Having acquitted himself of his filial duty and, moreover, finding his mother's larder - like the one in the nursery rhyme - to be rather bare, Mr Headstone resolved to leave behind the home of his childhood and once again shoulder the burden of life. In a touching display of concern his aged parents stood abreast on the threshold of their humble cottage and watched as their son made his way along the road. Only when his increasingly diminutive figure had finally disappeared over a hill on the horizon did they avert their gaze and close and bolt the door. Mr Headstone, too, had been greatly affected by the emotion engendered by their parting, and anyone passing him on the road could not have failed to notice the melancholy manner in which he swung his carpet bag at his side and whistled a touching ditty of country life.
Arriving at the staging post an hour before the coach, Mr Headstone made himself comfortable by the side of the road (or as comfortable as he could with only a milestone for a cushion) and proceeded to while away the time by whittling on a stick of ash with his pocket knife. This enterprise might well have afforded him sufficient entertainment had he applied himself to the task with a little less vigour. As it was, his determined stokes of the blade succeeded not only in stripping the ash of its bark, but also his thumb of its skin.
Mr Headstone could at least take some small comfort from the fact that his reaction to his own misfortune (which, to the disinterested observer, took the form of a primitive dance accompanied by the declension of some choice words of Saxon origin) left the approaching coachman in no doubt that here was another traveller flagging down his vehicle. Once aboard, Mr Headstone was able to staunch the flow of blood from his throbbing digit with a white handkerchief that all too swiftly became incarnadined with a fluid he would rather have remained an internal feature of his anatomy.
As they travelled north Mr Headstone roused himself sufficiently to look out of the window. The landscape had changed materially: gone were the gently rolling pastures, the well-tended farms, the neat villages of honeyed limestone and the trimmed hedgerows; in their place were straggling cottages by the roadside, paths of cinder and brick dust, the deep red glow of furnace fires in the distance, and volumes of dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around. On contemplating the scene, Mr Headstone was inclined to agree with the common opinion of gentlemen of refinement that the north of the country was unquestionably and unrelentingly grim.
Mr Charles Dickens
