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 Title: A Tale of Two Cities

        A story of the French Revolution

 	   Author: Charles Dickens

 The Period

 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

 it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,

 it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

 it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,

 it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,

 we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,

 we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct

 the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present

 period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its

 being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree

 of comparison only.

 There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face,

 on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and

 a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France.  In both

 countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State

 preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were

 settled for ever.

 It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and

 seventy-five.  Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at

 that favoured period, as at this.  Mrs. Southcott had recently

 attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a

 prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime

 appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the

 swallowing up of London and Westminster.  Even the Cock-lane

 ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping

 out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past

 (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs.

 Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to

 the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects

 in America:  which, strange to relate, have proved more important

 to the human race than any communications yet received through

 any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

 France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than

 her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding

 smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.

 Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained

 herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing

 a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with

 pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled

 down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks

 which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or

 sixty yards.  It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of

 France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer

 was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come

 down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework

 with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.  It is likely

 enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy

 lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather

 that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed

 about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death,

 had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution.

 But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly,

 work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with

 muffled tread:  the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion

 that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

 In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection

 to justify much national boasting.  Daring burglaries by armed

 men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself

 every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of

 town without removing their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses

 for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in

 the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-

 tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain,"

 gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was

 waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then

 got shot dead himself by the other four, "in consequence of the

 failure of his ammunition:" after which the mail was robbed in

 peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was

 made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman,

 who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his

 retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their

 turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among

 them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off

 diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court

 drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search for

 contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the

 musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these

 occurrences much out of the common way.  In the midst of them,

 the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in

 constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous

 criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been

 taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by

 the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall;

 to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a

 wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

 All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in

 and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred

 and seventy-five.  Environed by them, while the Woodman and the

 Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those

 other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough,

 and carried their divine rights with a high hand.  Thus did the

 year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their

 Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures--the creatures of this

 chronicle among the rest--along the roads that lay before them.

 II

 The Mail

 It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,

 before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.

 The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered

 up Shooter's Hill.  He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the

 mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the

 least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but

 because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were

 all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop,

 besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous

 intent of taking it back to Blackheath.  Reins and whip and coachman

 and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war

 which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument,

 that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had

 capitulated and returned to their duty.

 With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way

 through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles,

 as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints.  As often

 as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a

 wary "Wo-ho! so-ho-then!" the near leader violently shook his

 head and everything upon it--like an unusually emphatic horse,

 denying that the coach could be got up the hill.  Whenever the

 leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous

 passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.

 There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed

 in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest

 and finding none.  A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its

 slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and

 overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might

 do.  It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of

 the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of

 road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if

 they had made it all.

 Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill

 by the side of the mail.  All three were wrapped to the cheekbones

 and over the ears, and wore jack-boots.  Not one of the three

 could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other

 two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers

 from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his

 two companions.  In those days, travellers were very shy of being

 confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be

 a robber or in league with robbers.  As to the latter, when every

 posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in "the Captain's"

 pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable non-descript,

 it was the likeliest thing upon the cards.  So the guard of the

 Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one

 thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's

 Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail,

 beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest

 before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or

 eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.

 The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard

 suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another

 and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman

 was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he could

 with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two Testaments

 that they were not fit for the journey.

 "Wo-ho!" said the coachman.  "So, then!  One more pull and you're

 at the top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to

 get you to it!--Joe!"

 "Halloa!" the guard replied.

 "What o'clock do you make it, Joe?"

 "Ten minutes, good, past eleven."