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Updated: May 19, 2025
Down in yon cellar, where a farthing rushlight glimmers upon haggard cheeks, distorted with the idiotcy of drink; there, in that foul attic, from whose casement you see the beggar's rags hang to dry, or rather to crumble in the reeking and filthy air; farther on, within those walls which, black and heavy as the hearts they hide, close our miserable prospect, there, even there, in the mildewed dungeon, in the felon's cell, on the very scaffold's self, Ambition hugs her own hope or scowls upon her own despair.
I do not know how I bore parting with her, except with hoping that she would enjoy herself, for she always had wanted so very much to have a journey to go. But if she had been at home, so that I could have taken her advice, I do not think I should have been so silly about the Sunflowers and the Rushlight. She says "You'd have put on your slippers, and had a blanket round you at least.
There was a moon: besides my having a Rushlight. Then I wondered if I was very very silly, and why Dr. Brown had called me a Michaelmas Goose. But I remembered that it must be because to-morrow, was the 29th of September. Then the stairs clock struck eleven.
He had taken his candle with an unsteady hand, and unconsciously had blown it out himself. She restrained Claude by a look, and patiently taking the rushlight from Grio, she re-lit it and set it on the table for him to take. "As a candle goes out!" he repeated, eyeing it with drunken wisdom.
The Knight shook his head with a faint smile, but for all that, Robin's words made him more blithe of heart, for in truth hope, be it never so faint, bringeth a gleam into darkness, like a little rushlight that costeth but a groat. The day was well-nigh gone when they came near to the greenwood tree.
If you were not such a coward, if you had jumped up when the clock struck eleven, and slipped down the back-stairs, with the Rushlight in your hands, and unlocked the side-door, you might have run down the grass walk without hurting your feet, and flashed it in the faces of the Sunflowers, and had a good look, and got back to bed again before the clock struck a quarter-past; and then it would have been done, and couldn't be undone, and you would have known whether they look like the picture, and if they wake up with candles, and you never could have unknown.
'Well? I cried, rising on my elbow, and cursing the untimely interruption. I was burning with anxiety to see more. 'What is it? What is the matter? The trap-door was lifted a foot or more. The landlord thrust up his head. 'You called, did you not? he said. He held up a rushlight, which illumined half the room and lit up his grinning face.
Then bringing the Spaniard's rushlight from the three or four that stood on the dresser, she lighted it and held it out to him. "Set it down!" he said, with tipsy insolence. He was not quite sober. "Set it down! I am not going to hic! risk my salvation! Avaunt, Satan! It is possible to palm the evil one, like a card I am told, and hic! soul out, devil in, all lost as easy as candle goes out!"
But now, you'll go on putting off, and being frightened about it, and perhaps to-morrow Jael will tell Grandmamma you were asleep, and she won't let you have a Rushlight any more, not even when you are a grown-up young lady; and even when you get married and go away, you may marry a man who won't let you have one; and so you may never never know what you want to know, all because you're a Michaelmas Goose."
"Come, fill your glass, my trusty friend, And fill it sparkling to the brim A flowing bumper, bright and strong And push the bottle back again; For what is man without his drink? An oyster prison'd in his shell; A rushlight in the vaults of death; A rattlesnake without his tail.
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