Commissariat Department, godmother, and I am pretty well! Then she
said to another, 'Who are YOU, my darling, and how do YOU do?' - 'I
am the Head of the Medical Department, godmother, and I am pretty
well.' Then, she said to some gentlemen scented with lavender, who
kept themselves at a great distance from the rest, 'And who are
YOU, my pretty pets, and how do YOU do?' And they answered, 'Weaw-
are-the-aw-Staff-aw-Department, godmother, and we are very well
indeed.' - 'I am delighted to see you all, my beauties,' says this
wicked old Fairy, ' - Tape!' Upon that, the houses, clothes, and
provisions, all mouldered away; and the soldiers who were sound,
fell sick; and the soldiers who were sick, died miserably: and the
noble army of Prince Bull perished.
When the dismal news of his great loss was carried to the Prince,
he suspected his godmother very much indeed; but, he knew that his
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servants must have kept company with the malicious beldame, and
must have given way to her, and therefore he resolved to turn those
servants out of their places. So, he called to him a Roebuck who
had the gift of speech, and he said, 'Good Roebuck, tell them they
must go.' So, the good Roebuck delivered his message, so like a
man that you might have supposed him to be nothing but a man, and
they were turned out - but, not without warning, for that they had
had a long time.
And now comes the most extraordinary part of the history of this
Prince. When he had turned out those servants, of course he wanted
others. What was his astonishment to find that in all his
dominions, which contained no less than twenty-seven millions of
people, there were not above five-and-twenty servants altogether!
They were so lofty about it, too, that instead of discussing
whether they should hire themselves as servants to Prince Bull,
they turned things topsy-turvy, and considered whether as a favour
they should hire Prince Bull to be their master! While they were
arguing this point among themselves quite at their leisure, the
wicked old red Fairy was incessantly going up and down, knocking at
the doors of twelve of the oldest of the five-and-twenty, who were
the oldest inhabitants in all that country, and whose united ages
amounted to one thousand, saying, 'Will YOU hire Prince Bull for
your master? - Will YOU hire Prince Bull for your master?' To
which one answered, 'I will if next door will;' and another, 'I
won't if over the way does;' and another, 'I can't if he, she, or
they, might, could, would, or should.' And all this time Prince
Bull's affairs were going to rack and ruin.
At last, Prince Bull in the height of his perplexity assumed a
thoughtful face, as if he were struck by an entirely new idea. The
wicked old Fairy, seeing this, was at his elbow directly, and said,
'How do you do, my Prince, and what are you thinking of?' - 'I am
thinking, godmother,' says he, 'that among all the seven-and-twenty
millions of my subjects who have never been in service, there are
men of intellect and business who have made me very famous both
among my friends and enemies.' - 'Aye, truly?' says the Fairy. -
'Aye, truly,' says the Prince. - 'And what then?' says the Fairy. -
'Why, then,' says he, 'since the regular old class of servants do
so ill, are so hard to get, and carry it with so high a hand,
perhaps I might try to make good servants of some of these.' The
words had no sooner passed his lips than she returned, chuckling,
'You think so, do you? Indeed, my Prince? - Tape!' Thereupon he
directly forgot what he was thinking of, and cried out lamentably
to the old servants, 'O, do come and hire your poor old master!
Pray do! On any terms!'
And this, for the present, finishes the story of Prince Bull. I
wish I could wind it up by saying that he lived happy ever
afterwards, but I cannot in my conscience do so; for, with Tape at
his elbow, and his estranged children fatally repelled by her from
coming near him, I do not, to tell you the plain truth, believe in
the possibility of such an end to it.
PUTTING up for the night in one of the chiefest towns of
Staffordshire, I find it to be by no means a lively town. In fact,
it is as dull and dead a town as any one could desire not to see.
It seems as if its whole population might be imprisoned in its
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Railway Station. The Refreshment Room at that Station is a vortex
of dissipation compared with the extinct town-inn, the Dodo, in the
dull High Street.
Why High Street? Why not rather Low Street, Flat Street, Low-
Spirited Street, Used-up Street? Where are the people who belong
to the High Street? Can they all be dispersed over the face of the
country, seeking the unfortunate Strolling Manager who decamped
from the mouldy little Theatre last week, in the beginning of his
season (as his play-bills testify), repentantly resolved to bring
him back, and feed him, and be entertained? Or, can they all be
gathered to their fathers in the two old churchyards near to the
High Street - retirement into which churchyards appears to be a
mere ceremony, there is so very little life outside their confines,
and such small discernible difference between being buried alive in
the town, and buried dead in the town tombs? Over the way,
opposite to the staring blank bow windows of the Dodo, are a little
ironmonger's shop, a little tailor's shop (with a picture of the
Fashions in the small window and a bandy-legged baby on the
pavement staring at it) - a watchmakers shop, where all the clocks
and watches must be stopped, I am sure, for they could never have
the courage to go, with the town in general, and the Dodo in
particular, looking at them. Shade of Miss Linwood, erst of
Leicester Square, London, thou art welcome here, and thy retreat is
fitly chosen! I myself was one of the last visitors to that awful
storehouse of thy life's work, where an anchorite old man and woman
took my shilling with a solemn wonder, and conducting me to a
gloomy sepulchre of needlework dropping to pieces with dust and age
and shrouded in twilight at high noon, left me there, chilled,
frightened, and alone. And now, in ghostly letters on all the dead
walls of this dead town, I read thy honoured name, and find that
thy Last Supper, worked in Berlin Wool, invites inspection as a
powerful excitement!
Where are the people who are bidden with so much cry to this feast
of little wool? Where are they? Who are they? They are not the
bandy-legged baby studying the fashions in the tailor's window.
They are not the two earthy ploughmen lounging outside the
saddler's shop, in the stiff square where the Town Hall stands,
like a brick and mortar private on parade. They are not the
landlady of the Dodo in the empty bar, whose eye had trouble in it
and no welcome, when I asked for dinner. Th
ey are not the turnkeys
of the Town Jail, looking out of the gateway in their uniforms, as
if they had locked up all the balance (as my American friends would
say) of the inhabitants, and could now rest a little. They are not
the two dusty millers in the white mill down by the river, where
the great water-wheel goes heavily round and round, like the
monotonous days and nights in this forgotten place. Then who are
they, for there is no one else? No; this deponent maketh oath and
saith that there is no one else, save and except the waiter at the
Dodo, now laying the cloth. I have paced the streets, and stared
at the houses, and am come back to the blank bow window of the
Dodo; and the town clocks strike seven, and the reluctant echoes
seem to cry, 'Don't wake us!' and the bandy-legged baby has gone
home to bed.
If the Dodo were only a gregarious bird - if he had only some
confused idea of making a comfortable nest - I could hope to get
through the hours between this and bed-time, without being consumed
by devouring melancholy. But, the Dodo's habits are all wrong. It
provides me with a trackless desert of sitting-room, with a chair
for every day in the year, a table for every month, and a waste of
sideboard where a lonely China vase pines in a corner for its mate
long departed, and will never make a match with the candlestick in
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the opposite corner if it live till Doomsday. The Dodo has nothing
in the larder. Even now, I behold the Boots returning with my sole
in a piece of paper; and with that portion of my dinner, the Boots,
perceiving me at the blank bow window, slaps his leg as he comes
across the road, pretending it is something else. The Dodo
excludes the outer air. When I mount up to my bedroom, a smell of
closeness and flue gets lazily up my nose like sleepy snuff. The
loose little bits of carpet writhe under my tread, and take wormy
shapes. I don't know the ridiculous man in the looking-glass,
beyond having met him once or twice in a dish-cover - and I can
never shave HIM to-morrow morning! The Dodo is narrow-minded as to
towels; expects me to wash on a freemason's apron without the
trimming: when I asked for soap, gives me a stony-hearted something
white, with no more lather in it than the Elgin marbles. The Dodo
has seen better days, and possesses interminable stables at the
back - silent, grass-grown, broken-windowed, horseless.
This mournful bird can fry a sole, however, which is much. Can
cook a steak, too, which is more. I wonder where it gets its
Sherry? If I were to send my pint of wine to some famous chemist
to be analysed, what would it turn out to be made of? It tastes of
pepper, sugar, bitter-almonds, vinegar, warm knives, any flat
drinks, and a little brandy. Would it unman a Spanish exile by
reminding him of his native land at all? I think not. If there
really be any townspeople out of the churchyards, and if a caravan
of them ever do dine, with a bottle of wine per man, in this desert
of the Dodo, it must make good for the doctor next day!
Where was the waiter born? How did he come here? Has he any hope
of getting away from here? Does he ever receive a letter, or take
a ride upon the railway, or see anything but the Dodo? Perhaps he
has seen the Berlin Wool. He appears to have a silent sorrow on
him, and it may be that. He clears the table; draws the dingy
curtains of the great bow window, which so unwillingly consent to
meet, that they must be pinned together; leaves me by the fire with
my pint decanter, and a little thin funnel-shaped wine-glass, and a
plate of pale biscuits - in themselves engendering desperation.
No book, no newspaper! I left the Arabian Nights in the railway
carriage, and have nothing to read but Bradshaw, and 'that way
madness lies.' Remembering what prisoners and ship-wrecked
mariners have done to exercise their minds in solitude, I repeat
the multiplication table, the pence table, and the shilling table:
which are all the tables I happen to know. What if I write
something? The Dodo keeps no pens but steel pens; and those I
always stick through the paper, and can turn to no other account.
What am I to do? Even if I could have the bandy-legged baby
knocked up and brought here, I could offer him nothing but sherry,
and that would be the death of him. He would never hold up his
head again if he touched it. I can't go to bed, because I have
conceived a mortal hatred for my bedroom; and I can't go away,
because there is no train for my place of destination until
morning. To burn the biscuits will be but a fleeting joy; still it
is a temporary relief, and here they go on the fire! Shall I break
the plate? First let me look at the back, and see who made it.
COPELAND.
Copeland! Stop a moment. Was it yesterday I visited Copeland's
works, and saw them making plates? In the confusion of travelling
about, it might be yesterday or it might be yesterday month; but I
think it was yesterday. I appeal to the plate. The plate says,
decidedly, yesterday. I find the plate, as I look at it, growing
into a companion.
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Don't you remember (says the plate) how you steamed away, yesterday
morning, in the bright sun and the east wind, along the valley of
the sparkling Trent? Don't you recollect how many kilns you flew
past, looking like the bowls of gigantic tobacco-pipes, cut short
off from the stem and turned upside down? And the fires - and the
smoke - and the roads made with bits of crockery, as if all the
plates and dishes in the civilised world had been Macadamised,
expressly for the laming of all the horses? Of course I do!
And don't you remember (says the plate) how you alighted at Stoke -
a picturesque heap of houses, kilns, smoke, wharfs, canals, and
river, lying (as was most appropriate) in a basin - and how, after
climbing up the sides of the basin to look at the prospect, you
trundled down again at a walking-match pace, and straight proceeded
to my father's, Copeland's, where the whole of my family, high and
low, rich and poor, are turned out upon the world from our nursery
and seminary, covering some fourteen acres of ground? And don't
you remember what we spring from:- heaps of lumps of clay,
partially prepared and cleaned in Devonshire and Dorsetshire,
whence said clay principally comes - and hills of flint, without
which we should want our ringing sound, and should never be
musical? And as to the flint, don't you recollect that it is first
burnt in kilns, and is then laid under the four iron feet of a
demon slave, subject to violent stamping fits, who, when they come
on, stamps away insanely with his four iron legs, and would crush
all the flint in the Isle of Thanet to powder, without leaving off?
And as to the clay, don't you recollect how it is put into mills or
teazers, and is sliced, and dug, and cut at, by endless knives,
clogged and sticky, but persistent - and is pressed out of that
machine through a square trough, whose form it takes - and is cut
off in square lumps and thrown into a vat, and there mixed with
water, and beaten to a pulp by paddle-wheels - and is then run into
a rough house, all rugged beams and ladders splashed with white, -
superintended by Grindoff the Miller in his working clothes, all
splashed with white, - where it passes through no end of machinerymoved
sieves all splashed with white, arranged in an ascending
scale of fineness (some so fine, that three hundred silk threads
cross each other in a single square inch of their surface), and all
in a violent state of ague with their teeth for ever chattering,
and their bodies for ever shivering! And as to the flint again,
isn't it mashed and mollified and troubled and soothed, exactly as
rags are in a paper-mill, until it is reduced to a pap so fine that
it contains no atom of 'grit' perceptible to the nicest taste? And
as to the flint and the clay together, are they not, after all
this, mixed in the proportion of five of clay to one of flint, and
isn't the compound - known as 'slip' - run into oblong troughs,
where its superfluous moisture may evaporate; and finally, isn't it
slapped and banged and beaten and patted and kneaded and wedged and
knocked about like butter, until it becomes a beautiful grey dough,
ready for the potter's use?
In regard of the potter, popularly so called (says the plate), you
don't mean to say you have forgotten that a workman called a
Thrower is the man under whose hand this grey dough takes the
shapes of the simpler household vessels as quickly as the eye can
follow? You don't mean to say you cannot call him up before you,
sitting, with his attendant woman, at his potter's wheel - a disc
about the size of a dinner-plate, revolving on two drums slowly or
quickly as he wills - who made you a complete breakfast-set for a
bachelor, as a good-humoured little off-hand joke? You remember
how he took up as much dough as he wanted, and, throwing it on his
wheel, in a moment fashioned it into a teacup - caught up more clay
and made a saucer - a larger dab and whirled it into a teapot -
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winked at a smaller dab and converted it into the lid of the