Rattlin the Reefer

Excerpt

I begin a life without a similitude with a simile—Start off with four horses—And, finally, I make my first appearance on any stage, under the protection of the “Crown.”

In the volume I am going to write, it is my intention to adhere rigidly to the truth—this will be bonâ fide an autobiography—and, as the public like novelty, an autobiography without an iota of fiction in the whole of it, will be the greatest novelty yet offered to its fastidiousness. As many of the events which will be my province to record, are singular and even startling, I may be permitted to sport a little moral philosophy, drawn from the kennel in Lower Thames Street, which may teach my readers to hesitate ere they condemn as invention mere matters of absolute, though uncommon fact.

Let us stand with that old gentleman under the porch of Saint Magnus’s Church, for the rain is thrashing the streets till they actually look white, and the kennel before us is swelled into a formidable, and hardly fordable brook. That kennel is the stream of life—and a dirty and a weary one it is, if we may judge by the old gentleman’s looks. All is hurried into that common sewer, the grave! What bubbles float down it! Everything that is fairly in the middle of the stream seems to sail with it, steadily and triumphantly—and many a filthy fragment enters the sewer with a pomp and dignity not unlike the funeral obsequies of a great lord. But my business is with that little chip; by some means it has been thrust out of the principal current, and, now that it is out, see what pranks it is playing. How erratic are its motions!—into what strange holes and corners it is thrust! The same phenomenon will happen in life. Once start a being out of the usual course of existence, and many and strange will be his adventures ere he once more be allowed to regain the common stream, and be permitted to float down, in silent tranquillity, to the grave common to all.

About seven o’clock in the evening of the 20th of February, 17—, a post-chaise with four horses drove with fiery haste up to the door of the Crown Inn, at Reading. The evening had closed in bitterly. A continuous storm of mingled sleet and rain had driven every being who had a home, to the shelter it afforded. As the vehicle stopped, with a most consequential jerk, and the steps were flung down with that clatter post-boys will make when they can get four horses before their leathern boxes, the solitary inmate seemed to shrink further into its dark corner, instead of coming forward eagerly to exchange the comforts of the blazing hearth for the damp confinement of a hired chaise. Thrice had the obsequious landlord bowed his well-powdered head, and, at each inclination, wiped off; with the palm of his hand, the rain-drops that had settled on the central baldness of his occiput, ere the traveller seemed to be aware that such a man existed as the landlord of the Crown, or that that landlord was standing at the chaise-door. At length a female, closely veiled, and buried in shawls like a sultana, tremblingly took the proffered arm, and tottered into the hotel. Shortly after, mine host returned, attended by porter, waiter, and stable-boy—and giving, by the lady’s orders, a handsome gratuity to each of the post-boys, asked for the traveller’s luggage....