Ditcher

“ He has now, I believe, pretty nearly run through every thing except the house, which is a handsome one, though that too may perhaps be encumbered with debts; knowledge he has scarcely acquired any; employment is insupportable to him; and so one cannot help seeing with concern how he is advancing towards his ruin.
— The every-day history of numbers, observed the stranger, and the common course of a paltry vanity, that leads men gaily into the arms of dishonour. ”

“ This resignation which makes each one among you, even the greatest, only an insignificant detail-worker upon the immense labor whose completion you contemplate at an infinite remove, and the very outlines of which you ignore,—this resignation is sublime, though supremely painful to the aspiring soul. The individual laborer for his part abstains from all hope of seeing the whole truth, and works for his generation and futurity. ”

“ The return to nature you dream of is simply the fall downward into the dirt out of which a rational and spiritual manhood has grown. I feel and know this in spite of your handsome face and the fine ring of your voice.”
“Dirt. Dirt!” he mused. “Yes, I was in the dirt once, was born in it, the dirt of poverty and superstition and fears of laws here and hereafter. But I awoke at last, and shook it off, washed myself in knowledge and stood erect. I am a man now, with the eye of a king, conscious of my power. I look a lying hypocritical world in the face. ”

“ Do not deceive yourself. You urge me to discretion in one breath and tax me with timidity in the next. While there was hope that they might call Beauregard back out of their own good sense, I was determined to say nothing to inflame them. Do you call that timidity? Now their intention is clear, and you've heard me speak this morning clearly also. And now you talk about discretion—you, who call what was discretion at the right time, timidity, now counsel timidity at the wrong time, and call it discretion. ”

“ Still, there was an air of such sweet resignation in every feature, such a dignity in the port of her person—still symmetrical, though it had lost something of its roundness—such a majesty in her still-brilliant eyes—that even the wretches who had determined on her destruction dared not meet the glance of her whom they so foully wronged. ”

“ In Diversion, as in many other Particulars, the upper Part of Life is distinguished from the Lower. Let the Great therefore answer for the Employment of their Time, to themselves, or to their spiritual Governors. ”

“ Be brief, in mercy to me.’
‘Now, you hear this, my lord?’—said the old gentleman, calling up the stairs, to where the skirt of a dressing-gown fluttered on the landing-place. ‘Here is a gentleman here, whose house was actually burnt down last night.’
‘Dear me, dear me,’ replied a testy voice, ‘I am very sorry for it, but what am I to do? I can’t build it up again. The chief magistrate of the city can’t go and be a rebuilding of people’s houses, my good sir. ”

“ How many of the girls and boys--ah, men and women too--that are brought before you and you don't pity, are deaf and dumb in their minds, and go wrong in that state, and are punished in that state, body and soul, while you gentlemen are quarrelling among yourselves whether they ought to learn this or that? --Be a just man, Sir, and give me back my son.'
'You are desperate,' said the gentleman, taking out his snuff-box, 'and I am sorry for you.'
'I AM desperate,' returned the woman, 'and you have made me so. Give me back my son, to work for these helpless children. ”

“ I saw then in my dream, so far as the bounds of the vale, there was on the right hand a most deep ditch; that ditch is it to which the blind have led the blind in each age, and have both there lost their lives.
Once more, lo, on the left hand there was a fell quag, in the which, strange to say, if a good man falls he finds no ground for his foot to stand on.
The path was here quite strait, and hence good Christian was the more put to it; for when he sought in the dark to shun the ditch on the one hand, he was prone to tip on one side souse in the mire on the next. ”

“ Asks his mother to become, with him, a spy upon his father’s transactions through a lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world which we have painfully got together early and late, with wear and tear and toil and self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom they shall be given up, as reparation and restitution!’
Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual tone. ”

“ I infer that he was the cause of your disgust?"
"Why, look'ee here, sir," said the tinker, rising to his feet, and wiping his face on the corner of his black apron energetically;" I leave you to judge;—I ask you!—Last night I has a job that needs to be done in the night, and I works all night. Well, there's nothing in that. But this morning I comes along this road here, looking for a sunny and soft spot to sleep in, and I sees this desolation and ruination. I've lived myself in desolation and ruination; I knows many a fellow-creetur that's forced to live life-long in desolation and ruination ”

“ Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities of her pity, that for minutes together, sometimes, the weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon her—the duty of speaking before separation should constitute its chasm, of pleading for some benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of the emigre, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and negotiable some day in the market of misery. ”

“ In the ditch, on the inner side of the path, you cannot know what may be crouching. Shapes and forms and monsters too hateful for sanity to endure may be lurking in that ditch, and may spring out on you, on your unprotected side, at any moment as you walk along. ”

“ The devout poor, the devout mothers of families, how essential they are to the freedom and comfort of the rest. The less you have the more it is necessary that you should be contented, and nothing does this so thoroughly as the doctrine of resignation. ”

“ The man had shrunk down, thoroughly quelled by the ferocity of the crowd and the impossibility of escape, but seeing this sudden change with no less rapidity than it occurred, he sprung upon his feet, determined to make one last effort for his life by dropping into the ditch, and, at the risk of being stifled, endeavouring to creep away in the darkness and confusion. ”

“ What they are likely to say and do is what they have so often said and done, and that is to plead poverty and inability, and to submit themselves with such resignation as they can command to the decrees of an over-ruling fate. ”

“ Because of this, ditching has long been regarded as one of the finest things in the world to urge young men to higher things. They have been known to work so hard to get away from ditch [Pg 148] ing that they have become multi-millionaires and ministers and school teachers and such like.
The land through which the slip furrow passes is dead level, and, having been loosened by ploughing and harrowing, about an acre of it was as soft as mortar and as sticky as a bad reputation. Some one had told me once that when ditching one should begin at the top of the drain and work down with the water. ”

“ All this time the Patriarch sat serenely smiling; nodding or shaking his head benevolently, as the case required.
‘As to being a reference,’ said Pancks, ‘you know, in a general way, what being a reference means. It’s all your eye, that is! Look at your tenants down the Yard here. They’d all be references for one another, if you’d let ‘em. What would be the good of letting ‘em? It’s no satisfaction to be done by two men instead of one. ”

“ The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name
Your digging do disdain, and persons all defame.
Stand up now, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now;
Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,
But the Gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown. ”

“ Totally unheeding your future wretchedness, the grasping deceiver deprives you of your property, and without a pang consigns you to beggary and destitution. Suppose that, by a long course of labour and privations, you have contrived to amass a provision against the wants and infirmities of old age; well, no sooner is this cold-blooded hypocrite made the depositary of your little treasure, than he unhesitatingly appropriates it, leaving you to drag on a miserable existence, without a morsel of bread but such as the hand of charity doles out to you. ”

“ Well, my good fellow, if you should ever have need of discretion, understand that there are two sorts of discretion—the active and the negative. Negative discretion is that of fools who make use of silence, negation, an air of refusal, the discretion of locked doors—mere impotence! ”

“ Why, if you stood here now, freed from this devilish disguise, the old, fat, sluggish fellow that sat and yawned his head off under my eyes in his pew the Sunday before last, if I know anything about human nature I’d say it to your face, and a fig for your vanity and resignation—your last state would be worse than the first. ”

“ We quit business, give up property, resign office, abandon a habit or a trust. Relinquish commonly implies reluctance; the fainting hand relinquishes its grasp; the creditor relinquishes his claim. Abandon implies previous association with responsibility for or control of; forsake implies previous association with inclination or attachment, real or assumed; a man may abandon or forsake house or friends; he abandons an enterprise; forsakes God. Abandon is applied to both good and evil action; a thief abandons his designs, a man his principles. ”

“ One would think that if obliged to pronounce such a doom upon any, he would do it with tears—that he would retire into his closet, and throw ashes upon his head, and come forth in sackcloth, overwhelmed at the hard necessity which compelled the stern decree. ”

“ I discharge you.'
'So that I go,' remarked the Secretary, waving the point aside with his hand, 'it is all one to me.'
'Is it?' said Mr Boffin. 'But it's two to me, let me tell you. Allowing a fellow that's found out, to discharge himself, is one thing; discharging him for insolence and presumption, and likewise for designs upon his master's money, is another. One and one's two; not one. (Old lady, don't you cut in. You keep still.) ”

“ Willingly, without a regret, could she abdicate from all the pomp and splendor of a great household; she saw troops of servants depart, equipage sold, great apartments closed up without a pang! To come down to the small conditions of narrow fortune in her daily life cost her nothing, beyond a smile. ”

“ They consulted the king concerning the matter, and he said: "Let each (father) slay his son, but let my fosterlings be spared."
"Leave, leave!" says every one: "it shall be done for thee."
"Nay indeed," quoth he; "no ‘cast of life’ by me is the doom I have delivered. ”

“ I felt that I must save her first and then die if need be. I felt for the first time the cunning of the elemental man, the force that gave him food and shelter for himself and babies before the laws of property had come to rule the world. ”

“ Yet you surely can but resign what you own, what--if need be--you could defend; the possession of which you could dispute anyhow with your adversary to the last gasp. Despair does not resign, it only lets go what can no longer be held. ”

“ When you made your recessional into the Middle Ages by taking the feudal oath to me, you were flippant, almost sarcastic: yet by my standards, I could not feel that any man could defend my interests with propriety unless he were of my own people—so, you were adopted with more seriousness than you supposed. ”

“ After which a mad desire to see again the cause of all his misery, to openly accuse her of her treachery, to declare to her all the irreparable mischief she has done, the utter ruin she has made of his life, seizes hold upon him, and, leaving the great city, and reaching Truston, he goes straight from the station to The Cottage once so dear. ”

“ If anybody wouldn't make an admission, he said, "I'll have it out of you!" and if anybody made an admission, he said, "Now I have got you!" The magistrates shivered under a single bite of his finger. Thieves and thief takers hung in dread rapture on his words, and shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. ”

“ Some immensely rich old gentleman or lady, surrounded by needy relatives, makes, upon a low average, a will a-week. The old gentleman or lady, never very remarkable in the best of times for good temper, is full of aches and pains from head to foot; full of fancies and caprices; full of spleen, distrust, suspicion, and dislike. To cancel old wills, and invent new ones, is at last the sole business of such a testator’s existence ”

“ But though language be inadequate to describe the scenes of heart-rending, wide-spread, and, ever-deepening distress with which our duty makes us painfully familiar, we are constrained to attempt to convey to your gracious Majesty intelligence of the fact, that thousands of your loyal industrious subjects are in destitution, to a very great extent, of the common necessaries of life ”

“ Warden. "it seems to me we can't with a good conscience pay so much money for unnecessary finery, when we know that on the outskirts of the town—and even at our very doors—there are hundreds of people living in destitution—literally in destitution." ”

“ With a pitiful and plaintive look for everything, indeed, but with something in it for only him that was like protection, this Child of the Marshalsea and the child of the Father of the Marshalsea, sat by her friend the turnkey in the lodge, kept the family room, or wandered about the prison-yard, for the first eight years of her life. With a pitiful and plaintive look for her wayward sister; for her idle brother; for the high blank walls; for the faded crowd they shut in ”