I have kept one secret in the course of my life.
I am a bashful man. Nobody would suppose it,
nobody ever does suppose it, nobody ever did suppose
it, but I am naturally a bashful man. This is
the secret which I have never breathed until now.
I might greatly move the reader by some account of
the innumerable places I have not been to, the innumerable
people I have not called upon or received, the innumerable
social evasions I have been guilty of, solely because
I am by original constitution and character a bashful
man. But I will leave the reader unmoved, and
proceed with the object before me.
That object is to give a plain account of my travels
and discoveries in the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place
of good entertainment for man and beast I was once
snowed up.
It happened in the memorable year when I parted for
ever from Angela Leath, whom I was shortly to have
married, on making the discovery that she preferred
my bosom friend. From our school-days I had freely
admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior
to myself; and, though I was grievously wounded at
heart, I felt the preference to be natural, and tried
to forgive them both. It was under these circumstances
that I resolved to go to America—on my
way to the Devil.
Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to
Edwin, but resolving to write each of them an affecting
letter conveying my blessing and forgiveness, which
the steam-tender for shore should carry to the post
when I myself should be bound for the New World, far
beyond recall,—I say, locking up my grief
in my own breast, and consoling myself as I could
with the prospect of being generous, I quietly left
all I held dear, and started on the desolate journey
I have mentioned.
The dead winter-time was in full dreariness when I
left my chambers for ever, at five o’clock in
the morning. I had shaved by candle-light, of
course, and was miserably cold, and experienced that
general all-pervading sensation of getting up to be
hanged which I have usually found inseparable from
untimely rising under such circumstances.
How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street
when I came out of the Temple! The street-lamps
flickering in the gusty north-east wind, as if the
very gas were contorted with cold; the white-topped
houses; the bleak, star-lighted sky; the market people
and other early stragglers, trotting to circulate
their almost frozen blood; the hospitable light and
warmth of the few coffee-shops and public-houses that
were open for such customers; the hard, dry, frosty
rime with which the air was charged (the wind had
already beaten it into every crevice), and which lashed
my face like a steel whip.
