Three Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens
Page: 42

made no answer; having no breath, I certainly made none. Miss
Griffin and the strange man took me between them, and walked me back
to the palace in a sort of state; but not at all (as I couldn't help
feeling, with astonishment) in culprit state.

When we got there, we went into a room by ourselves, and Miss
Griffin called in to her assistance, Mesrour, chief of the dusky
guards of the Hareem. Mesrour, on being whispered to, began to shed
tears. "Bless you, my precious!" said that officer, turning to me;
"your Pa's took bitter bad!"

I asked, with a fluttered heart, "Is he very ill?"

"Lord temper the wind to you, my lamb!" said the good Mesrour,
kneeling down, that I might have a comforting shoulder for my head
to rest on, "your Pa's dead!"

Haroun Alraschid took to flight at the words; the Seraglio vanished;
from that moment, I never again saw one of the eight of the fairest
of the daughters of men.

I was taken home, and there was Debt at home as well as Death, and
we had a sale there. My own little bed was so superciliously looked
upon by a Power unknown to me, hazily called "The Trade," that a
brass coal-scuttle, a roasting-jack, and a birdcage, were obliged to
be put into it to make a Lot of it, and then it went for a song. So
I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song, and thought what a
dismal song it must have been to sing!

Then, I was sent to a great, cold, bare, school of big boys; where
everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being
enough; where everybody, largo and small, was cruel; where the boys
knew all about the sale, before I got there, and asked me what I had
fetched, and who had bought me, and hooted at me, "Going, going,
gone!" I never whispered in that wretched place that I had been
Haroun, or had had a Seraglio: for, I knew that if I mentioned my
reverses, I should be so worried, that I should have to drown myself
in the muddy pond near the playground, which looked like the beer.

Ah me, ah me! No other ghost has haunted the boy's room, my
friends, since I have occupied it, than the ghost of my own
childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy