away from you!"

Maybe those were harder words than I meant 'em; but from that time forth
my wife took to brooding, and would sit in the cart or walk beside it,
hours at a stretch, with her arms crossed, and her eyes looking on the
ground. When her furies took her (which was rather seldomer than before)
they took her in a new way, and she banged herself about to that extent
that I was forced to hold her. She got none the better for a little
drink now and then, and through some years I used to wonder, as I plodded
along at the old horse's head, whether there was many carts upon the road
that held so much dreariness as mine, for all my being looked up to as
the King of the Cheap Jacks. So sad our lives went on till one summer
evening, when, as we were coming into Exeter, out of the farther West of
England, we saw a woman beating a child in a cruel manner, who screamed,
"Don't beat me! O mother, mother, mother!" Then my wife stopped her
ears, and ran away like a wild thing, and next day she was found in the
river.

Me and my dog were all the company left in the cart now; and the dog
learned to give a short bark when they wouldn't bid, and to give another
and a nod of his head when I asked him, "Who said half a crown? Are you
the gentleman, sir, that offered half a crown?" He attained to an
immense height of popularity, and I shall always believe taught himself
entirely out of his own head to growl at any person in the crowd that bid
as low as sixpence. But he got to be well on in years, and one night
when I was conwulsing York with the spectacles, he took a conwulsion on
his own account upon the very footboard by me, and it finished him.

Being naturally of a tender turn, I had dreadful lonely feelings on me
arter this. I conquered 'em at selling times, having a reputation to
keep (not to mention keeping myself), but they got me down in private,
and rolled upon me. That's often the way with us public characters. See
us on the footboard, and you'd give pretty well anything you possess to
be us. See us off the footboard, and you'd add a trifle to be off your
bargain. It was under those circumstances that I come acquainted with a
giant. I might have been too high to fall into conversation with him,
had it not been for my lonely feelings. For the general rule is, going
round the country, to draw the line at dressing up. When a man can't
trust his getting a living to his undisguised abilities, you consider him