Reprinted Pieces

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Чарльз Диккенс. Reprinted Pieces

THE LONG VOYAGE

THE BEGGING-LETTER WRITER

A CHILD’S DREAM OF A STAR

OUR ENGLISH WATERING-PLACE

OUR FRENCH WATERING-PLACE

BILL-STICKING

‘BIRTHS. MRS. MEEK, OF A SON

LYING AWAKE

THE GHOST OF ART

OUT OF TOWN

OUT OF THE SEASON

A POOR MAN’S TALE OF A PATENT

THE NOBLE SAVAGE

A FLIGHT

THE DETECTIVE POLICE

THREE ‘DETECTIVE’ ANECDOTES

I. – THE PAIR OF GLOVES

II. – THE ARTFUL TOUCH

III. – THE SOFA

ON DUTY WITH INSPECTOR FIELD

DOWN WITH THE TIDE

A WALK IN A WORKHOUSE

PRINCE BULL. A FAIRY TALE

A PLATED ARTICLE

OUR HONOURABLE FRIEND

OUR SCHOOL

OUR VESTRY

OUR BORE

A MONUMENT OF FRENCH FOLLY

Отрывок из книги

The amount of money he annually diverts from wholesome and useful purposes in the United Kingdom, would be a set-off against the Window Tax. He is one of the most shameless frauds and impositions of this time. In his idleness, his mendacity, and the immeasurable harm he does to the deserving, – dirtying the stream of true benevolence, and muddling the brains of foolish justices, with inability to distinguish between the base coin of distress, and the true currency we have always among us, – he is more worthy of Norfolk Island than three-fourths of the worst characters who are sent there. Under any rational system, he would have been sent there long ago.

I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some time, a chosen receiver of Begging Letters. For fourteen years, my house has been made as regular a Receiving House for such communications as any one of the great branch Post-Offices is for general correspondence. I ought to know something of the Begging-Letter Writer. He has besieged my door at all hours of the day and night; he has fought my servant; he has lain in ambush for me, going out and coming in; he has followed me out of town into the country; he has appeared at provincial hotels, where I have been staying for only a few hours; he has written to me from immense distances, when I have been out of England. He has fallen sick; he has died and been buried; he has come to life again, and again departed from this transitory scene: he has been his own son, his own mother, his own baby, his idiot brother, his uncle, his aunt, his aged grandfather. He has wanted a greatcoat, to go to India in; a pound to set him up in life for ever; a pair of boots to take him to the coast of China; a hat to get him into a permanent situation under Government. He has frequently been exactly seven-and-sixpence short of independence. He has had such openings at Liverpool – posts of great trust and confidence in merchants’ houses, which nothing but seven-and-sixpence was wanting to him to secure – that I wonder he is not Mayor of that flourishing town at the present moment.

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‘I see the star!’

They whispered one another, ‘He is dying.’

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