Out of Town Page #2

"Out of Town" is a lesser-known work by Charles Dickens, written in 1851. It is a travel narrative that depicts a journey through the English countryside, capturing the sights, sounds, and experiences encountered along the way. The text reflects Dickens' keen observations and his love for the rural landscape, as well as his thoughts on social issues of the time. Through vivid descriptions and engaging character interactions, Dickens invites readers to appreciate the beauty and charm of the natural world, while also highlighting the contrasts between urban and rural life.

• Short story

								

be blown against the cold beef, and finally into bed.  At five in the
morning you were blown out of bed, and after a dreary breakfast, with
crumpled company, in the midst of confusion, were hustled on board a
steamboat and lay wretched on deck until you saw France lunging and
surging at you with great vehemence over the bowsprit.

Now, you come down to Pavilionstone in a free and easy manner, an
irresponsible agent, made over in trust to the South-Eastern Company,
until you get out of the railway-carriage at high-water mark.  If you are
crossing by the boat at once, you have nothing to do but walk on board
and be happy there if you can—I can’t.  If you are going to our Great
Pavilionstone Hotel, the sprightliest porters under the sun, whose
cheerful looks are a pleasant welcome, shoulder your luggage, drive it
off in vans, bowl it away in trucks, and enjoy themselves in playing
athletic games with it.  If you are for public life at our great
Pavilionstone Hotel, you walk into that establishment as if it were your
club; and find ready for you, your news-room, dining-room, smoking-room,
billiard-room, music-room, public breakfast, public dinner twice a-day
(one plain, one gorgeous), hot baths and cold baths.  If you want to be
bored, there are plenty of bores always ready for you, and from Saturday
to Monday in particular, you can be bored (if you like it) through and
through.  Should you want to be private at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel,
say but the word, look at the list of charges, choose your floor, name
your figure—there you are, established in your castle, by the day, week,
month, or year, innocent of all comers or goers, unless you have my fancy
for walking early in the morning down the groves of boots and shoes,
which so regularly flourish at all the chamber-doors before breakfast,
that it seems to me as if nobody ever got up or took them in.  Are you
going across the Alps, and would you like to air your Italian at our
Great Pavilionstone Hotel?  Talk to the Manager—always conversational,
accomplished, and polite.  Do you want to be aided, abetted, comforted,
or advised, at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel?  Send for the good
landlord, and he is your friend.  Should you, or any one belonging to
you, ever be taken ill at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, you will not
soon forget him or his kind wife.  And when you pay your bill at our
Great Pavilionstone Hotel, you will not be put out of humour by anything
you find in it.

A thoroughly good inn, in the days of coaching and posting, was a noble
place.  But no such inn would have been equal to the reception of four or
five hundred people, all of them wet through, and half of them dead sick,
every day in the year.  This is where we shine, in our Pavilionstone
Hotel.  Again—who, coming and going, pitching and tossing, boating and
training, hurrying in, and flying out, could ever have calculated the
fees to be paid at an old-fashioned house?  In our Pavilionstone Hotel
vocabulary, there is no such word as fee.  Everything is done for you;
every service is provided at a fixed and reasonable charge; all the
prices are hung up in all the rooms; and you can make out your own bill
beforehand, as well as the book-keeper.

In the case of your being a pictorial artist, desirous of studying at
small expense the physiognomies and beards of different nations, come, on
receipt of this, to Pavilionstone.  You shall find all the nations of the
earth, and all the styles of shaving and not shaving, hair cutting and
hair letting alone, for ever flowing through our hotel.  Couriers you
shall see by hundreds; fat leathern bags for five-franc pieces, closing
with violent snaps, like discharges of fire-arms, by thousands; more
luggage in a morning than, fifty years ago, all Europe saw in a week.
Looking at trains, steamboats, sick travellers, and luggage, is our great
Pavilionstone recreation.  We are not strong in other public amusements.
We have a Literary and Scientific Institution, and we have a Working
Men’s Institution—may it hold many gipsy holidays in summer fields, with
the kettle boiling, the band of music playing, and the people dancing;
and may I be on the hill-side, looking on with pleasure at a wholesome
sight too rare in England!—and we have two or three churches, and more
chapels than I have yet added up.  But public amusements are scarce with
us.  If a poor theatrical manager comes with his company to give us, in a
loft, Mary Bax, or the Murder on the Sand Hills, we don’t care much for
him—starve him out, in fact.  We take more kindly to wax-work, especially
if it moves; in which case it keeps much clearer of the second
commandment than when it is still.  Cooke’s Circus (Mr. Cooke is my
friend, and always leaves a good name behind him) gives us only a night
in passing through.  Nor does the travelling menagerie think us worth a
longer visit.  It gave us a look-in the other day, bringing with it the
residentiary van with the stained glass windows, which Her Majesty kept
ready-made at Windsor Castle, until she found a suitable opportunity of
submitting it for the proprietor’s acceptance.  I brought away five
wonderments from this exhibition.  I have wondered ever since, Whether
the beasts ever do get used to those small places of confinement; Whether
the monkeys have that very horrible flavour in their free state; Whether
wild animals have a natural ear for time and tune, and therefore every
four-footed creature began to howl in despair when the band began to
play; What the giraffe does with his neck when his cart is shut up; and,
Whether the elephant feels ashamed of himself when he is brought out of
his den to stand on his head in the presence of the whole Collection.

We are a tidal harbour at Pavilionstone, as indeed I have implied already
in my mention of tidal trains.  At low water, we are a heap of mud, with
an empty channel in it where a couple of men in big boots always shovel
and scoop: with what exact object, I am unable to say.  At that time, all
the stranded fishing-boats turn over on their sides, as if they were dead
marine monsters; the colliers and other shipping stick disconsolate in
the mud; the steamers look as if their white chimneys would never smoke
more, and their red paddles never turn again; the green sea-slime and
weed upon the rough stones at the entrance, seem records of obsolete high
tides never more to flow; the flagstaff-halyards droop; the very little
wooden lighthouse shrinks in the idle glare of the sun.  And here I may
observe of the very little wooden lighthouse, that when it is lighted at
night,—red and green,—it looks so like a medical man’s, that several
distracted husbands have at various times been found, on occasions of
premature domestic anxiety, going round and round it, trying to find the
Nightbell.

But, the moment the tide begins to make, the Pavilionstone Harbour begins
to revive.  It feels the breeze of the rising water before the water
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