Golden Hill Read Online Free PDF

and this dirty spill was a sixpence too – and another shilling. Eight shillings and eightpence, in the money of – he squinted – New-York and New Jersey. The flimsiness of the paper seemed altogether less entertaining now. Plus, he remembered with a burst of relief, the small pile of veritable coin, which he had left in a heap at his bedside. Twenty-nine shillings odd, where he had reckoned on six times as much. He calculated. Could he live as he had planned? No. He would live as he must.
    When he rose from his hiding place, his smile convincing once more, the road running along the far side of the common struck him as somehow familiar-looking, and a minute’s walk in that direction confirmed it. It was the Broad Way continuing in the other direction to the one he had set out in. He had circled the whole town; that was New-York, all of it. The far end of the common was blocked with a palisade, and the Broad Way, cobbles diminished into a cart-track, went out through the barrier at another sentry post. At a venture, he asked if the soldier decorating the ground there with spit had seen anyone; anyone running.
    ‘Migh’er done,’ he said.
    Smith studied the expectant face, and considered the state of his pockets.
    ‘You didn’t, though, did you,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ agreed the soldier, amiably, and stuck his clay pipe back between his teeth.
III
    With what sadder steps, and slower, Smith retraced his way, the reader may imagine; how the faces of passers-by, which had formerly expressed a cheerful involvement in their own concerns, now seemed locked tight, so many declarations of secretiveness and guile, not to be trusted; how the city itself, a few minutes before remarkable and new, now appeared provincial and small, rustic and contemptible, absurd in comparison to any metropolis of Europe, et cetera , with a mere delusive shine laid upon it by the morning. Even the savour of fresh bread, once he had returned to the coffee-house, stirred his appetite with less relish. He hesitatedat the threshold. He had been out of sight of the window when he was robbed, he calculated. Yet he had run past, and might have been seen. Some customer might have been going in, or coming out, at the critical instant. His catastrophe might have been deduced. Well, well: nothing for it but to spin the wheel, and play.
    ‘Service!’ he cried, entering a long low room canopied in smoke, diversified with steam, where men (all men) conversed in a gruff murmur that rose and fell like a masculine sea. At an unoccupied table he bounced into a chair and settled with a wide spread of knees, a confident sprawl of legs, a benignant beaming in all directions.
    ‘Service!’
    Heads turned, but mildly, slowly; not – he judged – with that quickness that betokens an interest in a drama resumed at its exciting mid-point. Not as if they were expecting Act Two of The Wrong’d Traveller , in which Simon Simple (an ingénu from the country) loses his all to a sharper, and must throw himself upon the dubious mercy of Sir Bartholomew Quorum (a lawyer) and Mrs Spurt (a bawd). It seemed only the slow stir with which any coffee-house registers an unknown come among regulars; fresh supply of another talking head, loud or wise or foolish as the case may be, to be recruited into the great plural organism of the room, which now and again loses a body or gains a body, as people arrive and depart, but talks on, talks on.
    ‘Yessir?’ A boy had bustled up in a white apron. ‘Tea, coffee or chocolate, sir?’
    ‘A pot of the dark Mahometan, no cow juice.’
    ‘Yessir. Victuals?’
    ‘Basket o’ white tommy.’
    ‘Yessir. News-paper, sir?’
    ‘What do you have?’
    ‘ Post-Boy, Intelligencer or Monitor , sir.’
    ‘All three, then.’
    ‘Yessir. In a moment, sir. May have to wait for the Post-Boy , sir. Only one copy in this morning, and it’s with those gentlemen over there.’ – A youngish pair, one bearded and one in horn-rimmed spectacles,