Three Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens
Page: 34

taken a great deal too much medicine.

"Where am I?" said the little spectre, in a pathetic voice. "And
why was I born in the Calomel days, and why did I have all that
Calomel given me?"

I replied, with sincere earnestness, that upon my soul I couldn't
tell him.

"Where is my little sister," said the ghost, "and where my angelic
little wife, and where is the boy I went to school with?"

I entreated the phantom to be comforted, and above all things to
take heart respecting the loss of the boy he went to school with. I
represented to him that probably that boy never did, within human
experience, come out well, when discovered. I urged that I myself
had, in later life, turned up several boys whom I went to school
with, and none of them had at all answered. I expressed my humble
belief that that boy never did answer. I represented that he was a
mythic character, a delusion, and a snare. I recounted how, the
last time I found him, I found him at a dinner party behind a wall
of white cravat, with an inconclusive opinion on every possible
subject, and a power of silent boredom absolutely Titanic. I
related how, on the strength of our having been together at "Old
Doylance's," he had asked himself to breakfast with me (a social
offence of the largest magnitude); how, fanning my weak embers of
belief in Doylance's boys, I had let him in; and how, he had proved
to be a fearful wanderer about the earth, pursuing the race of Adam
with inexplicable notions concerning the currency, and with a
proposition that the Bank of England should, on pain of being
abolished, instantly strike off and circulate, God knows how many
thousand millions of ten-and-sixpenny notes.

The ghost heard me in silence, and with a fixed stare. "Barber!" it
apostrophised me when I had finished.

"Barber?" I repeated--for I am not of that profession.

"Condemned," said the ghost, "to shave a constant change of
customers--now, me--now, a young man--now, thyself as thou art--now,
thy father--now, thy grandfather; condemned, too, to lie down with a
skeleton every night, and to rise with it every morning--"

(I shuddered on hearing this dismal announcement.)