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I suppose that my face expressed some wonder: for she went on, shaking my dripping hat and hanging it on a nail by the fire "Doctor Rodda'll be comin' in half-an-hour's time. 'Tis district Vaccination to-day, and he always inoculates here, 'tis so handy." She nodded her head at half a dozen deal chairs and a form arrayed round the wall under a row of sacred texts and tradesmen's almanacks.
On the mantelshelf was a small round alarm clock and some brightly polished tin canisters. At the other end of the room, facing the fireplace, was a small dresser on the shelves of which were nearly arranged a number of plates and dishes. The walls were papered with oak paper. On one wall, between two coloured almanacks, hung a tin lamp with a reflector behind the light.
The motion of each was suspended; so intense, in turn, was the hush of the breathless crowd, that you could have heard a single tick, but there was none to hear. "Time is no more," proclaimed a leader among the people. "I am a ruined man," lamented a watchmaker. "And I," ejaculated a maker of almanacks. "What of quarter-day?" inquired a landlord and a tenant simultaneously.
"By what I can gather from you," said I, "the Observations and Predictions you printed with your Almanacks, were mere impositions upon the people." He replied, "If it were otherwise, I should have the less to answer for. We have a common form for all those things.
Though I print Almanacks, and publish Advertisements; although I produce certificates under the Minister's and Churchwardens' hands, that I am alive: and attest the same, on oath, at Quarter Sessions: out comes A full and true Relation of the death and interment of JOHN PARTRIDGE. Truth is borne down; Attestations, neglected; the testimony of sober persons, despised: and a man is looked upon by his neighbours as if he had been seven years dead, and is buried alive in the midst of his friends and acquaintance.
That the tides literally 'revolve' round the Goodwins is well known to the Deal men and to sailors in general, and this revolution is described in most of the tide tables and nautical almanacks used by mariners, e.g.
The presses of Paris are no longer to serve but for posting-bills, and invitations to funerals and weddings. Almanacks are already a subject too elevated, and the inquisition examines and garbles them. "When I see a book," says MERCIER, "sanctioned by the government, I would lay a wager, without opening it, that this book contains political falsehoods.
Such is a brief outline of the lives and fortunes of those two persons, in whose society Mannering now found himself comfortably seated. Do not the hist'ries of all ages Relate miraculous presages, Of strange turns in the world's affairs, Foreseen by Astrologers, Sooth-sayers, Chaldeans learned Genethliacs, And some that have writ almanacks? Hudibras.
The walls were covered with dingy, antiquated paper, and ornamented with coloured supplements from Christmas Numbers there was a very patriotic picture of a soldier shaking the hand of a fallen comrade and waving his arm in defiance of a band of advancing Arabs; there was a 'Cherry Ripe, almost black with age and dirt; there were two almanacks several years old, one with a coloured portrait of the Marquess of Lorne, very handsome and elegantly dressed, the object of Mrs.
"And if your committee, or comity, gentlemen," he added, "can tell me what Vattel would say about the obligation to heave-to in a time of profound peace, and when the ship, or boat, in chase, can have no belligerent rights, I shall be grateful to my dying day; for I have looked him through as closely as old women usually examine almanacks to tell which way the wind is about to blow, and I fear he has overlooked the subject altogether."
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