To be candid I swerved myself. Most of us in these days are pleased to laugh at superstitions, provided we are in good company round a roaring fire. I am not to be a herdsman, I am not to be a grave-digger. Not any more will I discourse unto the people; for the last time have I spoken unto the dead.
"The theatre is open here, and Charles Kean is to-night playing for his last night. If it had been the 'rig'lar' drama I should have gone, but I was afraid Sir Giles Overreach might upset me, so I stayed away. “I think Fred ought not to need telling again what I have already said to him,” Mary answered, with a slight resentment in her manner. “I mean that he ought not to put such questions until he has done something worthy, instead of saying that he could do it.”
I was here alone in a lonely field, at nine of the clock on a winter night, and there, flittering and gliding through the spinney was a something in white. Virgil believed in ghosts, and so did Joe Braggs, and I, by oft reading the one and listening to the other, had preserved an open mind. My quarters are excellent, and the head-waiter is _such_ a waiter! Knowles (not Sheridan Knowles, but Knowles of the Cheetham Hill Road[28]) is an ass to him.
Apparently Sultan had his doubts, for he shivered and whinnied. This sounds bold, but truth is stranger than fiction. By-the-by, not the least comical thing that has occurred was the visit of the upholsterer (with some further calculations) since I began this letter. I think they took me here at the New London for the Wonderful Being I am; they were amazingly sedulous; and no doubt they looked for my being visited by the nobility and gentry of the neighborhood.
My first and only visitor came to-night: a ruddy-faced man in faded black, with extracts from a feather-bed all over him; an extraordinary and quite miraculously dirty face; a thick stick; and the personal appearance altogether of an amiable bailiff in a green old age. I have not seen the proper waiter since, and more than suspect I shall not recover this blow. He was announced (by _the_ waiter) as 'a person.' I expect my bill every minute.