But my
Englishman was either a very honest fellow, or else extremely
thirsty, and at last contrived to advertise me of his new position.
Now, the English sentry in Castile, and the wounded hero in the
Durham public-house, were one and the same person; and if he had
been a little less drunk, or myself less lively in getting away,
the travels of M. St. Ives might have come to an untimely end.
I suppose this woke me up; it stirred in me besides a spirit of
opposition, and in spite of cold, darkness, the highwaymen and the
footpads, I determined to walk right on till breakfast-time: a
happy resolution, which enabled me to observe one of those traits
of manners which at once depict a country and condemn it. It was
near midnight when I saw, a great way ahead of me, the light of
many torches; presently after, the sound of wheels reached me, and
the slow tread of feet, and soon I had joined myself to the rear of
a sordid, silent, and lugubrious procession, such as we see in
dreams. Close on a hundred persons marched by torchlight in
unbroken silence; in their midst a cart, and in the cart, on an
inclined platform, the dead body of a man--the centre-piece of this
solemnity, the hero whose obsequies we were come forth at this
unusual hour to celebrate. It was but a plain, dingy old fellow of
fifty or sixty, his throat cut, his shirt turned over as though to
show the wound.
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