Great, rambling queer old places they are, withgalleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and antiquatedenough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories, supposing weshould ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any,and that the world should exist long enough to exhaust the innumerableveracious legends connected with old London Bridge, and its adjacentneighbourhood on the Surrey side.
It's a queer name; buthe used to call it THE BAGMAN'S STORYand he used to tell it, something in this way.
Of any other queer chair,Tom would only have thought it was a queer chair, and there would havebeen an end of the matter; but there was something about this particularchair, and yet he couldn't tell what it was, so odd and so unlike anyother piece of furniture he had ever seen, that it seemed to fascinatehim.
( Dickens The Pickwick papers ) 'In about half an hour, Tom woke up with a start, from a confused dreamof tall men and tumblers of punch; and the first object that presenteditself to his waking imagination was the queer chair.
No use; nothing but queer chairs danced before his eyes, kickingup their legs, jumping over each other's backs, and playing all kinds ofantics.
"'"You must have seen some queer things," said Tom, with an inquisitivelook.
Isuppose,' he added, turning to Lowten, 'he'll say next, that my storyabout the queer client we had, when I was in an attorney's office, isnot true either--I shouldn't wonder.
But the ashes ofthe father do not mingle with theirs; nor, from that night forward, didthe attorney ever gain the remotest clue to the subsequent history ofhis queer client.