The Holly Tree

by Charles Dickens

Published 3 November 1994
While he was at supper, a parrot in the room began to talk, saying, 'Blood, blood! Wipe up the blood!' In Dickens's The Holy-Tree, the narrator tells of his travels, and particularly of his stay at an inn in which he was once snowed up for a time. He meets some other travellers, and they naturally begin terrifying each other with tales of murderous criminals.