Chapter 3 - Page 2

you oblige us by proceeding
with what you were going to relate?'

The dismal individual took a dirty roll of paper from his
pocket, and turning to Mr. Snodgrass, who had just taken out
his note-book, said in a hollow voice, perfectly in keeping with his
outward man--'Are you the poet?'

'I--I do a little in that way,' replied Mr. Snodgrass, rather
taken aback by the abruptness of the question.
'Ah! poetry makes life what light and music do the stage--
strip the one of the false embellishments, and the other of its
illusions, and what is there real in either to live or care for?'

'Very true, Sir,' replied Mr. Snodgrass.

'To be before the footlights,' continued the dismal man, 'is like
sitting at a grand court show, and admiring the silken dresses of
the gaudy throng; to be behind them is to be the people who
make that finery, uncared for and unknown, and left to sink or
swim, to starve or live, as fortune wills it.'

'Certainly,' said Mr. Snodgrass: for the sunken eye of the
dismal man rested on him, and he felt it necessary to say something.

'Go on, Jemmy,' said the Spanish traveller, 'like black-eyed
Susan--all in the Downs--no croaking--speak out--look lively.'
'Will you make another glass before you begin, Sir ?' said Mr. Pickwick.

The dismal man took the hint, and having mixed a glass of
brandy-and-water, and slowly swallowed half of it, opened the
roll of paper and proceeded, partly to read, and partly to relate,
the following incident, which we find recorded on the Transactions
of the Club as 'The Stroller's Tale.'

THE STROLLER'S TALE

'There is nothing of the marvellous in what I am going to relate,'
said the dismal man; 'there is nothing even uncommon in it.
Want and sickness are too common in many stations of life to
deserve more notice than is usually bestowed on the most
ordinary vicissitudes of human nature. I have thrown these few
notes together, because the subject of them was well known to me
for many years. I traced his progress downwards, step by step,
until at last he reached that excess of destitution from which he
never rose again.

'The man of whom I speak was a low pantomime actor; and,
like many people of his class, an habitual drunkard. in his better
days, before he had become enfeebled by dissipation and
emaciated by disease, he had been in the receipt of a good salary,
which, if he had been careful and prudent, he might have continued
to receive for some years--not many; because these men
either die early, or by unnaturally taxing their bodily energies,
lose, prematurely, those physical powers on which alone they can
depend for subsistence. His besetting sin gained so fast upon him,
however, that it was