CHAPTER III—­THE ROAD

My story being finished, and the Wassail too, we broke up as the Cathedral bell struck Twelve.  I did not take leave of my travellers that night; for it had come into my head to reappear, in conjunction with some hot coffee, at seven in the morning.

As I passed along the High Street, I heard the Waits at a distance, and struck off to find them.  They were playing near one of the old gates of the City, at the corner of a wonderfully quaint row of red-brick tenements, which the clarionet obligingly informed me were inhabited by the Minor-Canons.  They had odd little porches over the doors, like sounding-boards over old pulpits; and I thought I should like to see one of the Minor-Canons come out upon his top stop, and favour us with a little Christmas discourse about the poor scholars of Rochester; taking for his text the words of his Master relative to the devouring of Widows’ houses.

The clarionet was so communicative, and my inclinations were (as they generally are) of so vagabond a tendency, that I accompanied the Waits across an open green called the Vines, and assisted—­in the French sense—­at the performance of two waltzes, two polkas, and three Irish melodies, before I thought of my inn any more.  However, I returned to it then, and found a fiddle in the kitchen, and Ben, the wall-eyed young man, and two chambermaids, circling round the great deal table with the utmost animation.

I had a very bad night.  It cannot have been owing to the turkey or the beef,—­and the Wassail is out of the question—­but in every endeavour that I made to get to sleep I failed most dismally.  I was never asleep; and in whatsoever unreasonable direction my mind rambled, the effigy of Master Richard Watts perpetually embarrassed it.

In a word, I only got out of the Worshipful Master Richard Watts’s way by getting out of bed in the dark at six o’clock, and tumbling, as my custom is, into all the cold water that could be accumulated for the purpose.  The outer air was dull and cold enough in the street, when I came down there; and the one candle in our supper-room at Watts’s Charity looked as pale in the burning as if it had had a bad night too.  But my Travellers had all slept soundly, and they took to the hot coffee, and the piles of bread-and-butter, which Ben had arranged like deals in a timber-yard, as kindly as I could desire.

While it was yet scarcely daylight, we all came out into the street together, and there shook hands.  The widow took the little sailor towards Chatham, where he was to find a steamboat for Sheerness; the lawyer, with an extremely knowing look, went his own way, without committing himself by announcing his intentions; two more struck off by the cathedral and old castle for Maidstone; and the book-pedler accompanied me over the bridge.  As for me, I was going to walk by Cobham Woods, as far upon my way to London as I fancied.