
could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other
two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers
from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his
two companions.

The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was
cutting, set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step
the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften
the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her
child, returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous
faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved
away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that
appeared more natural to...

Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when
he had very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased
to clasp his wrists were so much more steady than they had been,
that she communicated some reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.

So the guard of the
Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's
Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail,
beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest
before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or
eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed
in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest
and finding none.

Cramped in all kinds of dun cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the
oldest of men carried on the business gravely.

All three were wrapped to the cheekbones
and over the ears, and wore jack-boots.

The task of recalling him from the vagrancy into which he always
sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person
from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure,
to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man.

Thus, Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they began
ascending the stairs.

"There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?"

As his eyes rested on a short, slight,
pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes that
met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular
capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), of rifting and
knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity,
or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it
included all the four expressions--as his eyes rested on these things,
a sudden vivid likeness passed befo...

If you could
kindly mention now, for instance, what nine times ninepence are,
or how many shillings in twenty guineas, it would be so encouraging.

--Halloa, father!" and, after raising this fictitious alarm,
darting in again with an undutiful grin.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five.

A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed
to be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in
some extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a
most wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good
measure too, or a great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in
advance of the inn servants, and soon settled the question of his
detachment from the poor young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his
chest, and s...

Yet,
work of that kind was being done in the garret; for, with his back
towards the door, and his face towards the window where the keeper of
the wine-shop stood looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a low
bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.

All three were wrapped to the cheekbones
and over the ears, and wore jack-boots.

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 fellow-
tradesman 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, ...

Jerry, you honest tradesman, it
wouldn't suit _your_ line of business!

The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing
round it as it began the descent.

Mr. Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly advanced
to take his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips.

Mr. Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly advanced
to take his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips.

I have passed from one to another,
in the course of my business life, just as I pass from one of our
customers to another in the course of my business day; in short, I
have no feelings; I am a mere machine.

He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a
few minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling
over the table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down
upon him.

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 fellow-
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was
waylaid by seven ro...

He knew enough of the world to
know that there is nothing in it better than the faithful service of
the heart; so rendered and so free from any mercenary taint, he had
such an exalted respect for it, that in the retributive arrangements
made by his own mind--we all make such arrangements, more or less--
he stationed Miss Pross much nearer to the lower Angels than many
ladies immeasurably better got up both by Nature and Art, who had
balances at Tellson's.

Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to
this.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

That, the lofty
example of this immaculate and unimpeachable witness for the Crown,
to refer to whom however unworthily was an honour, had communicated
itself to the prisoner's servant, and had engendered in him a holy
determination to examine his master's table-drawers and pockets, and
secrete his papers.

Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses,
in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was
patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the
man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and
started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse,
of anything to eat.

He added, in a jesting way, that perhaps George Washington
might gain almost as great a name in history as George the Third.

After standing with the
bridle over his heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the
mail were no longer within hearing and the night was quite still
again, he turned to walk down the hill.

The object in hand
being to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter
untracked, in the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five
years ago, and got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a
place where he did not remain, but from which he travelled back some
dozen miles or more, to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected
information; a witness was called to identify him as having been at
the precise time required, in the coffee-room of an hotel in th...

With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and
stood on the offensive.

Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty
to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for
that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent,
and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on
divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the
French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious,
excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going,
between the dominions of our said serene,...

Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress, went into an adjoining
room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and a towel
or two.

I will not
say with me, though he had business relations with me many years ago,
and we are now intimate; I will say with the fair daughter to whom he
is so devotedly attached, and who is so devotedly attached to him?

II

The Mail


It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.

I am as
rickety as a hackney-coach, I'm as sleepy as laudanum, my lines is
strained to that degree that I shouldn't know, if it wasn't for the
pain in 'em, which was me and which somebody else, yet I'm none the
better for it in pocket; and it's my suspicion that you've been at it
from morning to night to prevent me from being the better for it in pocket,
and I won't put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you say now!"

It was so like Smith's work, so much more like
the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best
of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most
dangerous man in the world to go over.

Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so hard to
answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with much feebler
sympathy and humility, while the strong woman, having banished the
inn servants under the mysterious penalty of "letting them know"
something not mentioned if they stayed there, staring, recovered her
charge by a regular series of gradations, and coaxed her to lay her
drooping head upon her shoulder.

On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his tread,
as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was no
drawbridge, and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he
dropped his daughter's hand and clasped his head again.

It was so like Smith's work, so much more like
the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best
of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most
dangerous man in the world to go over.

Mr. Stryver then called his few witnesses, and Mr. Cruncher had next
to attend while Mr. Attorney-General turned the whole suit of clothes
Mr. Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and
Cly were even a hundred times better than he had thought them, and the
prisoner a hundred times worse.

Pull off
gentleman's boots in Concord.

Your lighter boxes of family
papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great
dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the
year one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written
to you by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly
released from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the
heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity
worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.

It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of
the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of
road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if
they had made it all.

Depressed
and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among
them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor
foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused
about enduring, or inflicting.

Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to
this.

They had a sinister expression,
under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over a
great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended nearly to the
wearer's knees.

He had now to attend while
Mr. Stryver fitted the prisoner's case on the jury, like a compact
suit of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy
and traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest
scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas--which he certainly did
look rather like.

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.

The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about
five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek
and a dark eye.

There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left
last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
upon the trees.

Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the
holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to
Death.

So now let's look at you."

Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses,
in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was
patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the
man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and
started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse,
of anything to eat.

Mr. Cruncher's apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and
were but two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass
in it might be counted as one.

It would be
worse than useless now to inquire which; worse than useless to seek
to know whether he has been for years overlooked, or always designedly
held prisoner.

The people rudely pictured
as drinking in the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of
thin wine and beer, and were gloweringly confidential together.

On this
occasion, Miss Pross, responding to Ladybird's pleasant face and
pleasant efforts to please her, unbent exceedingly; so the dinner was
very pleasant, too.

Mrs. Southcott had recently
attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a
prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime
appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the
swallowing up of London and Westminster.

The
hollowness and thinness of his face would have caused them to look
large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white hair,
though they had been really otherwise; but, they were naturally
large, and looked unnaturally so.

There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left
last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
upon the trees.

That Providence, however, had put it into the heart of a person who
was beyond fear and beyond reproach, to ferret out the nature of the
prisoner's schemes, and, struck with horror, to disclose them to his
Majesty's Chief Secretary of State and most honourable Privy Council.

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a
party which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher
worried his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any
four-footed inmate of a menagerie.

The more
business he got, the greater his power seemed to grow of getting at
its pith and marrow; and however late at night he sat carousing with
Sydney Carton, he always had his points at his fingers' ends in the
morning.

So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant
gaze, pausing in his work.

After standing with the
bridle over his heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the
mail were no longer within hearing and the night was quite still
again, he turned to walk down the hill.

"Gentlemen," said her husband, who had kept his bright eye
observantly upon her, "good day.

"It is not often," said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur
Defarge, "that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine,
or of anything but black bread and death.

Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty
to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for
that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent,
and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on
divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the
French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious,
excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going,
between the dominions of our said serene,...

But, the time was not come yet; and
every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows
in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no warning.

Both resorted to the drinking-table without
stint, but each in a different way; the lion for the most part
reclining with his hands in his waistband, looking at the fire, or
occasionally flirting with some lighter document; the jackal, with
knitted brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that his eyes did
not even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass--which often
groped about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass for his
lips.

The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was
cutting, set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step
the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften
the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her
child, returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous
faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved
away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that
appeared more natural to...

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

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 fellow-
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was
waylaid by seven ro...

There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and she
softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill
and gentleness: calling her "my precious!" and "my bird!" and spreading
her golden hair aside over her shoulders with great pride and care.

"Speak for yourself, Mr. Lorry," said Stryver; "I have a night's work
to do yet.

He then
conducted the young lady straightway to her chair again, and, holding
the chair-back with his left hand, and using his right by turns to
rub his chin, pull his wig at the ears, or point what he said, stood
looking down into her face while she sat looking up into his.

In a similar way I am, or I have been, trustee of
one kind or other for scores of our customers.

Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it
might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the
reverse--but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each
particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked
after.

Both resorted to the drinking-table without
stint, but each in a different way; the lion for the most part
reclining with his hands in his waistband, looking at the fire, or
occasionally flirting with some lighter document; the jackal, with
knitted brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that his eyes did
not even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass--which often
groped about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass for his
lips.

While one external cause, and that a reference
to his long lingering agony, would always--as on the trial--evoke 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.

These had been oiled
and oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of
the room were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if _they_ were
buried, in deep graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of
could be expected from them until they were dug out.

A crown to drink.

Mr.
Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a
wigged gentleman, the prisoner's counsel, who had a great bundle of
papers before him: and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman with
his hands in his pockets, whose whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher
looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated on the
ceiling of the court.

With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied.

"After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won't trust
your fore-legs till I get you on the level," said this hoarse
messenger, glancing at his mare.

"Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?" asked Defarge,
motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.

From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he returned with
such eccentricities of damp headgear as no words can describe; which
were made the more ludicrous by his anxious gravity.

Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the
moving patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside
retreating by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall
into the train of the night shadows within.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

"I know this messenger, guard," said Mr. Lorry, getting down into
the road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the
other two passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach,
shut the door, and pulled up the window.

If you could
kindly mention now, for instance, what nine times ninepence are,
or how many shillings in twenty guineas, it would be so encouraging.

He had a good leg, and was a little
vain of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were
of a fine texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were
trim.

And if, when I shall tell you of my name, and of my father
who is living, and of my mother who is dead, you learn that I have to
kneel to my honoured father, and implore his pardon for having never
for his sake striven all day and lain awake and wept all night,
because the love of my poor mother hid his torture from me, weep for
it, weep for it!

We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen
in their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris,
sir.

A hundred times the
dozing passenger inquired of this spectre:

"Buried how long?"

After this odd description of his daily routine of employment, Mr.
Lorry flattened his flaxen wig upon his head with both hands (which
was most unnecessary, for nothing could be flatter than its shining
surface was before), and resumed his former attitude.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

The jackal then invigorated himself with a bum for his throttle,
and a fresh application to his head, and applied himself to the
collection of a second meal; this was administered to the lion in the
same manner, and was not disposed of until the clocks struck three in
the morning.

It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black
horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables.

As his eyes rested on a short, slight,
pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes that
met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular
capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), of rifting and
knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity,
or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it
included all the four expressions--as his eyes rested on these things,
a sudden vivid likeness passed befo...

"He told me that he was travelling on business of a delicate and
difficult nature, which might get people into trouble, and that he
was therefore travelling under an assumed name.

Miss Pross inquired, with placidity.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

At last, it began to get about,
among such as were interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton
would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he
rendered suit and service to Stryver in that humble capacity.

Bust me if I
don't think he'd been a drinking!"

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.

As I was saying--"

Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:

"As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had
suddenly and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away;
if it had not been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though
no art could trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot who
could exercise a privilege that I in my own time have known the boldest
people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across the water there;...

"I know this messenger, guard," said Mr. Lorry, getting down into
the road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the
other two passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach,
shut the door, and pulled up the window.

Carton, who smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite sober,
laughed then, and turned to Darnay:

"This is a strange chance that throws you and me together.

Then only was he
permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and
casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the
establishment.

The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough perhaps
to be heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly
expressive of people out of breath, and holding the breath, and
having the pulses quickened by expectation.

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.

"I kiss your hand, miss," said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an
earlier date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat.

So the guard of the
Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's
Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail,
beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest
before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or
eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided
negative, made a decided scramble for it, and the three other
horses followed suit.

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 fellow-
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was
waylaid by seven ro...

Under the over-swinging lamps--swinging ever brighter in the better
streets, and ever dimmer in the worse--and by lighted shops, gay
crowds, illuminated coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of the
city gates.

After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again, which the man dexterously
combated by stirring the fire continuously for five minutes, he got up,
tossed his hat on, and walked out.

"And as such," quoth Mr. Lorry, whom the counsel learned in the law
had now shouldered back into the group, just as he had previously
shouldered him out of it--"as such I will appeal to Doctor Manette,
to break up this conference and order us all to our homes.

Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious paunch.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

"If it was ever
intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose
Providence would have cast my lot in an island?"

"Come on at a footpace! d'ye mind me?

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 fellow-
tradesman 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, ...

Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was
clear, and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.

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 fellow-
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was
waylaid by seven ro...

Notwithstanding Miss Pross's denial of her own imagination, there was
a perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted by one sad idea,
in her repetition of the phrase, walking up and down, which testified
to her possessing such a thing.

"I ain't a going to be blest out of house and home.

In the fair city of this vision,
there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon
him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope
that sparkled in his sight.

The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the
mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from
head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of
the Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go
into it, all kinds and varieties of men came out of it.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

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.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

I am as
rickety as a hackney-coach, I'm as sleepy as laudanum, my lines is
strained to that degree that I shouldn't know, if it wasn't for the
pain in 'em, which was me and which somebody else, yet I'm none the
better for it in pocket; and it's my suspicion that you've been at it
from morning to night to prevent me from being the better for it in pocket,
and I won't put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you say now!"

Even the Cock-lane
ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping
out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past
(supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

A good reason for taking to a man,
that he shows you what you have fallen away from, and what you might
have been!

The scene was Mr. Cruncher's private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March
morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

"I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that
some intelligence--or discovery--"

"The word is not material, miss; either word will do."

"--respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I never
saw--so long dead--"

Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the
hospital procession of negro cupids.

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a
party which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher
worried his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any
four-footed inmate of a menagerie.

A kettle steamed upon the hob, and in
the midst of the wreck of papers a table shone, with plenty of wine
upon it, and brandy, and rum, and sugar, and lemons.

He was a French
gentleman; a scientific gentleman; a man of great acquirements--a
Doctor."

Joe!" cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down
from his box.

Hunger was the inscription on the baker's
shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad
bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was
offered for sale.

The
hollowness and thinness of his face would have caused them to look
large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white hair,
though they had been really otherwise; but, they were naturally
large, and looked unnaturally so.

Then, all the good you bring to him, all the relief, all the
happiness you bring to him, begin.

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 fellow-
tradesman 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, ...

The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that
grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave
voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into
every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and
sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to
sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if
to be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his
hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of
folded rag attached to it.

She was a golden-haired doll!"

Lastly, came my Lord himself, turning
the suit of clothes, now inside out, now outside in, but on the whole
decidedly trimming and shaping them into grave-clothes for the
prisoner.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

The horses stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to
skid the wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let
the passengers in.

Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin
at home.

The keeper of the wine-shop, always going
a little in advance, and always going on the side which Mr. Lorry
took, as though he dreaded to be asked any question by the young
lady, turned himself about here, and, carefully feeling in the
pockets of the coat he carried over his shoulder, took out a key.

The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step,
getting in; the two other passengers were close behind him, and
about to follow.

The postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under
the feeble over-swinging lamps.

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 fellow-
tradesman 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, ...

A narrow winding
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets
diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of
rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon
them that looked ill.

Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand
in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the
hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin,
and so on in regular changes, without a moment's intermission.

For he was furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps
had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had
only to shut himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well
off the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he
were lucky) in five minutes.

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 fellow-
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was
waylaid by seven ro...

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than
her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding
smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.

"Pray," said Mr. Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left hand
from the back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fingers that
clasped him in so violent a tremble: "pray control your agitation--a
matter of business.

Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out
his last glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of
satisfaction as is ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a
fresh complexion who has got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling
of wheels came up the narrow street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.

When this expression
was upon him, he looked as if he were old; but when it was stirred
and broken up--as it was now, in a moment, on his speaking to his
daughter--he became a handsome man, not past the prime of life.

Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out
his last glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of
satisfaction as is ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a
fresh complexion who has got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling
of wheels came up the narrow street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.

At last, it began to get about,
among such as were interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton
would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he
rendered suit and service to Stryver in that humble capacity.

The rider stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed
the passenger a small folded paper.

Through the rusted
bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled
neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the
summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it
of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.

For he was furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps
had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had
only to shut himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well
off the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he
were lucky) in five minutes.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

The scene was Mr. Cruncher's private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March
morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty.

Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out
his last glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of
satisfaction as is ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a
fresh complexion who has got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling
of wheels came up the narrow street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.

Something especially reckless in his demeanour,
not only gave him a disreputable look, but so diminished the strong
resemblance he undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which his momentary
earnestness, when they were compared together, had strengthened),
that many of the lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to one
another they would hardly have thought the two were so alike.

Even the Cock-lane
ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping
out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past
(supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs.

The air among the
houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have
supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went
down to be dipped in the sea.

His scientific knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting
ingenious experiments, brought him otherwise into moderate request,
and he earned as much as he wanted.

The coachman looked back and the guard
looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and
looked back, without contradicting.

The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other
learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was
Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative
practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the
drier parts of the legal race.

Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be
frightened--rave--tear himself to pieces--die--come to I know not what
harm--if his door was left open."

Allowing for my learned friend's appearance being careless and
slovenly if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to
surprise, not only the witness, but everybody present, when they were
thus brought into comparison.

It began to be rumoured
that the jury would be out a long while.

What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas,
might have floated a king's ship.

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 fellow-
tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was
waylaid by seven ro...

The guard soon replaced his
blunderbuss in his arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its
contents, and having looked to the supplementary pistols that he wore
in his belt, looked to a smaller chest beneath his seat, in which
there were a few smith's tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box.

Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
question of rebuilding Tellson's.

Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his three-
cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson's,
Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning, with young
Jerry standing by him, when not engaged in making forays through the
Bar, to inflict bodily and mental injuries of an acute description on
passing boys who were small enough for his amiable purpose.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monsei...

He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the
mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the
least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but
because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were
all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop,
besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous
intent of taking it back to Blackheath.

His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the
face from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started,
and resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake,
reverting to a subject of last night.

There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left
last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
upon the trees.

The air among the
houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have
supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went
down to be dipped in the sea.

He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the
mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the
least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but
because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were
all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop,
besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous
intent of taking it back to Blackheath.

"What is the matter?" asked the passenger, then, with mildly
quavering speech.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than
her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding
smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

When this expression
was upon him, he looked as if he were old; but when it was stirred
and broken up--as it was now, in a moment, on his speaking to his
daughter--he became a handsome man, not past the prime of life.

Neither did he wear anything more on his
head than his own crisply-curling short dark hair.

I'll let you know, if you don't bring
smelling-salts, cold water, and vinegar, quick, I will."

"You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far
from the truth."

Across the
streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and
pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted,
and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly
manner overhead, as if they were at sea.

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 Newgate by
the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall;
to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a
wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

Through the rusted
bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled
neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the
summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it
of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.

They had a sinister expression,
under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over a
great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended nearly to the
wearer's knees.

Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this
hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make
his way quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and
handed in his letter through a trap in it.

When he stopped for drink, he moved this muffler
with his left hand, only while he poured his liquor in with his
right; as soon as that was done, he muffled again.

His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms
were bare to the elbows.

The words were still in his hearing as just spoken--distinctly in his
hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life--when the weary
passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that
the shadows of the night were gone.

"Here is monsieur, who knows a well-made shoe
when he sees one.

Sessions and Old Bailey had now to summon their
favourite, specially, to their longing arms; and shouldering itself
towards the visage of the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of King's
Bench, the florid countenance of Mr. Stryver might be daily seen,
bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower pushing its
way at the sun from among a rank garden-full of flaring companions.

Mr. Lorry reddened as if he were conscious of having debated the point
in his mind, and Mr. Carton made his way to the outside of the bar.

He showed no surprise at seeing another figure,
but the unsteady fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as
he looked at it (his lips and his nails were of the same pale lead-
colour), and then the hand dropped to his work, and he once more bent
over the shoe.

"Hooray, father!

The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at
ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his
own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes.

Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to
the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects
in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important
to the human race than any communications yet received through
any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

Growling, in addition, such phrases as "Ah! yes!

There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper
inclination and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the
garret story was reached.

It was
appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when
the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the
shore.

The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the
questioner.

In those days, travellers were very shy of being
confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be
a robber or in league with robbers.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow
street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was
spilled.

"Only one thing more," said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as a
wholesome means of enforcing her attention: "he has been found under
another name; his own, long forgotten or long concealed.

Those who had been greedy with the
staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth;
and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid
bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger
dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.

A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed
to be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in
some extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a
most wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good
measure too, or a great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in
advance of the inn servants, and soon settled the question of his
detachment from the poor young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his
chest, and s...

"I know this messenger, guard," said Mr. Lorry, getting down into
the road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the
other two passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach,
shut the door, and pulled up the window.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

He never looked at the figure before him,
without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as
if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never
spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak.

The scene was Mr. Cruncher's private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March
morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty.

But, perhaps the confidential bachelor
clerks in Tellson's Bank were principally occupied with the cares of
other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand
clothes, come easily off and on.

The prisoner's
counsel was cross-examining this witness with no result, except that
he had never seen the prisoner on any other occasion, when the wigged
gentleman who had all this time been looking at the ceiling of the
court, wrote a word or two on a little piece of paper, screwed it up,
and tossed it to him.

There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not
only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with
it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody
acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.

The disposition of
everything in the rooms, from the largest object to the least; the
arrangement of colours, the elegant variety and contrast obtained by
thrift in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and good sense;
were at once so pleasant in themselves, and so expressive of their
originator, that, as Mr. Lorry stood looking about him, the very
chairs and tables seemed to ask him, with something of that peculiar
expression which he knew so well by this time, whether he approved?

Kicked on
that occasion for cheating at dice?

Good night."

Then only was he
permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and
casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the
establishment.

CONTENTS



Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period
Chapter II The Mail
Chapter III The Night Shadows
Chapter IV The Preparation
Chapter V The Wine-shop
Chapter VI The Shoemaker


Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later
Chapter II A Sight
Chapter III A Disappointment
Chapter IV Congratulatory
Chapter V The Jackal
Chapter VI Hundreds of People
Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town
Chapter VIII Monseigneur i...

Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this
hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make
his way quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and
handed in his letter through a trap in it.