garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible
to Lucie, in a hushed murmurlike the breathing of a summer sea
asleep upon a sandy shoreas the little Lucie, comically studious
at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her mother’s
footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were
blended in her life.
The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
Carton. Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his
privilege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them
through the evening, as he had once done often. He never came
there heated with wine. And one other thing regarding him was
whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all true
echoes for ages and ages.
No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with
a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and
a mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with himan
instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities
are touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so
here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out
her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The
little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. “Poor Carton! Kiss
him for me!”
Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some
great engine forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his
useful friend in his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so
favoured is usually in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so,
Sydney had a swamped life of it. But, easy and