They said of him that it was the most peaceful face ever seen there. What passed through Sydney Carton's mind as he walked those last steps to his death? Perhaps he saw into the future...
'I see Barsad, Defarge, the judges, all dying under this terrible machine. I see a beautiful city being built in this terrible place. I see that new people will live here, in real freedom. I see the lives for whom I give my life, happy and peaceful in that England which I shall never see again. I see Lucie when she is old, crying for me on this day every year, and I know that she and her husband remember me until their deaths. I see their son, who has my name, now a man. I see him become a famous lawyer and make my name famous by his work. I hear him tell his son my story.
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far far better rest than I go to, than I have ever known.'
You'll pass the churchyard, Mr Lockwood, on your way back to the Grange, and you'll see the three graverestones close to the moor. Catherine's, the middle one, is old now, and half buried in plants which have grown over it. On one side is Edgar Linton's, and on the other is Heathcliff's new one. If you stay there a moment, and watch the insects flying in the warm summer air, and listen to the soft wind breathing through the grass, you'll understand how quietly they rest, the sleepers in that quiet earth.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
They said of him that it was the most peaceful face ever seen there. What passed through Sydney Carton's mind as he walked those last steps to his death? Perhaps he saw into the future...
'I see Barsad, Defarge, the judges, all dying under this terrible machine. I see a beautiful city being built in this terrible place. I see that new people will live here, in real freedom. I see the lives for whom I give my life, happy and peaceful in that England which I shall never see again. I see Lucie when she is old, crying for me on this day every year, and I know that she and her husband remember me until their deaths. I see their son, who has my name, now a man. I see him become a famous lawyer and make my name famous by his work. I hear him tell his son my story.
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far far better rest than I go to, than I have ever known.'
Life is a chess-board The chess-board is the world: the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.