Another was the Metallic Watchman, who paced the same street towards Hanover Square, and had a clang in his voice like a trumpet. He was a voice and nothing else; but any difference is something in a watchman.
A third, who cried the hour in Bedford Square, was remarkable in his calling for being abrupt and loud. There was a fashion among his tribe just come up at that time, of omitting the words "past" and "o'clock," and crying only the number of the hour. I know not whether a recollection I have of his performance one night is entire matter of fact, or whether any subsequent fancies of what might have taken place are mixed up with it; but my impression is, that as I was turning the corner into the square with a friend, and was in the midst of a discussion in which numbers were concerned, we were suddenly startled, as if in solution of it, by a brief and tremendous outcry of—One. This paragraph ought to have been at the bottom of the page, and the word printed abruptly round the corner.
A fourth watchman was a very singular phenomenon, a Reading Watchman. He had a book, which he read by the light of his lantern; and instead of a pleasant, gave you a very uncomfortable idea of him. It seemed cruel to pitch amidst so many discomforts and privations one who had imagination enough to wish to be relieved from them. Nothing but a sluggish vacuity befits a watchman.
But the oddest of all was the Sliding Watchman. Think of walking up a street in the depth of a frosty winter, with long ice in the gutters, and sleet over head, and then figure to yourself a sort of bale of a man in white coming sliding towards you with a lantern in one hand, and an umbrella over his head. It was the oddest mixture of luxury and hardship, of juvenility and old age! But this looked agreeable. Animal spirits carry everything before them; and our invincible friend seemed a watchman for Rabelais. Time was run at and butted by him like a goat. The slide seemed to bear him half through the night at once; he slipped from out of his box and his commonplaces at one rush of a merry thought, and seemed to say "Everything's in imagination—here goes the whole weight of my office."
But we approach our home. How still the trees! How deliciously asleep the country! How beautifully grim and nocturnal this wooded avenue of ascent against the cold white sky! The watchmen and patrols, which the careful citizens have planted in abundance within a mile of their doors, salute us with their "Good mornings"—not so welcome as we pretend; for we ought not to be out so late; and it is one of the assumptions of these fatherly old fellows to remind us of it. Some fowls, who have made a strange roost in a tree, flutter as we pass them—another pull up the hill, unyielding; a few strides on a level; and there is the light in the window, the eye of the warm soul of the house—one's home. How particular, and yet how universal, is that word; and how surely does it deposit every one for himself in his own nest!
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LIMITED
PLYMOUTH
