“With you flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I
don’t know how scarce you mayn’t make the wittles and drink
here, by your flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at
your boy: he is your’n, ain’t he? He’s as thin as a lath. Do you call
yourself a mother, and not know that a mother’s first duty is to
blow her boy out?”
This touched young Jerry on a tender place; who adjured his
mother to perform her first duty, and whatever else she did or
neglected, above all things to lay especial stress on the discharge
of that maternal function so affectingly and delicately indicated by
his other parent.
Thus the evening wore away with the Cruncher family, until
Young Jerry was ordered to bed, and his mother, laid under
similar injunctions, obeyed them. Mr. Cruncher beguiled the
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A Tale of Two Cities
earlier watches of the night with solitary pipes, and did not start
upon his excursion until one o’clock. Towards that small and
ghostly hour, he rose up from his chair, took a key out of his
pocket, opened a locked cupboard, and brought forth a sack, a
crowbar of convenient size, a rope and chain, and other fishing
tackle of that nature. Disposing these articles about him in skilful
manner, he bestowed a parting defiance on Mrs. Cruncher,
extinguished the light, and went out.
Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he
went to bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the
darkness he followed out of the room, followed down the stairs,
followed down the court, followed out into the streets. He was in
no uneasiness concerning his getting into the house again, for it
was full of lodgers, and the door stood ajar all night.
Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of
his father’s honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house
fronts, walls, and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another,
held his honoured parent in view. The honoured parent steering
northward, had not gone far, when he was joined by another
disciple of Izaak Walton, and the two trudged on together.
Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond
the winking lamps, and the more than winking watchman, and
were out upon a lonely road. Another fisherman was picked up
here—and that so silently, that if Young Jerry had been
superstitious, he might have supposed the second follower of the
gentle craft to have, all of a sudden, split himself in two.
The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three
stopped under a bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the
bank was a low brick wall, surmounted by an iron railing. In the
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A Tale of Two Cities
shadow of bank and wall the three turned out of the road, and up a
blind lane, of which the wall—there, risen to some eight or ten feet
high—formed one side. Crouching down in a corner, peeping up
the lane, the next object that Young Jerry saw was the form of his
honoured parent, pretty well defined against a watery and clouded
moon, nimbly scaling an iron gate. He was soon over, and then the
second fisherman got over, and then the third. They all dropped
softly on the ground within the gate, and lay there a little—
listening perhaps. Then they moved away on their hands and
knees.
It was now Young Jerry’s turn to approach the gate: which he
did, holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there,
and looking in, he made out the three fishermen creeping through
some rank grass! and all the gravestones in the churchyard—it
was a large churchyard that they were in—looking on like ghosts
in white, while the church tower itself looked on like the ghost of a
monstrous giant. They did not creep far, before they stopped and
stood upright. And then they began to fish.
They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured
parent appeared to be adjusting some instrument like a great
corkscrew. Whatever tools they w"};
