I was provoked, I say, to think there were so many millions of dead bodies thrown away every year, for which I, in the greatest of my difficulties, should be none the better. Such was the extremity to which I was reduced, that I should have been content to change conditions with a beggar.
It was a night in February. The day had been uncommonly fine, with a soft southern air puffing through the streets; the frost was oozing from the pavement, and the flags—I beg their pardon, the bricks—were floating in the yellow mud, so that one walked as if upon a foundation of puddings. Such had been the state of things in the day; such also as late as at nine o'clock P. M.
But it was now eleven; the wind had chopped round to the northwest and northeast, and perhaps some half a dozen other points beside, for it seemed to blow in all directions, and the thermometer was galloping downward towards zero. A savage snow-storm had just set in, and with such sharp and piercing gusts of wind, and such fierce rattling of hail, that, had not my mind been in a ferment, I should have hesitated to expose myself to its fury. But I reflected that I was flying from wo and terror; and the hope of diving into some body that might introduce me to a life of sunshine, rendered me insensible to the rigours of the tempest.
Having stumbled about in the snow for a while, I began to inquire of myself whither I was going; and the answer, or rather the want of an answer, somewhat confounded me. Where was I to look for a dead body, at such a time of night? It occurred to me I had better refer to a newspaper, and see what persons had lately died in town and were yet unburied. I stepped accordingly into a barber's shop, that happened to be open, and snatched up an evening paper. The first paragraph I laid my eyes on contained an account of the forgeries of my son, Ralph Skinner. It was headed Unheard-of Depravity, and it blazoned, in italics and capitals, the crime, the unnatural crime of committing frauds in the name of a father.
The shock with which I beheld the fatal publication renewed my horror, and sharpened my desire to end it. I threw down the paper, without consulting the column of obituaries, and ran towards the Hospital, where, it appeared to me, I should certainly find one or more bodies which the doctors had no longer occasion for. But my visit was at a highly unseasonable hour, and the porter, being knocked out of a comfortable nap, got up in an ill humour. "Whose cow's dead now?" I heard him grumble from his lodge—"I wonder people can't break their necks by daylight!"
But my neck was not broken; and he listened to my eager inquiry—"whether there were no dead bodies in the house?"—with rage and indignation.
"I tell you what, mister," said he, "we takes no mad people in here, except they comes the regular way."
And with that he shut the door in my face, leaving me to wonder at his want of civility.
But the air was growing more frigid every moment, and the hour was waxing later and later. I ran to the Alms-house, not doubting, as that was a more democratic establishment, that I should be there received with greater respect. But good-breeding is not a whit more native to a leather shirt than to a silk stocking. My Cerberus here was cut from the same flint as the other; his civility had been learned in the same school, and his English studied from the same grammar.