19 10 361 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mrs._Lirriper_s_Lodgings_[1863_Christmas_Number]/1863-12-25-Mrs_Lirripers_Lodgings.pdf 29004a55e2143a256aec1fc3f35a71e9 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mrs._Lirriper_s_Lodgings_[1863_Christmas_Number]/1863-12-25-How_Mrs_Lirriper_carried_on_the_Business.pdf 59d875fd846c841df677828fd6891cb1 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mrs._Lirriper_s_Lodgings_[1863_Christmas_Number]/1863-12-25-How_the_Parlours_added_a_few_words.pdf f5f8e5f17e6810ef65400ddc37401660 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christmas Numbers Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context christmas-numbers Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites the eighteen Christmas numbers that Dickens orchestrated between 1850 and 1867 in conjunction with multiple Victorian authors, notably Wilkie Collins, and published in his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round. After writing five Christmas books and multiple sketches on Yuletide cheer - notably 'Scenes and Characters, No. 10, Christmas Festivities', published as 'A Christmas Dinner' in Sketches by Boz (1836) - not to mention the holiday merry-making described in Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Charles Dickens might reasonably be supposed to have had his fill of seasonal writing. However, he published a Christmas number in 1850 in HW that contained a series of sketches about Christmas, contributing 'A Christmas Tree' (1850). In the next year's Christmas number, he included the short piece 'What Christmas is, as we Grow Older' (1851). Holiday fiction, though, was what Dickens's readership seemed to crave, and the author, editor, and entrepreneur in Dickens all recognised the opportunity. In 1852, Dickens decided to develop an extra Christmas number for HW which would harness the creative talents of other writers for a series of unrelated stories told within a frame narrative of his own composition. Each year he himself would write several of these parts, generally two to three. Soon, the Christmas number became as much of an expected holiday tradition among Victorian subscribers as had been the Christmas books. All in all, eighteen Christmas numbers of this kind resulted (1850-1867); nine published in HW and nine in ATYR.  <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - Household Words</div> On 24 December 1852, Dickens published A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. Personally, he had written 'The Poor Relation's Story' (No.1) and 'The Child's Story' (No.2) with successive stories authored by other contributors, though no names appeared. What would have been the 1853 extra number was late, published instead on 18 February 1854, a circumstance that would not occur again until the 1864 Christmas number. This time, Dickens published more short stories by himself and others, contributing 'The Schoolboy's Story' and 'Nobody's Story', but the Christmas number, for once, lacked a frame narrative or overarching title, though it would come to be known as Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. 25 December 1854 saw The Seven Poor Travellers, with Dickens penning 'The First' (No.1) and 'The Road' (No.7). By writing the first and last stories in the collection, he, as editor, might steer the entire composition towards a cohesive conclusion.  Next, Dickens wrote 'The Guest' (No.1), 'The Boots' (No.3), and 'The Bill' (No.7) as part of The Holly-Tree Inn (15 December 1855). The Wreck of the 'Golden Mary' followed on 25 December 1856, with Dickens composing only 'The Wreck' (No.1), a lengthy description of a shipwreck which sets up the framing narrative. Next, Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels (7 December 1857), Dickens writing 'The Island of Silver-Store' (No.1) and 'The Rafts on the River' (No.3) with Collins contributing the second chapter. Rounding out the extra Christmas numbers for HW, A House to Let appeared on 7 December 1858, with Dickens authoring 'Going into Society' (No.3). The last issue of HW appeared on 28 May 1859, with the journal virtually concluded, due to disagreements with Dickens's publishers Bradbury and Evans, though it was symbolically folded into ATYR. <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - All the Year Round</div> After Dickens launched his new journal ATYR on 30 April 1859, Christmas remained house-themed with the extra Christmas number The Haunted House (13 December 1859). It featured three offerings from him, 'The Mortals in the House' (No.1), 'The Ghost in Master B's Room' (No.6), and 'The Ghost in the Corner Room' (No.8). Yet Dickens continued to experiment with his holiday themes. He would write 'The Village' (No.1), 'The Money' (No.2), and 'The Restitution' (No.5) for A Message from the Sea, published on 25 December 1860, a story about a New England mariner, Captain Jorgan, who seeks to discover the truth about the origin of a Welsh family's mysterious nest-egg.  For Tom Tiddler's Ground, published 25 December 1861, Dickens produced 'Picking up Soot and Cinders' (No.1), 'Picking up Miss Kimmeens' (No.6), and 'Picking up the Tinker' (No. 7). An impressive four parts of Somebody's Luggage (4 December 1862), 'His Leaving it Till Called For' (No.1), 'His Boots' (No.2), 'His Brown-Paper Parcel' (No.7), and 'His Wonderful End' (No. 10) were produced by Dickens, who notably portrays himself in the story as a character, in his capacity as AYTR editor, to amusing effect. Two subsequent Christmas numbers, Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (25 December 1863) and Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy' (12 January 1864), concern the life and activities of a generous landlady who adopts a young boy and raises him with the help of her gallant lodger, Major Jackman. The former contained Dickens's two introductory and conclusion chapters, 'How Mrs. Lirriper carried on the Business' (No.1) and 'How the Parlours added a few words' (No.6), while the latter featured 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how she went on, and went over' (No.1) and 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how Jimmy topped up' (No.7), a story including a jaunt to France, with identical placement at the beginning and end of the number. Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions appeared in 1865, with Mugby Junction following in 1866; both frame narratives deal with themes of disability and poverty. For the first, Dickens contributed 'To be Taken Immediately' (No.1), 'To be Taken with a Grain of Salt' (No.6), and 'To be Taken for Life' (No.8); for the latter, he wrote 'Barbox Brothers' (No.1), 'Barbox Brothers and Co.' (No.2), 'Main Line. The Boy at Mugby' (No.3), and 'No.1 Branch Line. The Signal-man' (No.4). For the final Christmas number, No Thoroughfare (12 December 1867), Dickens collaborated with Collins on an imaginative European thriller that ranges from orphanages and offices in London to hotels and precipices in the Swiss Alps. Dickens is known to have primarily written most of The Overture, Act I, Act III, with Collins taking Act 2. Both collaborated on Acts IV and V. However, they deliberately interspersed passages into each other's parts to confuse readers as to which author had written which 'Acts' (Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 569-573). Consequently, we have merely transcribed the Christmas number in its entirety, as a collaboration. Though Dickens considered beginning a Christmas number in 1868, his other activities, coupled with failing health, led him to gratefully relinquish the idea. Instead, he would eventually go on to attempt another novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), evidently sensing the public's interest in the detective genre, one which he and Collins had, more or less, pioneered with their respective novels Bleak House (1853) (Inspector Bucket) and The Moonstone (1868) (Sergeant Cuff). His mind may also have been running on the mysterious plot of No Thoroughfare, with its malevolent villain, though he did not live to see the plot through to its conclusion. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans from Dickens Journals Online; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. With the exception of No Thoroughfare, transcripts have been made only of parts of numbers Dickens is known to have authored. Lists of writers known to have authored chapters or portions of these extra Christmas numbers have been added to the metadata of each item (Klimaszewski, Appendix A).  Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions. 1. See Melisa Klimaszewski. Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals (Ohio University Press, 2019); Jude Piesse. 'Dreaming Across Oceans: Emigration and Nation in the Mid-Victorian Christmas Issue'. Victorian Periodicals Review 46.1 (Spring 2013): 37-60; Robert Tracy. '"A Whimsical Kind of Masque": The Christmas Books and Victorian Spectacle'. Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1998): 113-30; Deborah A. Thomas. 'The Chord of the Christmas Season'. In Dickens and the Short Story (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982): pp. 62-93; Sarah A. Solberg. '"Text Dropped into the Woodcuts": Dickens's Christmas Books'. Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): pp. 103-18; Ruth Glancy. 'Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes'. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35.1 (June 1980): pp. 53-72; Thomas. 'Contributors to the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round, 1850-1867.' Part I. The Dickensian 70.372 (1973): pp. 163-72. and Part II. TD 70 (1974): pp. 21-29; 'Messages in Bottles and Collins's Seafaring Man'. Anthea Trodd. SEL: Studies in English Literature 41.4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 751-64; Susan Shatto. 'Miss Havisham and Mr. Mopes the Hermit: Dickens and the Mentally Ill'. (Part One) Dickens Quarterly 2.2 (June 1985): pp. 43-50 and (Part Two) DQ 2.3 (September 1985): pp. 79-84; Molly Boggs. '"Given to you by nature for an enemy": The landlady in mid-century London'. Journal of Victorian Culture 23.3 (2018): pp. 310-331; Thomas. 'Dickens' Mrs. Lirriper and the Evolution of a Feminine Stereotype'. Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977): 154-169; Martha Stoddard Holmes. '"Happy and Yet Pitying Tears": Deafness and Affective Disjuncture in Dickens's Doctor Marigold'. Victorian Review 35.2 (Fall 2009): 53-64; Diana C. Archibald. 'Dickens's Visit to the Perkins School and Doctor Marigold'. Dickens and Massachusetts: The Lasting Legacy of the Commonwealth Visits. Eds. Archibald and Joel J. Brattin (University of Massachusetts, 2015): pp. 123-33; Anne Chapman. '"I am not going on": Negotiating Christmas Publishing Rhythms with Dickens's Mugby Junction'. Victorian Periodicals Review 51.1 (2018): 70-85; Samia Ounoughi. 'The Swiss Alps and Character Framing in No Thoroughfare'. Ed. Maxime Leroy. In Charles Dickens and Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2013. pp. 114-25; Lillian Nayder. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Cornell University Press, 2002). Michael Hollington. '"To the Droodstone": Or, From The Moonstone to Edwin Drood via No Thoroughfare'. Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 5 (1995): 141-9.  Short Story Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Periodical Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) All the Year Round Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18631225 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Whoever would begin to be worried with letting Lodgings that wasn't a lone woman with a living to get is a thing inconceivable to me my dear, excuse the familiarity but it comes natural to me in my own little room when wishing to open my mind to those that I can trust and I should be truly thankful if they were all mankind but such is not so, for have but a Furnished bill in the window and your watch on the mantelpiece and farewell to it if you turn your back for but a second however gentlemanly the manners, nor is being of your own sex any safeguard as I have reason in the form of sugar-tongs to know, for that lady (and a fine woman she was) got me to run for a glass of water on the plea of going to be confined, which certainly turned out true but it was in the Station-House. Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street Strand—situated midway between the City and St. James's and within five minutes' walk of the principal places of public amusement—is my address. I have rented this house many years as the parish rate-books will testify and I could wish my landlord was as alive to the fact as I am myself, but no bless you not a half a pound of paint to save his life nor so much my dear as a tile upon the roof though on your bended knees. My dear you never have found Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street Strand advertised in Bradshaw's Railway Guide and with the blessing of Heaven you never will or shall so find it. Some there are who do not think it lowering themselves to make their names that cheap and even going the lengths of a portrait of the house not like it with a blot in every window and a coach and four at the door, but what will suit Wozenham's lower down on the other side of the way will not suit me, Miss Wozenham having her opinions and me having mine, though when it comes to systematic underbidding capable of being proved on oath in a court of justice and taking the form of "If Mrs. Lirriper names eighteen shillings a week, I name fifteen and six" it then comes to a settlement between yourself and your conscience supposing for the sake of argument your name to be Wozenham which I am well aware it is not or my opinion of you would be greatly lowered, and as to airy bedrooms and a night-porter in constant attendance the less said the better, the bedrooms being stuffy and the porter stuff. It is forty years ago since me and my poor Lirriper got married at St. Clement's Danes where I now have a sitting in a very pleasant pew with genteel company and my own hassock and being partial to evening service not too crowded. My poor Lirriper was a handsome figure of a man with a beaming eye and a voice as mellow as a musical instrument made of honey and steel, but he had ever been a free liver being in the commercial travelling line and travelling what he called a limekiln road—"a dry road, Emma my dear," my poor Lirriper says to me "where I have to lay the dust with one drink or another all day long and half the night, and it wears me Emma"—and this led to his running through a good deal and might have run through the turnpike too when that dreadful horse that never would stand still for a single instant set off, but for its being night and the gate shut and consequently took his wheel my poor Lirriper and the gig smashed to atoms and never spoke afterwards. He was a handsome figure of a man and a man with a jovial heart and a sweet temper, but if they had come up then they never could have given you the mellowness of his voice, and indeed I consider photographs wanting in mellowness as a general rule and making you look like a new-ploughed field. My poor Lirriper being behindhand with the world and being buried at Hatfield church in Hertfordshire, not that it was his native place but that he had a liking for the Salisbury Arms where we went upon our wedding-day and passed as happy a fortnight as ever happy was, I went round to the creditors and I says "Gentlemen I am acquainted with the fact that I am not answerable for my late husband's debts but I wish to pay them for I am his lawful wife and his good name is dear to me. I am going into the Lodgings gentlemen as a business and if I prosper every farthing that my late husband owed shall be paid for the sake of the love I bore him, by this right hand." It took a long time to do but it was done, and the silver cream-jug which is between ourselves and the bed and the mattress in my room up-stairs (or it would have found legs so sure as ever the Furnished bill was up) being presented by the gentlemen engraved "To Mrs. Lirriper a mark of grateful respect for her honourable conduct" gave me a turn which was too much for my feelings, till Mr. Betley which at that time had the parlours and loved his joke says "Cheer up Mrs. Lirriper, you should feel as if it was only your christening and they were your godfathers and godmothers which did promise for you." And it brought me round, and I don't mind confessing to you my dear that I then put a sandwich and a drop of sherry in a little basket and went down to Hatfield churchyard outside the coach and kissed my hand and laid it with a kind of a proud and swelling love on my husband's grave, though bless you it had taken me so long to clear his name that my wedding ring was worn quite fine and smooth when I laid it on the green green waving grass. I am an old woman now and my good looks are gone but that's me my dear over the plate-warmer and considered like in the times when you used to pay two guineas on ivory and took your chance pretty much how you came out, which made you very careful how you left it about afterwards because people were turned so red and uncomfortable by mostly guessing it was somebody else quite different, and there was once a certain person that had put his money in a hop business that came in one morning to pay his rent and his respects being the second floor that would have taken it down from its hook and put it in his breast pocket—you understand my dear—for the L, he says, of the original— only there was no mellowness in his voice and I wouldn't let him, but his opinion of it you may gather from his saying to it "Speak to me Emma!" which was far from a rational observation no doubt but still a tribute to its being a likeness, and I think myself it was like me when I was young and wore that sort of stays. But it was about the Lodgings that I was intending to hold forth and certainly I ought to know something of the business having been in it so long, for it was early in the second year of my married life that I lost my poor Lirriper and I set up at Islington directly afterwards and afterwards came here, being two houses and eight and thirty years and some losses and a deal of experience. Girls are your first trial after fixtures and they try you even worse than what I call the Wandering Christians, though why they should roam the earth looking for bills and then coming in and viewing the apartments and stickling about terms and never at all wanting them or dreaming of taking them being already provided, is a mystery I should be thankful to have explained if by any miracle it could be. It's wonderful they live so long and thrive so on it but I suppose the exercise makes it healthy, knocking so much and going from house to house and up and down stairs all day, and then their pretending to be so particular and punctual is a most astonishing thing, looking at their watches and saying "Could you give me the refusal of the rooms till twenty minutes past eleven the day after to-morrow in the forenoon, and supposing it to be considered essential by my friend from the country could there be a small iron bedstead put in the little room upon the stairs?" Why when I was new to it my dear I used to consider before I promised and to make my mind anxious with calculations and to get quite wearied out with disappointments, but now I says "Certainly by all means" well knowing it's a Wandering Christian and I shall hear no more about it, indeed by this time I know most of the Wandering Christians by sight as well as they know me, it being the habit of each individual revolving round London in that capacity to come back about twice a year, and it's very remarkable that it runs in families and the children grow up to it, but even were it otherwise I should no sooner hear of the friend from the country which is a certain sign than I should nod and say to myself You're a Wandering Christian, though whether they are (as I have heard) persons of small property with a taste for regular employment and frequent change of scene I cannot undertake to tell you. Girls as I was beginning to remark are one of your first and your lasting troubles, being like your teeth which begin with convulsions and never cease tormenting you from the time you cut them till they cut you, and then you don't want to part with them which seems hard but we must all succumb or buy artificial, and even where you get a will nine times out of ten you'll get a dirty face with it and naturally lodgers do not like good society to be shown in with a smear of black across the nose or a smudgy eyebrow. Where they pick the black up is a mystery I cannot solve, as in the case of the willingest girl that ever came into a house half starved poor thing, a girl so willing that I called her Willing Sophy down upon her knees scrubbing early and late and ever cheerful but always smiling with a black face. And I says to Sophy "Now Sophy my good girl have a regular day for your stoves and keep the width of the Airy between yourself and the blacking and do not brush your hair with the bottoms of the saucepans and do not meddle with the snuffs of the candles and it stands to reason that it can no longer be" yet there it was and always on her nose, which turning up and being broad at the end seemed to boast of it and caused warning from a steady gentleman and excellent lodger with breakfast by the week but a little irritable and use of a sitting-room when required, his words being "Mrs. Lirriper I have arrived at the point of admitting that the Black is a man and a brother, but only in a natural form and when it can't be got off." Well consequently I put poor Sophy on to other work and forbid her answering the door or answering a bell on any account but she was so unfortunately willing that nothing would stop her flying up the kitchen stairs whenever a bell was heard to tingle. I put it to her " Oh Sophy Sophy for goodness goodness sake where does it come from?" To which that poor unlucky willing mortal bursting out crying to see me so vexed replied "I took a deal of black into me ma'am when I was a small child being much neglected and I think it must be, that it works out," so it continuing to work out of that poor thing and not having another fault to find with her I says Sophy "what do you seriously think of my helping you away to New South Wales where it might not be noticed?" Nor did I ever repent the money which was well spent, for she married the ship's cook on the voyage (himself a Mulotter) and did well and lived happy, and so far as ever I heard it was not noticed in a new state of society to her dying day. In what way Miss Wozenham lower down on the other side of the way reconciled it to her feelings as a lady (which she is not) to entice Mary Anne Perkinsop from my service is best known to herself, I do not know and I do not wish to know how opinions are formed at Wozenham's on any point. But Mary Anne Perkinsop although I behaved handsomely to her and she behaved unhandsomely to me was worth her weight in gold as overawing lodgers without driving them away, for lodgers would be far more sparing of their bells with Mary Anne than I ever knew them be with Maid or Mistress, which is a great triumph especially when accompanied with a cast in the eye and a bag of bones, but it was the steadiness of her way with them through her father's having failed in Pork. It was Mary Anne's looking so respectable in her person and being so strict in her spirits that conquered the tea-and-sugarest gentleman (for he weighed them both in a pair of scales every morning) that I have ever had to deal with and no lamb grew meeker, still it afterwards came round to me that Miss Wozenham happening to pass and seeing Mary Anne take in the milk of a milkman that made free in a rosy-faced way (I think no worse of him) with every girl in the street but was quite frozen up like the statue at Charing Cross by her, saw Mary Anne's value in the lodging business and went as high as one pound per quarter more, consequently Mary Anne with not a word betwixt us says "If you will provide yourself Mrs. Lirriper in a month from this day I have already done the same," which hurt me and I said so, and she then hurt me more by insinuating that her father having failed in Pork had laid her open to it. My dear I do assure you it's a harassing thing to know what kind of girls to give the preference to, for if they are lively they get bell'd off their legs and if they are sluggish you suffer from it yourself in complaints and if they are sparkling-eyed they get made love to and if they are smart in their persons they try on your Lodger's bonnets and if they are musical I defy you to keep them away from bands and organs, and allowing for any difference you like in their heads their heads will be always out of window just the same. And then what the gentlemen like in girls the ladies don't, which is fruitful hot water for all parties, and then there's temper though such a temper as Caroline Maxey's I hope not often. A good-looking black-eyed girl was Caroline and a comely-made girl to your cost when she did break out and laid about her, as took place first and last through a new-married couple come to see London in the first floor and the lady very high and it was supposed not liking the good looks of Caroline having none of her own to spare, but anyhow she did try Caroline though that was no excuse. So one afternoon Caroline comes down into the kitchen flushed and flashing, and she says to me "Mrs. Lirriper that woman in the first has aggravated me past bearing," I says " Caroline keep your temper," Caroline says with a curdling laugh "Keep my temper? You're right Mrs. Lirriper, so I will. Capital D her!" bursts out Caroline (you might have struck me into the centre of the earth with a feather when she said it) "I'll give her a touch of the temper that I keep!" Caroline downs with her hair my dear, screeches and rushes upstairs, I following as fast as my trembling legs could bear me, but before I got into the room the dinner cloth and pink and white service all dragged off upon the floor with a crash and the new married couple on their backs in the fire-grate, him with the shovel and tongs and a dish of cucumber across him and a mercy it was summer-time. "Caroline" I says "be calm," but she catches off my cap and tears it in her teeth as she passes me, then pounces on the new married lady makes her a bundle of ribbons takes her by the two ears and knocks the back of her head upon the carpet Murder screaming all the time Policemen running down the street and Wozenham's windows (judge of my feelings when I came to know it) thrown up and Miss Wozenham calling out from the balcony with crocodile's tears "It's Mrs. Lirriper been overcharging somebody to madness—she'll be murdered—I always thought so—Pleeseman save her!" My dear four of them and Caroline behind the chiffoniere attacking with the poker and when disarmed prize fighting with her double fists, and down and up and up and down and dreadful! But I couldn't bear to see the poor young creature roughly handled and her hair torn when they got the better of her, and I says "Gentlemen Policemen pray remember that her sex is the sex of your mothers and sisters and your sweethearts, and God bless them and you!" And there she was sitting down on the ground handcuffed, taking breath against the skirting-board and them cool with their coats in strips, and all she says was "Mrs. Lirriper I am sorry as ever I touched you, for you're a kind motherly old thing," and it made me think that I had often wished I had been a mother indeed and how would my heart have felt if I had been the mother of that girl! Well you know it turned out at the Police-office that she had done it before, and she had her clothes away and was sent to prison, and when she was to come out I trotted off to the gate in the evening with just a morsel of jelly in that little basket of mine to give her a mite of strength to face the world again, and there I met with a very decent mother waiting for her son through bad company and a stubborn one he was with his half boots not laced. So out came Caroline and I says "Caroline come along with me and sit down under the wall where it's retired and eat a little trifle that I have brought with me to do you good" and she throws her arms round my neck and says sobbing "O why were you never a mother when there are such mothers as there are!" she says, and in half a minute more she begins to laugh and says "Did I really tear your cap to shreds?" and when I told her "You certainly did so Caroline" she laughed again and said while she patted my face "Then why do you wear such queer old caps you dear old thing? If you hadn't worn such queer old caps I don't think I should have done it even then." Fancy the girl! Nothing could get out of her what she was going to do except O she would do well enough, and we parted she being very thankful and kissing my hands, and I never more saw or heard of that girl, except that I shall always believe that a very genteel cap which was brought anonymous to me one Saturday night in an oilskin basket by a most impertinent young sparrow of a monkey whistling with dirty shoes on the clean steps and playing the harp on the Airy railings with a hoop-stick came from Caroline. What you lay yourself open to my dear in the way of being the object of uncharitable suspicions when you go into the Lodging business I have not the words to tell you, but never was I so dishonourable as to have two keys nor would I willingly think it even of Miss Wozenham lower down on the other side of the way sincerely hoping that it may not be, though doubtless at the same time money cannot come from nowhere and it is not reason to suppose that Bradshaws put it in for love be it blotty as it may. It is a hardship hurting to the feelings that Lodgers open their minds so wide to the idea that you are trying to get the better of them and shut their minds so close to the idea that they are trying to get the better of you, but as Major Jackman says to me "I know the ways of this circular world Mrs. Lirriper, and that's one of 'em all round it" and many is the little ruffle in my mind that the Major has smoothed, for he is a clever man who has seen much. Dear dear, thirteen years have passed though it seems but yesterday since I was sitting with my glasses on at the open front parlour window one evening in August (the parlours being then vacant) reading yesterday's paper my eyes for print being poor though still I am thankful to say a long sight at a distance, when I hear a gentleman come posting across the road and up the street in a dreadful rage talking to himself in a fury and d'ing and c'ing somebody. "By George!" says he out loud and clutching his walking-stick, "I'll go to Mrs. Lirriper's. Which is Mrs. Lirriper's?" Then looking round and seeing me he flourishes his hat right off his head as if I had been the queen and he says "Excuse the intrusion Madam, but pray Madam can you tell me at what number in this street there resides a well-known and much-respected lady by the name of Lirriper?" A little flustered though I must say gratified I took off my glasses and curtseyed and said "Sir, Mrs. Lirriper is your humble servant." "As-tonishing!" says he. " A million pardons! Madam, may I ask you to have the kindness to direct one of your domestics to open the door to a gentleman in search of apartments, by the name of Jackman?" I had never heard the name but a politer gentleman I never hope to see, for says he "Madam I am shocked at your opening the door yourself to no worthier a fellow than Jemmy Jackman. After you Madam. I never precede a lady." Then he comes into the parlours and he sniffs and he says "Hah! These are parlours! Not musty cupboards" he says "but parlours, and no smell of coal-sacks." Now my dear it having been remarked by some inimical to the whole neighbourhood that it always smells of coal-sacks which might prove a drawback to Lodgers if encouraged, I says to the Major gently though firmly that I think he is referring to Arundel or Surrey or Howard but not Norfolk. "Madam" says he "I refer to Wozenham's lower down over the way—Madam you can form no notion what Wozenham's is— Madam it is a vast coal-sack, and Miss Wozenham has the principles and manners of a female heaver—Madam from the manner in which I have heard her mention you I know she has no appreciation of a lady, and from the manner in which she has conducted herself towards me I know she has no appreciation of a gentleman—Madam my name is Jackman—should you require any other reference than what I have already said, I name the Bank of England—perhaps you know it!" Such was the beginning of the Major's occupying the parlours and from that hour to this the same and a most obliging Lodger and punctual in all respects except one irregular which I need not particularly specify, but made up for by his being a protection and at all times ready to fill in the papers of the Assessed Taxes and Juries and that, and once collared a young man with the drawing-room clock under his cloak, and once on the parapets with his own hands and blankets put out the kitchen chimney and afterwards attending the summons made a most eloquent speech against the Parish before the magistrates and saved the engine, and ever quite the gentleman though passionate. And certainly Miss Wozenham's detaining the trunks and umbrella was not in a liberal spirit though it may have been according to her rights in law or an act I would myself have stooped to, the Major being so much the gentleman that though he is far from tall he seems almost so when he has his shirt frill out and his frock-coat on and his hat with the curly brims, and in what service he was I cannot truly tell you my dear whether Militia or Foreign, for I never heard him even name himself as Major but always simple "Jemmy Jackman" and once soon after he came when I felt it my duty to let him know that Miss Wozenham had put it about that he was no Major and I took the liberty of adding "which you are sir" his words were "Madam at any rate I am not a Minor, and sufficient for the day is the evil thereof" which cannot be denied to be the sacred truth, nor yet his military ways of having his boots with only the dirt brushed off taken to him in the front parlour every morning on a clean plate and varnishing them himself with a little sponge and a saucer and a whistle in a whisper so sure as ever his breakfast is ended, and so neat his ways that it never soils his linen which is scrupulous though more in quality than quantity, neither that nor his moustachios which to the best of my belief are done at the same time and which are as black and shining as his boots, his head of hair being a lovely white. It was the third year nearly up of the Major's being in the parlours that early one morning in the month of February when Parliament was coming on and you may therefore suppose a number of impostors were about ready to take hold of anything they could get, a gentleman and lady from the country came in to view the Second, and I well remember that I had been looking out of window and had watched them and the heavy sleet driving down the street together looking for bills. I did not quite take to the face of the gentleman though he was good-looking too but the lady was a very pretty young thing and delicate, and it seemed too rough for her to be out at all though she had only come from the Adelphi Hotel which would not have been much above a quarter of a mile if the weather had been less severe. Now it did so happen my dear that I had been forced to put five shillings weekly additional on the second in consequence of a loss from running away full-dressed as if going out to a dinner-party, which was very artful and had made me rather suspicious taking it along with Parliament, so when the gentleman proposed three months certain and the money in advance and leave then reserved to renew on the same terms for six months more, I says I was not quite certain but that I might have engaged myself to another party but would step down stairs and look into it if they would take a seat. They took a seat and I went down to the handle of the Major's door that I had already began to consult finding it a great blessing, and I knew by his whistling in a whisper that he was varnishing his boots which was generally considered private, however he kindly calls out "If it's you, Madam, come in," and I went in and told him. "Well, Madam," says the Major rubbing his nose—as I did fear at the moment with the black sponge but it was only his knuckle, he being always neat and dexterous with his fingers—"well, Madam, I suppose you would be glad of the money?" I was delicate of saying "Yes" too out, for a little extra colour rose into the Major's cheeks and there was irregularity which I will not particularly specify in a quarter which I will not name. "I am of opinion, Madam," says the Major "that when money is ready for you—when it is ready for you Mrs. Lirriper—you ought to take it. What is there against it, Madam, in this case up-stairs?" "I really cannot say there is anything against it sir, still I thought I would consult you." "You said a newly-married couple, I think, Madam?" says the Major. I says "Ye-es. Evidently. And indeed the young lady mentioned to me in a casual way that she had not been married many months." The Major rubbed his nose again and stirred the varnish round and round in its little saucer with his piece of sponge and took to his whistling in a whisper for a few moments. Then he says "You would call it a Good Let, Madam?" "Oh certainly a Good Let sir." "Say they renew for the additional six months. Would it put you about very much Madam if—if the worst was to come to the worst?" said the Major. "Well I hardly know," I says to the Major. "It depends upon circumstances. Would you object Sir for instance?" "I?" says the Major. "Object? Jemmy Jackman? Mrs. Lirriper close with the proposal." So I went up-stairs and accepted, and they came in next day which was Saturday and the Major was so good as to draw up a Memorandum of an agreement in a beautiful round hand and expressions that sounded to me equally legal and military, and Mr. Edson signed it on the Monday morning and the Major called upon Mr. Edson on the Tuesday and Mr. Edson called upon the Major on the Wednesday and the Second and the parlours were as friendly as could be wished. The three months paid for had run out and we had got without any fresh overtures as to payment into May my dear, when there came an obligation upon Mr. Edson to go a business expedition right across the Isle of Man, which fell quite unexpected on that pretty little thing and is not a place that according to my views is particularly in the way to anywhere at any time but that may be a matter of opinion. So short a notice was it that he was to go next day, and dreadfully she cried poor pretty and I am sure I cried too when I saw her on the cold pavement in the sharp east wind—it being a very backward spring that year taking a last leave of him with her pretty bright hair blowing this way and that and her arms clinging round his neck and him saying "There there there! Now let me go Peggy." And by that time it was plain that what the Major had been so accommodating as to say he would not object to happening in the house, would happen in it, and I told her as much when he was gone while I comforted her with my arm up the staircase, for I says "You will soon have others to keep up for my pretty and you must think of that." His letter never came when it ought to have come and what she went through morning after morning when the postman brought none for her the very postman himself compassionated when she ran down to the door, and yet we cannot wonder at its being calculated to blunt the feelings to have all the trouble of other people's letters and none of the pleasure and doing it oftener in the mud and mizzle than not and at a rate of wages more resembling Little Britain than Great. But at last one morning when she was too poorly to come running down stairs he says to me with a pleased look in his face that made me next to love the man in his uniform coat though he was dripping wet "I have taken you first in the street this morning Mrs. Lirriper, for here's the one for Mrs. Edson." I went up to her bedroom with it fast as ever I could go, and she sat up in bed when she saw it and kissed it and tore it open and then a blank stare came upon her. "It's very short!" she says lifting her large eyes to my face. "O Mrs. Lirriper it's very short!" I says "My dear Mrs. Edson no doubt that's because your husband hadn't time to write more just at that time." "No doubt, no doubt," says she, and puts her two hands on her face and turns round in her bed. I shut her softly in and I crept down stairs and I tapped at the Major's door, and when the Major having his thin slices of bacon in his own Dutch oven saw me he came out of his chair and put me down on the sofa. "Hush!" says he, "I see something's the matter. Don't speak—take time." I says "O Major I am afraid there's cruel work up-stairs." "Yes yes" says he "I had begun to be afraid of it—take time." And then in opposition to his own words he rages out frightfully, and says "I shall never forgive myself Madam, that I, Jemmy Jackman, didn't see it all that morning—didn't go straight up-stairs when my boot-sponge was in my hand—didn't force it down his throat—and choke him dead with it on the spot!" The Major and me agreed when we came to ourselves that just at present we could do no more than take on to suspect nothing and use our best endeavours to keep that poor young creature quiet, and what I ever should have done without the Major when it got about among the organ-men that quiet was our object is unknown, for he made lion and tiger war upon them to that degree that without seeing it I could not have believed it was in any gentleman to have such a power of bursting out with fire-irons walking-sticks water-jugs coals potatoes off his table the very hat off his head, and at the same time so furious in foreign languages that they would stand with their handles half turned fixed like the Sleeping Ugly—for I cannot say Beauty. Ever to see the postman come near the house now gave me such a fear that it was a reprieve when he went by, but in about another ten days or a fortnight he says again "Here's one for Mrs. Edson.—Is she pretty well?" "She is pretty well postman, but not well enough to rise so early as she used" which was so far gospel-truth. I carried the letter in to the Major at his breakfast and I says tottering "Major I have not the courage to take it up to her." "It's an ill-looking villain of a letter," says the Major. "I have not the courage Major" I says again in a tremble "to take it up to her." After seeming lost in consideration for some moments the Major says, raising his head as if something new and useful had occurred to his mind "Mrs. Lirriper, I shall never forgive myself that I, Jemmy Jackman, didn't go straight up-stairs that morning when my boot-sponge was in my hand—and force it down his throat—and choke him dead with it." "Major" I says a little hasty "you didn't do it which is a Blessing, for it would have done no good and I think your sponge was better employed on your own honourable boots." So we got to be rational, and planned that I should tap at her bedroom door and lay the letter on the mat outside and wait on the upper landing for what might happen, and never was gunpowder cannon-balls or shells or rockets more dreaded than that dreadful letter was by me as I took it to the second floor. A terrible loud scream sounded through the house the minute after she had opened it, and I found her on the floor lying as if her life was gone. My dear I never looked at the face of the letter which was lying open by her, for there was no occasion. Everything I needed to bring her round the Major brought up with his own hands, besides running out to the chemist's for what was not in the house and likewise having the fiercest of all his many skirmishes with a musical instrument representing a ball-room I do not know in what particular country and company waltzing in and out at folding-doors with rolling eyes. When after a long time I saw her coming to, I slipped on the landing till I heard her cry, and then I went in and says cheerily "Mrs. Edson you're not well my dear and it's not to be wondered at," as if I had not been in before. Whether she believed or disbelieved I cannot say and it would signify nothing if I could, but I stayed by her for hours and then she God ever blesses me! and says she will try to rest for her head is bad. "Major," I whispers, looking in at the parlours, "I beg and pray of you don't go out." The Major whispers "Madam, trust me I will do no such a thing. How is she?" I says "Major the good Lord above us only knows what burns and rages in her poor mind. I left her sitting at her window. I am going to sit at mine." It came on afternoon and it came on evening. Norfolk is a delightful street to lodge in—provided you don't go lower down—but of a summer evening when the dust and waste paper lie in it and stray children play in it and a kind of a gritty calm and bake settles on it and a peal of church-bells is practising in the neighbourhood it is a trifle dull, and never have I seen it since at such a time and never shall I see it evermore at such a time without seeing the dull June evening when that forlorn young creature sat at her open corner window on the second and me at my open corner window (the other corner) on the third. Something merciful, something wiser and better far than my own self, had moved me while it was yet light to sit in my bonnet and shawl, and as the shadows fell and the tide rose I could sometimes—when I put out my head and looked at her window below—see that she leaned out a little looking down the street. It was just settling dark when I saw her in the street. So fearful of losing sight of her that it almost stops my breath while I tell it, I went down stairs faster than I ever moved in all my life and only tapped with my hand at the Major's door in passing it and slipping out. She was gone already. I made the same speed down the street and when I came to the corner of Howard Street I saw that she had turned it and was there plain before me going towards the west. O with what a thankful heart I saw her going along! She was quite unacquainted with London and had very seldom been out for more than an airing in our own street where she knew two or three little children belonging to neighbours and had sometimes stood among them at the end of the street looking at the water. She must be going at hazard I knew, still she kept the by-streets quite correctly as long as they would serve her, and then turned up into the Strand. But at every corner I could see her head turned one way, and that way was always the river way. It may have been only the darkness and quiet of the Adelphi that caused her to strike into it but she struck into it much as readily as if she had set out to go there, which perhaps was the case. She went straight down to the Terrace and along it and looked over the iron rail, and I often woke afterwards in my own bed with the horror of seeing her doing it. The desertion of the wharf below and the flowing of the high water there seemed to settle her purpose. She looked about as if to make out the way down, and she struck out the right way or the wrong way—I don't know which, for I don't know the place before or since—and I followed her the way she went. It was noticeable that all this time she never once looked back. But there was now a great change in the manner of her going, and instead of going at a steady quick walk with her arms folded before her,—among the dark dismal arches she went in a wild way with her arms opened wide, as if they were wings and she was flying to her death. We were on the wharf and she stopped. I stopped. I saw her hands at her bonnet-strings, and I rushed between her and the brink and took her round the waist with both my arms. She might have drowned me, I felt then, but she could never have got quit of me. Down to that moment my mind had been all in a maze and not half an idea had I had in it what I should say to her, but the instant I touched her it came to me like magic and I had my natural voice and my senses and even almost my breath. "Mrs. Edson!" I says " My dear! Take care. How ever did you lose your way and stumble on a dangerous place like this? Why you must have come here by the most perplexing streets in all London. No wonder you are lost, I am sure. And this place too! Why I thought nobody ever got here, except me to order my coals and the Major in the parlours to smoke his cigar!"—for I saw that blessed man close by, pretending to it. "Hah—Hah—Hum!" coughs the Major. "And good gracious me" I says, "why here he is!" "Halloa! who goes there!" says the Major in a military manner. "Well!" I says, "if this don't beat everything! Don't yon know us Major Jackman?" "Halloa!" says the Major. "Who calls on Jemmy Jackman?" (and more out of breath he was, and did it less like life, than I should have expected). "Why here's Mrs. Edson Major" I says, "strolling out to cool her poor head which has been very bad, has missed her way and got lost, and Goodness knows where she might have got to but for me coming here to drop an order into my coal merchant's letter-box and you coming here to smoke your cigar!—And you really are not well enough my dear" I says to her " to be half so far from home without me.—And your arm will be very acceptable I am sure Major" I says to him "and I know she may lean upon it as heavy as she likes." And now we had both got her—thanks be Above!—one on each side. She was all in a cold shiver and she so continued till I laid her on her own bed, and up to the early morning she held me by the hand and moaned and moaned "O wicked, wicked, wicked!" But when at last I made believe to droop my head and be overpowered with a dead sleep, I heard that poor young creature give such touching and such humble thanks for being preserved from taking her own life in her madness that I thought I should have cried my eyes out on the counterpane and I knew she was safe. Being well enough to do and able to afford it, me and the Major laid our little plans next day while she was asleep worn out, and so I says to her as soon as I could do it nicely: "Mrs. Edson my dear, when Mr. Edson paid me the rent for these further six months—" She gave a start and I felt her large eyes look at me, but I went on with it and with my needle-work. "—I can't say that I am quite sure I dated the receipt right. Could you let me look at it?" She laid her frozen cold hand upon mine and she looked through me when I was forced to look up from my needlework, but I had taken the precaution of having on my spectacles. "I have no receipt" says she. "Ah! Then he has got it" I says in a careless way. "It's of no great consequence. A receipt's a receipt." From that time she always had hold of my hand when I could spare it which was generally only when I read to her, for of course she and me had our bits of needlework to plod at and neither of us was very handy at those little things, though I am still rather proud of my share in them too considering. And though she took to all I read to her, I used to fancy that next to what was taught upon the Mount she took most of all to His gentle compassion for us poor women and to His young life and to how His mother was proud of him and treasured His sayings in her heart. She had a grateful look in her eyes that never never never will be out of mine until they are closed in my last sleep, and when I chanced to look at her without thinking of it I would always meet that look, and she would often offer me her trembling lip to kiss, much more like a little affectionate half-broken-hearted child than ever I can imagine any grown person. One time the trembling of this poor lip was so strong and her tears ran down so fast that I thought she was going to tell me all her woe, so I takes her two hands in mine and I says: "No my dear not now, you had best not try to do it now. Wait for better times when you have got over this and are strong, and then you shall tell me whatever you will. Shall it be agreed?" With our hands still joined she nodded her head many times, and she lifted my hands and put them to her lips and to her bosom. "Only one word now my dear" I says. "Is there any one?" She looked inquiringly "Any one?" "That I can go to?" She shook her head. "No one that I can bring?" She shook her head. "No one is wanted by me my dear. Now that may be considered past and gone." Not much more than a week afterwards—for this was far on in the time of our being so together—I was bending over at her bedside with my ear down to her lips, by turns listening for her breath and looking for a sign of life in her face. At last it came in a solemn way—not in a flash but like a kind of pale faint light brought very slow to the face. She said something to me that had no sound in it, but I saw she asked me: "Is this death?" And I says "Poor dear poor dear, I think it is." Knowing somehow that she wanted me to move her weak right hand, I took it and laid it on her breast and then folded her other hand upon it, and she prayed a good good prayer and I joined in it poor me though there were no words spoke. Then I brought the baby in its wrappers from where it lay, and I says: "My dear this is sent to a childless old woman. This is for me to take care of." The trembling lip was put up towards my face for the last time, and I dearly kissed it. "Yes my dear" I says. "Please God! Me and the Major." I don't know how to tell it right, but I saw her soul brighten and leap up, and get free and fly away in the grateful look * * * * * So this is the why and wherefore of its coming to pass my dear that we called him Jemmy, being after the Major his own godfather with Lirriper for a surname being after myself, and never was a dear child such a brightening thing in a Lodgings or such a playmate to his grandmother as Jemmy to this house and me, and always good and minding what he was told (upon the whole) and soothing for the temper and making everything pleasanter except when he grew old enough to drop his cap down Wozenham's Airy and they wouldn't hand it up to him, and being worked into a state I put on my best bonnet and gloves and parasol with the child in my hand and I says "Miss Wozenham I little thought ever to have entered your house but unless my grandson's cap is instantly restored, the laws of this country regulating the property of the Subject shall at length decide betwixt yourself and me, cost what it may." With a sneer upon her face which did strike me I must say as being expressive of two keys but it may have been a mistake and if there is any doubt let Miss Wozenham have the full benefit of it as is but right, she rang the bell and she says "Jane, is there a street-child's old cap down our Airy?" I says "Miss Wozenham before your housemaid answers that question you must allow me to inform you to your face that my grandson is not a street-child and is not in the habit of wearing old caps. In fact" I says "Miss Wozenham I am far from sure that my grandson's cap may not be newer than your own" which was perfectly savage in me, her lace being the commonest machine-make washed and torn besides, but I had been put into a state to begin with fomented by impertinence. Miss Wozenham says red in the face "Jane you heard my question, is there any child's cap down our Airy?" " Yes Ma'am'" says Jane "I think I did see some such rubbish a lying there." "Then" says Miss Wozenham" let these visitors out, and then throw up that worthless article out of my premises." But here the child who had been staring at Miss Wozenham with all his eyes and more, frowns down his little eyebrows purses up his little mouth puts his chubby legs far apart turns his little dimpled fists round and round slowly over one another like a little coffee-mill, and says to her "Oo impdent to mi Gran, me tut oor hi!" " Oh!" says Miss Wozenham looking down scornfully at the Mite "this is not a street-child is it not! Really!" I bursts out laughing and I says " Miss Wozenham if this an't a pretty sight to you I don't envy your feelings and I wish you good day. Jemmy come along with Gran." And I was still in the best of humours though his cap came flying up into the street as if it had been just turned on out of the water-plug, and I went home laughing all the way, all owing to that dear boy. The miles and miles that me and the Major have travelled with Jemmy in the dusk between the lights are not to be calculated, Jemmy driving on the coach-box which is the Major's brass-bound writing-desk on the table, me inside in the easy-chair and the Major Guard up behind with a brown-paper horn doing it really wonderful. I do assure you my dear that sometimes when I have taken a few winks in my place inside the coach and have come half awake by the flashing light of the fire and have heard that precious pet driving and the Major blowing up behind to have the change of horses ready when we got to the Inn, I have half believed we were on the old North Road that my poor Lirriper knew so well. Then to see that child and the Major both wrapped up getting down to warm their feet and going stamping about and having glasses of ale out of the paper match-boxes on the chimney-piece is to see the Major enjoying it fully as much as the child I am very sure, and it's equal to any play when Coachee opens the coach-door to look in at me inside and say "Wery 'past that 'tage. 'Prightened old lady?" But what my inexpressible feelings were when we lost that child can only be compared to the Major's which were not a shade better, through his straying out at five years old and eleven o'clock in the forenoon and never heard of by word or sign or deed till half-past nine at night, when the Major had gone to the Editor of the Times newspaper to put in an advertisement, which came out next day four and twenty hours after he was found, and which I mean always carefully to keep in my lavender drawer as the first printed account of him. The more the day got on, the more I got distracted and the Major too and both of us made worse by the composed ways of the police though very civil and obliging and what I must call their obstinacy in not entertaining the idea that he was stolen. "We mostly find Mum" says the sergeant who came round to comfort me, which he didn't at all and he had been one of the private constables in Caroline's time to which he referred in his opening words when he said "Don't give way to uneasiness in your mind Mum, it'll all come as right as my nose did when I got the same barked by that young woman in your second floor"—says this sergeant "we mostly find Mum as people ain't over anxious to have what I may call second-hand children. You'll get him back Mum." "O but my dear good sir" I says clasping my hands and wringing them and clasping them again "he is such an uncommon child!" "Yes Mum" says the sergeant, "we mostly find that too Mum. The question is what his clothes were worth." "His clothes" I says "were not worth much sir for he had only got his playing-dress on, but the dear child!—" "All right Mum" says the sergeant. "You'll get him back, Mum. And even if he'd had his best clothes on, it wouldn't come to worse than his being found wrapped up in a cabbage-leaf, a shivering in a lane." His words pierced my heart like daggers and daggers, and me and the Major ran in and out like wild things all day long till the Major returning from his interview with the Editor of the Times at night rushes into my little room hysterical and squeezes my hand and wipes his eyes and says " Joy joy—officer in plain clothes came up on the steps as I was letting myself in—compose your feelings—Jemmy's found." Consequently I fainted away and when I came to, embraced the legs of the officer in plain clothes who seemed to be taking a kind of a quiet inventory in his mind of the property in my little room with brown whiskers, and I says " Blessings on you sir where is the Darling!" and he says "In Kennington Station House." I was dropping at his feet Stone at the image of that Innocence in cells with murderers when he adds "He followed the Monkey." I says deeming it slang language "Oh sir explain for a loving grandmother what Monkey!" He says "him in the spangled cap with the strap under the chin, as won't keep on—him as sweeps the crossings on a round table and don't want to draw his sabre more than he can help." Then I understood it all and most thankfully thanked him, and me and the Major and him drove over to Kennington and there we found our boy lying quite comfortable before a blazing fire having sweetly played himself to sleep upon a small accordion nothing like so big as a flat iron which they had been so kind as to lend him for the purpose and which it appeared had been stopped upon a very young person. My dear the system upon which the Major commenced and as I may say perfected Jemmy's learning when he was so small that if the dear was on the other side of the table you had to look under it instead of over it to see him with his mother's own bright hair in beautiful curls, is a thing that ought to be known to the Throne and Lords and Commons and then might obtain some promotion for the Major which he well deserves and would be none the worse for (speaking between friends) L. S. D.-ically. When the Major first undertook his learning he says to me: "I'm going Madam." he says " to make our child a Calculating Boy." "Major" I says, "you terrify me and may do the pet a permanent injury you would never forgive yourself." "Madam," says the Major, "next to my regret that when I had my boot-sponge in my hand, I didn't choke that scoundrel with it—on the spot—" "There! For Gracious sake," I interrupts, "let his conscience find him without sponges." "I say next to that regret, Madam," says the Major "would be the regret with which my breast," which he tapped, "would be surcharged if this fine mind was not early cultivated. But mark me Madam," says the Major holding up his forefinger "cultivated on a principle that will make it a delight." "Major" I says "I will be candid with you and tell you openly that if ever I find the dear child fall off in his appetite I shall know it is his calculations and shall put a stop to them at two minutes' notice. Or if I find them mounting to his head" I says, "or striking any ways cold to his stomach or leading to anything approaching flabbiness in his legs, the result will be the same, but Major you are a clever man and have seen much and you love the child and are his own godfather, and if you feel a confidence in trying try." "Spoken Madam" says the Major "like Emma Lirriper. All I have to ask Madam, is, that you will leave my godson and myself to make a week or two's preparations for surprising you, and that you will give me leave to have up and down any small articles not actually in use that I may require from the kitchen." "From the kitchen Major?" I says half feeling as if he had a mind to cook the child. "From the kitchen" says the Major, and smiles and swells, and at the same time looks taller. So I passed my word and the Major and the dear boy were shut up together for half an hour at a time through a certain while, and never could I hear anything going on betwixt them but talking and laughing and Jemmy clapping his hands and screaming out numbers, so I says to myself "it has not harmed him yet" nor could I on examining the dear find any signs of it anywhere about him which was likewise a great relief. At last one day Jemmy brings me a card in joke in the Major's neat writing "The Messrs. Jemmy Jackman" for we had given him the Major's other name too "request the honour of Mrs. Lirriper's company at the Jackman Institution in the front parlour this evening at five, military time, to witness a few slight feats of elementary arithmetic." And if you'll believe me there in the front parlour at five punctual to the moment was the Major behind the Pembroke table with both leaves up and a lot of things from the kitchen tidily set out on old newspapers spread atop of it, and there was the Mite stood up on a chair with his rosy cheeks flushing and his eyes sparkling clusters of diamonds. "Now Gran" says he, "oo tit down and don't oo touch ler poople"—for he saw with every one of those diamonds of his that I was going to give him a squeeze. "Very well sir" I says "I am obedient in this good company I am sure." And I sits down in the easy-chair that was put for me, shaking my sides. But picture my admiration when the Major going on almost as quick as if he was conjuring sets out all the articles he names, and says, "Three saucepans, an Italian iron, a hand-bell, a toasting-fork, a nutmeg-grater, four pot-lids, a spice-box, two egg-cups, and a chopping-board—how many?" and when that Mite instantly cries "Tifteen, tut down tive and carry ler 'toppin-board" and then claps his hands draws up his legs and dances on his chair! My dear with the same astonishing ease and correctness him and the Major added up the tables chairs and sofy, the picters fender and fire-irons their own selves me and the cat and the eyes in Miss Wozenham's head, and whenever the sum was done Young Roses and Diamonds claps his hands and draws up his legs and dances on his chair. The pride of the Major! ("Here's a mind Ma'am!" he says to me behind his hand.) Then he says aloud, "We now come to the next elementary rule: which is called—" "Umtraction!" cries Jemmy. "Right" says the Major. "We have here a toasting-fork, a potato in its natural state, two pot-lids, one egg-cup, a wooden spoon, and two skewers, from which it is necessary for commercial purposes to subtract a sprat-gridiron, a small pickle-jar, two lemons, one pepper-castor, a blackbeetle-trap, and a knob of the dresser-drawer what remains?" "Toatin-fork!" cries Jemmy. "In numbers how many?" says the Major. "One!" cries Jemmy. ("Here's a boy, Ma'am?" says the Major to me, behind his hand.) Then the Major goes on: "We now approach the next elementary rule: which is entitled—" "Tickleication" cries Jemmy. "Correct" says the Major. But my dear to relate to you in detail the way in which they multiplied fourteen sticks of fire-wood by two bits of ginger and a larding-needle, or divided pretty well everything else there was on the table by the heater of the Italian iron and a chamber candlestick, and got a lemon over, would make my head spin round and round and round as it did at the time. So I says "if you'll excuse my addressing the chair Professor Jackman I think the period of the lecture has now arrived when it becomes necessary that I should take a good hug of this young scholar." Upon which Jemmy calls out from his station on the chair "Gran oo open oor arms and me'll make a 'pring into 'em." So I opened my arms to him as I had opened my sorrowful heart when his poor young mother lay a dying, and he had his jump and we had a good long hug together and the Major prouder than any peacock says to me behind his hand, "You need not let him know it Madam" (which I certainly need not for the Major was quite audible) "but he is a boy!" In this way Jemmy grew and grew and went to day-school and continued under the Major too, and in summer we were as happy as the days were long and in winter we were as happy as the days were short and there seemed to rest a Blessing on the Lodgings for they as good as Let themselves and would have done it if there had been twice the accommodation, when sore and hard against my will I one day says to the Major "Major you know what I am going to break to you. Our boy must go to boarding-school." It was a sad sight to see the Major's countenance drop, and I pitied the good soul with all my heart. "Yes Major" I says " though he is as popular with the Lodgers as you are yourself and though he is to you and me what only you and me know, still it is in the course of things and Life is made of partings and we must part with our Pet." Bold as I spoke, I saw two Majors and half a dozen fireplaces, and when the poor Major put one of his neat bright-varnished boots upon the fender and his elbow on his knee and his head upon his hand and rocked himself a little to and fro, I was dreadfully cut up. "But" says I clearing my throat "you have so well prepared him Major—he has had such a Tutor in you—that he will have none of the first drudgery to go through. And he is so clever besides that he'll soon make his way to the front rank." "He is a boy" says the Major—having sniffed—"that has not his like on the face of the earth." "True as you say Major, and it is not for us merely for our own sakes to do anything to keep him back from being a credit and an ornament wherever he goes and perhaps even rising to be a great man, is it Major? He will have all my little savings when my work is done (being all the world to me) and we must try to make him a wise man and a good man, mustn't we Major?" ''Madam" says the Major rising "Jemmy Jackman is becoming an older file than I was aware of, and you put him to shame. You are thoroughly right Madam. You are simply and undeniably right—And if you'll excuse me, I'll take a walk." So the Major being gone out and Jemmy being at home, I got the child into my little room here and I stood him by my chair and I took his mother's own curls in my hand and I spoke to him loving and serious. And when I had reminded the darling how that he was now in his tenth year and when I had said to him about his getting on in life pretty much what I had said to the Major I broke to him how that we must have this same parting, and there I was forced to stop for there I saw of a sudden the well remembered lip with its tremble, and it so brought back that time! But with the spirit that was in him he controlled it soon and he says gravely nodding through his tears, "I understand Gran—I know it must be, Gran—go on Gran, don't be afraid of me." And when I had said all that ever I could think of, he turned his bright steady face to mine and he says just a little broken here and there "You shall see Gran that I can be a man and that I can do anything that is grateful and loving to you—and if I don't grow up to be what you would like to have me—I hope it will be—because I shall die." And with that he sat down by me and I went on to tell him of the school of which I had excellent recommendations and where it was and how many scholars and what games they played as I had heard and what length of holidays, to all of which he listened bright and clear. And so it came that at last he says " And now dear Gran let me kneel down here where I have been used to say my prayers and let me fold my face for just a minute in your gown and let me cry, for you have been more than father—more than mother—more than brothers sisters friends—to me!" And so he did cry and I too and we were both much the better for it. From that time forth he was true to his word and ever blithe and ready, and even when me and the Major took him down into Lincolnshire he was far the gayest of the party though for sure and certain he might easily have been that, but he really was and put life into us only when it came to the last Good-by, he says with a wistful look "You wouldn't have me not really sorry would you Gran?" and when I says " No dear, Lord forbid!" he says " I am glad of that!" and ran in out of sight. But now that the child was gone out of the Lodgings the Major fell into a regularly moping state. It was taken notice of by all the Lodgers that the Major moped. He hadn't even the same air of being rather tall that he used to have, and if he varnished his boots with a single gleam of interest it was as much as he did. One evening the Major came into my little room to take a cup of tea and a morsel of buttered toast and to read Jemmy's newest letter which had arrived that afternoon (by the very same postman more than middle-aged upon the Beat now), and the letter raising him up a little I says to the Major: "Major you mustn't get into a moping way." The Major shook his head. "Jemmy Jackman Madam," he says with a deep sigh, " is an older file than I thought him." "Moping is not the way to grow younger Major." "My dear Madam," says the Major, "is there any way of growing younger?" Feeling that the Major was getting rather the best of that point I made a diversion to another. "Thirteen years! Thir-teen years! Many Lodgers have come and gone, in the thirteen years that you have lived in the parlours Major." "Hah!" says the Major warming. "Many Madam, many." "And I should say you have been familiar with them all?" "As a rule (with its exceptions like all rules) my dear Madam" says the Major, " they have honoured me with their acquaintance, and not infrequently with their confidence." Watching the Major as he drooped his white head and stroked his black moustachios and moped again, a thought which I think must have been going about looking for an owner somewhere dropped into my old noddle if you will excuse the expression. "The walls of my Lodgings" I says in a casual way—for my dear it is of no use going straight at a man who mopes—" might have something to tell, if they could tell it." The Major neither moved nor said anything but I saw he was attending with his shoulders my dear—attending with his shoulders to what I said. In fact I saw that his shoulders were struck by it. "The dear boy was always fond of story-books" I went on, like as if I was talking to myself. " I am sure this house—his own home—might write a story or two for his reading one day or another." The Major's shoulders gave a dip and a curve and his head came up in his shirt-collar. The Major's head came up in his shirt-collar as I hadn't seen it come up since Jemmy went to school. "It is unquestionable that in intervals of cribbage and a friendly rubber, my dear Madam," says the Major, "and also over what used to be called in my young times—in the salad days of Jemmy Jackman—the social glass, I have exchanged many a reminiscence with your Lodgers." My remark was—I confess I made it with the deepest and artfullest of intentions—"I wish our dear boy had heard them!" "Are you serious Madam?" asks the Major starting and turning full round. "Why not Major?" "Madam" says the Major, turning up one of his cuffs, "they shall be written for him." "Ah! Now you speak" I says giving my hands a pleased clap. "Now you are in a way out of moping Major!" "Between this and my holidays—I mean the dear boy's" says the Major turning up his other cuff, "a good deal may be done towards it." "Major you are a clever man and you have seen much and not a doubt of it." "I'll begin," says the Major looking as tall as ever he did, "to-morrow." My dear the Major was another man in three days and he was himself again in a week and he wrote and wrote and wrote with his pen scratching like rats behind the wainscot, and whether he had many grounds to go upon or whether he did at all romance I cannot tell you, but what he has written is in the left-hand glass closet of the little bookcase close behind you, and if you'll put your hand in you'll find it come out heavy in lumps sewn together and being beautifully plain and unknown Greek and Hebrew to myself and me quite wakeful, I shall take it as a favour if you'll read out loud and read on. I have the honour of presenting myself by the name of Jackman. I esteem it a proud privilege to go down to posterity through the instrumentality of the most remarkable boy that ever lived—by the name of JEMMY JACKMAN LIRRIPER—and of my most worthy and most highly respected friend, Mrs. Emma Lirriper, of Eighty-one, Norfolk-street, Strand, in the County of Middlesex, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It is not for me to express the rapture with which we received that dear and eminently remarkable boy, on the occurrence of his first Christmas holidays. Suffice it to observe that when he came flying into the house with two splendid prizes (Arithmetic, and Exemplary Conduct), Mrs. Lirriper and myself embraced with emotion, and instantly took him to the Play, where we were all three admirably entertained. Nor, is it to render homage to the virtues of the best of her good and honoured sex—whom, in deference to her unassuming worth, I will only here designate by the initials E. L.—that I add this record to the bundle of papers with which our, in a most distinguished degree, remarkable boy has expressed himself delighted, before re-consigning the same to the left-hand glass closet of Mrs. Lirriper's little bookcase. Neither, is it to obtrude the name of the old original superannuated obscure Jemmy Jackman, once (to his degradation) of Wozenham's, long (to his elevation) of Lirriper's. If I could be consciously guilty of that piece of bad taste, it would indeed be a work of supererogation, now that the name is borne by JEMMY JACKMAN LIRRIPER. No. I take up my humble pen to register a little record of our strikingly remarkable boy, which my poor capacity regards as presenting a pleasant little picture of the dear boy's mind. The picture may be interesting to himself when he is a man. Our first re-united Christmas-day was the most delightful one we have ever passed together. Jemmy was never silent for five minutes, except in church-time. He talked as we sat by the fire, he talked when we were out walking, he talked as we sat by the fire again, he talked incessantly at dinner, though he made a dinner almost as remarkable as himself. It was the spring of happiness in his fresh young heart flowing and flowing, and it fertilised (if I may be allowed so bold a figure) my much-esteemed friend, and J— J—the present writer. There were only we three. We dined in my esteemed friend's little room, and our entertainment was perfect. But everything in the establishment is, in neatness, order, and comfort, always perfect. After dinner, our boy slipt away to his old stool at my esteemed friend's knee, and there, with his hot chesnuts and his glass of brown sherry (really, a most excellent wine!) on a chair for a table, his face outshone the apples in the dish. We talked of these jottings of mine, which Jemmy had read through and through by that time; and so it came about that my esteemed friend remarked, as she sat smoothing Jemmy's curls: "And as you belong to the house too, Jemmy, —and so much more than the Lodgers, having been born in it—why, your story ought to be added to the rest, I think, one of these days." Jemmy's eye sparkled at this, and he said, "So I think, Gran." Then, he sat looking at the fire, and then he began to laugh, in a sort of confidence with the fire, and then he said, folding his arms across my esteemed friend's lap and raising his bright face to hers: "Would you like to hear a boy's story, Gran?" "Of all things," replied my esteemed friend. "Would you, godfather?" "Of all things," I too replied. "Well then," said Jemmy, " I'll tell you one." Here, our indisputably remarkable boy gave himself a hug, and laughed again, musically, at the idea of his coming out in that new line. Then, he once more took the fire into the same sort of confidence as before, and began: "Once upon a time, When pigs drank wine, And monkeys chewed tobaccer, 'Twas neither in your time nor mine, But that's no macker—" "Bless the child!" cried my esteemed friend, "what's amiss with his brain'!" "It's poetry, Gran," returned Jemmy, shouting with laughter. "We always begin stories that way, at school." "Gave me quite a turn, Major," said my esteemed friend, fanning herself with a plate. "Thought he was light-headed!" "In those remarkable times, Gran and God- father, there was once a boy;—not me, you know." "No, no," says my respected friend, "not you. Not him, Major, you understand?" "No, no," says I. "And he went to school in Rutlandshire" "Why not Lincolnshire?" says my respected friend. "Why not, you dear old Gran? Because I go to school in Lincolnshire, don't I?" "Ah, to be sure!" says my respected friend. "And it's not Jemmy, you understand, Major?" "No, no," says I. "Well!" our boy proceeded, hugging himself comfortably, and laughing merrily (again in confidence with the fire), before he again looked up in Mrs. Lirriper's face, "and so he was tremendously in love with his schoolmaster's daughter, and she was the most beautiful creature that ever was seen, and she had brown eyes, and she had brown hair all curling beautifully, and she had a delicious voice, and she was delicious altogether, and her name was Seraphina." "What's the name of your schoolmaster's daughter, Jemmy?" asks my respected friend. "Polly!" replied Jemmy, pointing his forefinger at her. "There now! Caught you! Ha! ha! ha!" When he and my respected friend had had a laugh and a hug together, our admittedly remarkable boy resumed with a great relish: "Well! And so he loved her. And so he thought about her, and dreamed about her, and made her presents of oranges and nuts, and would have made her presents of pearls and diamonds if he could have afforded it out of his pocket-money, but he couldn't. And so her father—O, he WAS a Tartar! Keeping the boys up to the mark, holding examinations once a month, lecturing upon all sorts of subjects at all sorts of times, and knowing everything in the world out of book. And so this boy—" "Had he any name?" asks my respected friend. "No he hadn't, Gran. Ha! ha! There now! Caught you again!" After this, they had another laugh and another hug, and then our boy went on. "Well! And so this boy he had a friend about as old as himself, at the same school, and his name (for He had a name, as it happened) was—let me remember—was Bobbo." "Not Bob," says my respected friend. "Of course not," says Jemmy. " What made you think it was, Gran? Well! And so this friend was the cleverest and bravest and best looking and most generous of all the friends that ever were, and so he was in love with Seraphina's sister, and so Seraphina's sister was in love with him, and so they all grew up." "Bless us!" says my respected friend. "They were very sudden about it." "So they all grew up," our boy repeated, laughing heartily, "and Bobbo and this boy went away together on horseback to seek their fortunes, and they partly got their horses by favour, and partly in a bargain; that is to say, they had saved up between them seven-and-fourpence, and the two horses, being Arabs, were worth more, only the man said he would take that, to favour them. Well! And so they made their fortunes and came prancing back to the school, with their pockets full of gold enough to last for ever. And so they rang at the parents' and visitors' bell (not the back gate), and when the bell was answered they proclaimed, 'The same as if it was scarlet fever! Every boy goes home for an indefinite period!' And then there was great hurrahing, and then they kissed Seraphina and her sister—each his own love and not the other's on any account—and then they ordered the Tartar into instant confinement." "Poor man!" said my respected friend. "Into instant confinement, Gran," repeated Jemmy, trying to look severe and roaring with laughter, "and he was to have nothing to eat but the boys' dinners, and was to drink half a cask of their beer, every day. And so then the preparations were made for the two weddings, and there were hampers, and potted things, and sweet things, and nuts, and postage-stamps, and all manner of things. And so they were so jolly, that they let the Tartar out, and he was jolly too." "I am glad they let him out," says my respected friend, "because he had only done his duty." "Oh but hadn't he overdone it though!" cried Jemmy. " Well! And so then this boy mounted his horse, with his bride in his arms, and cantered away, and cantered on and on till he came to a certain place where he had a certain Gran and a certain godfather—not you two, you know." "No, no," we both said. "And there he was received with great rejoicings, and he filled the cupboard and the bookcase with gold, and he showered it out on his Gran and his godfather because they were the two kindest and dearest people that ever lived in this world. And so while they were sitting up to their knees in gold, a knocking was heard at the street door, and who should it be but Bobbo, also on horseback with his bride in his arms, and what had he come to say but that he would take (at double rent) all the Lodgings for ever, that were not wanted by this boy and this Gran and this godfather, and that they would all live together, and all be happy! And so they were, and so it never ended!" "And was there no quarrelling?" asked my respected friend, as Jemmy sat upon her lap, and hugged her. "No! Nobody ever quarrelled." "And did the money never melt away?" "No! Nobody could ever spend it all." "And did none of them ever grow older?" "No! Nobody ever grew older after that." "And did none of them ever die?" "O no, no, no, Gran!" exclaimed our dear boy, laying his cheek upon her breast, and drawing her closer to him. "Nobody ever died." "Ah Major, Major," says my respected friend, smiling benignly upon me. "This beats our stories. Let us end with the Boy's story, Major, for the Boy's story is the best that is ever told!" In submission to which request on the part of the best of women, I have here noted it down as faithfully as my best abilities, coupled with my best intentions, would admit, subscribing it with my name, J. JACKMAN. THE PARLOURS. MRS. LIRRIPER'S LODGINGS. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (1863 Christmas Number) Description An account of the resource Published in All the Year Round, Vol. X, Extra Christmas Number, 25 December 1863, pp. 1-48. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-x/page-573.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-x/page-573.html</a>. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-x/page-618.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-x/page-618.html</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1863-12-25 Type The nature or genre of the resource Christmas Number Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1863-12-25-Mrs_Lirripers_Lodgings Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (25 December 1863). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1863-12-25-Mrs_Lirripers_Lodgings">https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1863-12-25-Mrs_Lirripers_Lodgings</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Scanned material from Dickens Journals Online, <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk" id="LPNoLPOWALinkPreview" contenteditable="false" title="http://www.djo.org.uk">www.djo.org.uk</a>. Available under CC BY licence. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. <ul> <li>Charles Dickens. 'How Mrs. Lirriper Carried On the Business' (No.1), pp. 1-12.</li> <li>Elizabeth Gaskell. 'How the First Floor Went to Crowley Castle' (No.2), pp. 12-25.</li> <li>Andrew Halliday. 'How the Side-Room Was Attended by a Doctor' (No.3), pp. 25-31.</li> <li>Edmund Yates. 'How the Second Floor Kept a Dog' (No.4), pp. 31-35.</li> <li>Amelia B. Edwards. 'How the Third Floor Knew the Potteries' (No.5), pp. 35-40.</li> <li>Charles Allston Collins. 'How the Best Attic Was Under a Cloud' (No.6), pp. 40-46.</li> <li>Charles Dickens. 'How the Parlours Added a Few Words' (No.7), pp. 46-48.</li> </ul> Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Whoever would begin to be worried with letting Lodgings that wasn't a lone woman with a living to get is a thing inconceivable to me my dear, excuse the familiarity but it comes natural to me in my own little room when wishing to open my mind to those that I can trust and I should be truly thankful if they were all mankind but such is not so, for have but a Furnished bill in the window and your watch on the mantelpiece and farewell to it if you turn your back for but a second however gentlemanly the manners, nor is being of your own sex any safeguard as I have reason in the form of sugar-tongs to know, for that lady (and a fine woman she was) got me to run for a glass of water on the plea of going to be confined, which certainly turned out true but it was in the Station-House. Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street Strand—situated midway between the City and St. James's and within five minutes' walk of the principal places of public amusement—is my address. I have rented this house many years as the parish rate-books will testify and I could wish my landlord was as alive to the fact as I am myself, but no bless you not a half a pound of paint to save his life nor so much my dear as a tile upon the roof though on your bended knees. My dear you never have found Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street Strand advertised in Bradshaw's Railway Guide and with the blessing of Heaven you never will or shall so find it. Some there are who do not think it lowering themselves to make their names that cheap and even going the lengths of a portrait of the house not like it with a blot in every window and a coach and four at the door, but what will suit Wozenham's lower down on the other side of the way will not suit me, Miss Wozenham having her opinions and me having mine, though when it comes to systematic underbidding capable of being proved on oath in a court of justice and taking the form of "If Mrs. Lirriper names eighteen shillings a week, I name fifteen and six" it then comes to a settlement between yourself and your conscience supposing for the sake of argument your name to be Wozenham which I am well aware it is not or my opinion of you would be greatly lowered, and as to airy bedrooms and a night-porter in constant attendance the less said the better, the bedrooms being stuffy and the porter stuff. It is forty years ago since me and my poor Lirriper got married at St. Clement's Danes where I now have a sitting in a very pleasant pew with genteel company and my own hassock and being partial to evening service not too crowded. My poor Lirriper was a handsome figure of a man with a beaming eye and a voice as mellow as a musical instrument made of honey and steel, but he had ever been a free liver being in the commercial travelling line and travelling what he called a limekiln road—"a dry road, Emma my dear," my poor Lirriper says to me "where I have to lay the dust with one drink or another all day long and half the night, and it wears me Emma"—and this led to his running through a good deal and might have run through the turnpike too when that dreadful horse that never would stand still for a single instant set off, but for its being night and the gate shut and consequently took his wheel my poor Lirriper and the gig smashed to atoms and never spoke afterwards. He was a handsome figure of a man and a man with a jovial heart and a sweet temper, but if they had come up then they never could have given you the mellowness of his voice, and indeed I consider photographs wanting in mellowness as a general rule and making you look like a new-ploughed field. My poor Lirriper being behindhand with the world and being buried at Hatfield church in Hertfordshire, not that it was his native place but that he had a liking for the Salisbury Arms where we went upon our wedding-day and passed as happy a fortnight as ever happy was, I went round to the creditors and I says "Gentlemen I am acquainted with the fact that I am not answerable for my late husband's debts but I wish to pay them for I am his lawful wife and his good name is dear to me. I am going into the Lodgings gentlemen as a business and if I prosper every farthing that my late husband owed shall be paid for the sake of the love I bore him, by this right hand." It took a long time to do but it was done, and the silver cream-jug which is between ourselves and the bed and the mattress in my room up-stairs (or it would have found legs so sure as ever the Furnished bill was up) being presented by the gentlemen engraved "To Mrs. Lirriper a mark of grateful respect for her honourable conduct" gave me a turn which was too much for my feelings, till Mr. Betley which at that time had the parlours and loved his joke says "Cheer up Mrs. Lirriper, you should feel as if it was only your christening and they were your godfathers and godmothers which did promise for you." And it brought me round, and I don't mind confessing to you my dear that I then put a sandwich and a drop of sherry in a little basket and went down to Hatfield churchyard outside the coach and kissed my hand and laid it with a kind of a proud and swelling love on my husband's grave, though bless you it had taken me so long to clear his name that my wedding ring was worn quite fine and smooth when I laid it on the green green waving grass. I am an old woman now and my good looks are gone but that's me my dear over the plate-warmer and considered like in the times when you used to pay two guineas on ivory and took your chance pretty much how you came out, which made you very careful how you left it about afterwards because people were turned so red and uncomfortable by mostly guessing it was somebody else quite different, and there was once a certain person that had put his money in a hop business that came in one morning to pay his rent and his respects being the second floor that would have taken it down from its hook and put it in his breast pocket—you understand my dear—for the L, he says, of the original— only there was no mellowness in his voice and I wouldn't let him, but his opinion of it you may gather from his saying to it "Speak to me Emma!" which was far from a rational observation no doubt but still a tribute to its being a likeness, and I think myself it was like me when I was young and wore that sort of stays. But it was about the Lodgings that I was intending to hold forth and certainly I ought to know something of the business having been in it so long, for it was early in the second year of my married life that I lost my poor Lirriper and I set up at Islington directly afterwards and afterwards came here, being two houses and eight and thirty years and some losses and a deal of experience. Girls are your first trial after fixtures and they try you even worse than what I call the Wandering Christians, though why they should roam the earth looking for bills and then coming in and viewing the apartments and stickling about terms and never at all wanting them or dreaming of taking them being already provided, is a mystery I should be thankful to have explained if by any miracle it could be. It's wonderful they live so long and thrive so on it but I suppose the exercise makes it healthy, knocking so much and going from house to house and up and down stairs all day, and then their pretending to be so particular and punctual is a most astonishing thing, looking at their watches and saying "Could you give me the refusal of the rooms till twenty minutes past eleven the day after to-morrow in the forenoon, and supposing it to be considered essential by my friend from the country could there be a small iron bedstead put in the little room upon the stairs?" Why when I was new to it my dear I used to consider before I promised and to make my mind anxious with calculations and to get quite wearied out with disappointments, but now I says "Certainly by all means" well knowing it's a Wandering Christian and I shall hear no more about it, indeed by this time I know most of the Wandering Christians by sight as well as they know me, it being the habit of each individual revolving round London in that capacity to come back about twice a year, and it's very remarkable that it runs in families and the children grow up to it, but even were it otherwise I should no sooner hear of the friend from the country which is a certain sign than I should nod and say to myself You're a Wandering Christian, though whether they are (as I have heard) persons of small property with a taste for regular employment and frequent change of scene I cannot undertake to tell you. Girls as I was beginning to remark are one of your first and your lasting troubles, being like your teeth which begin with convulsions and never cease tormenting you from the time you cut them till they cut you, and then you don't want to part with them which seems hard but we must all succumb or buy artificial, and even where you get a will nine times out of ten you'll get a dirty face with it and naturally lodgers do not like good society to be shown in with a smear of black across the nose or a smudgy eyebrow. Where they pick the black up is a mystery I cannot solve, as in the case of the willingest girl that ever came into a house half starved poor thing, a girl so willing that I called her Willing Sophy down upon her knees scrubbing early and late and ever cheerful but always smiling with a black face. And I says to Sophy "Now Sophy my good girl have a regular day for your stoves and keep the width of the Airy between yourself and the blacking and do not brush your hair with the bottoms of the saucepans and do not meddle with the snuffs of the candles and it stands to reason that it can no longer be" yet there it was and always on her nose, which turning up and being broad at the end seemed to boast of it and caused warning from a steady gentleman and excellent lodger with breakfast by the week but a little irritable and use of a sitting-room when required, his words being "Mrs. Lirriper I have arrived at the point of admitting that the Black is a man and a brother, but only in a natural form and when it can't be got off." Well consequently I put poor Sophy on to other work and forbid her answering the door or answering a bell on any account but she was so unfortunately willing that nothing would stop her flying up the kitchen stairs whenever a bell was heard to tingle. I put it to her " Oh Sophy Sophy for goodness goodness sake where does it come from?" To which that poor unlucky willing mortal bursting out crying to see me so vexed replied "I took a deal of black into me ma'am when I was a small child being much neglected and I think it must be, that it works out," so it continuing to work out of that poor thing and not having another fault to find with her I says Sophy "what do you seriously think of my helping you away to New South Wales where it might not be noticed?" Nor did I ever repent the money which was well spent, for she married the ship's cook on the voyage (himself a Mulotter) and did well and lived happy, and so far as ever I heard it was not noticed in a new state of society to her dying day. In what way Miss Wozenham lower down on the other side of the way reconciled it to her feelings as a lady (which she is not) to entice Mary Anne Perkinsop from my service is best known to herself, I do not know and I do not wish to know how opinions are formed at Wozenham's on any point. But Mary Anne Perkinsop although I behaved handsomely to her and she behaved unhandsomely to me was worth her weight in gold as overawing lodgers without driving them away, for lodgers would be far more sparing of their bells with Mary Anne than I ever knew them be with Maid or Mistress, which is a great triumph especially when accompanied with a cast in the eye and a bag of bones, but it was the steadiness of her way with them through her father's having failed in Pork. It was Mary Anne's looking so respectable in her person and being so strict in her spirits that conquered the tea-and-sugarest gentleman (for he weighed them both in a pair of scales every morning) that I have ever had to deal with and no lamb grew meeker, still it afterwards came round to me that Miss Wozenham happening to pass and seeing Mary Anne take in the milk of a milkman that made free in a rosy-faced way (I think no worse of him) with every girl in the street but was quite frozen up like the statue at Charing Cross by her, saw Mary Anne's value in the lodging business and went as high as one pound per quarter more, consequently Mary Anne with not a word betwixt us says "If you will provide yourself Mrs. Lirriper in a month from this day I have already done the same," which hurt me and I said so, and she then hurt me more by insinuating that her father having failed in Pork had laid her open to it. My dear I do assure you it's a harassing thing to know what kind of girls to give the preference to, for if they are lively they get bell'd off their legs and if they are sluggish you suffer from it yourself in complaints and if they are sparkling-eyed they get made love to and if they are smart in their persons they try on your Lodger's bonnets and if they are musical I defy you to keep them away from bands and organs, and allowing for any difference you like in their heads their heads will be always out of window just the same. And then what the gentlemen like in girls the ladies don't, which is fruitful hot water for all parties, and then there's temper though such a temper as Caroline Maxey's I hope not often. A good-looking black-eyed girl was Caroline and a comely-made girl to your cost when she did break out and laid about her, as took place first and last through a new-married couple come to see London in the first floor and the lady very high and it was supposed not liking the good looks of Caroline having none of her own to spare, but anyhow she did try Caroline though that was no excuse. So one afternoon Caroline comes down into the kitchen flushed and flashing, and she says to me "Mrs. Lirriper that woman in the first has aggravated me past bearing," I says " Caroline keep your temper," Caroline says with a curdling laugh "Keep my temper? You're right Mrs. Lirriper, so I will. Capital D her!" bursts out Caroline (you might have struck me into the centre of the earth with a feather when she said it) "I'll give her a touch of the temper that I keep!" Caroline downs with her hair my dear, screeches and rushes upstairs, I following as fast as my trembling legs could bear me, but before I got into the room the dinner cloth and pink and white service all dragged off upon the floor with a crash and the new married couple on their backs in the fire-grate, him with the shovel and tongs and a dish of cucumber across him and a mercy it was summer-time. "Caroline" I says "be calm," but she catches off my cap and tears it in her teeth as she passes me, then pounces on the new married lady makes her a bundle of ribbons takes her by the two ears and knocks the back of her head upon the carpet Murder screaming all the time Policemen running down the street and Wozenham's windows (judge of my feelings when I came to know it) thrown up and Miss Wozenham calling out from the balcony with crocodile's tears "It's Mrs. Lirriper been overcharging somebody to madness—she'll be murdered—I always thought so—Pleeseman save her!" My dear four of them and Caroline behind the chiffoniere attacking with the poker and when disarmed prize fighting with her double fists, and down and up and up and down and dreadful! But I couldn't bear to see the poor young creature roughly handled and her hair torn when they got the better of her, and I says "Gentlemen Policemen pray remember that her sex is the sex of your mothers and sisters and your sweethearts, and God bless them and you!" And there she was sitting down on the ground handcuffed, taking breath against the skirting-board and them cool with their coats in strips, and all she says was "Mrs. Lirriper I am sorry as ever I touched you, for you're a kind motherly old thing," and it made me think that I had often wished I had been a mother indeed and how would my heart have felt if I had been the mother of that girl! Well you know it turned out at the Police-office that she had done it before, and she had her clothes away and was sent to prison, and when she was to come out I trotted off to the gate in the evening with just a morsel of jelly in that little basket of mine to give her a mite of strength to face the world again, and there I met with a very decent mother waiting for her son through bad company and a stubborn one he was with his half boots not laced. So out came Caroline and I says "Caroline come along with me and sit down under the wall where it's retired and eat a little trifle that I have brought with me to do you good" and she throws her arms round my neck and says sobbing "O why were you never a mother when there are such mothers as there are!" she says, and in half a minute more she begins to laugh and says "Did I really tear your cap to shreds?" and when I told her "You certainly did so Caroline" she laughed again and said while she patted my face "Then why do you wear such queer old caps you dear old thing? If you hadn't worn such queer old caps I don't think I should have done it even then." Fancy the girl! Nothing could get out of her what she was going to do except O she would do well enough, and we parted she being very thankful and kissing my hands, and I never more saw or heard of that girl, except that I shall always believe that a very genteel cap which was brought anonymous to me one Saturday night in an oilskin basket by a most impertinent young sparrow of a monkey whistling with dirty shoes on the clean steps and playing the harp on the Airy railings with a hoop-stick came from Caroline. What you lay yourself open to my dear in the way of being the object of uncharitable suspicions when you go into the Lodging business I have not the words to tell you, but never was I so dishonourable as to have two keys nor would I willingly think it even of Miss Wozenham lower down on the other side of the way sincerely hoping that it may not be, though doubtless at the same time money cannot come from nowhere and it is not reason to suppose that Bradshaws put it in for love be it blotty as it may. It is a hardship hurting to the feelings that Lodgers open their minds so wide to the idea that you are trying to get the better of them and shut their minds so close to the idea that they are trying to get the better of you, but as Major Jackman says to me "I know the ways of this circular world Mrs. Lirriper, and that's one of 'em all round it" and many is the little ruffle in my mind that the Major has smoothed, for he is a clever man who has seen much. Dear dear, thirteen years have passed though it seems but yesterday since I was sitting with my glasses on at the open front parlour window one evening in August (the parlours being then vacant) reading yesterday's paper my eyes for print being poor though still I am thankful to say a long sight at a distance, when I hear a gentleman come posting across the road and up the street in a dreadful rage talking to himself in a fury and d'ing and c'ing somebody. "By George!" says he out loud and clutching his walking-stick, "I'll go to Mrs. Lirriper's. Which is Mrs. Lirriper's?" Then looking round and seeing me he flourishes his hat right off his head as if I had been the queen and he says "Excuse the intrusion Madam, but pray Madam can you tell me at what number in this street there resides a well-known and much-respected lady by the name of Lirriper?" A little flustered though I must say gratified I took off my glasses and curtseyed and said "Sir, Mrs. Lirriper is your humble servant." "As-tonishing!" says he. " A million pardons! Madam, may I ask you to have the kindness to direct one of your domestics to open the door to a gentleman in search of apartments, by the name of Jackman?" I had never heard the name but a politer gentleman I never hope to see, for says he "Madam I am shocked at your opening the door yourself to no worthier a fellow than Jemmy Jackman. After you Madam. I never precede a lady." Then he comes into the parlours and he sniffs and he says "Hah! These are parlours! Not musty cupboards" he says "but parlours, and no smell of coal-sacks." Now my dear it having been remarked by some inimical to the whole neighbourhood that it always smells of coal-sacks which might prove a drawback to Lodgers if encouraged, I says to the Major gently though firmly that I think he is referring to Arundel or Surrey or Howard but not Norfolk. "Madam" says he "I refer to Wozenham's lower down over the way—Madam you can form no notion what Wozenham's is— Madam it is a vast coal-sack, and Miss Wozenham has the principles and manners of a female heaver—Madam from the manner in which I have heard her mention you I know she has no appreciation of a lady, and from the manner in which she has conducted herself towards me I know she has no appreciation of a gentleman—Madam my name is Jackman—should you require any other reference than what I have already said, I name the Bank of England—perhaps you know it!" Such was the beginning of the Major's occupying the parlours and from that hour to this the same and a most obliging Lodger and punctual in all respects except one irregular which I need not particularly specify, but made up for by his being a protection and at all times ready to fill in the papers of the Assessed Taxes and Juries and that, and once collared a young man with the drawing-room clock under his cloak, and once on the parapets with his own hands and blankets put out the kitchen chimney and afterwards attending the summons made a most eloquent speech against the Parish before the magistrates and saved the engine, and ever quite the gentleman though passionate. And certainly Miss Wozenham's detaining the trunks and umbrella was not in a liberal spirit though it may have been according to her rights in law or an act I would myself have stooped to, the Major being so much the gentleman that though he is far from tall he seems almost so when he has his shirt frill out and his frock-coat on and his hat with the curly brims, and in what service he was I cannot truly tell you my dear whether Militia or Foreign, for I never heard him even name himself as Major but always simple "Jemmy Jackman" and once soon after he came when I felt it my duty to let him know that Miss Wozenham had put it about that he was no Major and I took the liberty of adding "which you are sir" his words were "Madam at any rate I am not a Minor, and sufficient for the day is the evil thereof" which cannot be denied to be the sacred truth, nor yet his military ways of having his boots with only the dirt brushed off taken to him in the front parlour every morning on a clean plate and varnishing them himself with a little sponge and a saucer and a whistle in a whisper so sure as ever his breakfast is ended, and so neat his ways that it never soils his linen which is scrupulous though more in quality than quantity, neither that nor his moustachios which to the best of my belief are done at the same time and which are as black and shining as his boots, his head of hair being a lovely white. It was the third year nearly up of the Major's being in the parlours that early one morning in the month of February when Parliament was coming on and you may therefore suppose a number of impostors were about ready to take hold of anything they could get, a gentleman and lady from the country came in to view the Second, and I well remember that I had been looking out of window and had watched them and the heavy sleet driving down the street together looking for bills. I did not quite take to the face of the gentleman though he was good-looking too but the lady was a very pretty young thing and delicate, and it seemed too rough for her to be out at all though she had only come from the Adelphi Hotel which would not have been much above a quarter of a mile if the weather had been less severe. Now it did so happen my dear that I had been forced to put five shillings weekly additional on the second in consequence of a loss from running away full-dressed as if going out to a dinner-party, which was very artful and had made me rather suspicious taking it along with Parliament, so when the gentleman proposed three months certain and the money in advance and leave then reserved to renew on the same terms for six months more, I says I was not quite certain but that I might have engaged myself to another party but would step down stairs and look into it if they would take a seat. They took a seat and I went down to the handle of the Major's door that I had already began to consult finding it a great blessing, and I knew by his whistling in a whisper that he was varnishing his boots which was generally considered private, however he kindly calls out "If it's you, Madam, come in," and I went in and told him. "Well, Madam," says the Major rubbing his nose—as I did fear at the moment with the black sponge but it was only his knuckle, he being always neat and dexterous with his fingers—"well, Madam, I suppose you would be glad of the money?" I was delicate of saying "Yes" too out, for a little extra colour rose into the Major's cheeks and there was irregularity which I will not particularly specify in a quarter which I will not name. "I am of opinion, Madam," says the Major "that when money is ready for you—when it is ready for you Mrs. Lirriper—you ought to take it. What is there against it, Madam, in this case up-stairs?" "I really cannot say there is anything against it sir, still I thought I would consult you." "You said a newly-married couple, I think, Madam?" says the Major. I says "Ye-es. Evidently. And indeed the young lady mentioned to me in a casual way that she had not been married many months." The Major rubbed his nose again and stirred the varnish round and round in its little saucer with his piece of sponge and took to his whistling in a whisper for a few moments. Then he says "You would call it a Good Let, Madam?" "Oh certainly a Good Let sir." "Say they renew for the additional six months. Would it put you about very much Madam if—if the worst was to come to the worst?" said the Major. "Well I hardly know," I says to the Major. "It depends upon circumstances. Would you object Sir for instance?" "I?" says the Major. "Object? Jemmy Jackman? Mrs. Lirriper close with the proposal." So I went up-stairs and accepted, and they came in next day which was Saturday and the Major was so good as to draw up a Memorandum of an agreement in a beautiful round hand and expressions that sounded to me equally legal and military, and Mr. Edson signed it on the Monday morning and the Major called upon Mr. Edson on the Tuesday and Mr. Edson called upon the Major on the Wednesday and the Second and the parlours were as friendly as could be wished. The three months paid for had run out and we had got without any fresh overtures as to payment into May my dear, when there came an obligation upon Mr. Edson to go a business expedition right across the Isle of Man, which fell quite unexpected on that pretty little thing and is not a place that according to my views is particularly in the way to anywhere at any time but that may be a matter of opinion. So short a notice was it that he was to go next day, and dreadfully she cried poor pretty and I am sure I cried too when I saw her on the cold pavement in the sharp east wind—it being a very backward spring that year taking a last leave of him with her pretty bright hair blowing this way and that and her arms clinging round his neck and him saying "There there there! Now let me go Peggy." And by that time it was plain that what the Major had been so accommodating as to say he would not object to happening in the house, would happen in it, and I told her as much when he was gone while I comforted her with my arm up the staircase, for I says "You will soon have others to keep up for my pretty and you must think of that." His letter never came when it ought to have come and what she went through morning after morning when the postman brought none for her the very postman himself compassionated when she ran down to the door, and yet we cannot wonder at its being calculated to blunt the feelings to have all the trouble of other people's letters and none of the pleasure and doing it oftener in the mud and mizzle than not and at a rate of wages more resembling Little Britain than Great. But at last one morning when she was too poorly to come running down stairs he says to me with a pleased look in his face that made me next to love the man in his uniform coat though he was dripping wet "I have taken you first in the street this morning Mrs. Lirriper, for here's the one for Mrs. Edson." I went up to her bedroom with it fast as ever I could go, and she sat up in bed when she saw it and kissed it and tore it open and then a blank stare came upon her. "It's very short!" she says lifting her large eyes to my face. "O Mrs. Lirriper it's very short!" I says "My dear Mrs. Edson no doubt that's because your husband hadn't time to write more just at that time." "No doubt, no doubt," says she, and puts her two hands on her face and turns round in her bed. I shut her softly in and I crept down stairs and I tapped at the Major's door, and when the Major having his thin slices of bacon in his own Dutch oven saw me he came out of his chair and put me down on the sofa. "Hush!" says he, "I see something's the matter. Don't speak—take time." I says "O Major I am afraid there's cruel work up-stairs." "Yes yes" says he "I had begun to be afraid of it—take time." And then in opposition to his own words he rages out frightfully, and says "I shall never forgive myself Madam, that I, Jemmy Jackman, didn't see it all that morning—didn't go straight up-stairs when my boot-sponge was in my hand—didn't force it down his throat—and choke him dead with it on the spot!" The Major and me agreed when we came to ourselves that just at present we could do no more than take on to suspect nothing and use our best endeavours to keep that poor young creature quiet, and what I ever should have done without the Major when it got about among the organ-men that quiet was our object is unknown, for he made lion and tiger war upon them to that degree that without seeing it I could not have believed it was in any gentleman to have such a power of bursting out with fire-irons walking-sticks water-jugs coals potatoes off his table the very hat off his head, and at the same time so furious in foreign languages that they would stand with their handles half turned fixed like the Sleeping Ugly—for I cannot say Beauty. Ever to see the postman come near the house now gave me such a fear that it was a reprieve when he went by, but in about another ten days or a fortnight he says again "Here's one for Mrs. Edson.—Is she pretty well?" "She is pretty well postman, but not well enough to rise so early as she used" which was so far gospel-truth. I carried the letter in to the Major at his breakfast and I says tottering "Major I have not the courage to take it up to her." "It's an ill-looking villain of a letter," says the Major. "I have not the courage Major" I says again in a tremble "to take it up to her." After seeming lost in consideration for some moments the Major says, raising his head as if something new and useful had occurred to his mind "Mrs. Lirriper, I shall never forgive myself that I, Jemmy Jackman, didn't go straight up-stairs that morning when my boot-sponge was in my hand—and force it down his throat—and choke him dead with it." "Major" I says a little hasty "you didn't do it which is a Blessing, for it would have done no good and I think your sponge was better employed on your own honourable boots." So we got to be rational, and planned that I should tap at her bedroom door and lay the letter on the mat outside and wait on the upper landing for what might happen, and never was gunpowder cannon-balls or shells or rockets more dreaded than that dreadful letter was by me as I took it to the second floor. A terrible loud scream sounded through the house the minute after she had opened it, and I found her on the floor lying as if her life was gone. My dear I never looked at the face of the letter which was lying open by her, for there was no occasion. Everything I needed to bring her round the Major brought up with his own hands, besides running out to the chemist's for what was not in the house and likewise having the fiercest of all his many skirmishes with a musical instrument representing a ball-room I do not know in what particular country and company waltzing in and out at folding-doors with rolling eyes. When after a long time I saw her coming to, I slipped on the landing till I heard her cry, and then I went in and says cheerily "Mrs. Edson you're not well my dear and it's not to be wondered at," as if I had not been in before. Whether she believed or disbelieved I cannot say and it would signify nothing if I could, but I stayed by her for hours and then she God ever blesses me! and says she will try to rest for her head is bad. "Major," I whispers, looking in at the parlours, "I beg and pray of you don't go out." The Major whispers "Madam, trust me I will do no such a thing. How is she?" I says "Major the good Lord above us only knows what burns and rages in her poor mind. I left her sitting at her window. I am going to sit at mine." It came on afternoon and it came on evening. Norfolk is a delightful street to lodge in—provided you don't go lower down—but of a summer evening when the dust and waste paper lie in it and stray children play in it and a kind of a gritty calm and bake settles on it and a peal of church-bells is practising in the neighbourhood it is a trifle dull, and never have I seen it since at such a time and never shall I see it evermore at such a time without seeing the dull June evening when that forlorn young creature sat at her open corner window on the second and me at my open corner window (the other corner) on the third. Something merciful, something wiser and better far than my own self, had moved me while it was yet light to sit in my bonnet and shawl, and as the shadows fell and the tide rose I could sometimes—when I put out my head and looked at her window below—see that she leaned out a little looking down the street. It was just settling dark when I saw her in the street. So fearful of losing sight of her that it almost stops my breath while I tell it, I went down stairs faster than I ever moved in all my life and only tapped with my hand at the Major's door in passing it and slipping out. She was gone already. I made the same speed down the street and when I came to the corner of Howard Street I saw that she had turned it and was there plain before me going towards the west. O with what a thankful heart I saw her going along! She was quite unacquainted with London and had very seldom been out for more than an airing in our own street where she knew two or three little children belonging to neighbours and had sometimes stood among them at the end of the street looking at the water. She must be going at hazard I knew, still she kept the by-streets quite correctly as long as they would serve her, and then turned up into the Strand. But at every corner I could see her head turned one way, and that way was always the river way. It may have been only the darkness and quiet of the Adelphi that caused her to strike into it but she struck into it much as readily as if she had set out to go there, which perhaps was the case. She went straight down to the Terrace and along it and looked over the iron rail, and I often woke afterwards in my own bed with the horror of seeing her doing it. The desertion of the wharf below and the flowing of the high water there seemed to settle her purpose. She looked about as if to make out the way down, and she struck out the right way or the wrong way—I don't know which, for I don't know the place before or since—and I followed her the way she went. It was noticeable that all this time she never once looked back. But there was now a great change in the manner of her going, and instead of going at a steady quick walk with her arms folded before her,—among the dark dismal arches she went in a wild way with her arms opened wide, as if they were wings and she was flying to her death. We were on the wharf and she stopped. I stopped. I saw her hands at her bonnet-strings, and I rushed between her and the brink and took her round the waist with both my arms. She might have drowned me, I felt then, but she could never have got quit of me. Down to that moment my mind had been all in a maze and not half an idea had I had in it what I should say to her, but the instant I touched her it came to me like magic and I had my natural voice and my senses and even almost my breath. "Mrs. Edson!" I says " My dear! Take care. How ever did you lose your way and stumble on a dangerous place like this? Why you must have come here by the most perplexing streets in all London. No wonder you are lost, I am sure. And this place too! Why I thought nobody ever got here, except me to order my coals and the Major in the parlours to smoke his cigar!"—for I saw that blessed man close by, pretending to it. "Hah—Hah—Hum!" coughs the Major. "And good gracious me" I says, "why here he is!" "Halloa! who goes there!" says the Major in a military manner. "Well!" I says, "if this don't beat everything! Don't yon know us Major Jackman?" "Halloa!" says the Major. "Who calls on Jemmy Jackman?" (and more out of breath he was, and did it less like life, than I should have expected). "Why here's Mrs. Edson Major" I says, "strolling out to cool her poor head which has been very bad, has missed her way and got lost, and Goodness knows where she might have got to but for me coming here to drop an order into my coal merchant's letter-box and you coming here to smoke your cigar!—And you really are not well enough my dear" I says to her " to be half so far from home without me.—And your arm will be very acceptable I am sure Major" I says to him "and I know she may lean upon it as heavy as she likes." And now we had both got her—thanks be Above!—one on each side. She was all in a cold shiver and she so continued till I laid her on her own bed, and up to the early morning she held me by the hand and moaned and moaned "O wicked, wicked, wicked!" But when at last I made believe to droop my head and be overpowered with a dead sleep, I heard that poor young creature give such touching and such humble thanks for being preserved from taking her own life in her madness that I thought I should have cried my eyes out on the counterpane and I knew she was safe. Being well enough to do and able to afford it, me and the Major laid our little plans next day while she was asleep worn out, and so I says to her as soon as I could do it nicely: "Mrs. Edson my dear, when Mr. Edson paid me the rent for these further six months—" She gave a start and I felt her large eyes look at me, but I went on with it and with my needle-work. "—I can't say that I am quite sure I dated the receipt right. Could you let me look at it?" She laid her frozen cold hand upon mine and she looked through me when I was forced to look up from my needlework, but I had taken the precaution of having on my spectacles. "I have no receipt" says she. "Ah! Then he has got it" I says in a careless way. "It's of no great consequence. A receipt's a receipt." From that time she always had hold of my hand when I could spare it which was generally only when I read to her, for of course she and me had our bits of needlework to plod at and neither of us was very handy at those little things, though I am still rather proud of my share in them too considering. And though she took to all I read to her, I used to fancy that next to what was taught upon the Mount she took most of all to His gentle compassion for us poor women and to His young life and to how His mother was proud of him and treasured His sayings in her heart. She had a grateful look in her eyes that never never never will be out of mine until they are closed in my last sleep, and when I chanced to look at her without thinking of it I would always meet that look, and she would often offer me her trembling lip to kiss, much more like a little affectionate half-broken-hearted child than ever I can imagine any grown person. One time the trembling of this poor lip was so strong and her tears ran down so fast that I thought she was going to tell me all her woe, so I takes her two hands in mine and I says: "No my dear not now, you had best not try to do it now. Wait for better times when you have got over this and are strong, and then you shall tell me whatever you will. Shall it be agreed?" With our hands still joined she nodded her head many times, and she lifted my hands and put them to her lips and to her bosom. "Only one word now my dear" I says. "Is there any one?" She looked inquiringly "Any one?" "That I can go to?" She shook her head. "No one that I can bring?" She shook her head. "No one is wanted by me my dear. Now that may be considered past and gone." Not much more than a week afterwards—for this was far on in the time of our being so together—I was bending over at her bedside with my ear down to her lips, by turns listening for her breath and looking for a sign of life in her face. At last it came in a solemn way—not in a flash but like a kind of pale faint light brought very slow to the face. She said something to me that had no sound in it, but I saw she asked me: "Is this death?" And I says "Poor dear poor dear, I think it is." Knowing somehow that she wanted me to move her weak right hand, I took it and laid it on her breast and then folded her other hand upon it, and she prayed a good good prayer and I joined in it poor me though there were no words spoke. Then I brought the baby in its wrappers from where it lay, and I says: "My dear this is sent to a childless old woman. This is for me to take care of." The trembling lip was put up towards my face for the last time, and I dearly kissed it. "Yes my dear" I says. "Please God! Me and the Major." I don't know how to tell it right, but I saw her soul brighten and leap up, and get free and fly away in the grateful look * * * * * So this is the why and wherefore of its coming to pass my dear that we called him Jemmy, being after the Major his own godfather with Lirriper for a surname being after myself, and never was a dear child such a brightening thing in a Lodgings or such a playmate to his grandmother as Jemmy to this house and me, and always good and minding what he was told (upon the whole) and soothing for the temper and making everything pleasanter except when he grew old enough to drop his cap down Wozenham's Airy and they wouldn't hand it up to him, and being worked into a state I put on my best bonnet and gloves and parasol with the child in my hand and I says "Miss Wozenham I little thought ever to have entered your house but unless my grandson's cap is instantly restored, the laws of this country regulating the property of the Subject shall at length decide betwixt yourself and me, cost what it may." With a sneer upon her face which did strike me I must say as being expressive of two keys but it may have been a mistake and if there is any doubt let Miss Wozenham have the full benefit of it as is but right, she rang the bell and she says "Jane, is there a street-child's old cap down our Airy?" I says "Miss Wozenham before your housemaid answers that question you must allow me to inform you to your face that my grandson is not a street-child and is not in the habit of wearing old caps. In fact" I says "Miss Wozenham I am far from sure that my grandson's cap may not be newer than your own" which was perfectly savage in me, her lace being the commonest machine-make washed and torn besides, but I had been put into a state to begin with fomented by impertinence. Miss Wozenham says red in the face "Jane you heard my question, is there any child's cap down our Airy?" " Yes Ma'am'" says Jane "I think I did see some such rubbish a lying there." "Then" says Miss Wozenham" let these visitors out, and then throw up that worthless article out of my premises." But here the child who had been staring at Miss Wozenham with all his eyes and more, frowns down his little eyebrows purses up his little mouth puts his chubby legs far apart turns his little dimpled fists round and round slowly over one another like a little coffee-mill, and says to her "Oo impdent to mi Gran, me tut oor hi!" " Oh!" says Miss Wozenham looking down scornfully at the Mite "this is not a street-child is it not! Really!" I bursts out laughing and I says " Miss Wozenham if this an't a pretty sight to you I don't envy your feelings and I wish you good day. Jemmy come along with Gran." And I was still in the best of humours though his cap came flying up into the street as if it had been just turned on out of the water-plug, and I went home laughing all the way, all owing to that dear boy. The miles and miles that me and the Major have travelled with Jemmy in the dusk between the lights are not to be calculated, Jemmy driving on the coach-box which is the Major's brass-bound writing-desk on the table, me inside in the easy-chair and the Major Guard up behind with a brown-paper horn doing it really wonderful. I do assure you my dear that sometimes when I have taken a few winks in my place inside the coach and have come half awake by the flashing light of the fire and have heard that precious pet driving and the Major blowing up behind to have the change of horses ready when we got to the Inn, I have half believed we were on the old North Road that my poor Lirriper knew so well. Then to see that child and the Major both wrapped up getting down to warm their feet and going stamping about and having glasses of ale out of the paper match-boxes on the chimney-piece is to see the Major enjoying it fully as much as the child I am very sure, and it's equal to any play when Coachee opens the coach-door to look in at me inside and say "Wery 'past that 'tage. 'Prightened old lady?" But what my inexpressible feelings were when we lost that child can only be compared to the Major's which were not a shade better, through his straying out at five years old and eleven o'clock in the forenoon and never heard of by word or sign or deed till half-past nine at night, when the Major had gone to the Editor of the Times newspaper to put in an advertisement, which came out next day four and twenty hours after he was found, and which I mean always carefully to keep in my lavender drawer as the first printed account of him. The more the day got on, the more I got distracted and the Major too and both of us made worse by the composed ways of the police though very civil and obliging and what I must call their obstinacy in not entertaining the idea that he was stolen. "We mostly find Mum" says the sergeant who came round to comfort me, which he didn't at all and he had been one of the private constables in Caroline's time to which he referred in his opening words when he said "Don't give way to uneasiness in your mind Mum, it'll all come as right as my nose did when I got the same barked by that young woman in your second floor"—says this sergeant "we mostly find Mum as people ain't over anxious to have what I may call second-hand children. You'll get him back Mum." "O but my dear good sir" I says clasping my hands and wringing them and clasping them again "he is such an uncommon child!" "Yes Mum" says the sergeant, "we mostly find that too Mum. The question is what his clothes were worth." "His clothes" I says "were not worth much sir for he had only got his playing-dress on, but the dear child!—" "All right Mum" says the sergeant. "You'll get him back, Mum. And even if he'd had his best clothes on, it wouldn't come to worse than his being found wrapped up in a cabbage-leaf, a shivering in a lane." His words pierced my heart like daggers and daggers, and me and the Major ran in and out like wild things all day long till the Major returning from his interview with the Editor of the Times at night rushes into my little room hysterical and squeezes my hand and wipes his eyes and says " Joy joy—officer in plain clothes came up on the steps as I was letting myself in—compose your feelings—Jemmy's found." Consequently I fainted away and when I came to, embraced the legs of the officer in plain clothes who seemed to be taking a kind of a quiet inventory in his mind of the property in my little room with brown whiskers, and I says " Blessings on you sir where is the Darling!" and he says "In Kennington Station House." I was dropping at his feet Stone at the image of that Innocence in cells with murderers when he adds "He followed the Monkey." I says deeming it slang language "Oh sir explain for a loving grandmother what Monkey!" He says "him in the spangled cap with the strap under the chin, as won't keep on—him as sweeps the crossings on a round table and don't want to draw his sabre more than he can help." Then I understood it all and most thankfully thanked him, and me and the Major and him drove over to Kennington and there we found our boy lying quite comfortable before a blazing fire having sweetly played himself to sleep upon a small accordion nothing like so big as a flat iron which they had been so kind as to lend him for the purpose and which it appeared had been stopped upon a very young person. My dear the system upon which the Major commenced and as I may say perfected Jemmy's learning when he was so small that if the dear was on the other side of the table you had to look under it instead of over it to see him with his mother's own bright hair in beautiful curls, is a thing that ought to be known to the Throne and Lords and Commons and then might obtain some promotion for the Major which he well deserves and would be none the worse for (speaking between friends) L. S. D.-ically. When the Major first undertook his learning he says to me: "I'm going Madam." he says " to make our child a Calculating Boy." "Major" I says, "you terrify me and may do the pet a permanent injury you would never forgive yourself." "Madam," says the Major, "next to my regret that when I had my boot-sponge in my hand, I didn't choke that scoundrel with it—on the spot—" "There! For Gracious sake," I interrupts, "let his conscience find him without sponges." "I say next to that regret, Madam," says the Major "would be the regret with which my breast," which he tapped, "would be surcharged if this fine mind was not early cultivated. But mark me Madam," says the Major holding up his forefinger "cultivated on a principle that will make it a delight." "Major" I says "I will be candid with you and tell you openly that if ever I find the dear child fall off in his appetite I shall know it is his calculations and shall put a stop to them at two minutes' notice. Or if I find them mounting to his head" I says, "or striking any ways cold to his stomach or leading to anything approaching flabbiness in his legs, the result will be the same, but Major you are a clever man and have seen much and you love the child and are his own godfather, and if you feel a confidence in trying try." "Spoken Madam" says the Major "like Emma Lirriper. All I have to ask Madam, is, that you will leave my godson and myself to make a week or two's preparations for surprising you, and that you will give me leave to have up and down any small articles not actually in use that I may require from the kitchen." "From the kitchen Major?" I says half feeling as if he had a mind to cook the child. "From the kitchen" says the Major, and smiles and swells, and at the same time looks taller. So I passed my word and the Major and the dear boy were shut up together for half an hour at a time through a certain while, and never could I hear anything going on betwixt them but talking and laughing and Jemmy clapping his hands and screaming out numbers, so I says to myself "it has not harmed him yet" nor could I on examining the dear find any signs of it anywhere about him which was likewise a great relief. At last one day Jemmy brings me a card in joke in the Major's neat writing "The Messrs. Jemmy Jackman" for we had given him the Major's other name too "request the honour of Mrs. Lirriper's company at the Jackman Institution in the front parlour this evening at five, military time, to witness a few slight feats of elementary arithmetic." And if you'll believe me there in the front parlour at five punctual to the moment was the Major behind the Pembroke table with both leaves up and a lot of things from the kitchen tidily set out on old newspapers spread atop of it, and there was the Mite stood up on a chair with his rosy cheeks flushing and his eyes sparkling clusters of diamonds. "Now Gran" says he, "oo tit down and don't oo touch ler poople"—for he saw with every one of those diamonds of his that I was going to give him a squeeze. "Very well sir" I says "I am obedient in this good company I am sure." And I sits down in the easy-chair that was put for me, shaking my sides. But picture my admiration when the Major going on almost as quick as if he was conjuring sets out all the articles he names, and says, "Three saucepans, an Italian iron, a hand-bell, a toasting-fork, a nutmeg-grater, four pot-lids, a spice-box, two egg-cups, and a chopping-board—how many?" and when that Mite instantly cries "Tifteen, tut down tive and carry ler 'toppin-board" and then claps his hands draws up his legs and dances on his chair! My dear with the same astonishing ease and correctness him and the Major added up the tables chairs and sofy, the picters fender and fire-irons their own selves me and the cat and the eyes in Miss Wozenham's head, and whenever the sum was done Young Roses and Diamonds claps his hands and draws up his legs and dances on his chair. The pride of the Major! ("Here's a mind Ma'am!" he says to me behind his hand.) Then he says aloud, "We now come to the next elementary rule: which is called—" "Umtraction!" cries Jemmy. "Right" says the Major. "We have here a toasting-fork, a potato in its natural state, two pot-lids, one egg-cup, a wooden spoon, and two skewers, from which it is necessary for commercial purposes to subtract a sprat-gridiron, a small pickle-jar, two lemons, one pepper-castor, a blackbeetle-trap, and a knob of the dresser-drawer what remains?" "Toatin-fork!" cries Jemmy. "In numbers how many?" says the Major. "One!" cries Jemmy. ("Here's a boy, Ma'am?" says the Major to me, behind his hand.) Then the Major goes on: "We now approach the next elementary rule: which is entitled—" "Tickleication" cries Jemmy. "Correct" says the Major. But my dear to relate to you in detail the way in which they multiplied fourteen sticks of fire-wood by two bits of ginger and a larding-needle, or divided pretty well everything else there was on the table by the heater of the Italian iron and a chamber candlestick, and got a lemon over, would make my head spin round and round and round as it did at the time. So I says "if you'll excuse my addressing the chair Professor Jackman I think the period of the lecture has now arrived when it becomes necessary that I should take a good hug of this young scholar." Upon which Jemmy calls out from his station on the chair "Gran oo open oor arms and me'll make a 'pring into 'em." So I opened my arms to him as I had opened my sorrowful heart when his poor young mother lay a dying, and he had his jump and we had a good long hug together and the Major prouder than any peacock says to me behind his hand, "You need not let him know it Madam" (which I certainly need not for the Major was quite audible) "but he is a boy!" In this way Jemmy grew and grew and went to day-school and continued under the Major too, and in summer we were as happy as the days were long and in winter we were as happy as the days were short and there seemed to rest a Blessing on the Lodgings for they as good as Let themselves and would have done it if there had been twice the accommodation, when sore and hard against my will I one day says to the Major "Major you know what I am going to break to you. Our boy must go to boarding-school." It was a sad sight to see the Major's countenance drop, and I pitied the good soul with all my heart. "Yes Major" I says " though he is as popular with the Lodgers as you are yourself and though he is to you and me what only you and me know, still it is in the course of things and Life is made of partings and we must part with our Pet." Bold as I spoke, I saw two Majors and half a dozen fireplaces, and when the poor Major put one of his neat bright-varnished boots upon the fender and his elbow on his knee and his head upon his hand and rocked himself a little to and fro, I was dreadfully cut up. "But" says I clearing my throat "you have so well prepared him Major—he has had such a Tutor in you—that he will have none of the first drudgery to go through. And he is so clever besides that he'll soon make his way to the front rank." "He is a boy" says the Major—having sniffed—"that has not his like on the face of the earth." "True as you say Major, and it is not for us merely for our own sakes to do anything to keep him back from being a credit and an ornament wherever he goes and perhaps even rising to be a great man, is it Major? He will have all my little savings when my work is done (being all the world to me) and we must try to make him a wise man and a good man, mustn't we Major?" ''Madam" says the Major rising "Jemmy Jackman is becoming an older file than I was aware of, and you put him to shame. You are thoroughly right Madam. You are simply and undeniably right—And if you'll excuse me, I'll take a walk." So the Major being gone out and Jemmy being at home, I got the child into my little room here and I stood him by my chair and I took his mother's own curls in my hand and I spoke to him loving and serious. And when I had reminded the darling how that he was now in his tenth year and when I had said to him about his getting on in life pretty much what I had said to the Major I broke to him how that we must have this same parting, and there I was forced to stop for there I saw of a sudden the well remembered lip with its tremble, and it so brought back that time! But with the spirit that was in him he controlled it soon and he says gravely nodding through his tears, "I understand Gran—I know it must be, Gran—go on Gran, don't be afraid of me." And when I had said all that ever I could think of, he turned his bright steady face to mine and he says just a little broken here and there "You shall see Gran that I can be a man and that I can do anything that is grateful and loving to you—and if I don't grow up to be what you would like to have me—I hope it will be—because I shall die." And with that he sat down by me and I went on to tell him of the school of which I had excellent recommendations and where it was and how many scholars and what games they played as I had heard and what length of holidays, to all of which he listened bright and clear. And so it came that at last he says " And now dear Gran let me kneel down here where I have been used to say my prayers and let me fold my face for just a minute in your gown and let me cry, for you have been more than father—more than mother—more than brothers sisters friends—to me!" And so he did cry and I too and we were both much the better for it. From that time forth he was true to his word and ever blithe and ready, and even when me and the Major took him down into Lincolnshire he was far the gayest of the party though for sure and certain he might easily have been that, but he really was and put life into us only when it came to the last Good-by, he says with a wistful look "You wouldn't have me not really sorry would you Gran?" and when I says " No dear, Lord forbid!" he says " I am glad of that!" and ran in out of sight. But now that the child was gone out of the Lodgings the Major fell into a regularly moping state. It was taken notice of by all the Lodgers that the Major moped. He hadn't even the same air of being rather tall that he used to have, and if he varnished his boots with a single gleam of interest it was as much as he did. One evening the Major came into my little room to take a cup of tea and a morsel of buttered toast and to read Jemmy's newest letter which had arrived that afternoon (by the very same postman more than middle-aged upon the Beat now), and the letter raising him up a little I says to the Major: "Major you mustn't get into a moping way." The Major shook his head. "Jemmy Jackman Madam," he says with a deep sigh, " is an older file than I thought him." "Moping is not the way to grow younger Major." "My dear Madam," says the Major, "is there any way of growing younger?" Feeling that the Major was getting rather the best of that point I made a diversion to another. "Thirteen years! Thir-teen years! Many Lodgers have come and gone, in the thirteen years that you have lived in the parlours Major." "Hah!" says the Major warming. "Many Madam, many." "And I should say you have been familiar with them all?" "As a rule (with its exceptions like all rules) my dear Madam" says the Major, " they have honoured me with their acquaintance, and not infrequently with their confidence." Watching the Major as he drooped his white head and stroked his black moustachios and moped again, a thought which I think must have been going about looking for an owner somewhere dropped into my old noddle if you will excuse the expression. "The walls of my Lodgings" I says in a casual way—for my dear it is of no use going straight at a man who mopes—" might have something to tell, if they could tell it." The Major neither moved nor said anything but I saw he was attending with his shoulders my dear—attending with his shoulders to what I said. In fact I saw that his shoulders were struck by it. "The dear boy was always fond of story-books" I went on, like as if I was talking to myself. " I am sure this house—his own home—might write a story or two for his reading one day or another." The Major's shoulders gave a dip and a curve and his head came up in his shirt-collar. The Major's head came up in his shirt-collar as I hadn't seen it come up since Jemmy went to school. "It is unquestionable that in intervals of cribbage and a friendly rubber, my dear Madam," says the Major, "and also over what used to be called in my young times—in the salad days of Jemmy Jackman—the social glass, I have exchanged many a reminiscence with your Lodgers." My remark was—I confess I made it with the deepest and artfullest of intentions—"I wish our dear boy had heard them!" "Are you serious Madam?" asks the Major starting and turning full round. "Why not Major?" "Madam" says the Major, turning up one of his cuffs, "they shall be written for him." "Ah! Now you speak" I says giving my hands a pleased clap. "Now you are in a way out of moping Major!" "Between this and my holidays—I mean the dear boy's" says the Major turning up his other cuff, "a good deal may be done towards it."  "Major you are a clever man and you have seen much and not a doubt of it." "I'll begin," says the Major looking as tall as ever he did, "to-morrow." My dear the Major was another man in three days and he was himself again in a week and he wrote and wrote and wrote with his pen scratching like rats behind the wainscot, and whether he had many grounds to go upon or whether he did at all romance I cannot tell you, but what he has written is in the left-hand glass closet of the little bookcase close behind you, and if you'll put your hand in you'll find it come out heavy in lumps sewn together and being beautifully plain and unknown Greek and Hebrew to myself and me quite wakeful, I shall take it as a favour if you'll read out loud and read on. I have the honour of presenting myself by the name of Jackman. I esteem it a proud privilege to go down to posterity through the instrumentality of the most remarkable boy that ever lived—by the name of JEMMY JACKMAN LIRRIPER—and of my most worthy and most highly respected friend, Mrs. Emma Lirriper, of Eighty-one, Norfolk-street, Strand, in the County of Middlesex, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It is not for me to express the rapture with which we received that dear and eminently remarkable boy, on the occurrence of his first Christmas holidays. Suffice it to observe that when he came flying into the house with two splendid prizes (Arithmetic, and Exemplary Conduct), Mrs. Lirriper and myself embraced with emotion, and instantly took him to the Play, where we were all three admirably entertained. Nor, is it to render homage to the virtues of the best of her good and honoured sex—whom, in deference to her unassuming worth, I will only here designate by the initials E. L.—that I add this record to the bundle of papers with which our, in a most distinguished degree, remarkable boy has expressed himself delighted, before re-consigning the same to the left-hand glass closet of Mrs. Lirriper's little bookcase. Neither, is it to obtrude the name of the old original superannuated obscure Jemmy Jackman, once (to his degradation) of Wozenham's, long (to his elevation) of Lirriper's. If I could be consciously guilty of that piece of bad taste, it would indeed be a work of supererogation, now that the name is borne by JEMMY JACKMAN LIRRIPER. No. I take up my humble pen to register a little record of our strikingly remarkable boy, which my poor capacity regards as presenting a pleasant little picture of the dear boy's mind. The picture may be interesting to himself when he is a man. Our first re-united Christmas-day was the most delightful one we have ever passed together. Jemmy was never silent for five minutes, except in church-time. He talked as we sat by the fire, he talked when we were out walking, he talked as we sat by the fire again, he talked incessantly at dinner, though he made a dinner almost as remarkable as himself. It was the spring of happiness in his fresh young heart flowing and flowing, and it fertilised (if I may be allowed so bold a figure) my much-esteemed friend, and J— J—the present writer. There were only we three. We dined in my esteemed friend's little room, and our entertainment was perfect. But everything in the establishment is, in neatness, order, and comfort, always perfect. After dinner, our boy slipt away to his old stool at my esteemed friend's knee, and there, with his hot chesnuts and his glass of brown sherry (really, a most excellent wine!) on a chair for a table, his face outshone the apples in the dish. We talked of these jottings of mine, which Jemmy had read through and through by that time; and so it came about that my esteemed friend remarked, as she sat smoothing Jemmy's curls: "And as you belong to the house too, Jemmy, —and so much more than the Lodgers, having been born in it—why, your story ought to be added to the rest, I think, one of these days." Jemmy's eye sparkled at this, and he said, "So I think, Gran." Then, he sat looking at the fire, and then he began to laugh, in a sort of confidence with the fire, and then he said, folding his arms across my esteemed friend's lap and raising his bright face to hers: "Would you like to hear a boy's story, Gran?" "Of all things," replied my esteemed friend. "Would you, godfather?" "Of all things," I too replied. "Well then," said Jemmy, " I'll tell you one." Here, our indisputably remarkable boy gave himself a hug, and laughed again, musically, at the idea of his coming out in that new line. Then, he once more took the fire into the same sort of confidence as before, and began: "Once upon a time, When pigs drank wine, And monkeys chewed tobaccer, 'Twas neither in your time nor mine, But that's no macker—" "Bless the child!" cried my esteemed friend, "what's amiss with his brain'!" "It's poetry, Gran," returned Jemmy, shouting with laughter. "We always begin stories that way, at school." "Gave me quite a turn, Major," said my esteemed friend, fanning herself with a plate. "Thought he was light-headed!" "In those remarkable times, Gran and God- father, there was once a boy;—not me, you know." "No, no," says my respected friend, "not you. Not him, Major, you understand?" "No, no," says I. "And he went to school in Rutlandshire" "Why not Lincolnshire?" says my respected friend. "Why not, you dear old Gran? Because I go to school in Lincolnshire, don't I?" "Ah, to be sure!" says my respected friend. "And it's not Jemmy, you understand, Major?" "No, no," says I. "Well!" our boy proceeded, hugging himself comfortably, and laughing merrily (again in confidence with the fire), before he again looked up in Mrs. Lirriper's face, "and so he was tremendously in love with his schoolmaster's daughter, and she was the most beautiful creature that ever was seen, and she had brown eyes, and she had brown hair all curling beautifully, and she had a delicious voice, and she was delicious altogether, and her name was Seraphina." "What's the name of your schoolmaster's daughter, Jemmy?" asks my respected friend. "Polly!" replied Jemmy, pointing his forefinger at her. "There now! Caught you! Ha! ha! ha!" When he and my respected friend had had a laugh and a hug together, our admittedly remarkable boy resumed with a great relish: "Well! And so he loved her. And so he thought about her, and dreamed about her, and made her presents of oranges and nuts, and would have made her presents of pearls and diamonds if he could have afforded it out of his pocket-money, but he couldn't. And so her father—O, he WAS a Tartar! Keeping the boys up to the mark, holding examinations once a month, lecturing upon all sorts of subjects at all sorts of times, and knowing everything in the world out of book. And so this boy—" "Had he any name?" asks my respected friend. "No he hadn't, Gran. Ha! ha! There now! Caught you again!" After this, they had another laugh and another hug, and then our boy went on. "Well! And so this boy he had a friend about as old as himself, at the same school, and his name (for He had a name, as it happened) was—let me remember—was Bobbo." "Not Bob," says my respected friend. "Of course not," says Jemmy. " What made you think it was, Gran? Well! And so this friend was the cleverest and bravest and best looking and most generous of all the friends that ever were, and so he was in love with Seraphina's sister, and so Seraphina's sister was in love with him, and so they all grew up." "Bless us!" says my respected friend. "They were very sudden about it." "So they all grew up," our boy repeated, laughing heartily, "and Bobbo and this boy went away together on horseback to seek their fortunes, and they partly got their horses by favour, and partly in a bargain; that is to say, they had saved up between them seven-and-fourpence, and the two horses, being Arabs, were worth more, only the man said he would take that, to favour them. Well! And so they made their fortunes and came prancing back to the school, with their pockets full of gold enough to last for ever. And so they rang at the parents' and visitors' bell (not the back gate), and when the bell was answered they proclaimed, 'The same as if it was scarlet fever! Every boy goes home for an indefinite period!' And then there was great hurrahing, and then they kissed Seraphina and her sister—each his own love and not the other's on any account—and then they ordered the Tartar into instant confinement." "Poor man!" said my respected friend. "Into instant confinement, Gran," repeated Jemmy, trying to look severe and roaring with laughter, "and he was to have nothing to eat but the boys' dinners, and was to drink half a cask of their beer, every day. And so then the preparations were made for the two weddings, and there were hampers, and potted things, and sweet things, and nuts, and postage-stamps, and all manner of things. And so they were so jolly, that they let the Tartar out, and he was jolly too." "I am glad they let him out," says my respected friend, "because he had only done his duty." "Oh but hadn't he overdone it though!" cried Jemmy. " Well! And so then this boy mounted his horse, with his bride in his arms, and cantered away, and cantered on and on till he came to a certain place where he had a certain Gran and a certain godfather—not you two, you know." "No, no," we both said. "And there he was received with great rejoicings, and he filled the cupboard and the bookcase with gold, and he showered it out on his Gran and his godfather because they were the two kindest and dearest people that ever lived in this world. And so while they were sitting up to their knees in gold, a knocking was heard at the street door, and who should it be but Bobbo, also on horseback with his bride in his arms, and what had he come to say but that he would take (at double rent) all the Lodgings for ever, that were not wanted by this boy and this Gran and this godfather, and that they would all live together, and all be happy! And so they were, and so it never ended!" "And was there no quarrelling?" asked my respected friend, as Jemmy sat upon her lap, and hugged her. "No! Nobody ever quarrelled." "And did the money never melt away?" "No! Nobody could ever spend it all." "And did none of them ever grow older?" "No! Nobody ever grew older after that." "And did none of them ever die?" "O no, no, no, Gran!" exclaimed our dear boy, laying his cheek upon her breast, and drawing her closer to him. "Nobody ever died." "Ah Major, Major," says my respected friend, smiling benignly upon me. "This beats our stories. Let us end with the Boy's story, Major, for the Boy's story is the best that is ever told!" In submission to which request on the part of the best of women, I have here noted it down as faithfully as my best abilities, coupled with my best intentions, would admit, subscribing it with my name, J. JACKMAN. THE PARLOURS. MRS. LIRRIPER'S LODGINGS. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mrs._Lirriper_s_Legacy_[1864_Christmas_Number]/1864-01-12_Mrs_Lirripers_Legacy.pdf dbda550343e02e6327356ac2cd3c98e0 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mrs._Lirriper_s_Legacy_[1864_Christmas_Number]/1864-01-12-Mrs_Lirriper_Relates_how_she_went_on_and_went_over.pdf e93a08853a18933ff825d87e69f897c4 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mrs._Lirriper_s_Legacy_[1864_Christmas_Number]/1864-01-12-Mrs_Lirriper_relates_how_Jimmy_topped_up.pdf 9aec9c49414461c60d4a084f1b6018d6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christmas Numbers Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context christmas-numbers Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites the eighteen Christmas numbers that Dickens orchestrated between 1850 and 1867 in conjunction with multiple Victorian authors, notably Wilkie Collins, and published in his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round. After writing five Christmas books and multiple sketches on Yuletide cheer - notably 'Scenes and Characters, No. 10, Christmas Festivities', published as 'A Christmas Dinner' in Sketches by Boz (1836) - not to mention the holiday merry-making described in Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Charles Dickens might reasonably be supposed to have had his fill of seasonal writing. However, he published a Christmas number in 1850 in HW that contained a series of sketches about Christmas, contributing 'A Christmas Tree' (1850). In the next year's Christmas number, he included the short piece 'What Christmas is, as we Grow Older' (1851). Holiday fiction, though, was what Dickens's readership seemed to crave, and the author, editor, and entrepreneur in Dickens all recognised the opportunity. In 1852, Dickens decided to develop an extra Christmas number for HW which would harness the creative talents of other writers for a series of unrelated stories told within a frame narrative of his own composition. Each year he himself would write several of these parts, generally two to three. Soon, the Christmas number became as much of an expected holiday tradition among Victorian subscribers as had been the Christmas books. All in all, eighteen Christmas numbers of this kind resulted (1850-1867); nine published in HW and nine in ATYR.  <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - Household Words</div> On 24 December 1852, Dickens published A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. Personally, he had written 'The Poor Relation's Story' (No.1) and 'The Child's Story' (No.2) with successive stories authored by other contributors, though no names appeared. What would have been the 1853 extra number was late, published instead on 18 February 1854, a circumstance that would not occur again until the 1864 Christmas number. This time, Dickens published more short stories by himself and others, contributing 'The Schoolboy's Story' and 'Nobody's Story', but the Christmas number, for once, lacked a frame narrative or overarching title, though it would come to be known as Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. 25 December 1854 saw The Seven Poor Travellers, with Dickens penning 'The First' (No.1) and 'The Road' (No.7). By writing the first and last stories in the collection, he, as editor, might steer the entire composition towards a cohesive conclusion.  Next, Dickens wrote 'The Guest' (No.1), 'The Boots' (No.3), and 'The Bill' (No.7) as part of The Holly-Tree Inn (15 December 1855). The Wreck of the 'Golden Mary' followed on 25 December 1856, with Dickens composing only 'The Wreck' (No.1), a lengthy description of a shipwreck which sets up the framing narrative. Next, Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels (7 December 1857), Dickens writing 'The Island of Silver-Store' (No.1) and 'The Rafts on the River' (No.3) with Collins contributing the second chapter. Rounding out the extra Christmas numbers for HW, A House to Let appeared on 7 December 1858, with Dickens authoring 'Going into Society' (No.3). The last issue of HW appeared on 28 May 1859, with the journal virtually concluded, due to disagreements with Dickens's publishers Bradbury and Evans, though it was symbolically folded into ATYR. <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - All the Year Round</div> After Dickens launched his new journal ATYR on 30 April 1859, Christmas remained house-themed with the extra Christmas number The Haunted House (13 December 1859). It featured three offerings from him, 'The Mortals in the House' (No.1), 'The Ghost in Master B's Room' (No.6), and 'The Ghost in the Corner Room' (No.8). Yet Dickens continued to experiment with his holiday themes. He would write 'The Village' (No.1), 'The Money' (No.2), and 'The Restitution' (No.5) for A Message from the Sea, published on 25 December 1860, a story about a New England mariner, Captain Jorgan, who seeks to discover the truth about the origin of a Welsh family's mysterious nest-egg.  For Tom Tiddler's Ground, published 25 December 1861, Dickens produced 'Picking up Soot and Cinders' (No.1), 'Picking up Miss Kimmeens' (No.6), and 'Picking up the Tinker' (No. 7). An impressive four parts of Somebody's Luggage (4 December 1862), 'His Leaving it Till Called For' (No.1), 'His Boots' (No.2), 'His Brown-Paper Parcel' (No.7), and 'His Wonderful End' (No. 10) were produced by Dickens, who notably portrays himself in the story as a character, in his capacity as AYTR editor, to amusing effect. Two subsequent Christmas numbers, Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (25 December 1863) and Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy' (12 January 1864), concern the life and activities of a generous landlady who adopts a young boy and raises him with the help of her gallant lodger, Major Jackman. The former contained Dickens's two introductory and conclusion chapters, 'How Mrs. Lirriper carried on the Business' (No.1) and 'How the Parlours added a few words' (No.6), while the latter featured 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how she went on, and went over' (No.1) and 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how Jimmy topped up' (No.7), a story including a jaunt to France, with identical placement at the beginning and end of the number. Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions appeared in 1865, with Mugby Junction following in 1866; both frame narratives deal with themes of disability and poverty. For the first, Dickens contributed 'To be Taken Immediately' (No.1), 'To be Taken with a Grain of Salt' (No.6), and 'To be Taken for Life' (No.8); for the latter, he wrote 'Barbox Brothers' (No.1), 'Barbox Brothers and Co.' (No.2), 'Main Line. The Boy at Mugby' (No.3), and 'No.1 Branch Line. The Signal-man' (No.4). For the final Christmas number, No Thoroughfare (12 December 1867), Dickens collaborated with Collins on an imaginative European thriller that ranges from orphanages and offices in London to hotels and precipices in the Swiss Alps. Dickens is known to have primarily written most of The Overture, Act I, Act III, with Collins taking Act 2. Both collaborated on Acts IV and V. However, they deliberately interspersed passages into each other's parts to confuse readers as to which author had written which 'Acts' (Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 569-573). Consequently, we have merely transcribed the Christmas number in its entirety, as a collaboration. Though Dickens considered beginning a Christmas number in 1868, his other activities, coupled with failing health, led him to gratefully relinquish the idea. Instead, he would eventually go on to attempt another novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), evidently sensing the public's interest in the detective genre, one which he and Collins had, more or less, pioneered with their respective novels Bleak House (1853) (Inspector Bucket) and The Moonstone (1868) (Sergeant Cuff). His mind may also have been running on the mysterious plot of No Thoroughfare, with its malevolent villain, though he did not live to see the plot through to its conclusion. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans from Dickens Journals Online; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. With the exception of No Thoroughfare, transcripts have been made only of parts of numbers Dickens is known to have authored. Lists of writers known to have authored chapters or portions of these extra Christmas numbers have been added to the metadata of each item (Klimaszewski, Appendix A).  Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions. 1. See Melisa Klimaszewski. Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals (Ohio University Press, 2019); Jude Piesse. 'Dreaming Across Oceans: Emigration and Nation in the Mid-Victorian Christmas Issue'. Victorian Periodicals Review 46.1 (Spring 2013): 37-60; Robert Tracy. '"A Whimsical Kind of Masque": The Christmas Books and Victorian Spectacle'. Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1998): 113-30; Deborah A. Thomas. 'The Chord of the Christmas Season'. In Dickens and the Short Story (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982): pp. 62-93; Sarah A. Solberg. '"Text Dropped into the Woodcuts": Dickens's Christmas Books'. Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): pp. 103-18; Ruth Glancy. 'Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes'. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35.1 (June 1980): pp. 53-72; Thomas. 'Contributors to the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round, 1850-1867.' Part I. The Dickensian 70.372 (1973): pp. 163-72. and Part II. TD 70 (1974): pp. 21-29; 'Messages in Bottles and Collins's Seafaring Man'. Anthea Trodd. SEL: Studies in English Literature 41.4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 751-64; Susan Shatto. 'Miss Havisham and Mr. Mopes the Hermit: Dickens and the Mentally Ill'. (Part One) Dickens Quarterly 2.2 (June 1985): pp. 43-50 and (Part Two) DQ 2.3 (September 1985): pp. 79-84; Molly Boggs. '"Given to you by nature for an enemy": The landlady in mid-century London'. Journal of Victorian Culture 23.3 (2018): pp. 310-331; Thomas. 'Dickens' Mrs. Lirriper and the Evolution of a Feminine Stereotype'. Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977): 154-169; Martha Stoddard Holmes. '"Happy and Yet Pitying Tears": Deafness and Affective Disjuncture in Dickens's Doctor Marigold'. Victorian Review 35.2 (Fall 2009): 53-64; Diana C. Archibald. 'Dickens's Visit to the Perkins School and Doctor Marigold'. Dickens and Massachusetts: The Lasting Legacy of the Commonwealth Visits. Eds. Archibald and Joel J. Brattin (University of Massachusetts, 2015): pp. 123-33; Anne Chapman. '"I am not going on": Negotiating Christmas Publishing Rhythms with Dickens's Mugby Junction'. Victorian Periodicals Review 51.1 (2018): 70-85; Samia Ounoughi. 'The Swiss Alps and Character Framing in No Thoroughfare'. Ed. Maxime Leroy. In Charles Dickens and Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2013. pp. 114-25; Lillian Nayder. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Cornell University Press, 2002). Michael Hollington. '"To the Droodstone": Or, From The Moonstone to Edwin Drood via No Thoroughfare'. Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 5 (1995): 141-9.  Short Story Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Periodical Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) All the Year Round Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18640112 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Ah! It's pleasant to drop into my own easy-chair my dear though a little palpitating what with trotting up-stairs and what with trotting down, and why kitchen-stairs should all be corner stairs is for the builders to justify though I do not think they fully understand their trade and never did, else why the sameness and why not more conveniences and fewer draughts and likewise making a practice of laying the plaster on too thick I am well convinced which holds the damp, and as to chimney-pots putting them on by guess-work like hats at a party and no more knowing what their effect will be upon the smoke bless you than I do if so much, except that it will mostly be either to send it down your throat in a straight form or give it a twist before it goes there. And what I says speaking as I find of those new metal chimneys all manner of shapes (there's a row of 'em at Miss Wozenham's lodging-house lower down on the other side of the way) is that they only work your smoke into artificial patterns for you before you swallow it and that I'd quite as soon swallow mine plain, the flavour being the same, not to mention the conceit of putting up signs on the top of your house to show the forms in which you take your smoke into your inside. Being here before your eyes my dear in my own easy-chair in my own quiet room in my own Lodging House Number Eighty-one Norfolk-street Strand London situated midway between the City and St. James's—if anything is where it used to be with these hotels calling themselves Limited but called Unlimited by Major Jackman rising up everywhere and rising up into flagstaffs where they can't go any higher, but my mind of those monsters is give me a landlord's or landlady's wholesome face when I come off a journey and not a brass plate with an electrified number clicking out of it which it's not in nature can be glad to see me and to which I don't want to be hoisted like molasses at the Docks and left there telegraphing for help with the most ingenious instruments but quite in vain—being here my dear I have no call to mention that I am still in the Lodgings as a business hoping to die in the same and if agreeable to the clergy partly read over at Saint Clement's Danes and concluded in Hatfield churchyard when lying once again by my poor Lirriper ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Neither should I tell you any news my dear in telling you that the Major is still a fixture in the Parlours quite as much so as the roof of the house, and that Jemmy is of boys the best and brightest and has ever had kept from him the cruel story of his poor pretty young mother Mrs. Edson being deserted in the second floor and dying in my arms, fully believing that I am his born Gran and him an orphan, though what with engineering since he took a taste for it and him and the Major making Locomotives out of parasols broken iron pots and cotton-reels and them absolutely a getting off the line and falling over the table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the originals it really is quite wonderful. And when I says to the Major, "Major can't you by any means give us a communication with the guard?" the Major says quite huffy, "No madam it's not to be done," and when I says " Why not?" the Major says, "That is between us who are in the Railway Interest madam and our friend the Right Honourable Vice-President of the Board of Trade" and if you'll believe me my dear the Major wrote to Jemmy at school to consult him on the answer I should have before I could get even that amount of unsatisfactoriness out of the man, the reason being that when we first began with the little model and the working signals beautiful and perfect (being in general as wrong as the real) and when I says laughing "What appointment am I to hold in this undertaking gentlemen?" Jemmy hugs me round the neck and tells me dancing, "You shall be the Public Gran" and consequently they put upon me just as much as ever they like and I sit a growling in my easy-chair. My dear whether it is that a grown man as clever as the Major cannot give half his heart and mind to anything—even a plaything—but must get into right down earnest with it, whether it is so or whether it is not so I do not undertake to say, but Jemmy is far outdone by the serious and believing ways of the Major in the management of the United Grand Junction Lirriper and Jackman Great Norfolk Parlour Line, "For" says my Jemmy with the sparkling eyes when it was christened, "we must have a whole mouthful of name Gran or our dear old Public" and there the young rogue kissed me, "won't stump up." So the Public took the shares—ten at ninepence, and immediately when that was spent twelve Preference at one-and-sixpence—and they were all signed by Jemmy and countersigned by the Major, and between ourselves much better worth the money than some shares I have paid for in my time. In the same holidays the line was made and worked and opened and ran excursions and had collisions and burst its boilers and all sorts of accidents and offences all most regular correct and pretty. The sense of responsibility entertained by the Major as a military style of station-master my dear starting the down train behind time and ringing one of those little bells that you buy with the little coal-scuttles off the tray round the man's neck in the street did him honour, but noticing the Major of a night when he is writing out his monthly report to Jemmy at school of the state of the Rolling Stock and the Permanent Way and all the rest of it (the whole kept upon the Major's sideboard and dusted with his own hands every morning before varnishing his boots) I notice him as full of thought and care as full can be and frowning in a fearful manner, but indeed the Major does nothing by halves as witness his great delight in going out surveying with Jemmy when he has Jemmy to go with, carrying a chain and a measuring tape and driving I don't know what improvements right through Westminster Abbey and fully believed in the streets to be knocking everything upside down by Act of Parliament. As please Heaven will come to pass when Jemmy takes to that as a profession! Mentioning my poor Lirriper brings into my head his own youngest brother the Doctor though Doctor of what I am sure it would be hard to say unless Liquor, for neither Physic nor Music nor yet Law does Joshua Lirriper know a morsel of except continually being summoned to the County Court and having orders made upon him which he runs away from, and once was taken in the passage of this very house with an umbrella up and the Major's hat on, giving his name with the door-mat round him as Sir Johnson Jones K.C.B. in spectacles residing at the Horse Guards. On which occasion he had got into the house not a minute before, through the girl letting him on to the mat when he sent in a piece of paper twisted more like one of those spills for lighting candles than a note, offering me the choice between thirty shillings in hand and his brains on the premises marked immediate and waiting for an answer. My dear it gave me such a dreadful turn to think of the brains of my poor dear Lirriper's own flesh and blood flying about the new oilcloth however unworthy to be so assisted, that I went out of my room here to ask him what he would take once for all not to do it for life when I found him in the custody of two gentlemen that I should have judged to be in the feather-bed trade if they had not announced the law, so fluffy were their personal appearance. "Bring your chains sir," says Joshua to the littlest of the two in the biggest hat, "rivet on my fetters!" Imagine my feelings when I pictered him clanking up Norfolk-street in irons and Miss Wozenham looking out of window! "Gentlemen" I says all of a tremble and ready to drop "please to bring him into Major Jackman's apartments." So they brought him into the Parlours, and when the Major spies his own curly-brimmed hat on him which Joshua Lirriper had whipped off its peg in the passage for a military disguise he goes into such a tearing passion that he tips it off his head with his hand and kicks it up to the ceiling with his foot where it grazed long afterwards. "Major" I says "be cool and advise me what to do with Joshua my dead and gone Lirriper's own youngest brother." "Madam" says the Major "my advice is that you board and lodge him in a Powder Mill, with a handsome gratuity to the proprietor when exploded." "Major" I says "as a Christian you cannot mean your words." "Madam" says the Major "by the Lord I do!" and indeed the Major besides being with all his merits a very passionate man for his size had a bad opinion of Joshua on account of former troubles even unattended by liberties taken with his apparel. When Joshua Lirriper hears this conversation betwixt us he turns upon the littlest one with the biggest hat and says "Come sir! Remove me to my vile dungeon. Where is my mouldy straw!" My dear at the picter of him rising in my mind dressed almost entirely in padlocks like Baron Trenck in Jemmy's book I was so overcome that I burst into tears and I says to the Major, "Major take my keys and settle with these gentlemen or I shall never know a happy minute more," which was done several times both before and since, but still I must remember that Joshua Lirriper has his good feelings and shows them in being always so troubled in his mind when he cannot wear mourning for his brother. Many a long year have I left off my widow's mourning not being wishful to intrude, but the tender point in Joshua that I cannot help a little yielding to is when he writes "One single sovereign would enable me to wear a decent suit of mourning for my much-loved brother. I vowed at the time of his lamented death that I would ever wear sables in memory of him but Alas how short-sighted is man, How keep that vow when penniless!" It says a good deal for the strength of his feelings that he couldn't have been seven year old when my poor Lirriper died and to have kept to it ever since is highly creditable. But we know there's good in all of us—if we only knew where it was in some of us—and though it was far from delicate in Joshua to work upon the dear child's feelings when first sent to school and write down into Lincolnshire for his pocket-money by return of post and got it, still he is my poor Lirriper's own youngest brother and mightn't have meant not paying his bill at the Salisbury Arms when his affection took him down to stay a fortnight at Hatfield churchyard and might have meant to keep sober but for bad company. Consequently if the Major had played on him with the garden-engine which he got privately into his room without my knowing of it, I think that much as I should have regretted it there would have been words betwixt the Major and me. Therefore my dear though he played on Mr. Buffle by mistake being hot in his head, and though it might have been misrepresented down at Wozenham's into not being ready for Mr. Buffle in other respects he being the Assessed Taxes, still I do not so much regret it as perhaps I ought. And whether Joshua Lirriper will yet do well in life I cannot say, but I did hear of his coming out at a Private Theatre in the character of a Bandit without receiving any offers afterwards from the regular managers. Mentioning Mr. Buffle gives an instance of there being good in persons where good is not expected, for it cannot be denied that Mr. Buffle's manners when engaged in his business were not agreeable. To collect is one thing and to look about as if suspicious of the goods being gradually removing in the dead of the night by a back door is another, over taxing you have no control but suspecting is voluntary. Allowances too must ever be made for a gentleman of the Major's warmth not relishing being spoke to with a pen in the mouth, and while I do not know that it is more irritable to my own feelings to have a low-crowned hat with a broad brim kept on in-doors than any other hat still I can appreciate the Major's, besides which without bearing malice or vengeance the Major is a man that scores up arrears as his habit always was with Joshua Lirriper. So at last my dear the Major lay in wait for Mr. Buffle and it worrited me a good deal. Mr. Buffle gives his rap of two sharp knocks one day and the Major bounces to the door. "Collector has called for two quarters' Assessed Taxes" says Mr. Buffle. "They are ready for him" says the Major and brings him in here. But on the way Mr. Buffle looks about him in his usual suspicious manner and the Major fires and asks him "Do you see a Ghost sir?" "No sir" says Mr. Buffle. "Because I have before noticed you" says the Major "apparently looking for a spectre very hard beneath the roof of my respected friend. When you find that supernatural agent, be so good as point him out sir." Mr. Buffle stares at the Major and then nods at me. "Mrs. Lirriper sir" says the Major going off into a perfect steam and introducing me with his hand. "Pleasure of knowing her" says Mr. Buffle. "A—hum—Jemmy Jackman sir!" says the Major introducing himself. "Honour of knowing you by sight" says Mr. Buffle. "Jemmy Jackman sir" says the Major wagging his head sideways in a sort of an obstinate fury "presents to you his esteemed friend that lady Mrs. Emma Lirriper of Eighty-one Norfolk-street Strand London in the County of Middlesex in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Upon which occasion sir," says the Major, "Jemmy Jackman takes your hat off." Mr. Buffle looks at his hat where the Major drops it on the floor, and he picks it up and puts it on again. "Sir" says the Major very red and looking him full in the face "there are two quarters of the Gallantry Taxes due and the Collector has called." Upon which if you can believe my words my dear the Major drops Mr. Buffle's hat off again. "This—" Mr. Buffle begins very angry with his pen in his mouth, when the Major steaming more and more says "Take your bit out sir! Or by the whole infernal system of Taxation of this country and every individual figure in the National Debt, I'll get upon your back and ride you like a horse!" which it's my belief he would have done and even actually jerking his neat little legs ready for a spring as it was. "This" says Mr. Buffle without his pen "is an assault and I'll have the law of you." "Sir" replies the Major "if you are a man of honour, your Collector of whatever may be due on the Honourable Assessment by applying to Major Jackman at The Parlours Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings, may obtain what he wants in full at any moment." When the Major glared at Mr. Buffle with those meaning words my dear I literally gasped for a teaspoonful of sal volatile in a wine-glass of water, and I says "Pray let it go no further gentlemen I beg and beseech of you!" But the Major could be got to do nothing else but snort long after Mr. Buffle was gone, and the effect it had upon my whole mass of blood when on the next day of Mr. Buffle's rounds the Major spruced himself up and went humming a tune up and down the street with one eye almost obliterated by his hat there are not expressions in Johnson's Dictionary to state. But I safely put the street door on the jar and got behind the Major's blinds with my shawl on and my mind made up the moment I saw danger to rush out screeching till my voice failed me and catch the Major round the neck till my strength went and have all parties bound. I had not been behind the blinds a quarter of an hour when I saw Mr. Buffle approaching with his Collecting-books in his hand. The Major likewise saw him approaching and hummed louder and himself approached. They met before the Airy railings. The Major takes off his hat at arm's length and says "Mr. Buffle I believe?" Mr. Buffle takes off his hat at arm's length and says "That is my name sir." Says the Major "Have you any commands for me, Mr. Buffle?" Says Mr. Buffle "Not any sir." Then my dear both of 'em bowed very low and haughty and parted, and whenever Mr. Buffle made his rounds in future him and the Major always met and bowed before the Airy railings, putting me much in mind of Hamlet and the other gentleman in mourning before killing one another, though I could have wished the other gentleman had done it fairer and even if less polite no poison. Mr. Buffle's family were not liked in this neighbourhood, for when you are a householder my dear you'll find it does not come by nature to like the Assessed, and it was considered besides that a one-horse pheayton ought not to have elevated Mrs. Buffle to that heighth especially when purloined from the Taxes which I myself did consider uncharitable. But they were not liked and there was that domestic unhappiness in the family in consequence of their both being very hard with Miss Buffle and one another on account of Miss Buffle's favouring Mr. Buffle's articled young gentleman, that it was whispered that Miss Buffle would go either into a consumption or a convent she being so very thin and off her appetite and two close-shaved gentlemen with white bands round their necks peeping round the corner whenever she went out in waistcoats resembling black pinafores. So things stood towards Mr. Buffle when one night I was woke by a frightful noise and a smell of burning, and going to my bed-room window saw the whole street in a glow. Fortunately we had two sets empty just then and before I could hurry on some clothes I heard the Major hammering at the attics' doors and calling out "Dress yourselves!—Fire! Don't be frightened!—Fire ! Collect your presence of mind!—Fire! All right—Fire!" most tremenjously. As I opened my bedroom door the Major came tumbling in over himself and me and caught me in his arms. "Major" I says breathless "where is it?" "I don't know dearest madam" says the Major—"Fire! Jemmy Jackman will defend you to the last drop of his blood—Fire! If the dear boy was at home what a treat this would be for him—Fire!" and altogether very collected and bold except that he couldn't say a single sentence without shaking me to the very centre with roaring Fire. We ran down to the drawing-room and put our heads out of window, and the Major calls to an unfeeling young monkey scampering by be joyful and ready to split "Where is it?—Fire!" The monkey answers without stopping " Oh here's a lark! Old Buffle's been setting his house alight to prevent its being found out that he boned the Taxes. Hurrah! Fire!" And then the sparks came flying up and the smoke came pouring down and the crackling of flames and spatting of water and banging of engines and hacking of axes and breaking of glass and knocking at doors and the shouting and crying and hurrying and the heat and altogether gave me a dreadful palpitation. "Don't be frightened dearest madam," says the Major, "—Fire! There's nothing to be alarmed at—Fire! Don't open the street door till I come back—Fire! I'll go and see if I can be of any service—Fire! You're quite composed and comfortable ain't you?—Fire, Fire, Fire!" It was in vain for me to hold the man and tell him he'd be galloped to death by the engines—pumped to death by his over-exertions—wet-feeted to death by the slop and mess—flattened to death when the roofs fell in—his spirit was up and he went scampering off after the young monkey with all the breath he had and none to spare, and me and the girls huddled together at the parlour windows looking at the dreadful flames above the houses over the way, Mr. Buffle's being round the corner. Presently what should we see but some people running down the street straight to our door, and then the Major directing operations in the busiest way, and then some more people and then—carried in a chair similar to Guy Fawkes—Mr. Buffle in a blanket! My dear the Major has Mr. Buffle brought up our steps and whisked into the parlour and carted out on the sofy, and then he and all the rest of them without so much as a word burst away again full speed, leaving the impression of a vision except for Mr. Buffle awful in his blanket with his eyes a rolling. In a twinkling they all burst back again with Mrs. Buffle in another blanket, which whisked in and carted out on the sofy they all burst off again and all burst back again with Miss Buffle in another blanket, which again whisked in and carted out they all burst off again and all burst back again with Mr. Buffle's articled young gentleman in another blanket—him a holding round the necks of two men carrying him by the legs, similar to the picter of the disgraceful creetur who has lost the fight (but where the chair I do not know) and his hair having the appearance of newly played. upon. When all four of a row, the Major rubs his hands and whispers me with what little hoarseness he can get together, "If our dear remarkable boy was only at home what a delightful treat this would be for him!" My dear we made them some hot tea and toast and some hot brandy-and-water with a little comfortable nutmeg in it, and at first they were scared and low in their spirits but being fully insured got sociable. And the first use Mr. Buffle made of his tongue was to call the Major his Preserver and his best of friends and to say "My for ever dearest sir let me make you known to Mrs. Buffle" which also addressed him as her Preserver and her best of friends and was fully as cordial as the blanket would admit of. Also Miss Buffle. The articled young gentleman's head was a little light and he sat a moaning "Robina is reduced to cinders, Robina is reduced to cinders!" Which went more to the heart on account of his having got wrapped in his blanket as if he was looking out of a violin-celler-case, until Mr. Buffle says "Robina speak to him!" Miss Buffle says "Dear George!" and but for the Major's pouring down brandy-and-water on the instant which caused a catching in his throat owing to the nutmeg and a violent fit of coughing it might have proved too much for his strength. When the articled young gentleman got the better of it Mr. Buffle leaned up against Mrs. Buffle being two bundles, a little while in confidence, and then says with tears in his eyes which the Major noticing wiped, "We have not been an united family, let us after this danger become so, take her George." The young gentleman could not put his arm out far to do it, but his spoken expressions were very beautiful though of a wandering class. And I do not know that I ever had a much pleasanter meal than the breakfast we took together after we had all dozed, when Miss Buffle made tea very sweetly in quite the Roman style as depicted formerly at Covent Garden Theatre and when the whole family was most agreeable, as they have ever proved since that night when the Major stood at the foot of the Fire-Escape and claimed them as they came down—the young gentleman headforemost, which accounts. And though I do not say that we should be less liable to think ill of one another if strictly limited to blankets, still I do say that we might most of us come to a better understanding if we kept one another less at a distance. Why there's Wozenham's lower down on the other side of the street. I had a feeling of much soreness several years respecting what I must still ever call Miss Wozenham's systematic underbidding and the likeness of the house in Bradshaw having far too many windows and a most umbrageous and outrageous Oak which never yet was seen in Norfolk-street nor yet a carriage and four at Wozenham's door, which it would have been far more to Bradshaw's credit to have drawn a cab. This frame of mind continued bitter down to the very afternoon in January last when one of my girls, Sally Rairyganoo which I still suspect of Irish extraction though family represented Cambridge, else why abscond with a bricklayer of the Limerick persuasion and be married in pattens not waiting till his black eye was decently got round with all the company fourteen in number and one horse fighting outside on the roof of the vehicle—I repeat my dear my ill-regulated state of mind towards Miss Wozenham continued down to the very afternoon of January last past when Sally Rairyganoo came banging (I can use no milder expression) into my room with a jump which may be Cambridge and may not, and said "Hurroo Missis! Miss Wozenham's sold up!" My dear when I had it thrown in my face and conscience that the girl Sally had reason to think I could be glad of the ruin of a fellow-creeter, I burst into tears and dropped back in my chair and I says "I am ashamed of myself!" Well! I tried to settle to my tea but I could not do it what with thinking of Miss Wozenham and her distresses. It was a wretched night and I went up to a front window and looked over at Wozenham's and as well as I could make it out down the street in the fog it was the dismalest of the dismal and not a light to be seen. So at last I says to myself "This will not do," and I puts on my oldest bonnet and shawl not wishing Miss Wozenham to be reminded of my best at such a time, and lo and behold you I goes over to Wozenham's and knocks. "Miss Wozenham at home?" I says turning my head when I heard the door go. And then I saw it was Miss Wozenham herself who had opened it and sadly worn she was poor thing and her eyes all swelled and swelled with crying. "Miss Wozenham" I says "it is several years since there was a little unpleasantness betwixt us on the subject of my grandson's cap being down your Airy. I have overlooked it and I hope you have done the same." "Yes Mrs. Lirriper" she says in a surprise "I have." "Then my dear" I says "I should be glad to come in and speak a word to you." Upon my calling her my dear Miss Wozenham breaks out a crying most pitiful, and a not unfeeling elderly person that might have been better shaved in a nightcap with a hat over it offering a polite apology for the mumps having worked themselves into his constitution, and also for sending home to his wife on the bellows which was in his hand as a writing-desk, looks out of the back parlour and says "The lady wants a word of comfort" and goes in again. So I was able to say quite natural "Wants a word of comfort does she sir? Then please the pigs she shall have it!" And Miss Wozenham and me we go into the front room with a wretched light that seemed to have been crying too and was sputtering out, and I says "Now my dear, tell me all," and she wrings her hands and says "Oh Mrs. Lirriper that man is in possession here, and I have not a friend in the world who is able to help me with a shilling." It doesn't signify a bit what a talkative old body like me said to Miss Wozenham when she said that, and so I'll tell you instead my dear that I'd have given thirty shillings to have taken her over to tea, only I durstn't on account of the Major. Not you see but what I knew I could draw the Major out like thread and wind him round my linger on most subjects and perhaps even on that if I was to set myself to it, but him and me had so often belied Miss Wozenham to one another that I was shamefaced, and I knew she had offended his pride and never mine, and likewise I felt timid that that Rairyganoo girl might make things awkward. So I says "My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs." And we had the tea and the affairs too and after all it was but forty pound, and—There! she's as industrious and straight a creeter as ever lived and has paid back half of it already, and where's the use of saying more, particularly when it ain't the point? For the point is that when she was a kissing my hands and holding them in hers and kissing them again and blessing blessing blessing, I cheered up at last and I says " Why what a waddling old goose I have been my dear to take you for something so very different!" "Ah but I too" says she "how have I mistaken you!" "Come for goodness' sake tell me" I says "what you. thought of me?" "Oh" says she "I thought you had no feeling for such a hard hand-to-mouth life as mine, and were rolling in affluence." I says shaking my sides (and very glad to do it for I had been a choking quite long enough) "Only look at my figure my dear and give me your opinion whether if I was in affluence I should be likely to roll in it!" That did it! We got as merry as grigs (whatever they are, if you happen to know my dear—I don't) and I went home to my blessed home as happy and as thankful as could be. But before I make an end of it, think even of my having misunderstood the Major! Yes! For next forenoon the Major came into my little room with his brushed hat in his hand and he begins "My dearest madam" and then put his face in his hat as if he had just come into church. As I sat all in a maze he came out of his hat and began again. "My esteemed and beloved friend—" and then went into his hat again. "Major," I cries out frightened "has anything happened to our darling boy?" "No, no, no" says the Major "but Miss Wozenham has been here this morning to make her excuses to me, and by the Lord I can't get over what she told me." "Hoity toity, Major," I says "you don't know yet that I was afraid of you last night and didn't think half as well of you as I ought! So come out of church Major and forgive me like a dear old friend and I'll never do so any more." And I leave you to judge my dear whether I ever did or will. And how affecting to think of Miss Wozenham out of her small income and her losses doing so much for her poor old father, and keeping a brother that had had the misfortune to soften his brain against the hard mathematics as neat as a new pin in the three back represented to lodgers as a lumber-room and consuming a whole shoulder of mutton whenever provided! And now my dear I really am a going to tell you about my Legacy if you're inclined to favour me with your attention, and I did fully intend to have come straight to it only one thing does so bring up another. It was the month of June and the day before Midsummer Day when my girl—Winifred Madgers—she was what is termed a Plymouth Sister, and the Plymouth Brother that made away with her was quite right, for a tidier young woman for a wife never came into a house and afterwards called with the beautifullest Plymouth Twins — it was the day before Midsummer Day when Winifred Madgers comes and says to me "A gentleman from the Consul's wishes particular to speak to Mrs. Lirriper." If you'll believe me my dear the Consols at the bank where I have a little matter for Jemmy got into my head, and I says "Good gracious I hope he ain't had any dreadful fall!" Says Winifred "He don't look as if he had ma'am." And I says " Show him in." The gentleman came in dark and with his hair cropped what I should consider too close, and he says very polite "Madame Lirrwiper!" I says "Yes sir. Take a chair." "I come," says he "frrwom the Frrwench Consul's." So I saw at once that it wasn't the Bank of England. "We have rrweceived," says the gentleman turning his r's very curious and skilful, "frrwom the Mairrwie at Sens, a communication which I will have the honour to rrwead. Madame Lirrwiper understands Frrwench?" "Oh dear no sir!" says I. "Madame Lirriper don't understand anything of the sort." "It matters not," says the gentleman, " I will trrwanslate." With that my dear the gentleman after reading something about a Department and a Mairie (which Lord forgive me I supposed till the Major came home was Mary, and never was I more puzzled than to think how that young woman came to have so much to do with it) translated a lot with the most obliging pains, and it came to this:—That in the town of Sens in France, an unknown Englishman lay a dying. That he was speechless and without motion. That in his lodging there was a gold watch and a purse containing such and such money and a trunk containing such and such clothes, but no passport and no papers, except that on his table was a pack of cards and that he had written in pencil on the back of the ace of hearts: "To the authorities. When I am dead, pray send what is left, as a last Legacy, to Mrs. Lirriper Eighty-one Norfolk-street Strand London." When the gentleman had explained all this, which seemed to be drawn up much more methodical than I should have given the French credit for, not at that time knowing the nation, he put the document into my hand. And much the wiser I was for that you may be sure, except that it had the look of being made out upon grocery-paper and was stamped all over with eagles. "Does Madame Lirrwiper" says the gentleman "believe she rrwecognises her unfortunate compatrrwiot?" You may imagine the flurry it put me into my dear to be talked to about my compatriots. I says "Excuse me. Would you have the kindness sir to make your language as simple as you can?" "This Englishman unhappy, at the point of death. This compatrrwiot afflicted," says the gentleman. "Thank you sir" I says "I understand you now. No sir I have not the least idea who this can be." "Has Madame Lirrwiper no son, no nephew, no godson, no frrwiend, no acquaintance of any kind in Frrwance?" "To my certain knowledge" says I "no relation or friend, and to the best of my belief no acquaintance." "Pardon me. You take Locataires?" says the gentleman. My dear fully believing he was offering me something with his obliging foreign manners—snuff for anything I knew—I gave a little bend of my head and I says if you'll credit it, "No I thank you. I have not contracted the habit." The gentleman looks perplexed and says "Lodgers?" "Oh!" says I laughing. "Bless the man! Why yes to be sure!" "May it not be a former lodger?" says the gentleman. "Some lodger that you pardoned some rrwent? You have pardoned lodgers some rrwent?" "Hem! It has happened sir" says I, "but I assure you I can call to mind no gentleman of that description that this is at all likely to be." In short my dear we could make nothing of it, and the gentleman noted down what I said and went away. But he left me the paper of which he had two with him, and when the Major came in I says to the Major as I put it in his hand "Major here's Old Moore's Almanack with the hieroglyphic complete, for your opinion." It took the Major a little longer to read than I should have thought, judging from the copious flow with which he seemed to be gifted when attacking the organ-men, but at last he got through it and stood a gazing at me in amazement. "Major" I says "you're paralysed." "Madam" says the Major, "Jemmy Jackman is doubled up." Now it did so happen that the Major had been out to get a little information about railroads and steam-boats, as our boy was coming home for his Midsummer holidays next day and we were going to take him somewhere for a treat and a change. So while the Major stood a gazing it came into my head to say to him "Major I wish you'd go and look at some of your books and maps, and see whereabouts this same town of Sens is in France." The Major he roused himself and he went into the Parlours and he poked about a little, and he came back to me and lie says: "Sens my dearest madam is seventy odd miles south of Paris." With what I may truly call a desperate effort "Major" I says "we'll go there with our blessed boy!" If ever the Major was beside himself it was at the thoughts of that journey. All day long he was like the wild man of the woods after meeting with an advertisement in the papers telling him something to his advantage, and early next morning hours before Jemmy could possibly come home he was outside in the street ready to call out to him that we was all a going to France. Young Rosy-cheeks you may believe was as wild as the Major, and they did carry on to that degree that I says "If you two children ain't more orderly I'll pack you both off to bed." And then they fell to cleaning up the Major's telescope to see France with, and went out and bought a leather bag with a snap to hang round Jemmy, and him to carry the money like a little Fortunatus with his purse. If I hadn't passed my word and raised their hopes, I doubt if I could have gone through with the undertaking but it was too late to go back now. So on the second day after Midsummer Day we went off by the morning mail. And when we came to the sea which I had never seen but once in my life and that when my poor Lirriper was courting me, the freshness of it and the deepness and the airiness and to think that it had been rolling ever since and that it was always a rolling and so few of us minding, made me feel quite serious. But I felt happy too and so did Jemmy and the Major and not much motion on the whole, though me with a swimming in the head and a sinking but able to take notice that the foreign insides appear to be constructed hollower than the English, leading to much more tremenjous noises when bad sailors. But my dear the blueness and the lightness and the coloured look of everything and the very sentry-boxes striped and the shining rattling drums and the little soldiers with their waists and tidy gaiters, when we got across to the Continentit made me feel as if I don't know what—as if the atmosphere had been lifted off me. And as to lunch why bless you if I kept a man-cook and two kitchen-maids I couldn't get it done for twice the money, and no injured young women a glaring at you and grudging you and acknowledging your patronage by wishing that your food might choke you, but so civil and so hot and attentive and every way comfortable except Jemmy pouring wine down his throat by tumblers-full and me expecting to see him drop under the table. And the way in which Jemmy spoke his French was a real charm. It was often wanted of him, for whenever anybody spoke a syllable to me I says "Noncomprenny, you're very kind but it's no use—Now Jemmy!" and then Jemmy he fires away at 'em lovely, the only thing wanting in Jemmy's French being as it appeared to me that he hardly ever understood a word of what they said to him which made it scarcely of the use it might have been though in other respects a perfect Native, and regarding the Major's fluency I should have been of the opinion judging French by English that there might have been a greater choice of words in the language though still I must admit that if I hadn't known him when he asked a military gentleman in a grey cloak what o'clock it was I should have took him for a Frenchman born. Before going on to look after my Legacy we were to make one regular day in Paris, and I leave you to judge my dear what a day that was with Jemmy and the Major and the telescope and me and the prowling young man at the inn door (but very civil too) that went along with us to show the sights. All along the railway to Paris Jemmy and the Major had been frightening me to death by stooping down on the platforms at stations to inspect the engines underneath their mechanical stomachs, and by creeping in and out I don't know where all, to find improvements for the United Grand Junction Parlour, but when we got out into the brilliant streets on a bright morning they gave up all their London improvements as a bad job and gave their minds to Paris. Says the prowling young man to me "Will I speak Inglis No?" So I says "If you can young man I shall take it as a favour," but after half an hour of it when I fully believed the man had gone mad and me too I says "Be so good as fall back on your French sir," knowing that then I shouldn't have the agonies of trying to understand him which was a happy release. Not that I lost much more than the rest either, for I generally noticed that when he had described something very long indeed and I says to Jemmy "What does he say Jemmy?" Jemmy says looking at him with vengeance in his eye "He is so jolly indistinct!" and that when he had described it longer all over again and I says to Jemmy "Well Jemmy what's it all about?" says "He says the building was repaired in seventeen hundred and four, Gran." Wherever that prowling young man formed his prowling habits I cannot be expected to know, but the way in which he went round the corner while we had our breakfasts and was there again when we swallowed the last crumb was most marvellous, and just the same at dinner and at night, prowling equally at the theatre and the inn gateway and the shop-doors when we bought a trifle or two and everywhere else but troubled with a tendency to spit. And of Paris I can tell you no more my dear than that it's town and country both in one, and carved stone and long streets of high houses and gardens and fountains and statues and trees and gold, and immensely big soldiers and immensely little soldiers and the pleasantest nurses with the whitest caps a playing at skipping-rope with the bunchiest babies in the flattest caps, and clean tablecloths spread everywhere for dinner and people sitting out of doors smoking and sipping all day long and little plays being acted in the open air for little people and every shop a complete and elegant room, and everybody seeming to play at everything in this world. And as to the sparkling lights my dear after dark, glittering high up and low down and on before and on behind and all round, and the crowd of theatres and the crowd of people and the crowd of all sorts, it's pure enchantment. And pretty well the only thing that grated on me was that whether you pay your fare at the railway or whether you change your money at a money-dealer's or whether you take your ticket at the theatre, the lady or gentleman is caged up (I suppose by Government) behind the strongest iron bars having more of a Zoological appearance than a free country. Well to be sure when I did after all get my precious bones to bed that night, and my Young Rogue came in to kiss me and asks "What do you think of this lovely lovely Paris, Gran?" I says "Jemmy I feel as if it was beautiful fireworks being let off in my head." And very cool and refreshing the pleasant country was next day when we went on to look after my Legacy, and rested me much and did me a deal of good. So at length and at last my dear we come to Sens, a pretty little town with a great two-towered cathedral and the rooks flying in and out of the loopholes and another tower atop of one of the towers like a sort of a stone pulpit. In which pulpit with the birds skimming below him if you'll believe me, I saw a speck while I was resting at the inn before dinner which they made signs to me was Jemmy and which really was. I had been a fancying as I sat in the balcony of the hotel that an Angel might light there and call down to the people to be good, but I little thought what Jemmy all unknown to himself was a calling down from that high place to some one in the town. The pleasantest-situated inn my dear! Right under the two towers, with their shadows a changing upon it all day like a kind of a sundial, and country people driving in and out of the court-yard in carts and hooded cabriolets and such-like, and a market outside in front of the cathedral, and all so quaint and like a picter. The Major and me agreed that whatever came of my Legacy this was the place to stay in for our holiday, and we also agreed that our dear boy had best not be checked in his joy that night by the sight of the Englishman if he was still alive, but that we would go together and alone. For you are to understand that the Major not feeling himself quite equal in his wind to the heighth to which Jemmy had climbed, had come back to me and left him with the Guide. So after dinner when Jemmy had set off to see the river, the Major went down to the Mairie, and presently came back with a military character in a sword and spurs and a cocked-hat and a yellow shoulder-belt and long tags about him that he must have found inconvenient. And the Major says "The Englishman still lies in the same state dearest madam. This gentleman will conduct us to his lodging." Upon which the military character pulled off his cocked-hat to me, and I took notice that he had shaved his forehead in imitation of Napoleon Bonaparte but not like. We went out at the court-yard gate and past the great doors of the cathedral and down a narrow High Street where the people were sitting chatting at their shop-doors and the children were at play. The military character went in front and he stopped at a pork-shop with a little statue of a pig sitting up, in the window, and a private door that a donkey was looking out of. When the donkey saw the military character he came slipping out on the pavement to turn round and then clattered along the passage into a back-yard. So the coast being clear, the Major and me were conducted up the common stair and into the front room on the second, a bare room with a red tiled floor and the outside lattice blinds pulled close to darken it. As the military character opened the blinds I saw the tower where I had seen Jemmy, darkening as the sun got low, and I turned to the bed by the wall and saw the Englishman. It was some kind of brain fever he had had, and his hair was all gone, and some wetted folded linen lay upon his head. I looked at him very attentive as he lay there all wasted away with his eyes closed, and I says to the Major "I never saw this face before." The Major looked at him very attentive too, and he says "I never saw this face before." When the Major explained our words to the military character, that gentleman shrugged his shoulders and showed the Major the card on which it was written about the Legacy for me. It had been written with a weak and trembling hand in bed, and I knew no more of the writing than of the face. Neither did the Major. Though lying there alone, the poor creetur was as well taken care of as could be hoped, and would have been quite unconscious of any one's sitting by him then. I got the Major to say that we were not going away at present and that I would come back to-morrow and watch a bit by the bedside. But I got him to add—and I shook my head hard to make it stronger—"We agree that we never saw this face before." Our boy was greatly surprised when we told him sitting out in the balcony in the starlight, and he ran over some of those stories of former Lodgers, of the Major's putting down, and asked wasn't it possible that it might be this lodger or that lodger. It was not possible and we went to bed. In the morning just at breakfast-time the military character came jingling round, and said that the doctor thought from the signs he saw there might be some rally before the end. So I says to the Major and Jemmy, "You two boys go and enjoy yourselves, and I'll take my Prayer-Book and go sit by the bed." So I went, and I sat there some hours, reading a prayer for him poor soul now and then, and it was quite on in the day when he moved his hand. He had been so still, that the moment he moved I knew of it, and I pulled off my spectacles and laid down my book and rose and looked at him. From moving one hand he began to move both, and then his action was the action of a person groping in the dark. Long after his eyes had opened, there was a film over them and he still felt for his way out into light. But by slow degrees his sight cleared and his hands stopped. He saw the ceiling, he saw the wall, he saw me. As his sight cleared, mine cleared too, and when at last we looked in one another's faces, I started back and I cries passionately: "O you wicked wicked man! Your sin has found you out!" For I knew him, the moment life looked out of his eyes, to be Mr. Edson, Jemmy's father who had so cruelly deserted Jemmy's young unmarried mother who had died in my arms, poor tender creetur, and left Jemmy to me. "You cruel wicked man! You bad black traitor!" With the little strength he had, he made an attempt to turn over on his wretched face to hide it. His arm dropped out of the bed and his head with it, and there he lay before me crushed in body and in mind. Surely the miserablest sight under the summer sun! "O blessed Heaven" I says a crying, "teach me what to say to this broken mortal! I am a poor sinful creetur, and the Judgment is not mine." As I lifted my eyes up to the clear bright sky, I saw the high tower where Jemmy had stood above the birds, seeing that very window; and the last look of that poor pretty young mother when her soul brightened and got free, seemed to shine down from it. "O man, man, man!" I says, and I went on my knees beside the bed; "if your heart is rent asunder and you are truly penitent for what you did, Our Saviour will have mercy on you yet!" As I leaned my face against the bed, his feeble hand could just move itself enough to touch me. I hope the touch was penitent. It tried to hold my dress and keep hold, but the fingers were too weak to close. I lifted him back upon the pillows, and I says to him: "Can you hear me?" He looked yes. "Do you know me?" He looked yes, even yet more plainly. "I am not here alone. The Major is with me. You recollect the Major?" Yes. That is to say he made out yes, in the same way as before. "And even the Major and I are not alone. My grandson—his godson—is with us. Do you hear? My grandson." The fingers made another trial to catch at my sleeve, but could only creep near it and fall. "Do you know who my grandson is?" Yes. "I pitied and loved his lonely mother. When his mother lay a dying I said to her, 'My dear this baby is sent to a childless old woman.' He has been my pride and joy ever since. I love him as dearly as if he had drunk from my breast. Do you ask to see my grandson before you die?' Yes. "Show me, when I leave off speaking, if you correctly understand what I say. He has been kept unacquainted with the story of his birth. He has no knowledge of it. No suspicion of it. If I bring him here to the side of this bed, he will suppose you to be a perfect stranger. It is more than I can do, to keep from him the knowledge that there is such wrong and misery in the world; but that it was ever so near him in his innocent cradle, I have kept from him, and I do keep from him, and I ever will keep from him. For his mother's sake, and for his own." He showed me that he distinctly understood, and the tears fell from his eyes. "Now rest, and you shall see him." So I got him a little wine and some brandy and I put things straight about his bed. But I began to be troubled in my mind lest Jemmy and the Major might be too long of coming back. What with this occupation for my thoughts and hands, I didn't hear a foot upon the stairs, and was startled when I saw the Major stopped short in the middle of the room by the eyes of the man upon the bed, and knowing him then, as I had known him a little while ago. There was anger in the Major's face, and there was horror and repugnance and I don't know what. So I went up to him and I led him to the bedside and when I clasped my hands and lifted of them up, the Major did the like. "O Lord " I says "Thou knowest what we two saw together of the sufferings and sorrows of that young creetur now with Thee. If this dying man is truly penitent, we two together humbly pray Thee to have mercy on him!" The Major says "Amen!" and then after a little stop I whispers him, "Dear old friend fetch our beloved boy." And the Major, so clever as to have got to understand it all without being told a word, went away and brought him. Never never never, shall I forget the fair bright face of our boy when he stood at the foot of the bed, looking at his unknown father. And O so like his dear young mother then! "Jemmy" I says, "I have found out all about this poor gentleman who is so ill, and he did lodge in the old house once. And as he wants to see all belonging to it, now that he is passing away, I sent for you." "Ah poor man!" says Jemmy stepping forward and touching one of his hands with great gentleness. "My heart melts for him. Poor, poor, man!" The eyes that were so soon to close for ever, turned to me, and I was not that strong in the pride of my strength that I could resist them. "My darling boy, there is a reason in the secret history of this fellow-creetur, lying as the best and worst of us must all lie one day, which I think would ease his spirit in his last hour if you would lay your cheek against his forehead and say 'May God forgive you!'" "O Gran," says Jemmy with a full heart "I am not worthy!" But he leaned down and did it. Then the faltering fingers made out to catch hold of my sleeve at last, and I believe he was a trying to kiss me when he died. * * * * * There my dear! There you have the story of my Legacy in full, and it's worth ten times the trouble I have spent upon it if you are pleased to like it. You might suppose that it set us against the little French town of Sens, but no we didn't find that. I found myself that I never looked up at the high tower atop of the other tower, but the days came back again when that fair young creetur with her pretty bright hair trusted in me like a mother, and the recollection made the place so peaceful to me as I can't express. And every soul about the hotel down to the pigeons in the court-yard made friends with Jemmy and the Major, and went lumbering away with them on all sorts of expeditions in all sorts of vehicles drawn by rampagious cart-horses—with heads and without—mud for paint and ropes for harness and every new friend dressed in blue like a butcher, and every new horse standing on his hind legs wanting to devour and consume every other horse, and every man that had a whip to crack crack-crack-crack-crack-cracking it as if it was a schoolboy with his first. As to the Major my dear that man lived the greater part of his time with a little tumbler in one hand and a bottle of small wine in the other, and whenever he saw anybody else with a little tumbler, no matter who it was—the military character with the tags, or the inn servants at their supper in the court-yard, or towns-people a chatting on a bench, or country-people a starting home after market—down rushes the Major to clink his glass against their glasses and cry—Hola! Vive Somebody! or Vive Something! as if he was beside himself. And though I could not quite approve of the Major's doing it, still the ways of the world are the ways of the world varying according to different parts of it, and dancing at all in the open Square with a lady that kept a barber's shop my opinion is that the Major was right to dance his best and to lead off with a power that I did not think was in him, though I was a little uneasy at the Barricading sound of the cries that were set up by the other dancers and the rest of the company, until when I says "What are they ever calling out Jemmy?" Jemmy says "They're calling out Gran, Bravo the Military English! Bravo the Military English!" which was very gratifying to my feelings as a Briton and became the name the Major was known by. But every evening at a regular time we all three sat out in the balcony of the hotel at the end of the court-yard, looking up at the golden and rosy light as it changed on the great towers, and looking at the shadows of the towers as they changed on all about us ourselves included, and what do you think we did there? My dear if Jemmy hadn't brought some other of those stories of the Major's taking down from the telling of former lodgers at Eighty-one Norfolk-street, and if he didn't bring 'em out with this speech: "Here you are Gran! Here you are Godfather! More of 'em! I'll read. And though you wrote 'em for me, Godfather, I know you won't disapprove of my making 'em over to Gran; will you?" "No my dear boy," says the Major. "Everything we have is hers, and we are hers." "Hers ever affectionately and devotedly J. Jackman, and J. Jackman Lirriper," cries the Young Rogue giving me a close hug. "Very well then Godfather. Look here. As Gran is in the Legacy way just now, I shall make these stories a part of Gran's Legacy. I'll leave 'em to her. What do you say Godfather?" "Hip hip Hurrah!" says the Major. "Very well then" cries Jemmy all in a bustle. "Vive the Military English! Vive the Lady Lirriper! Vive the Jemmy Jackman Ditto! Vive the Legacy! Now, you look out, Gran. And you look out, Godfather, I'll read! And I'll tell you what I'll do besides. On the last night of our holiday here when we are all packed and going away, I'll top up with something of my own." "Mind you do sir" says I. "Don't you be afraid, Gran" cries Young Sparkles. "Now then! I'm going to read. Once, twice, three and away. Open your mouths and shut your eyes, and see what Fortune sends you. All in to begin. Look out Gran. Look out Godfather!" So in his lively spirits Jemmy began a reading, and he read every evening while we were there, and sometimes we were about it late enough to have a candle burning quite steady out in the balcony in the still air. And so here is the rest of my Legacy my dear that I now hand over to you in this bundle of papers all in the Major's plain round writing. I wish I could hand you the church towers over too, and the pleasant air and the inn yard and the pigeons often coming and perching on the rail by Jemmy and seeming to be critical with their heads on one side, but you'll take as you find. Well my dear and so the evening readings of these jottings of the Major's brought us round at last to the evening when we were all packed and going away next day, and I do assure you that by that time though it was deliciously comfortable to look forward to the dear old house in Norfolk-street again, I had formed quite a high opinion of the French nation and had noticed them to be much more homely and domestic in their families and far more simple and amiable in their lives than I had ever been led to expect, and it did strike me between ourselves that in one particular they might be imitated to advantage by another nation which I will not mention, and that is in the courage with which they take their little enjoyments on little means and with little things and don't let solemn big-wigs stare them out of countenance or speechify them dull, of which said solemn big-wigs I have ever had the one opinion that I wish they were all made comfortable separately in coppers with the lids on and never let out any more. "Now young man," I says to Jemmy when we brought our chairs into the balcony that last evening, "you please to remember who was to 'top up.'" "l am the illustrious personage." But he looked so serious after he had made me that light answer, that the Major raised his eyebrows at me and I raised mine at the Major. "Gran and Godfather," says Jemmy, "you can hardly think how much my mind has run on Mr. Edson's death." It gave me a little check. "Ah! It was a sad scene my love" I says, "and sad remembrances come back stronger than merry. But this" I says after a little silence, to rouse myself and the Major and Jemmy all together, "is not topping up. Tell us your story my dear." "I will" says Jemmy. "What is the date sir?" says I. "Once upon a time when pigs drank wine?" "No Gran," says Jemmy, still serious; "once upon a time when the French drank wine." Again I glanced at the Major, and the Major glanced at me. "In short, Gran and Godfather," says Jemmy, looking up, "the date is this time, and I'm going to tell you Mr. Edson's story." The flutter that it threw me into. The change of colour on the part of the Major! "That is to say, you understand," our bright-eyed boy says, "I am going to give you my version of it. I shall not ask whether it's right or not, firstly because you said you knew very little about it, Gran, and secondly because what little you did know was a secret." I folded my hands in my lap and I never took my eyes off Jemmy as he went running on. "The unfortunate gentleman" Jemmy commences, "who is the subject of our present narrative was the son of Somebody, and was born Somewhere, and chose a profession Somehow. It is not with those parts of his career that we have to deal; but with his early attachment to a young and beautiful lady." I thought I should have dropped. I durstn't look at the Major; but I knew what his state was, without looking at him. "The father of our ill-starred hero" says Jemmy, copying as it seemed to me the style of some of his story-books, "was a worldly man who entertained ambitious views for his only son and who firmly set his face against the contemplated alliance with a virtuous but penniless orphan. Indeed he went so far as roundly to assure our hero that unless he weaned his thoughts from the object of his devoted affection, he would disinherit him. At the same time, he proposed as a suitable match, the daughter of a neighbouring gentleman of a good estate, who was neither ill favoured nor unamiable, and whose eligibility in a pecuniary point of view could not be disputed. But young Mr. Edson, true to the first and only love that had inflamed his breast, rejected all considerations of self-advancement, and, deprecating his father's anger in a respectful letter, ran away with her." My dear I had begun to take a turn for the better, but when it come to running away I began to take another turn for the worse. "The lovers" says Jemmy "fled to London and were united at the altar of Saint Clement's Danes. And it is at this period of their simple but touching story, that we find them inmates of the dwelling of a highly respected and beloved lady of the name of Gran, residing within a hundred miles of Norfolk street." I felt that we were almost safe now, I felt that the dear boy had no suspicion of the bitter truth, and I looked at the Major for the first time and drew a long breath. The Major gave me a nod. "Our hero's father" Jemmy goes on "proving implacable and carrying his threat into unrelenting execution, the struggles of the young couple in London were severe, and would have been far more so, but for their good angel's having conducted them to the abode of Mrs. Gran: who, divining their poverty (in spite of their endeavours to conceal it from her), by a thousand delicate arts smoothed their rough way, and alleviated the sharpness of their first distress." Here Jemmy took one of my hands in one of his, and began a marking the turns of his story by making me give a beat from time to time upon his other hand. "After a while, they left the house of Mrs. Gran, and pursued their fortunes through a variety of successes and failures elsewhere. But in all reverses, whether for good or evil, the words of Mr. Edson to the fair young partner of his life, were: 'Unchanging Love and Truth will carry us through all!'" My hand trembled in the dear boy's, those words were so wofully unlike the fact. "Unchanging Love and Truth" says Jemmy over again, as if he had a proud kind of a noble pleasure in it, "will carry us through all! Those were his words. And so they fought their way, poor but gallant and happy, until Mrs. Edson gave birth to a child." "A daughter," I says. "No" says Jemmy, "a son. And the father was so proud of it that he could hardly bear it out of his sight. But a dark cloud overspread the scene. Mrs. Edson sickened, drooped, and died." "Ah! Sickened, drooped, and died!" I says. "And so Mr. Edson's only comfort, only hope on earth, and only stimulus to action, was his darling boy. As the child grew older, he grew so like his mother that he was her living picture. It used to make him wonder why his father cried when he kissed him. But unhappily he was like his mother in constitution as well as in face, and he died too before he had grown out of childhood. Then Mr. Edson, who had good abilities, in his forlornness and despair threw them all to the winds. He became apathetic, reckless, lost. Little by little he sank down, down, down, down, until at last he almost lived (I think) by gaming. And so sickness overtook him in the town of Sens in France, and he lay down to die. But now that he laid him down when all was done, and looked back upon the green Past beyond the time when he had covered it with ashes, he thought gratefully of the good Mrs. Gran long lost sight of, who had been so kind to him and his young wife in the early days of their marriage, and he left the little that he had as a last Legacy to her. And she, being brought to see him, at first no more knew him than she would know from seeing the ruin of a Greek or Roman Temple, what it used to be before it fell; but at length she remembered him. And then he told her with tears, of his regret for the misspent part of his life, and besought her to think as mildly of it as she could, because it was the poor fallen Angel of his unchanging Love and Constancy after all. And because she had her grandson with her, and he fancied that his own boy, if he had lived, might have grown to be something like him, he asked her to let him touch his forehead with his cheek and say certain parting words." Jemmy's voice sank low when it got to that, and tears filled my eyes, and filled the Major's. "You little Conjuror" I says, "how did you ever make it all out? Go in and write it every word down, for it's a wonder." Which Jemmy did, and I have repeated it to you my dear from his writing. Then the Major took my hand and kissed it, and said "Dearest madam all has prospered with us." "Ah Major" I says drying my eyes, "we needn't have been afraid. We might have known it. Treachery don't come natural to beaming youth; but trust and pity, love and constancy they do, thank God!" Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy (1864 Christmas Number) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xii/page-573.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xii/page-573.html</a>. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xii/page-599.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xii/page-599.html</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1864-01-12 Type The nature or genre of the resource Christmas Number Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1864-01-12-Mrs_Lirripers_Legacy Description An account of the resource Published in All the Year Round, Vol. XII, Extra Christmas Number, 12 January 1864, pp. 1-48. Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles et. al. Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy (12 January 1864). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1864-01-12-Mrs_Lirripers_Legacy">https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1864-01-12-Mrs_Lirripers_Legacy</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Scanned material from Dickens Journals Online, <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk" id="LPNoLPOWALinkPreview" contenteditable="false" title="http://www.djo.org.uk">www.djo.org.uk</a>. Available under CC BY licence.* *Pages 15-36 are missing on DJO. They will be added to the scan on Dickens Search eventually. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. <ul> <li>Charles Dickens. 'Mrs. Lirriper Relates How She Went On, and Went Over' (No.1), pp. 1-11.</li> <li>Charles Allston Collins. 'A Past Lodger Relates a Wild Legend of a Doctor' (No.2), pp. 11-18.</li> <li>Rosa Mulholland. 'Another Past Lodger Relates His Experience as a Poor Relation' (No.3), pp. 18-24.</li> <li>Henry Spicer. 'Another Past Lodger Relates What Lot He Drew at Glumper House' (No.4), pp. 24-35.</li> <li>Amelia B. Edwards. 'Another Past Lodger Relates His Own Ghost Story' (No.5), pp. 35-40.</li> <li>Hesba Stretton. 'Another Past Lodger Relates Certain Passages to Her Husband' (No.6), pp. 40-47.</li> <li>Charles Dickens. 'Mrs. Lirriper Relates How Jemmy Topped Up' (No.7), pp. 47-48.</li> </ul> Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Ah! It's pleasant to drop into my own easy-chair my dear though a little palpitating what with trotting up-stairs and what with trotting down, and why kitchen-stairs should all be corner stairs is for the builders to justify though I do not think they fully understand their trade and never did, else why the sameness and why not more conveniences and fewer draughts and likewise making a practice of laying the plaster on too thick I am well convinced which holds the damp, and as to chimney-pots putting them on by guess-work like hats at a party and no more knowing what their effect will be upon the smoke bless you than I do if so much, except that it will mostly be either to send it down your throat in a straight form or give it a twist before it goes there. And what I says speaking as I find of those new metal chimneys all manner of shapes (there's a row of 'em at Miss Wozenham's lodging-house lower down on the other side of the way) is that they only work your smoke into artificial patterns for you before you swallow it and that I'd quite as soon swallow mine plain, the flavour being the same, not to mention the conceit of putting up signs on the top of your house to show the forms in which you take your smoke into your inside. Being here before your eyes my dear in my own easy-chair in my own quiet room in my own Lodging House Number Eighty-one Norfolk-street Strand London situated midway between the City and St. James's—if anything is where it used to be with these hotels calling themselves Limited but called Unlimited by Major Jackman rising up everywhere and rising up into flagstaffs where they can't go any higher, but my mind of those monsters is give me a landlord's or landlady's wholesome face when I come off a journey and not a brass plate with an electrified number clicking out of it which it's not in nature can be glad to see me and to which I don't want to be hoisted like molasses at the Docks and left there telegraphing for help with the most ingenious instruments but quite in vain—being here my dear I have no call to mention that I am still in the Lodgings as a business hoping to die in the same and if agreeable to the clergy partly read over at Saint Clement's Danes and concluded in Hatfield churchyard when lying once again by my poor Lirriper ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Neither should I tell you any news my dear in telling you that the Major is still a fixture in the Parlours quite as much so as the roof of the house, and that Jemmy is of boys the best and brightest and has ever had kept from him the cruel story of his poor pretty young mother Mrs. Edson being deserted in the second floor and dying in my arms, fully believing that I am his born Gran and him an orphan, though what with engineering since he took a taste for it and him and the Major making Locomotives out of parasols broken iron pots and cotton-reels and them absolutely a getting off the line and falling over the table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the originals it really is quite wonderful. And when I says to the Major, "Major can't you by any means give us a communication with the guard?" the Major says quite huffy, "No madam it's not to be done," and when I says " Why not?" the Major says, "That is between us who are in the Railway Interest madam and our friend the Right Honourable Vice-President of the Board of Trade" and if you'll believe me my dear the Major wrote to Jemmy at school to consult him on the answer I should have before I could get even that amount of unsatisfactoriness out of the man, the reason being that when we first began with the little model and the working signals beautiful and perfect (being in general as wrong as the real) and when I says laughing "What appointment am I to hold in this undertaking gentlemen?" Jemmy hugs me round the neck and tells me dancing, "You shall be the Public Gran" and consequently they put upon me just as much as ever they like and I sit a growling in my easy-chair. My dear whether it is that a grown man as clever as the Major cannot give half his heart and mind to anything—even a plaything—but must get into right down earnest with it, whether it is so or whether it is not so I do not undertake to say, but Jemmy is far outdone by the serious and believing ways of the Major in the management of the United Grand Junction Lirriper and Jackman Great Norfolk Parlour Line, "For" says my Jemmy with the sparkling eyes when it was christened, "we must have a whole mouthful of name Gran or our dear old Public" and there the young rogue kissed me, "won't stump up." So the Public took the shares—ten at ninepence, and immediately when that was spent twelve Preference at one-and-sixpence—and they were all signed by Jemmy and countersigned by the Major, and between ourselves much better worth the money than some shares I have paid for in my time. In the same holidays the line was made and worked and opened and ran excursions and had collisions and burst its boilers and all sorts of accidents and offences all most regular correct and pretty. The sense of responsibility entertained by the Major as a military style of station-master my dear starting the down train behind time and ringing one of those little bells that you buy with the little coal-scuttles off the tray round the man's neck in the street did him honour, but noticing the Major of a night when he is writing out his monthly report to Jemmy at school of the state of the Rolling Stock and the Permanent Way and all the rest of it (the whole kept upon the Major's sideboard and dusted with his own hands every morning before varnishing his boots) I notice him as full of thought and care as full can be and frowning in a fearful manner, but indeed the Major does nothing by halves as witness his great delight in going out surveying with Jemmy when he has Jemmy to go with, carrying a chain and a measuring tape and driving I don't know what improvements right through Westminster Abbey and fully believed in the streets to be knocking everything upside down by Act of Parliament. As please Heaven will come to pass when Jemmy takes to that as a profession! Mentioning my poor Lirriper brings into my head his own youngest brother the Doctor though Doctor of what I am sure it would be hard to say unless Liquor, for neither Physic nor Music nor yet Law does Joshua Lirriper know a morsel of except continually being summoned to the County Court and having orders made upon him which he runs away from, and once was taken in the passage of this very house with an umbrella up and the Major's hat on, giving his name with the door-mat round him as Sir Johnson Jones K.C.B. in spectacles residing at the Horse Guards. On which occasion he had got into the house not a minute before, through the girl letting him on to the mat when he sent in a piece of paper twisted more like one of those spills for lighting candles than a note, offering me the choice between thirty shillings in hand and his brains on the premises marked immediate and waiting for an answer. My dear it gave me such a dreadful turn to think of the brains of my poor dear Lirriper's own flesh and blood flying about the new oilcloth however unworthy to be so assisted, that I went out of my room here to ask him what he would take once for all not to do it for life when I found him in the custody of two gentlemen that I should have judged to be in the feather-bed trade if they had not announced the law, so fluffy were their personal appearance. "Bring your chains sir," says Joshua to the littlest of the two in the biggest hat, "rivet on my fetters!" Imagine my feelings when I pictered him clanking up Norfolk-street in irons and Miss Wozenham looking out of window! "Gentlemen" I says all of a tremble and ready to drop "please to bring him into Major Jackman's apartments." So they brought him into the Parlours, and when the Major spies his own curly-brimmed hat on him which Joshua Lirriper had whipped off its peg in the passage for a military disguise he goes into such a tearing passion that he tips it off his head with his hand and kicks it up to the ceiling with his foot where it grazed long afterwards. "Major" I says "be cool and advise me what to do with Joshua my dead and gone Lirriper's own youngest brother." "Madam" says the Major "my advice is that you board and lodge him in a Powder Mill, with a handsome gratuity to the proprietor when exploded." "Major" I says "as a Christian you cannot mean your words." "Madam" says the Major "by the Lord I do!" and indeed the Major besides being with all his merits a very passionate man for his size had a bad opinion of Joshua on account of former troubles even unattended by liberties taken with his apparel. When Joshua Lirriper hears this conversation betwixt us he turns upon the littlest one with the biggest hat and says "Come sir! Remove me to my vile dungeon. Where is my mouldy straw!" My dear at the picter of him rising in my mind dressed almost entirely in padlocks like Baron Trenck in Jemmy's book I was so overcome that I burst into tears and I says to the Major, "Major take my keys and settle with these gentlemen or I shall never know a happy minute more," which was done several times both before and since, but still I must remember that Joshua Lirriper has his good feelings and shows them in being always so troubled in his mind when he cannot wear mourning for his brother. Many a long year have I left off my widow's mourning not being wishful to intrude, but the tender point in Joshua that I cannot help a little yielding to is when he writes "One single sovereign would enable me to wear a decent suit of mourning for my much-loved brother. I vowed at the time of his lamented death that I would ever wear sables in memory of him but Alas how short-sighted is man, How keep that vow when penniless!" It says a good deal for the strength of his feelings that he couldn't have been seven year old when my poor Lirriper died and to have kept to it ever since is highly creditable. But we know there's good in all of us—if we only knew where it was in some of us—and though it was far from delicate in Joshua to work upon the dear child's feelings when first sent to school and write down into Lincolnshire for his pocket-money by return of post and got it, still he is my poor Lirriper's own youngest brother and mightn't have meant not paying his bill at the Salisbury Arms when his affection took him down to stay a fortnight at Hatfield churchyard and might have meant to keep sober but for bad company. Consequently if the Major had played on him with the garden-engine which he got privately into his room without my knowing of it, I think that much as I should have regretted it there would have been words betwixt the Major and me. Therefore my dear though he played on Mr. Buffle by mistake being hot in his head, and though it might have been misrepresented down at Wozenham's into not being ready for Mr. Buffle in other respects he being the Assessed Taxes, still I do not so much regret it as perhaps I ought. And whether Joshua Lirriper will yet do well in life I cannot say, but I did hear of his coming out at a Private Theatre in the character of a Bandit without receiving any offers afterwards from the regular managers. Mentioning Mr. Buffle gives an instance of there being good in persons where good is not expected, for it cannot be denied that Mr. Buffle's manners when engaged in his business were not agreeable. To collect is one thing and to look about as if suspicious of the goods being gradually removing in the dead of the night by a back door is another, over taxing you have no control but suspecting is voluntary. Allowances too must ever be made for a gentleman of the Major's warmth not relishing being spoke to with a pen in the mouth, and while I do not know that it is more irritable to my own feelings to have a low-crowned hat with a broad brim kept on in-doors than any other hat still I can appreciate the Major's, besides which without bearing malice or vengeance the Major is a man that scores up arrears as his habit always was with Joshua Lirriper. So at last my dear the Major lay in wait for Mr. Buffle and it worrited me a good deal. Mr. Buffle gives his rap of two sharp knocks one day and the Major bounces to the door. "Collector has called for two quarters' Assessed Taxes" says Mr. Buffle. "They are ready for him" says the Major and brings him in here. But on the way Mr. Buffle looks about him in his usual suspicious manner and the Major fires and asks him "Do you see a Ghost sir?" "No sir" says Mr. Buffle. "Because I have before noticed you" says the Major "apparently looking for a spectre very hard beneath the roof of my respected friend. When you find that supernatural agent, be so good as point him out sir." Mr. Buffle stares at the Major and then nods at me. "Mrs. Lirriper sir" says the Major going off into a perfect steam and introducing me with his hand. "Pleasure of knowing her" says Mr. Buffle. "A—hum—Jemmy Jackman sir!" says the Major introducing himself. "Honour of knowing you by sight" says Mr. Buffle. "Jemmy Jackman sir" says the Major wagging his head sideways in a sort of an obstinate fury "presents to you his esteemed friend that lady Mrs. Emma Lirriper of Eighty-one Norfolk-street Strand London in the County of Middlesex in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Upon which occasion sir," says the Major, "Jemmy Jackman takes your hat off." Mr. Buffle looks at his hat where the Major drops it on the floor, and he picks it up and puts it on again. "Sir" says the Major very red and looking him full in the face "there are two quarters of the Gallantry Taxes due and the Collector has called." Upon which if you can believe my words my dear the Major drops Mr. Buffle's hat off again. "This—" Mr. Buffle begins very angry with his pen in his mouth, when the Major steaming more and more says "Take your bit out sir! Or by the whole infernal system of Taxation of this country and every individual figure in the National Debt, I'll get upon your back and ride you like a horse!" which it's my belief he would have done and even actually jerking his neat little legs ready for a spring as it was. "This" says Mr. Buffle without his pen "is an assault and I'll have the law of you." "Sir" replies the Major "if you are a man of honour, your Collector of whatever may be due on the Honourable Assessment by applying to Major Jackman at The Parlours Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings, may obtain what he wants in full at any moment." When the Major glared at Mr. Buffle with those meaning words my dear I literally gasped for a teaspoonful of sal volatile in a wine-glass of water, and I says "Pray let it go no further gentlemen I beg and beseech of you!" But the Major could be got to do nothing else but snort long after Mr. Buffle was gone, and the effect it had upon my whole mass of blood when on the next day of Mr. Buffle's rounds the Major spruced himself up and went humming a tune up and down the street with one eye almost obliterated by his hat there are not expressions in Johnson's Dictionary to state. But I safely put the street door on the jar and got behind the Major's blinds with my shawl on and my mind made up the moment I saw danger to rush out screeching till my voice failed me and catch the Major round the neck till my strength went and have all parties bound. I had not been behind the blinds a quarter of an hour when I saw Mr. Buffle approaching with his Collecting-books in his hand. The Major likewise saw him approaching and hummed louder and himself approached. They met before the Airy railings. The Major takes off his hat at arm's length and says "Mr. Buffle I believe?" Mr. Buffle takes off his hat at arm's length and says "That is my name sir." Says the Major "Have you any commands for me, Mr. Buffle?" Says Mr. Buffle "Not any sir." Then my dear both of 'em bowed very low and haughty and parted, and whenever Mr. Buffle made his rounds in future him and the Major always met and bowed before the Airy railings, putting me much in mind of Hamlet and the other gentleman in mourning before killing one another, though I could have wished the other gentleman had done it fairer and even if less polite no poison. Mr. Buffle's family were not liked in this neighbourhood, for when you are a householder my dear you'll find it does not come by nature to like the Assessed, and it was considered besides that a one-horse pheayton ought not to have elevated Mrs. Buffle to that heighth especially when purloined from the Taxes which I myself did consider uncharitable. But they were not liked and there was that domestic unhappiness in the family in consequence of their both being very hard with Miss Buffle and one another on account of Miss Buffle's favouring Mr. Buffle's articled young gentleman, that it was whispered that Miss Buffle would go either into a consumption or a convent she being so very thin and off her appetite and two close-shaved gentlemen with white bands round their necks peeping round the corner whenever she went out in waistcoats resembling black pinafores. So things stood towards Mr. Buffle when one night I was woke by a frightful noise and a smell of burning, and going to my bed-room window saw the whole street in a glow. Fortunately we had two sets empty just then and before I could hurry on some clothes I heard the Major hammering at the attics' doors and calling out "Dress yourselves!—Fire! Don't be frightened!—Fire ! Collect your presence of mind!—Fire! All right—Fire!" most tremenjously. As I opened my bedroom door the Major came tumbling in over himself and me and caught me in his arms. "Major" I says breathless "where is it?" "I don't know dearest madam" says the Major—"Fire! Jemmy Jackman will defend you to the last drop of his blood—Fire! If the dear boy was at home what a treat this would be for him—Fire!" and altogether very collected and bold except that he couldn't say a single sentence without shaking me to the very centre with roaring Fire. We ran down to the drawing-room and put our heads out of window, and the Major calls to an unfeeling young monkey scampering by be joyful and ready to split "Where is it?—Fire!" The monkey answers without stopping " Oh here's a lark! Old Buffle's been setting his house alight to prevent its being found out that he boned the Taxes. Hurrah! Fire!" And then the sparks came flying up and the smoke came pouring down and the crackling of flames and spatting of water and banging of engines and hacking of axes and breaking of glass and knocking at doors and the shouting and crying and hurrying and the heat and altogether gave me a dreadful palpitation. "Don't be frightened dearest madam," says the Major, "—Fire! There's nothing to be alarmed at—Fire! Don't open the street door till I come back—Fire! I'll go and see if I can be of any service—Fire! You're quite composed and comfortable ain't you?—Fire, Fire, Fire!" It was in vain for me to hold the man and tell him he'd be galloped to death by the engines—pumped to death by his over-exertions—wet-feeted to death by the slop and mess—flattened to death when the roofs fell in—his spirit was up and he went scampering off after the young monkey with all the breath he had and none to spare, and me and the girls huddled together at the parlour windows looking at the dreadful flames above the houses over the way, Mr. Buffle's being round the corner. Presently what should we see but some people running down the street straight to our door, and then the Major directing operations in the busiest way, and then some more people and then—carried in a chair similar to Guy Fawkes—Mr. Buffle in a blanket! My dear the Major has Mr. Buffle brought up our steps and whisked into the parlour and carted out on the sofy, and then he and all the rest of them without so much as a word burst away again full speed, leaving the impression of a vision except for Mr. Buffle awful in his blanket with his eyes a rolling. In a twinkling they all burst back again with Mrs. Buffle in another blanket, which whisked in and carted out on the sofy they all burst off again and all burst back again with Miss Buffle in another blanket, which again whisked in and carted out they all burst off again and all burst back again with Mr. Buffle's articled young gentleman in another blanket—him a holding round the necks of two men carrying him by the legs, similar to the picter of the disgraceful creetur who has lost the fight (but where the chair I do not know) and his hair having the appearance of newly played. upon. When all four of a row, the Major rubs his hands and whispers me with what little hoarseness he can get together, "If our dear remarkable boy was only at home what a delightful treat this would be for him!" My dear we made them some hot tea and toast and some hot brandy-and-water with a little comfortable nutmeg in it, and at first they were scared and low in their spirits but being fully insured got sociable. And the first use Mr. Buffle made of his tongue was to call the Major his Preserver and his best of friends and to say "My for ever dearest sir let me make you known to Mrs. Buffle" which also addressed him as her Preserver and her best of friends and was fully as cordial as the blanket would admit of. Also Miss Buffle. The articled young gentleman's head was a little light and he sat a moaning "Robina is reduced to cinders, Robina is reduced to cinders!" Which went more to the heart on account of his having got wrapped in his blanket as if he was looking out of a violin-celler-case, until Mr. Buffle says "Robina speak to him!" Miss Buffle says "Dear George!" and but for the Major's pouring down brandy-and-water on the instant which caused a catching in his throat owing to the nutmeg and a violent fit of coughing it might have proved too much for his strength. When the articled young gentleman got the better of it Mr. Buffle leaned up against Mrs. Buffle being two bundles, a little while in confidence, and then says with tears in his eyes which the Major noticing wiped, "We have not been an united family, let us after this danger become so, take her George." The young gentleman could not put his arm out far to do it, but his spoken expressions were very beautiful though of a wandering class. And I do not know that I ever had a much pleasanter meal than the breakfast we took together after we had all dozed, when Miss Buffle made tea very sweetly in quite the Roman style as depicted formerly at Covent Garden Theatre and when the whole family was most agreeable, as they have ever proved since that night when the Major stood at the foot of the Fire-Escape and claimed them as they came down—the young gentleman headforemost, which accounts. And though I do not say that we should be less liable to think ill of one another if strictly limited to blankets, still I do say that we might most of us come to a better understanding if we kept one another less at a distance. Why there's Wozenham's lower down on the other side of the street. I had a feeling of much soreness several years respecting what I must still ever call Miss Wozenham's systematic underbidding and the likeness of the house in Bradshaw having far too many windows and a most umbrageous and outrageous Oak which never yet was seen in Norfolk-street nor yet a carriage and four at Wozenham's door, which it would have been far more to Bradshaw's credit to have drawn a cab. This frame of mind continued bitter down to the very afternoon in January last when one of my girls, Sally Rairyganoo which I still suspect of Irish extraction though family represented Cambridge, else why abscond with a bricklayer of the Limerick persuasion and be married in pattens not waiting till his black eye was decently got round with all the company fourteen in number and one horse fighting outside on the roof of the vehicle—I repeat my dear my ill-regulated state of mind towards Miss Wozenham continued down to the very afternoon of January last past when Sally Rairyganoo came banging (I can use no milder expression) into my room with a jump which may be Cambridge and may not, and said "Hurroo Missis! Miss Wozenham's sold up!" My dear when I had it thrown in my face and conscience that the girl Sally had reason to think I could be glad of the ruin of a fellow-creeter, I burst into tears and dropped back in my chair and I says "I am ashamed of myself!" Well! I tried to settle to my tea but I could not do it what with thinking of Miss Wozenham and her distresses. It was a wretched night and I went up to a front window and looked over at Wozenham's and as well as I could make it out down the street in the fog it was the dismalest of the dismal and not a light to be seen. So at last I says to myself "This will not do," and I puts on my oldest bonnet and shawl not wishing Miss Wozenham to be reminded of my best at such a time, and lo and behold you I goes over to Wozenham's and knocks. "Miss Wozenham at home?" I says turning my head when I heard the door go. And then I saw it was Miss Wozenham herself who had opened it and sadly worn she was poor thing and her eyes all swelled and swelled with crying. "Miss Wozenham" I says "it is several years since there was a little unpleasantness betwixt us on the subject of my grandson's cap being down your Airy. I have overlooked it and I hope you have done the same." "Yes Mrs. Lirriper" she says in a surprise "I have." "Then my dear" I says "I should be glad to come in and speak a word to you." Upon my calling her my dear Miss Wozenham breaks out a crying most pitiful, and a not unfeeling elderly person that might have been better shaved in a nightcap with a hat over it offering a polite apology for the mumps having worked themselves into his constitution, and also for sending home to his wife on the bellows which was in his hand as a writing-desk, looks out of the back parlour and says "The lady wants a word of comfort" and goes in again. So I was able to say quite natural "Wants a word of comfort does she sir? Then please the pigs she shall have it!" And Miss Wozenham and me we go into the front room with a wretched light that seemed to have been crying too and was sputtering out, and I says "Now my dear, tell me all," and she wrings her hands and says "Oh Mrs. Lirriper that man is in possession here, and I have not a friend in the world who is able to help me with a shilling." It doesn't signify a bit what a talkative old body like me said to Miss Wozenham when she said that, and so I'll tell you instead my dear that I'd have given thirty shillings to have taken her over to tea, only I durstn't on account of the Major. Not you see but what I knew I could draw the Major out like thread and wind him round my linger on most subjects and perhaps even on that if I was to set myself to it, but him and me had so often belied Miss Wozenham to one another that I was shamefaced, and I knew she had offended his pride and never mine, and likewise I felt timid that that Rairyganoo girl might make things awkward. So I says "My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs." And we had the tea and the affairs too and after all it was but forty pound, and—There! she's as industrious and straight a creeter as ever lived and has paid back half of it already, and where's the use of saying more, particularly when it ain't the point? For the point is that when she was a kissing my hands and holding them in hers and kissing them again and blessing blessing blessing, I cheered up at last and I says " Why what a waddling old goose I have been my dear to take you for something so very different!" "Ah but I too" says she "how have I mistaken you!" "Come for goodness' sake tell me" I says "what you. thought of me?" "Oh" says she "I thought you had no feeling for such a hard hand-to-mouth life as mine, and were rolling in affluence." I says shaking my sides (and very glad to do it for I had been a choking quite long enough) "Only look at my figure my dear and give me your opinion whether if I was in affluence I should be likely to roll in it!" That did it! We got as merry as grigs (whatever they are, if you happen to know my dear—I don't) and I went home to my blessed home as happy and as thankful as could be. But before I make an end of it, think even of my having misunderstood the Major! Yes! For next forenoon the Major came into my little room with his brushed hat in his hand and he begins "My dearest madam" and then put his face in his hat as if he had just come into church. As I sat all in a maze he came out of his hat and began again. "My esteemed and beloved friend—" and then went into his hat again. "Major," I cries out frightened "has anything happened to our darling boy?" "No, no, no" says the Major "but Miss Wozenham has been here this morning to make her excuses to me, and by the Lord I can't get over what she told me." "Hoity toity, Major," I says "you don't know yet that I was afraid of you last night and didn't think half as well of you as I ought! So come out of church Major and forgive me like a dear old friend and I'll never do so any more." And I leave you to judge my dear whether I ever did or will. And how affecting to think of Miss Wozenham out of her small income and her losses doing so much for her poor old father, and keeping a brother that had had the misfortune to soften his brain against the hard mathematics as neat as a new pin in the three back represented to lodgers as a lumber-room and consuming a whole shoulder of mutton whenever provided! And now my dear I really am a going to tell you about my Legacy if you're inclined to favour me with your attention, and I did fully intend to have come straight to it only one thing does so bring up another. It was the month of June and the day before Midsummer Day when my girl—Winifred Madgers—she was what is termed a Plymouth Sister, and the Plymouth Brother that made away with her was quite right, for a tidier young woman for a wife never came into a house and afterwards called with the beautifullest Plymouth Twins — it was the day before Midsummer Day when Winifred Madgers comes and says to me "A gentleman from the Consul's wishes particular to speak to Mrs. Lirriper." If you'll believe me my dear the Consols at the bank where I have a little matter for Jemmy got into my head, and I says "Good gracious I hope he ain't had any dreadful fall!" Says Winifred "He don't look as if he had ma'am." And I says " Show him in." The gentleman came in dark and with his hair cropped what I should consider too close, and he says very polite "Madame Lirrwiper!" I says "Yes sir. Take a chair." "I come," says he "frrwom the Frrwench Consul's." So I saw at once that it wasn't the Bank of England. "We have rrweceived," says the gentleman turning his r's very curious and skilful, "frrwom the Mairrwie at Sens, a communication which I will have the honour to rrwead. Madame Lirrwiper understands Frrwench?" "Oh dear no sir!" says I. "Madame Lirriper don't understand anything of the sort." "It matters not," says the gentleman, " I will trrwanslate." With that my dear the gentleman after reading something about a Department and a Mairie (which Lord forgive me I supposed till the Major came home was Mary, and never was I more puzzled than to think how that young woman came to have so much to do with it) translated a lot with the most obliging pains, and it came to this:—That in the town of Sens in France, an unknown Englishman lay a dying. That he was speechless and without motion. That in his lodging there was a gold watch and a purse containing such and such money and a trunk containing such and such clothes, but no passport and no papers, except that on his table was a pack of cards and that he had written in pencil on the back of the ace of hearts: "To the authorities. When I am dead, pray send what is left, as a last Legacy, to Mrs. Lirriper Eighty-one Norfolk-street Strand London." When the gentleman had explained all this, which seemed to be drawn up much more methodical than I should have given the French credit for, not at that time knowing the nation, he put the document into my hand. And much the wiser I was for that you may be sure, except that it had the look of being made out upon grocery-paper and was stamped all over with eagles. "Does Madame Lirrwiper" says the gentleman "believe she rrwecognises her unfortunate compatrrwiot?" You may imagine the flurry it put me into my dear to be talked to about my compatriots. I says "Excuse me. Would you have the kindness sir to make your language as simple as you can?" "This Englishman unhappy, at the point of death. This compatrrwiot afflicted," says the gentleman. "Thank you sir" I says "I understand you now. No sir I have not the least idea who this can be." "Has Madame Lirrwiper no son, no nephew, no godson, no frrwiend, no acquaintance of any kind in Frrwance?" "To my certain knowledge" says I "no relation or friend, and to the best of my belief no acquaintance." "Pardon me. You take Locataires?" says the gentleman. My dear fully believing he was offering me something with his obliging foreign manners—snuff for anything I knew—I gave a little bend of my head and I says if you'll credit it, "No I thank you. I have not contracted the habit." The gentleman looks perplexed and says "Lodgers?" "Oh!" says I laughing. "Bless the man! Why yes to be sure!" "May it not be a former lodger?" says the gentleman. "Some lodger that you pardoned some rrwent? You have pardoned lodgers some rrwent?" "Hem! It has happened sir" says I, "but I assure you I can call to mind no gentleman of that description that this is at all likely to be." In short my dear we could make nothing of it, and the gentleman noted down what I said and went away. But he left me the paper of which he had two with him, and when the Major came in I says to the Major as I put it in his hand "Major here's Old Moore's Almanack with the hieroglyphic complete, for your opinion." It took the Major a little longer to read than I should have thought, judging from the copious flow with which he seemed to be gifted when attacking the organ-men, but at last he got through it and stood a gazing at me in amazement. "Major" I says "you're paralysed." "Madam" says the Major, "Jemmy Jackman is doubled up." Now it did so happen that the Major had been out to get a little information about railroads and steam-boats, as our boy was coming home for his Midsummer holidays next day and we were going to take him somewhere for a treat and a change. So while the Major stood a gazing it came into my head to say to him "Major I wish you'd go and look at some of your books and maps, and see whereabouts this same town of Sens is in France." The Major he roused himself and he went into the Parlours and he poked about a little, and he came back to me and lie says: "Sens my dearest madam is seventy odd miles south of Paris." With what I may truly call a desperate effort "Major" I says "we'll go there with our blessed boy!" If ever the Major was beside himself it was at the thoughts of that journey. All day long he was like the wild man of the woods after meeting with an advertisement in the papers telling him something to his advantage, and early next morning hours before Jemmy could possibly come home he was outside in the street ready to call out to him that we was all a going to France. Young Rosy-cheeks you may believe was as wild as the Major, and they did carry on to that degree that I says "If you two children ain't more orderly I'll pack you both off to bed." And then they fell to cleaning up the Major's telescope to see France with, and went out and bought a leather bag with a snap to hang round Jemmy, and him to carry the money like a little Fortunatus with his purse. If I hadn't passed my word and raised their hopes, I doubt if I could have gone through with the undertaking but it was too late to go back now. So on the second day after Midsummer Day we went off by the morning mail. And when we came to the sea which I had never seen but once in my life and that when my poor Lirriper was courting me, the freshness of it and the deepness and the airiness and to think that it had been rolling ever since and that it was always a rolling and so few of us minding, made me feel quite serious. But I felt happy too and so did Jemmy and the Major and not much motion on the whole, though me with a swimming in the head and a sinking but able to take notice that the foreign insides appear to be constructed hollower than the English, leading to much more tremenjous noises when bad sailors. But my dear the blueness and the lightness and the coloured look of everything and the very sentry-boxes striped and the shining rattling drums and the little soldiers with their waists and tidy gaiters, when we got across to the Continentit made me feel as if I don't know what—as if the atmosphere had been lifted off me. And as to lunch why bless you if I kept a man-cook and two kitchen-maids I couldn't get it done for twice the money, and no injured young women a glaring at you and grudging you and acknowledging your patronage by wishing that your food might choke you, but so civil and so hot and attentive and every way comfortable except Jemmy pouring wine down his throat by tumblers-full and me expecting to see him drop under the table. And the way in which Jemmy spoke his French was a real charm. It was often wanted of him, for whenever anybody spoke a syllable to me I says "Noncomprenny, you're very kind but it's no use—Now Jemmy!" and then Jemmy he fires away at 'em lovely, the only thing wanting in Jemmy's French being as it appeared to me that he hardly ever understood a word of what they said to him which made it scarcely of the use it might have been though in other respects a perfect Native, and regarding the Major's fluency I should have been of the opinion judging French by English that there might have been a greater choice of words in the language though still I must admit that if I hadn't known him when he asked a military gentleman in a grey cloak what o'clock it was I should have took him for a Frenchman born. Before going on to look after my Legacy we were to make one regular day in Paris, and I leave you to judge my dear what a day that was with Jemmy and the Major and the telescope and me and the prowling young man at the inn door (but very civil too) that went along with us to show the sights. All along the railway to Paris Jemmy and the Major had been frightening me to death by stooping down on the platforms at stations to inspect the engines underneath their mechanical stomachs, and by creeping in and out I don't know where all, to find improvements for the United Grand Junction Parlour, but when we got out into the brilliant streets on a bright morning they gave up all their London improvements as a bad job and gave their minds to Paris. Says the prowling young man to me "Will I speak Inglis No?" So I says "If you can young man I shall take it as a favour," but after half an hour of it when I fully believed the man had gone mad and me too I says "Be so good as fall back on your French sir," knowing that then I shouldn't have the agonies of trying to understand him which was a happy release. Not that I lost much more than the rest either, for I generally noticed that when he had described something very long indeed and I says to Jemmy "What does he say Jemmy?" Jemmy says looking at him with vengeance in his eye "He is so jolly indistinct!" and that when he had described it longer all over again and I says to Jemmy "Well Jemmy what's it all about?" says "He says the building was repaired in seventeen hundred and four, Gran." Wherever that prowling young man formed his prowling habits I cannot be expected to know, but the way in which he went round the corner while we had our breakfasts and was there again when we swallowed the last crumb was most marvellous, and just the same at dinner and at night, prowling equally at the theatre and the inn gateway and the shop-doors when we bought a trifle or two and everywhere else but troubled with a tendency to spit. And of Paris I can tell you no more my dear than that it's town and country both in one, and carved stone and long streets of high houses and gardens and fountains and statues and trees and gold, and immensely big soldiers and immensely little soldiers and the pleasantest nurses with the whitest caps a playing at skipping-rope with the bunchiest babies in the flattest caps, and clean tablecloths spread everywhere for dinner and people sitting out of doors smoking and sipping all day long and little plays being acted in the open air for little people and every shop a complete and elegant room, and everybody seeming to play at everything in this world. And as to the sparkling lights my dear after dark, glittering high up and low down and on before and on behind and all round, and the crowd of theatres and the crowd of people and the crowd of all sorts, it's pure enchantment. And pretty well the only thing that grated on me was that whether you pay your fare at the railway or whether you change your money at a money-dealer's or whether you take your ticket at the theatre, the lady or gentleman is caged up (I suppose by Government) behind the strongest iron bars having more of a Zoological appearance than a free country. Well to be sure when I did after all get my precious bones to bed that night, and my Young Rogue came in to kiss me and asks "What do you think of this lovely lovely Paris, Gran?" I says "Jemmy I feel as if it was beautiful fireworks being let off in my head." And very cool and refreshing the pleasant country was next day when we went on to look after my Legacy, and rested me much and did me a deal of good. So at length and at last my dear we come to Sens, a pretty little town with a great two-towered cathedral and the rooks flying in and out of the loopholes and another tower atop of one of the towers like a sort of a stone pulpit. In which pulpit with the birds skimming below him if you'll believe me, I saw a speck while I was resting at the inn before dinner which they made signs to me was Jemmy and which really was. I had been a fancying as I sat in the balcony of the hotel that an Angel might light there and call down to the people to be good, but I little thought what Jemmy all unknown to himself was a calling down from that high place to some one in the town. The pleasantest-situated inn my dear! Right under the two towers, with their shadows a changing upon it all day like a kind of a sundial, and country people driving in and out of the court-yard in carts and hooded cabriolets and such-like, and a market outside in front of the cathedral, and all so quaint and like a picter. The Major and me agreed that whatever came of my Legacy this was the place to stay in for our holiday, and we also agreed that our dear boy had best not be checked in his joy that night by the sight of the Englishman if he was still alive, but that we would go together and alone. For you are to understand that the Major not feeling himself quite equal in his wind to the heighth to which Jemmy had climbed, had come back to me and left him with the Guide. So after dinner when Jemmy had set off to see the river, the Major went down to the Mairie, and presently came back with a military character in a sword and spurs and a cocked-hat and a yellow shoulder-belt and long tags about him that he must have found inconvenient. And the Major says "The Englishman still lies in the same state dearest madam. This gentleman will conduct us to his lodging." Upon which the military character pulled off his cocked-hat to me, and I took notice that he had shaved his forehead in imitation of Napoleon Bonaparte but not like. We went out at the court-yard gate and past the great doors of the cathedral and down a narrow High Street where the people were sitting chatting at their shop-doors and the children were at play. The military character went in front and he stopped at a pork-shop with a little statue of a pig sitting up, in the window, and a private door that a donkey was looking out of. When the donkey saw the military character he came slipping out on the pavement to turn round and then clattered along the passage into a back-yard. So the coast being clear, the Major and me were conducted up the common stair and into the front room on the second, a bare room with a red tiled floor and the outside lattice blinds pulled close to darken it. As the military character opened the blinds I saw the tower where I had seen Jemmy, darkening as the sun got low, and I turned to the bed by the wall and saw the Englishman. It was some kind of brain fever he had had, and his hair was all gone, and some wetted folded linen lay upon his head. I looked at him very attentive as he lay there all wasted away with his eyes closed, and I says to the Major "I never saw this face before." The Major looked at him very attentive too, and he says "I never saw this face before." When the Major explained our words to the military character, that gentleman shrugged his shoulders and showed the Major the card on which it was written about the Legacy for me. It had been written with a weak and trembling hand in bed, and I knew no more of the writing than of the face. Neither did the Major. Though lying there alone, the poor creetur was as well taken care of as could be hoped, and would have been quite unconscious of any one's sitting by him then. I got the Major to say that we were not going away at present and that I would come back to-morrow and watch a bit by the bedside. But I got him to add—and I shook my head hard to make it stronger—"We agree that we never saw this face before." Our boy was greatly surprised when we told him sitting out in the balcony in the starlight, and he ran over some of those stories of former Lodgers, of the Major's putting down, and asked wasn't it possible that it might be this lodger or that lodger. It was not possible and we went to bed. In the morning just at breakfast-time the military character came jingling round, and said that the doctor thought from the signs he saw there might be some rally before the end. So I says to the Major and Jemmy, "You two boys go and enjoy yourselves, and I'll take my Prayer-Book and go sit by the bed." So I went, and I sat there some hours, reading a prayer for him poor soul now and then, and it was quite on in the day when he moved his hand. He had been so still, that the moment he moved I knew of it, and I pulled off my spectacles and laid down my book and rose and looked at him. From moving one hand he began to move both, and then his action was the action of a person groping in the dark. Long after his eyes had opened, there was a film over them and he still felt for his way out into light. But by slow degrees his sight cleared and his hands stopped. He saw the ceiling, he saw the wall, he saw me. As his sight cleared, mine cleared too, and when at last we looked in one another's faces, I started back and I cries passionately: "O you wicked wicked man! Your sin has found you out!" For I knew him, the moment life looked out of his eyes, to be Mr. Edson, Jemmy's father who had so cruelly deserted Jemmy's young unmarried mother who had died in my arms, poor tender creetur, and left Jemmy to me. "You cruel wicked man! You bad black traitor!" With the little strength he had, he made an attempt to turn over on his wretched face to hide it. His arm dropped out of the bed and his head with it, and there he lay before me crushed in body and in mind. Surely the miserablest sight under the summer sun! "O blessed Heaven" I says a crying, "teach me what to say to this broken mortal! I am a poor sinful creetur, and the Judgment is not mine." As I lifted my eyes up to the clear bright sky, I saw the high tower where Jemmy had stood above the birds, seeing that very window; and the last look of that poor pretty young mother when her soul brightened and got free, seemed to shine down from it. "O man, man, man!" I says, and I went on my knees beside the bed; "if your heart is rent asunder and you are truly penitent for what you did, Our Saviour will have mercy on you yet!" As I leaned my face against the bed, his feeble hand could just move itself enough to touch me. I hope the touch was penitent. It tried to hold my dress and keep hold, but the fingers were too weak to close. I lifted him back upon the pillows, and I says to him: "Can you hear me?" He looked yes. "Do you know me?" He looked yes, even yet more plainly. "I am not here alone. The Major is with me. You recollect the Major?" Yes. That is to say he made out yes, in the same way as before. "And even the Major and I are not alone. My grandson—his godson—is with us. Do you hear? My grandson." The fingers made another trial to catch at my sleeve, but could only creep near it and fall. "Do you know who my grandson is?" Yes. "I pitied and loved his lonely mother. When his mother lay a dying I said to her, 'My dear this baby is sent to a childless old woman.' He has been my pride and joy ever since. I love him as dearly as if he had drunk from my breast. Do you ask to see my grandson before you die?' Yes. "Show me, when I leave off speaking, if you correctly understand what I say. He has been kept unacquainted with the story of his birth. He has no knowledge of it. No suspicion of it. If I bring him here to the side of this bed, he will suppose you to be a perfect stranger. It is more than I can do, to keep from him the knowledge that there is such wrong and misery in the world; but that it was ever so near him in his innocent cradle, I have kept from him, and I do keep from him, and I ever will keep from him. For his mother's sake, and for his own." He showed me that he distinctly understood, and the tears fell from his eyes. "Now rest, and you shall see him." So I got him a little wine and some brandy and I put things straight about his bed. But I began to be troubled in my mind lest Jemmy and the Major might be too long of coming back. What with this occupation for my thoughts and hands, I didn't hear a foot upon the stairs, and was startled when I saw the Major stopped short in the middle of the room by the eyes of the man upon the bed, and knowing him then, as I had known him a little while ago. There was anger in the Major's face, and there was horror and repugnance and I don't know what. So I went up to him and I led him to the bedside and when I clasped my hands and lifted of them up, the Major did the like. "O Lord " I says "Thou knowest what we two saw together of the sufferings and sorrows of that young creetur now with Thee. If this dying man is truly penitent, we two together humbly pray Thee to have mercy on him!" The Major says "Amen!" and then after a little stop I whispers him, "Dear old friend fetch our beloved boy." And the Major, so clever as to have got to understand it all without being told a word, went away and brought him. Never never never, shall I forget the fair bright face of our boy when he stood at the foot of the bed, looking at his unknown father. And O so like his dear young mother then! "Jemmy" I says, "I have found out all about this poor gentleman who is so ill, and he did lodge in the old house once. And as he wants to see all belonging to it, now that he is passing away, I sent for you." "Ah poor man!" says Jemmy stepping forward and touching one of his hands with great gentleness. "My heart melts for him. Poor, poor, man!" The eyes that were so soon to close for ever, turned to me, and I was not that strong in the pride of my strength that I could resist them. "My darling boy, there is a reason in the secret history of this fellow-creetur, lying as the best and worst of us must all lie one day, which I think would ease his spirit in his last hour if you would lay your cheek against his forehead and say 'May God forgive you!'" "O Gran," says Jemmy with a full heart "I am not worthy!" But he leaned down and did it. Then the faltering fingers made out to catch hold of my sleeve at last, and I believe he was a trying to kiss me when he died. * * * * * There my dear! There you have the story of my Legacy in full, and it's worth ten times the trouble I have spent upon it if you are pleased to like it. You might suppose that it set us against the little French town of Sens, but no we didn't find that. I found myself that I never looked up at the high tower atop of the other tower, but the days came back again when that fair young creetur with her pretty bright hair trusted in me like a mother, and the recollection made the place so peaceful to me as I can't express. And every soul about the hotel down to the pigeons in the court-yard made friends with Jemmy and the Major, and went lumbering away with them on all sorts of expeditions in all sorts of vehicles drawn by rampagious cart-horses—with heads and without—mud for paint and ropes for harness and every new friend dressed in blue like a butcher, and every new horse standing on his hind legs wanting to devour and consume every other horse, and every man that had a whip to crack crack-crack-crack-crack-cracking it as if it was a schoolboy with his first. As to the Major my dear that man lived the greater part of his time with a little tumbler in one hand and a bottle of small wine in the other, and whenever he saw anybody else with a little tumbler, no matter who it was—the military character with the tags, or the inn servants at their supper in the court-yard, or towns-people a chatting on a bench, or country-people a starting home after market—down rushes the Major to clink his glass against their glasses and cry—Hola! Vive Somebody! or Vive Something! as if he was beside himself. And though I could not quite approve of the Major's doing it, still the ways of the world are the ways of the world varying according to different parts of it, and dancing at all in the open Square with a lady that kept a barber's shop my opinion is that the Major was right to dance his best and to lead off with a power that I did not think was in him, though I was a little uneasy at the Barricading sound of the cries that were set up by the other dancers and the rest of the company, until when I says "What are they ever calling out Jemmy?" Jemmy says "They're calling out Gran, Bravo the Military English! Bravo the Military English!" which was very gratifying to my feelings as a Briton and became the name the Major was known by. But every evening at a regular time we all three sat out in the balcony of the hotel at the end of the court-yard, looking up at the golden and rosy light as it changed on the great towers, and looking at the shadows of the towers as they changed on all about us ourselves included, and what do you think we did there? My dear if Jemmy hadn't brought some other of those stories of the Major's taking down from the telling of former lodgers at Eighty-one Norfolk-street, and if he didn't bring 'em out with this speech: "Here you are Gran! Here you are Godfather! More of 'em! I'll read. And though you wrote 'em for me, Godfather, I know you won't disapprove of my making 'em over to Gran; will you?" "No my dear boy," says the Major. "Everything we have is hers, and we are hers." "Hers ever affectionately and devotedly J. Jackman, and J. Jackman Lirriper," cries the Young Rogue giving me a close hug. "Very well then Godfather. Look here. As Gran is in the Legacy way just now, I shall make these stories a part of Gran's Legacy. I'll leave 'em to her. What do you say Godfather?" "Hip hip Hurrah!" says the Major. "Very well then" cries Jemmy all in a bustle. "Vive the Military English! Vive the Lady Lirriper! Vive the Jemmy Jackman Ditto! Vive the Legacy! Now, you look out, Gran. And you look out, Godfather, I'll read! And I'll tell you what I'll do besides. On the last night of our holiday here when we are all packed and going away, I'll top up with something of my own." "Mind you do sir" says I. "Don't you be afraid, Gran" cries Young Sparkles. "Now then! I'm going to read. Once, twice, three and away. Open your mouths and shut your eyes, and see what Fortune sends you. All in to begin. Look out Gran. Look out Godfather!" So in his lively spirits Jemmy began a reading, and he read every evening while we were there, and sometimes we were about it late enough to have a candle burning quite steady out in the balcony in the still air. And so here is the rest of my Legacy my dear that I now hand over to you in this bundle of papers all in the Major's plain round writing. I wish I could hand you the church towers over too, and the pleasant air and the inn yard and the pigeons often coming and perching on the rail by Jemmy and seeming to be critical with their heads on one side, but you'll take as you find. Well my dear and so the evening readings of these jottings of the Major's brought us round at last to the evening when we were all packed and going away next day, and I do assure you that by that time though it was deliciously comfortable to look forward to the dear old house in Norfolk-street again, I had formed quite a high opinion of the French nation and had noticed them to be much more homely and domestic in their families and far more simple and amiable in their lives than I had ever been led to expect, and it did strike me between ourselves that in one particular they might be imitated to advantage by another nation which I will not mention, and that is in the courage with which they take their little enjoyments on little means and with little things and don't let solemn big-wigs stare them out of countenance or speechify them dull, of which said solemn big-wigs I have ever had the one opinion that I wish they were all made comfortable separately in coppers with the lids on and never let out any more. "Now young man," I says to Jemmy when we brought our chairs into the balcony that last evening, "you please to remember who was to 'top up.'" "l am the illustrious personage." But he looked so serious after he had made me that light answer, that the Major raised his eyebrows at me and I raised mine at the Major. "Gran and Godfather," says Jemmy, "you can hardly think how much my mind has run on Mr. Edson's death." It gave me a little check. "Ah! It was a sad scene my love" I says, "and sad remembrances come back stronger than merry. But this" I says after a little silence, to rouse myself and the Major and Jemmy all together, "is not topping up. Tell us your story my dear." "I will" says Jemmy. "What is the date sir?" says I. "Once upon a time when pigs drank wine?" "No Gran," says Jemmy, still serious; "once upon a time when the French drank wine." Again I glanced at the Major, and the Major glanced at me. "In short, Gran and Godfather," says Jemmy, looking up, "the date is this time, and I'm going to tell you Mr. Edson's story." The flutter that it threw me into. The change of colour on the part of the Major! "That is to say, you understand," our bright-eyed boy says, "I am going to give you my version of it. I shall not ask whether it's right or not, firstly because you said you knew very little about it, Gran, and secondly because what little you did know was a secret." I folded my hands in my lap and I never took my eyes off Jemmy as he went running on. "The unfortunate gentleman" Jemmy commences, "who is the subject of our present narrative was the son of Somebody, and was born Somewhere, and chose a profession Somehow. It is not with those parts of his career that we have to deal; but with his early attachment to a young and beautiful lady." I thought I should have dropped. I durstn't look at the Major; but I knew what his state was, without looking at him. "The father of our ill-starred hero" says Jemmy, copying as it seemed to me the style of some of his story-books, "was a worldly man who entertained ambitious views for his only son and who firmly set his face against the contemplated alliance with a virtuous but penniless orphan. Indeed he went so far as roundly to assure our hero that unless he weaned his thoughts from the object of his devoted affection, he would disinherit him. At the same time, he proposed as a suitable match, the daughter of a neighbouring gentleman of a good estate, who was neither ill favoured nor unamiable, and whose eligibility in a pecuniary point of view could not be disputed. But young Mr. Edson, true to the first and only love that had inflamed his breast, rejected all considerations of self-advancement, and, deprecating his father's anger in a respectful letter, ran away with her." My dear I had begun to take a turn for the better, but when it come to running away I began to take another turn for the worse. "The lovers" says Jemmy "fled to London and were united at the altar of Saint Clement's Danes. And it is at this period of their simple but touching story, that we find them inmates of the dwelling of a highly respected and beloved lady of the name of Gran, residing within a hundred miles of Norfolk street." I felt that we were almost safe now, I felt that the dear boy had no suspicion of the bitter truth, and I looked at the Major for the first time and drew a long breath. The Major gave me a nod. "Our hero's father" Jemmy goes on "proving implacable and carrying his threat into unrelenting execution, the struggles of the young couple in London were severe, and would have been far more so, but for their good angel's having conducted them to the abode of Mrs. Gran: who, divining their poverty (in spite of their endeavours to conceal it from her), by a thousand delicate arts smoothed their rough way, and alleviated the sharpness of their first distress." Here Jemmy took one of my hands in one of his, and began a marking the turns of his story by making me give a beat from time to time upon his other hand. "After a while, they left the house of Mrs. Gran, and pursued their fortunes through a variety of successes and failures elsewhere. But in all reverses, whether for good or evil, the words of Mr. Edson to the fair young partner of his life, were: 'Unchanging Love and Truth will carry us through all!'" My hand trembled in the dear boy's, those words were so wofully unlike the fact. "Unchanging Love and Truth" says Jemmy over again, as if he had a proud kind of a noble pleasure in it, "will carry us through all! Those were his words. And so they fought their way, poor but gallant and happy, until Mrs. Edson gave birth to a child." "A daughter," I says. "No" says Jemmy, "a son. And the father was so proud of it that he could hardly bear it out of his sight. But a dark cloud overspread the scene. Mrs. Edson sickened, drooped, and died." "Ah! Sickened, drooped, and died!" I says. "And so Mr. Edson's only comfort, only hope on earth, and only stimulus to action, was his darling boy. As the child grew older, he grew so like his mother that he was her living picture. It used to make him wonder why his father cried when he kissed him. But unhappily he was like his mother in constitution as well as in face, and he died too before he had grown out of childhood. Then Mr. Edson, who had good abilities, in his forlornness and despair threw them all to the winds. He became apathetic, reckless, lost. Little by little he sank down, down, down, down, until at last he almost lived (I think) by gaming. And so sickness overtook him in the town of Sens in France, and he lay down to die. But now that he laid him down when all was done, and looked back upon the green Past beyond the time when he had covered it with ashes, he thought gratefully of the good Mrs. Gran long lost sight of, who had been so kind to him and his young wife in the early days of their marriage, and he left the little that he had as a last Legacy to her. And she, being brought to see him, at first no more knew him than she would know from seeing the ruin of a Greek or Roman Temple, what it used to be before it fell; but at length she remembered him. And then he told her with tears, of his regret for the misspent part of his life, and besought her to think as mildly of it as she could, because it was the poor fallen Angel of his unchanging Love and Constancy after all. And because she had her grandson with her, and he fancied that his own boy, if he had lived, might have grown to be something like him, he asked her to let him touch his forehead with his cheek and say certain parting words." Jemmy's voice sank low when it got to that, and tears filled my eyes, and filled the Major's. "You little Conjuror" I says, "how did you ever make it all out? Go in and write it every word down, for it's a wonder." Which Jemmy did, and I have repeated it to you my dear from his writing. Then the Major took my hand and kissed it, and said "Dearest madam all has prospered with us." "Ah Major" I says drying my eyes, "we needn't have been afraid. We might have known it. Treachery don't come natural to beaming youth; but trust and pity, love and constancy they do, thank God!" https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Doctor_Marigold_s_Prescriptions_nbsp_[1865_Christmas_Number]/1865-12-07-Doctor_Marigolds_Prescriptions.pdf b1a991fa4e96de0b7d960b7f21aad56e https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Doctor_Marigold_s_Prescriptions_nbsp_[1865_Christmas_Number]/1865-12-07-To_be_Taken_Immediately.pdf c6084112b0730c9ff1d5b8fd7f35b053 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Doctor_Marigold_s_Prescriptions_nbsp_[1865_Christmas_Number]/1865-12-07-To_be_Taken_with_a_Grain_Of_Salt.pdf 792af67d85aff297023d92618a9263b4 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Doctor_Marigold_s_Prescriptions_nbsp_[1865_Christmas_Number]/1865-12-07-To_be_Taken_for_Life.pdf 31b32c897b4c7c951577bca78d05cb85 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christmas Numbers Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context christmas-numbers Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites the eighteen Christmas numbers that Dickens orchestrated between 1850 and 1867 in conjunction with multiple Victorian authors, notably Wilkie Collins, and published in his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round. After writing five Christmas books and multiple sketches on Yuletide cheer - notably 'Scenes and Characters, No. 10, Christmas Festivities', published as 'A Christmas Dinner' in Sketches by Boz (1836) - not to mention the holiday merry-making described in Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Charles Dickens might reasonably be supposed to have had his fill of seasonal writing. However, he published a Christmas number in 1850 in HW that contained a series of sketches about Christmas, contributing 'A Christmas Tree' (1850). In the next year's Christmas number, he included the short piece 'What Christmas is, as we Grow Older' (1851). Holiday fiction, though, was what Dickens's readership seemed to crave, and the author, editor, and entrepreneur in Dickens all recognised the opportunity. In 1852, Dickens decided to develop an extra Christmas number for HW which would harness the creative talents of other writers for a series of unrelated stories told within a frame narrative of his own composition. Each year he himself would write several of these parts, generally two to three. Soon, the Christmas number became as much of an expected holiday tradition among Victorian subscribers as had been the Christmas books. All in all, eighteen Christmas numbers of this kind resulted (1850-1867); nine published in HW and nine in ATYR.  <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - Household Words</div> On 24 December 1852, Dickens published A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. Personally, he had written 'The Poor Relation's Story' (No.1) and 'The Child's Story' (No.2) with successive stories authored by other contributors, though no names appeared. What would have been the 1853 extra number was late, published instead on 18 February 1854, a circumstance that would not occur again until the 1864 Christmas number. This time, Dickens published more short stories by himself and others, contributing 'The Schoolboy's Story' and 'Nobody's Story', but the Christmas number, for once, lacked a frame narrative or overarching title, though it would come to be known as Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. 25 December 1854 saw The Seven Poor Travellers, with Dickens penning 'The First' (No.1) and 'The Road' (No.7). By writing the first and last stories in the collection, he, as editor, might steer the entire composition towards a cohesive conclusion.  Next, Dickens wrote 'The Guest' (No.1), 'The Boots' (No.3), and 'The Bill' (No.7) as part of The Holly-Tree Inn (15 December 1855). The Wreck of the 'Golden Mary' followed on 25 December 1856, with Dickens composing only 'The Wreck' (No.1), a lengthy description of a shipwreck which sets up the framing narrative. Next, Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels (7 December 1857), Dickens writing 'The Island of Silver-Store' (No.1) and 'The Rafts on the River' (No.3) with Collins contributing the second chapter. Rounding out the extra Christmas numbers for HW, A House to Let appeared on 7 December 1858, with Dickens authoring 'Going into Society' (No.3). The last issue of HW appeared on 28 May 1859, with the journal virtually concluded, due to disagreements with Dickens's publishers Bradbury and Evans, though it was symbolically folded into ATYR. <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - All the Year Round</div> After Dickens launched his new journal ATYR on 30 April 1859, Christmas remained house-themed with the extra Christmas number The Haunted House (13 December 1859). It featured three offerings from him, 'The Mortals in the House' (No.1), 'The Ghost in Master B's Room' (No.6), and 'The Ghost in the Corner Room' (No.8). Yet Dickens continued to experiment with his holiday themes. He would write 'The Village' (No.1), 'The Money' (No.2), and 'The Restitution' (No.5) for A Message from the Sea, published on 25 December 1860, a story about a New England mariner, Captain Jorgan, who seeks to discover the truth about the origin of a Welsh family's mysterious nest-egg.  For Tom Tiddler's Ground, published 25 December 1861, Dickens produced 'Picking up Soot and Cinders' (No.1), 'Picking up Miss Kimmeens' (No.6), and 'Picking up the Tinker' (No. 7). An impressive four parts of Somebody's Luggage (4 December 1862), 'His Leaving it Till Called For' (No.1), 'His Boots' (No.2), 'His Brown-Paper Parcel' (No.7), and 'His Wonderful End' (No. 10) were produced by Dickens, who notably portrays himself in the story as a character, in his capacity as AYTR editor, to amusing effect. Two subsequent Christmas numbers, Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (25 December 1863) and Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy' (12 January 1864), concern the life and activities of a generous landlady who adopts a young boy and raises him with the help of her gallant lodger, Major Jackman. The former contained Dickens's two introductory and conclusion chapters, 'How Mrs. Lirriper carried on the Business' (No.1) and 'How the Parlours added a few words' (No.6), while the latter featured 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how she went on, and went over' (No.1) and 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how Jimmy topped up' (No.7), a story including a jaunt to France, with identical placement at the beginning and end of the number. Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions appeared in 1865, with Mugby Junction following in 1866; both frame narratives deal with themes of disability and poverty. For the first, Dickens contributed 'To be Taken Immediately' (No.1), 'To be Taken with a Grain of Salt' (No.6), and 'To be Taken for Life' (No.8); for the latter, he wrote 'Barbox Brothers' (No.1), 'Barbox Brothers and Co.' (No.2), 'Main Line. The Boy at Mugby' (No.3), and 'No.1 Branch Line. The Signal-man' (No.4). For the final Christmas number, No Thoroughfare (12 December 1867), Dickens collaborated with Collins on an imaginative European thriller that ranges from orphanages and offices in London to hotels and precipices in the Swiss Alps. Dickens is known to have primarily written most of The Overture, Act I, Act III, with Collins taking Act 2. Both collaborated on Acts IV and V. However, they deliberately interspersed passages into each other's parts to confuse readers as to which author had written which 'Acts' (Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 569-573). Consequently, we have merely transcribed the Christmas number in its entirety, as a collaboration. Though Dickens considered beginning a Christmas number in 1868, his other activities, coupled with failing health, led him to gratefully relinquish the idea. Instead, he would eventually go on to attempt another novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), evidently sensing the public's interest in the detective genre, one which he and Collins had, more or less, pioneered with their respective novels Bleak House (1853) (Inspector Bucket) and The Moonstone (1868) (Sergeant Cuff). His mind may also have been running on the mysterious plot of No Thoroughfare, with its malevolent villain, though he did not live to see the plot through to its conclusion. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans from Dickens Journals Online; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. With the exception of No Thoroughfare, transcripts have been made only of parts of numbers Dickens is known to have authored. Lists of writers known to have authored chapters or portions of these extra Christmas numbers have been added to the metadata of each item (Klimaszewski, Appendix A).  Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions. 1. See Melisa Klimaszewski. Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals (Ohio University Press, 2019); Jude Piesse. 'Dreaming Across Oceans: Emigration and Nation in the Mid-Victorian Christmas Issue'. Victorian Periodicals Review 46.1 (Spring 2013): 37-60; Robert Tracy. '"A Whimsical Kind of Masque": The Christmas Books and Victorian Spectacle'. Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1998): 113-30; Deborah A. Thomas. 'The Chord of the Christmas Season'. In Dickens and the Short Story (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982): pp. 62-93; Sarah A. Solberg. '"Text Dropped into the Woodcuts": Dickens's Christmas Books'. Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): pp. 103-18; Ruth Glancy. 'Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes'. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35.1 (June 1980): pp. 53-72; Thomas. 'Contributors to the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round, 1850-1867.' Part I. The Dickensian 70.372 (1973): pp. 163-72. and Part II. TD 70 (1974): pp. 21-29; 'Messages in Bottles and Collins's Seafaring Man'. Anthea Trodd. SEL: Studies in English Literature 41.4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 751-64; Susan Shatto. 'Miss Havisham and Mr. Mopes the Hermit: Dickens and the Mentally Ill'. (Part One) Dickens Quarterly 2.2 (June 1985): pp. 43-50 and (Part Two) DQ 2.3 (September 1985): pp. 79-84; Molly Boggs. '"Given to you by nature for an enemy": The landlady in mid-century London'. Journal of Victorian Culture 23.3 (2018): pp. 310-331; Thomas. 'Dickens' Mrs. Lirriper and the Evolution of a Feminine Stereotype'. Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977): 154-169; Martha Stoddard Holmes. '"Happy and Yet Pitying Tears": Deafness and Affective Disjuncture in Dickens's Doctor Marigold'. Victorian Review 35.2 (Fall 2009): 53-64; Diana C. Archibald. 'Dickens's Visit to the Perkins School and Doctor Marigold'. Dickens and Massachusetts: The Lasting Legacy of the Commonwealth Visits. Eds. Archibald and Joel J. Brattin (University of Massachusetts, 2015): pp. 123-33; Anne Chapman. '"I am not going on": Negotiating Christmas Publishing Rhythms with Dickens's Mugby Junction'. Victorian Periodicals Review 51.1 (2018): 70-85; Samia Ounoughi. 'The Swiss Alps and Character Framing in No Thoroughfare'. Ed. Maxime Leroy. In Charles Dickens and Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2013. pp. 114-25; Lillian Nayder. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Cornell University Press, 2002). Michael Hollington. '"To the Droodstone": Or, From The Moonstone to Edwin Drood via No Thoroughfare'. Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 5 (1995): 141-9.  Short Story Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Periodical Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) All the Year Round Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18651207 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. I am a Cheap Jack, and my own father's name was Willum Marigold. It was in his lifetime supposed by some that his name was William, but my own father always consistently said, No, it was Willum. On which point I content myself with looking at the argument this way:—If a man is not allowed to know his own name in a free country, how much is he allowed to know in a land of slavery? As to looking at the argument through the medium of the Register, Willum Marigold come into the world before Registers come up much—and went out of it too. They wouldn't have been greatly in his line neither, if they had chanced to come up before him. I was born on the Queen's highway, but it was the King's at that time. A doctor was fetched to my own mother by my own father, when it took place on a common; and in consequence of his being a very kind gentleman, and accepting no fee but a tea-tray, I was named Doctor, out of gratitude and compliment to him. There you have me. Doctor Marigold. I am at present a middle-aged man of a broadish build, in cords, leggings, and a sleeved waistcoat the strings of which is always gone behind. Repair them how you will, they go like fiddle-strings. You have been to the theatre, and you have seen one of the wiolin-players screw up his wiolin, after listening to it as if it had been whispering the secret to him that it feared it was out of order, and then you have heard it snap. That's as exactly similar to my waistcoat, as a waistcoat and a wiolin can be like one another. I am partial to a white hat, and I like a shawl round my neck wore loose and easy. Sitting down is my favourite posture. If I have a taste in point of personal jewellery, it is mother-of-pearl buttons. There you have me again, as large as life. The doctor having accepted a tea-tray, you'll guess that my father was a Cheap Jack before me. You are right. He was. It was a pretty tray. It represented a large lady going along a serpentining up-hill gravel-walk, to attend a little church. Two swans had likewise come astray with the same intentions. When I call her a large lady, I don't mean in point of breadth, for there she fell below my views, but she more than made it up in heighth; her heighth and slimness was—in short THE heighth of both. I often saw that tray, after I was the innocently smiling cause (or more likely screeching one) of the doctor's standing it up on a table against the wall in his consulting-room. Whenever my own father and mother were in that part of the country, I used to put my head (I have heard my own mother say it was flaxen curls at that time, though you wouldn't know an old hearth-broom from it now, till you come to the handle and found it wasn't me) in at the doctor's door, and the doctor was always glad to see me, and said, "Aha, my brother practitioner! Come in, little M.D. How are your inclinations as to sixpence?" You can't go on for ever, you'll find, nor yet could my father nor yet my mother. If you don't go off as a whole when you are about due, you're liable to go off in part and two to one your head's the part. Gradually my father went off his, and my mother went off hers. It was in a harmless way, but it put out the family where I boarded them. The old couple, though retired, got to be wholly and solely devoted to the Cheap Jack business, and were always selling the family off. Whenever the cloth was laid for dinner, my father began rattling the plates and dishes, as we do in our line when we put up crockery for a bid, only he had lost the trick of it, and mostly let 'em drop and broke 'em. As the old lady had been used to sit in the cart, and hand the articles out one by one to the old gentleman on the footboard to sell, just in the same way she handed him every item of the family's property, and they disposed of it in their own imaginations from morning to night. At last the old gentleman, lying bedridden in the same room with the old lady, cries out in the old patter, fluent, after having been silent for two days and nights: "Now here, my jolly companions every one—which the Nightingale club in a village was held, At the sign of the Cabbage and Shears, Where the singers no doubt would have greatly excelled, But for want of taste voices and ears—now here, my jolly companions every one, is a working model of a used-up old Cheap Jack, without a tooth in his head, and with a pain in every bone: so like life that it would be just as good if it wasn't better, just as bad if it wasn't worse, and just as new if it wasn't worn out. Bid for the working model of the old Cheap Jack, who has drunk more gunpowder-tea with the ladies in his time than would blow the lid off a washerwoman's copper, and carry it as many thousands of miles higher than the moon as nought nix nought, divided by the national debt, carry nothing to the poor-rates, three under, and two over. Now my hearts of oak and men of straw, what do you say for the lot? Two shillings, a shilling, tenpence, eightpence, sixpence, fourpence. Twopence? Who said twopence? The gentleman in the scarecrow's hat? I am ashamed of the gentleman in the scarecrow's hat. I really am ashamed of him for his want of public spirit. Now I'll tell you what I'll do with you. Come! I'll throw you in a working model of a old woman that was married to the old Cheap Jack so long ago, that upon my word and honour it took place in Noah's Ark, before the Unicorn could get in to forbid the banns by blowing a tune upon his horn. There now! Come! What do you say for both? I'll tell you what I'll do with you. I don't bear you malice for being so backward. Here! If you make me a bid that'll only reflect a little credit on your town, I'll throw you in a warming-pan for nothing, and lend you a toasting-fork for life. Now come; what do you say after that splendid offer? Say two pound, say thirty shillings, say a pound, say ten shillings, say five, say two and six. You don't say even two and six? You say two and three? No. You shan't have the lot for two and three. I'd sooner give it you, if you was good looking enough. Here! Missis! Chuck the old man and woman into the cart, put the horse to, and drive 'em away and bury 'em!" Such were the last words of Willum Marigold, my own father, and they were carried out, by him and by his wife my own mother on one and the same day, as I ought to know, having followed as mourner. My father had been a lovely one in his time at the Cheap Jack work, as his dying observations went to prove. But I top him. I don't say it because it's myself, but because it has been universally acknowledged by all that has had the means of comparison. I have worked at it. I have measured myself against other public speakers, Members of Parliament, Platforms, Pulpits, Counsel learned in the law—and where I have found 'em good, I have took a bit of imitation from 'em, and where I have found 'em bad, I have let 'em, alone. Now I'll tell you what. I mean to go down into my grave declaring that of all the callings ill used in Great Britain, the Cheap Jack calling is the worst used. Why ain't we a profession? Why ain't we endowed with privileges? Why are we forced to take out a hawkers' license, when no such thing is expected of the political hawkers? Where's the difference betwixt us? Except that we are Cheap Jacks and they are Dear Jacks, I don't see any difference but what's in our favour. For look here! Say it's election-time. I am on the footboard of my cart in the market-place on a Saturday night. I put up a general miscellaneous lot. I say: "Now here my free and independent woters, I'm a going to give you such a chance as you never had in all your born days, nor yet the days preceding. Now I'll show you what I am a going to do with you. Here's a pair of razors that'll shave you closer than the Board of Guardians, here's a flat-iron worth its weight in gold, here's a frying-pan artificially flavoured with essence of beefsteaks to that degree that you've only got for the rest of your lives to fry bread and dripping in it and there you are replete with animal food, here's a genuine chronometer watch in such a solid silver case that you may knock at the door with it when you come home late from a social meeting and rouse your wife and family and save up your knocker for the postman, and here's half a dozen dinner plates that you may play the cymbals with to charm the baby when it's fractious. Stop! I'll throw you in another article and I'll give you that, and it's a rolling-pin, and if the baby can only get it well into its mouth when its teeth is coming and rub the gums once with it, they'll come through double in a fit of laughter equal to being tickled. Stop again! I'll throw you in another article, because I don't like the looks of you, for you haven't the appearance of buyers unless I lose by you, and because I'd rather lose than not take money to-night, and that's a looking-glass in which you may see how ugly you look when you don't bid. What do you say now? Come! Do you say a pound? Not you, for you haven't got it. Do you say ten shillings? Not you, for you owe more to the tallyman. Well then, I'll tell you what I'll do with you. I'll heap 'em all on the footboard of the cart— there they are! razors, flat-iron, frying-pan, chronometer watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and looking-glass—take 'em all away for four shillings, and I'll give you sixpence for your trouble!" This is me, the Cheap Jack. But on the Monday morning, in the same marketplace, comes the Dear Jack on the hustings—his cart—and what does he say? "Now my free and independent woters, I am a going to give you such a chance" (he begins just like me) "as you never had in all your born days, and that's the chance of sending Myself to Parliament. Now I'll tell you what I am a going to do for you. Here's the interests of this magnificent town promoted above all the rest of the civilised and uncivilised earth. Here's your railways carried, and your neighbours' railways jockeyed. Here's all your sons in the Post-office. Here's Britannia smiling on you. Here's the eyes of Europe on you. Here's uniwersal prosperity for you, repletion of animal food, golden cornfields, gladsome homesteads, and rounds of applause from your own hearts, all in one lot and that's myself. Will you take me as I stand? You won't? Well then, I'll tell you what I'll do with you. Come now! I'll throw you in anything you ask for. There! Church-rates, abolition of church-rates, more malt tax, no malt tax, uniwersal education to the highest mark or uniwersal ignorance to the lowest, total abolition of flogging in the army or a dozen for every private once a month all round, Wrongs of Men or Rights of Women,—only say which it shall be, take 'em or leave 'em, and I'm of your opinion altogether, and the lot's your own on your own terms. There! You won't take it yet? Well then, I'll tell you what I'll do with you. Come! You are such free and independent woters, and I am so proud of you—you are such a noble and enlightened constituency, and I am so ambitious of the honour and dignity of being your member, which is by far the highest level to which the wings of the human mind can soar—that I'll tell you what I'll do with you. I'll throw you in all the public-houses in your magnificent town for nothing. Will that content you? It won't? You won't take the lot yet? Well then, before I put the horse in and drive away, and make the offer to the next most magnificent town that can be discovered, I'll tell you what I'll do. Take the lot, and I'll drop two thousand pound in the streets of your magnificent town for them to pick up that can. Not enough? Now look here. This is the very furthest that I'm a going to. I'll make it two thousand five hundred. And still you won't? Here, missis! Put the horse—no, stop half a moment, I shouldn't like to turn my back upon you neither for a trifle, I'll make it two thousand seven hundred and fifty pound. There! Take the lot on your own terms, and I'll count out two thousand seven hundred and fifty pound on the footboard of the cart, to be dropped in the streets of your magnificent town for them to pick up that can. What do you say? Come now! You won't do better, and you may do worse. You take it? Hooray! Sold again, and got the seat!" These Dear Jacks soap the people shameful, but we Cheap Jacks don't. We tell 'em the truth about themselves to their faces, and scorn to court 'em. As to wenturesomeness in the way of puffing up the lots, the Dear Jacks beat us hollow. It is considered in the Cheap Jack calling that better patter can be made out of a gun than any article we put up from the cart, except a pair of spectacles. I often hold forth about a gun for a quarter of an hour, and feel as if I need never leave off. But when I tell 'em what the gun can do, and what the gun has brought down, I never go half so far as the Dear Jacks do when they make speeches in praise of their guns—their great guns that set 'em on to do it. Besides, I'm in business for myself, I ain't sent down into the market-place to order, as they are. Besides again, my guns don't know what I say in their laudation, and their guns do, and the whole concern of 'em have reason to be sick and ashamed all round. These are some of my arguments for declaring that the Cheap Jack calling is treated ill in Great Britain, and for turning warm when I think of the other Jacks in question setting themselves up to pretend to look down upon it. I courted my wife from the footboard of the cart. I did indeed. She was a Suffolk young woman, and it was in Ipswich market-place right opposite the corn-chandler's shop. I had noticed her up at a window last Saturday that was, appreciating highly. I had took to her, and I had said to myself, "If not already disposed of, I'll have that lot." Next Saturday that come, I pitched the cart on the same pitch, and I was in very high feather indeed, keeping 'em laughing the whole of the time and getting off the goods briskly. At last I took out of my waistcoat-pocket, a small lot wrapped in soft paper, and I put it this way (looking up at the window where she was). "Now here my blooming English maidens is an article, the last article of the present evening's sale, which I offer to only you the lovely Suffolk Dumplings biling over with beauty, and I won't take a bid of a thousand pound for, from any man alive. Now what is it? Why, I'll tell you what it is. It's made of fine gold, and it's not broke though there's a hole in the middle of it, and it's stronger than any fetter that ever was forged, though it's smaller than any finger in my set of ten. Why ten? Because when my parents made over my property to me, I tell you true, there was twelve sheets, twelve towels, twelve tablecloths, twelve knives, twelve forks, twelve tablespoons, and twelve teaspoons, but my set of fingers was two short of a dozen and could never since be matched. Now what else is it? Come I'll tell you. It's a hoop of solid gold, wrapped in a silver curl-paper that I myself took off the shining locks of the ever beautiful old lady in Threadneedle-street, London city. I wouldn't tell you so if I hadn't the paper to show, or you mightn't believe it even of me. Now what else is it? It's a man-trap and a handcuff, the parish stocks and a leg-lock, all in gold and all in one. Now what else is it? It's a wedding ring. Now I'll tell you what I'm a-going to do with it. I'm not a-going to offer this lot for money, but I mean to give it to the next of you beauties that laughs, and I'll pay her a visit to-morrow morning at exactly half after nine o'clock as the chimes go, and I'll take her out for a walk to put up the banns." She laughed, and got the ring handed up to her. When I called in the morning, she says, "Oh dear! It's never you and you never mean it?" "It's ever me," says I, "and I am ever yours, and I ever mean it." So we got married, after being put up three times—which, by-the-by, is quite in the Cheap Jack way again, and shows once more how the Cheap Jack customs pervade society. She wasn't a bad wife, but she had a temper. If she could have parted with that one article at a sacrifice, I wouldn't have swopped her away in exchange for any other woman in England. Not that I ever did swop her away, for we lived together till she died, and that was thirteen year. Now my lords and ladies and gentlefolks all, I'll let you into a secret, though you won't believe it. Thirteen year of temper in a Palace would try the worst of you, but thirteen year of temper in a Cart would try the best of you. You are kept so very close to it in a cart, you see. There's thousands of couples among you, getting on like sweet ile upon a whetstone in houses five and six pairs of stairs high, that would go to the Divorce Court in a cart. Whether the jolting makes it worse, I don't undertake to decide, but in a cart it does come home to you and stick to you. Wiolence in a cart is so wiolent, and aggrawation in a cart is so aggrawating. We might have had such a pleasant life! A roomy cart, with the large goods hung outside and the bed slung underneath it when on the road, an iron pot and a kettle, a fireplace for the cold weather, a chimney for the smoke, a hanging shelf and a cupboard, a dog, and a horse. What more do you want? You draw off upon a bit of turf in a green lane or by the roadside, you hobble your old horse and turn him grazing, you light your fire upon the ashes of the last visitors, you cook your stew, and you wouldn't call the Emperor of France your father. But have a temper in the cart, flinging language and the hardest goods in stock at you, and where are you then? Put a name to your feelings. My dog knew as well when she was on the turn as I did. Before she broke out, he would give a howl, and bolt. How he knew it, was a mystery to me, but the sure and certain knowledge of it would wake him up out of his soundest sleep, and he would give a howl, and bolt. At such times I wished I was him. The worst of it was, we had a daughter born to us, and I love children with all my heart. When she was in her furies, she beat the child. This got to be so shocking as the child got to be four or five year old, that I have many a time gone on with my whip over my shoulder, at the old horse's head, sobbing and crying worse than ever little Sophy did. For how could I prevent it? Such a thing is not to be tried with such a temper—in a cart—without coming to a fight. It's in the natural size and formation of a cart to bring it to a fight. And then the poor child got worse terrified than before, as well as worse hurt generally, and her mother made complaints to the next people we lighted on, and the word went round, "Here's a wretch of a Cheap Jack been a beating his wife." Little Sophy was such a brave child! She grew to be quite devoted to her poor father, though he could do so little to help her. She had a wonderful quantity of shining dark hair, all curling natural about her. It is quite astonishing to me now, that I didn't go tearing mad when I used to see her run from her mother before the cart, and her mother catch her by this hair, and pull her down by it, and beat her. Such a brave child I said she was. Ah! with reason. "Don't you mind next time, father dear," she would whisper to me, with her little face still flushed, and her bright eyes still wet; "if I don't cry out, you may know I am not much hurt. And even if I do cry out, it will only be to get mother to let go and leave off." What I have seen the little spirit bear—for me—without crying out! Yet in other respects her mother took great care of her. Her clothes were always clean and neat, and her mother was never tired of working at 'em. Such is the inconsistency in things. Our being down in the marsh country in unhealthy weather, I consider the cause of Sophy's taking bad low fever; but however she took it, once she got it she turned away from her mother for evermore, and nothing would persuade her to be touched by her mother's hand. She would shiver and say "No, no, no," when it was offered at, and would hide her face on my shoulder, and hold me tighter round the neck. The Cheap Jack business had been worse than ever I had known it, what with one thing and what with another (and not least what with railroads, which will cut it all to pieces, I expect at last), and I was run dry of money. For which reason, one night at that period of little Sophy's being so bad, either we must have come to a dead-lock for victuals and drink, or I must have pitched the cart as I did. I couldn't get the dear child to lie down or leave go of me, and indeed I hadn't the heart to try, so I stepped out on the footboard with her holding round my neck. They all set up a laugh when they see us, and one chuckle-headed Joskin (that I hated for it) made the bidding, "tuppence for her!" "Now, you country boobies," says I, feeling as if my heart was a heavy weight at the end of a broken sash-line, "I give you notice that I am a going to charm the money out of your pockets, and to give you so much more than your money's worth that you'll only persuade yourselves to draw your Saturday night's wages ever again arterwards, by the hopes of meeting me to lay 'em out with, which you never will, and why not? Because I've made my fortune by selling my goods on a large scale for seventy-five per cent less than I give for 'em, and I am consequently to be elevated to the House of Peers next week, by the title of the Duke of Cheap and Markis Jackaloorul. Now let's know what you want to-night, and you shall have it. But first of all, shall I tell you why I have got this little girl round my neck? You don't want to know? Then you shall. She belongs to the Fairies. She's a fortune-teller. She can tell me all about you in a whisper, and can put me up to whether you're a-going to buy a lot or leave it. Now do you want a saw? No, she says you don't, because you're too clumsy to use one. Else here's a saw which would be a lifelong blessing to a handy man, at four shillings, at three and six, at three, at two and six, at two, at eighteenpence. But none of you shall have it at any price, on account of your well-known awkwardness which would make it manslaughter. The same objection applies to this set of three planes which I won't let you have neither, so don't bid for 'em. Now I am a-going to ask her what you do want. (Then I whispered, "Your head burns so, that I am afraid it hurts you bad, my pet," and she answered, without opening her heavy eyes, "Just a little, father.") Oh! This little fortune-teller says it's a memorandum-book you want. Then why didn't you mention it? Here it is. Look at it. Two hundred super-fine hot-pressed wire-wove pages—if you don't believe me, count 'em—ready ruled for your expenses, an everlastingly-pointed pencil to put 'em down with, a double-bladed penknife to scratch 'em out with, a book of printed tables to calculate your income with, and a camp-stool to sit down upon while you give your mind to it! Stop! And an umbrella to keep the moon off when you give your mind to it on a pitch dark night. Now I won't ask you how much for the lot, but how little? How little are you thinking of? Don't be ashamed to mention it, because my fortune-teller knows already. (Then making believe to whisper, I kissed her, and she kissed me.) Why, she says you're thinking of as little as three and threepence! I couldn't have believed it, even of you, unless she told me. Three and threepence! And a set of printed tables in the lot that'll calculate your income up to forty thousand a year! With an income of forty thousand a year, you grudge three and sixpence. Well then, I'll tell you my opinion. I so despise the threepence, that I'd sooner take three shillings. There. For three shillings, three shillings, three shillings! Gone. Hand 'em over to the lucky man." As there had been no bid at all, everybody looked about and grinned at everybody, while I touched little Sophy's face and asked her if she felt faint or giddy. "Not very, father. It will soon be over." Then turning from the pretty patient eyes, which were opened now, and seeing nothing but grins across my lighted grease-pot, I went on again in my Cheap Jack style. "Where's the butcher?" (My sorrowful eye had just caught sight of a fat young butcher on the outside of the crowd.) She says the good luck is the butcher's. "Where is he?" Everybody handed on the blushing butcher to the front, and there was a roar, and the butcher felt himself obliged to put his hand in his pocket and take the lot. The party so picked out, in general does feel obliged to take the lot—good four times out of six. Then we had another lot the counterpart of that one, and sold it sixpence cheaper, which is always wery much enjoyed. Then we had the spectacles. It ain't a special profitable lot, but I put 'em on, and I see what the Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to take off the taxes, and I see what the sweetheart of the young woman in the shawl is doing at home, and I see what the Bishops has got for dinner, and a deal more that seldom fails to fetch 'em up in their spirits; and the better their spirits, the better their bids. Then we had the ladies' lot—the teapot, tea-caddy, glass sugar basin, half a dozen spoons, and caudle-cup—and all the time I was making similar excuses to give a look or two and say a word or two to my poor child. It was while the second ladies' lot was holding 'em enchained that I felt her lift herself a little on my shoulder, to look across the dark street. "What troubles you, darling?" "Nothing troubles me, father. I am not at all troubled. But don't I see a pretty churchyard over there?" "Yes, my dear." "Kiss me twice, dear father, and lay me down to rest upon that churchyard grass so soft and green." I staggered back into the cart with her head dropped on my shoulder, and I says to her mother, "Quick. Shut the door! Don't let those laughing people see!" "What's the matter?" she cries. "O, woman, woman," I tells her, "you'll never catch my little Sophy by her hair again, for she has flown 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 further 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 heighth 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 below your sort. And this giant when on view figured as a Roman. He was a languid young man, which I attribute to the distance betwixt his extremities. He had a little head and less in it, he had weak eyes and weak knees, and altogether you couldn't look at him without feeling that there was greatly too much of him both for his joints and his mind. But he was an amiable though timid young man (his mother let him out, and spent the money), and we come acquainted when he was walking to ease the horse betwixt two fairs. He was called Rinaldo di Velasco, his name being Pickleson. This giant otherwise Pickleson mentioned to me under the seal of confidence, that beyond his being a burden to himself, his life was made a burden to him, by the cruelty of his master towards a step-daughter who was deaf and dumb. Her mother was dead, and she had no living soul to take her part, and was used most hard. She travelled with his master's caravan only because there was nowhere to leave her, and this giant otherwise Pickleson did go so far as to believe that his master often tried to lose her. He was such a very languid young man, that I don't know how long it didn't take him to get this story out, but it passed through his defective circulation to his top extremity in course of time. When I heard this account from the giant otherwise Pickleson, and likewise that the poor girl had beautiful long dark hair, and was often pulled down by it and beaten, I couldn't see the giant through what stood in my eyes. Having wiped 'em, I give him sixpence (for he was kept as short as he was long), and he laid it out in two threepennorths of gin-and-water, which so brisked him up, that he sang the Favourite Comic of Shivery Shakey, ain't it cold. A popular effect which his master had tried every other means to get out of him as a Roman, wholly in vain. His master's name was Mim, a wery hoarse man and I knew him to speak to. I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart outside the town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the performing was going on, and at last sitting dozing against a muddy cart-wheel, I come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the first look I might almost have judged that she had escaped from the Wild Beast Show, but at the second I thought better of her, and thought that if she was more cared for and more kindly used she would be like my child. She was just the same age that my own daughter would have been, if her pretty head had not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate night. To cut it short, I spoke confidential to Mim while he was beating the gong outside betwixt two lots of Pickleson's publics, and I put it to him, "She lies heavy on your own hands; what'll you take for her?" Mim was a most ferocious swearer. Suppressing that part of his reply, which was much the longest part, his reply was, "A pair of braces." "Now I'll tell you," says I, "what I'm a going to do with you. I'm a going to fetch you half a dozen pair of the primest braces in the cart, and then to take her away with me." Says Mim (again ferocious), "I'll believe it when I've got the goods, and no sooner." I made all the haste I could, lest he should think twice of it, and the bargain was completed, which Pickleson he was thereby so relieved in his mind that he come out at his little back door, longways like a serpent, and give us Shivery Shakey in a whisper among the wheels at parting. It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in the cart. I at once give her the name of Sophy, to put her ever towards me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to understand one another through the goodness of the Heavens, when she knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have any body wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me. You'd have laughed—or the rewerse—it's according to your disposition—if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first I was helped—you'd never guess by what—milestones. I got some large alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and say we was going to WINDSOR, I give her those letters in that order, and then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same order again, and pointed towards the abode of royalty. Another time I give her C A R T, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I give her D O C T O R M A R I G O L D, and hung a corresponding inscription outside my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what did I care if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off. We had our signs, too, and they was hundreds in number. Sometimes, she would sit looking at me and considering hard how to communicate with me about something fresh—how to ask me what she wanted explained—and then she was (or I thought she was; what does it signify?) so like my child with those years added to her, that I half believed it was herself, trying to tell me where she had been to up in the skies, and what she had seen since that unhappy night when she flied away. She had a pretty face, and now that there was no one to drag at her bright dark hair and it was all in order, there was a something touching in her looks that made the cart most peaceful and most quiet, though not at all melancolly. [N.B. In the Cheap Jack patter, we generally sound it, lemonjolly, and it gets a laugh.] The way she learnt to understand any look of mine was truly surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart unseen by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles I wanted. And then she would clap her hands and laugh for joy. And as for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep against the muddy cart-wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a greater heighth of reputation than ever, and I put Pickleson down (by the name of Mim's Travelling Giant otherwise Pickleson) for a fypunnote in my will. This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen year old. By which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced explaining my views to her, but what's right is right and you can't neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character. So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak to us, I says to him: "Now I'll tell you what I'll do with you sir. I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted) and you can't produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be taught her, in the shortest separation that can be named—state the figure for it—and I am game to put the money down. I won't bate you a single farthing sir but I'll put down the money here and now, and I'll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!" The gentleman smiled, and then, "Well, well," says he, "I must first know what she has learnt already. How do you communicate with her?" Then I showed him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so forth, and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a little story in a book which the gentleman showed her and which she was able to read. "This is most extraordinary," says the gentleman; "is it possible that you have been her only teacher?" "I have been her only teacher, sir," I says, "besides herself." "Then," says the gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, "you're a clever fellow, and a good fellow." This he makes known to Sophy, who kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it. We saw the gentleman four times in all, and when he took down my name and asked how in the world it ever chanced to be Doctor, it come out that he was own nephew by the sister's side, if you'll believe me, to the very Doctor that I was called after. This made our footing still easier, and he says to me: "Now Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to know?" "I want her sir to be cut off from the world as little as can be, considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read whatever is wrote, with perfect ease and pleasure." "My good fellow," urges the gentleman, opening his eyes wide, "why I can't do that myself!" I took his joke and give him a laugh (knowing by experience how flat you fall without it) and I mended my words accordingly. "What do you mean to do with her afterwards?" asks the gentleman, with a sort of a doubtful eye. "To take her about the country?" "In the cart sir, but only in the cart. She will live a private life, you understand, in the cart. I should never think of bringing her infirmities before the public. I wouldn't make a show of her, for any money." The gentleman nodded and seemed to approve. "Well," says he, "can you part with her for two years?" "To do her that good—yes, sir." "There's another question," says the gentleman, looking towards her: "Can she part with you for two years?" I don't know that it was a harder matter of itself (for the other was hard enough to me), but it was harder to get over. However, she was pacified to it at last, and the separation betwixt us was settled. How it cut up both of us when it took place, and when I left her at the door in the dark of an evening, I don't tell. But I know this:— remembering that night, I shall never pass that same establishment without a heart-ache and a swelling in the throat, and I couldn't put you up the best of lots in sight of it with my usual spirit—no, not even the gun, nor the pair of spectacles—for five hundred pound reward from the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and throw in the honour of putting my legs under his mahogany arterwards. Still, the loneliness that followed in the cart was not the old loneliness, because there was a term put to it however long to look forward to, and because I could think, when I was anyways down, that she belonged to me and I belonged to her. Always planning for her coming back, I bought in a few months' time another cart, and what do you think I planned to do with it? I'll tell you. I planned to fit it up with shelves, and books for her reading, and to have a seat in it where I could sit and see her read, and think that I had been her first teacher. Not hurrying over the job, I had the fittings knocked together in contriving ways under my own inspection, and here was her bed in a berth with curtains, and there was her reading-table, and here was her writing-desk, and elsewhere was her books in rows upon rows, picters and no picters, bindings and no bindings, gilt-edged and plain, just as I could pick 'em up for her in lots up and down the country, North and South and West and East, Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone astray, Over the hills and far away. And when I had got together pretty well as many books as the cart would neatly hold, a new scheme come into my head which, as it turned out, kept my time and attention a good deal employed and helped me over the two years stile. Without being of an awaricious temper, I like to be the owner of things. I shouldn't wish, for instance, to go partners with yourself in the Cheap Jack cart. It's not that I mistrust you, but that I'd rather know it was mine. Similarly, very likely you'd rather know it was yours. Well! A kind of a jealousy began to creep into my mind when I reflected that all those books would have been read by other people long before they was read by her. It seemed to take away from her being the owner of 'em like. In this way, the question got into my head:—Couldn't I have a book new-made express for her, which she should be the first to read? It pleased me, that thought did, and as I never was a man to let a thought sleep (you must wake up all the whole family of thoughts you've got and burn their nightcaps, or you won't do in the cheap Jack line), I set to work at it. Considering that I was in the habit of changing so much about the country, and that I should have to find out a literary character here to make a deal with, and another literary character there to make a deal with, as opportunities presented, I hit on the plan that this same book should be a general miscellaneous lot—like the razors, flat-iron, chronometer watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and looking-glass—and shouldn't be offered as a single indiwidual article like the spectacles or the gun. When I had come to that conclusion, I come to another, which shall likewise be yours. Often had I regretted that she never had heard me on the footboard, and that she never could hear me. It ain't that I am vain, but that you don't like to put your own light under a bushel. What's the worth of your reputation, if you can't convey the reason for it to the person you most wish to value it? Now I'll put it to you. Is it worth sixpence, fippence, fourpence, threepence, twopence, a penny, a halfpenny, a farthing? No, it ain't. Not worth a farthing. Very well then. My conclusion was, that I would begin her book with some account of myself. So that, through reading a specimen or two of me on the footboard, she might form an idea of my merits there. I was aware that I couldn't do myself justice. A man can't write his eye (at least I don't know how to), nor yet can a man write his voice, nor the rate of his talk, nor the quickness of his action, nor his general spicy way. But he can write his turns of speech, when he is a public speaker—and indeed I have heard that he very often does, before he speaks 'em. Well! Having formed that resolution, then come the question of a name. How did I hammer that hot iron into shape? This way. The most difficult explanation I had ever had with her was, how I come to be called Doctor, and yet was no Doctor. After all, I felt that I had failed of getting it correctly into her mind, with my utmost pains. But trusting to her improvement in the two years, I thought that I might trust to her understanding it when she should come to read it as put down by my own hand. Then I thought I would try a joke with her and watch how it took, by which of itself I might fully judge of her understanding it. We had first discovered the mistake we had dropped into, through her having asked me to prescribe for her when she had supposed me to be a Doctor in a medical point of view, so thinks I, "Now, if I give this book the name of my Prescriptions, and if she catches the idea that my only Prescriptions are for her amusement and interest—to make her laugh in a pleasant way, or to make her cry in a pleasant way—it will be a delightful proof to both of us that we have got over our difficulty. It fell out to absolute perfection. For when she saw the book, as I had it got up—the printed and pressed book—lying on her desk in her cart, and saw the title, DOCTOR MARIGOLD'S PRESCRIPTIONS, she looked at me for a moment with astonishment, then fluttered the leaves, then broke out a laughing in the charmingest way, then felt her pulse and shook her head, then turned the pages pretending to read them most attentive, then kissed the book to me, and put it to her bosom with both her hands. I never was better pleased in all my life! But let me not anticipate. (I take that expression out of a lot of romances I bought for her. I never opened a single one of 'em—and I have opened many—but I found the romancer saying "let me not anticipate." Which being so, I wonder why he did anticipate, or who asked him to it.) Let me not, I say, anticipate. This same book took up all my spare time. It was no play to get the other articles together in the general miscellaneous lot, but when it come to my own article! There! I couldn't have believed the blotting, nor yet the buckling to at it, nor the patience over it. Which again is like the footboard. The public have no idea. At last it was done, and the two years' time was gone after all the other time before it, and where it's all gone to, Who knows? The new cart was finished—yellow outside, relieved with wermillion and brass fittings—the old horse was put in it, a new 'un and a boy being laid on for the Cheap Jack cart—and I cleaned myself up to go and fetch her. Bright cold weather it was, cart-chimneys smoking, carts pitched private on a piece of waste ground over at Wandsworth where you may see 'em from the Sou' Western Railway when not upon the road. (Look out of the right-hand window going down.) "Marigold," says the gentleman, giving his hand hearty, "I am very glad to see you." "Yet I have my doubts, sir," says I, "if you can be half as glad to see me, as I am to see you." "The time has appeared so long; has it, Marigold?" "I won't say that, sir, considering its real length; but—" "What a start, my good fellow!" Ah! I should think it was! Grown such a woman, so pretty, so intelligent, so expressive! I knew then that she must be really like my child, or I could never have known her, standing quiet by the door. "You are affected," says the gentleman in a kindly manner. "I feel, sir," says I, "that I am but a rough chap in a sleeved waistcoat." "I feel," says the gentleman, "that it was you who raised her from misery and degradation, and brought her into communication with her kind. But why do we converse alone together, when we can converse so well with her? Address her in your own way." "I am such a rough chap in a sleeved waistcoat, sir," says I, "and she is such a graceful woman, and she stands so quiet at the door!" "Try if she moves at the old sign," says the gentleman. They had got it up together o' purpose to please me! For when I give her the old sign, she rushed to my feet, and dropped upon her knees, holding up her hands to me with pouring tears of love and joy; and when I took her hands and lifted her, she clasped me round the neck and lay there; and I don't know what a fool I didn't make of myself, until we all three settled down into talking without sound, as if there was a something soft and pleasant spread over the whole world for us. Now I'll tell you what I am a going to do with you. I am a going to offer you the general miscellaneous lot, her own book, never read by anybody else but me, added to and completed by me after her first reading of it, eight-and-forty printed pages, six-and-ninety columns, Whiting's own work, Beaufort House to wit, thrown off by the steam-ingine, best of paper, beautiful green wrapper, folded like clean linen come home from the clear-starcher's, and so exquisitely stitched that, regarded as a piece of needlework alone it's better than the sampler of a seamstress undergoing a Competitive Examination for Starvation before the Civil Service Commissioners—and I offer the lot for what? For eight pound? Not so much. For six pound? Less. For four pound? Why, I hardly expect you to believe me, but that's the sum. Four pound! The stitching alone cost half as much again. Here's forty-eight original pages, ninety-six original columns, for four pound. You want more for the money? Take it. Three whole pages of advertisements of thrilling interest thrown in for nothing. Read 'em and believe 'em. More? My best of wishes for your merry Christmases and your happy New Years, your long lives and your true prosperities. Worth twenty pound good if they are delivered as I send them. Remember! Here's a final prescription added, "To be taken for life," which will tell you how the cart broke down, and where the journey ended. You think Four Pound too much? And still you think so? Come! I'll tell you what then. Say Four Pence, and keep the secret. I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener's internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. In what I am going to relate I have no intention of setting up, opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever. I know the history of the Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a late Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have followed the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of Spectral Illusion occurring within my private circle of friends. It may be necessary to state as to this last that the sufferer (a lady) was in no degree, however distant, related to me. A mistaken assumption on that head, might suggest an explanation of a part of my own case—but only a part—which would be wholly without foundation. It cannot be referred to my inheritance of any developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at all similar experience, nor have I ever had any at all similar experience since. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in England, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murderers as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and I would bury the memory of this particular brute, if I could, as his body was buried, in Newgate Jail. I purposely abstain from giving any direct clue to the criminal's individuality. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicion fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. As no reference was at that time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him can at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but in chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of Saint James's-street. It was entirely new to me. I was in my easy-chair at the moment, and the sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver which started the chair from its position. (But it is to be noted that the chair ran easily on castors.) I went to one of the windows (there are two in the room, and the room is on the second floor) to refresh my eyes with the moving objects down in Piccadilly. It was a bright autumn morning, and the street was sparkling and cheerful. The wind was high. As I looked out, it brought down from the Park a quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and whirled into a spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I saw two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East. They were one behind the other. The foremost man often looked back over his shoulder. The second man followed him, at a distance of some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised. First, the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so public a thoroughfare, attracted my attention; and next, the more remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded their way among the other passengers, with a smoothness hardly consistent even with the action of walking on a pavement, and no single creature that I could see, gave them place, touched them, or looked after them. In passing before my windows, they both stared up at me. I saw their two faces very distinctly, and I knew that I could recognise them anywhere. Not that I had consciously noticed anything very remarkable in either face, except that the man who went first had an unusually lowering appearance, and that the face of the man who followed him was of the colour of impure wax. I am a bachelor, and my valet and his wife constitute my whole establishment. My occupation is in a certain Branch Bank, and I wish that my duties as head of a Department were as light as they are popularly supposed to be. They kept me in town that autumn, when I stood in need of change. I was not ill, but I was not well. My reader is to make the most that can be reasonably made of my feeling jaded, having a depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being "slightly dyspeptic." I am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of health at that time justifies no stronger description, and I quote his own from his written answer to my request for it. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger possession of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. But I knew that a verdict of Wilful Murder had been found against the suspected Murderer, and that he had been committed to Newgate for trial. I also knew that his trial had been postponed over one Sessions of the Central Criminal Court, on the ground of general prejudice and want of time for the preparation of the defence. I may further have known, but I believe I did not, when, or about when, the Sessions to which his trial stood postponed would come on. My sitting-room, bedroom, and dressing-room, are all on one floor. With the last, there is no communication but through the bedroom. True, there is a door in it, once communicating with the staircase; but a part of the fitting of my bath has been—and had then been for some years—fixed across it. At the same period, and as a part of the same arrangement, the door had been nailed up and canvased over. I was standing in my bedroom late one night, giving some directions to my servant before he went to bed. My face was towards the only available door of communication with the dressing-room, and it was closed. My servant's back was towards that door. While I was speaking to him I saw it open, and a man look in, who very earnestly and mysteriously beckoned to me. That man was the man who had gone second of the two along Piccadilly, and whose face was of the colour of impure wax. The figure, having beckoned, drew back and closed the door. With no longer pause than was made by my crossing the bedroom, I opened the dressing-room door, and looked in. I had a lighted candle already in my hand. I felt no inward expectation of seeing the figure in the dressing-room, and I did not see it there. Conscious that my servant stood amazed, I turned round to him, and said: "Derrick, could you believe that in my cool senses I fancied I saw a—" As I there laid my hand upon his breast, with a sudden start he trembled violently, and said, "O Lord yes, sir! A dead man beckoning!" Now, I do not believe that this John Derrick, my trusty and attached servant for more than twenty years, had any impression whatever of having seen any such figure, until I touched him. The change in him was so startling when I touched him, that I fully believe he derived his impression in some occult manner from me at that instant. I bade John Derrick bring some brandy, and I gave him a dram, and was glad to take one myself. Of what had preceded that night's phenomenon, I told him not a single word. Reflecting on it, I was absolutely certain that I had never seen that face before, except on the one occasion in Piccadilly. Comparing its expression when beckoning at the door, with its expression when it had stared up at me as I stood at my window, I came to the conclusion that on the first occasion it had sought to fasten itself upon my memory, and that on the second occasion it had made sure of being immediately remembered. I was not very comfortable that night, though I felt a certainty, difficult to explain, that the figure would not return. At daylight, I fell into a heavy sleep, from which I was awakened by John Derrick's coming to my bedside with a paper in his hand. This paper, it appeared, had been the subject of an altercation at the door between its bearer and my servant. It was a summons to me to serve upon a Jury at the forthcoming Sessions of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. I had never before been summoned on such a Jury, as John Derrick well knew. He believed—I am not certain at this hour whether with reason or otherwise—that that class of Jurors were customarily chosen on a lower qualification than mine, and he had at first refused to accept the summons. The man who served it had taken the matter very coolly. He had said that my attendance or non-attendance was nothing to him; there the summons was; and I should deal with it at my own peril, and not at his. For a day or two I was undecided whether to respond to this call, or take no notice of it. I was not conscious of the slightest mysterious bias, influence, or attraction, one way or other. Of that I am as strictly sure as of every other statement that I make here. Ultimately I decided, as a break in the monotony of my life, that I would go. The appointed morning was a raw morning in the month of November. There was a dense brown fog in Piccadilly, and it became positively black and in the last degree oppressive East of Temple Bar. I found the passages and staircases of the Court House flaringly lighted with gas, and the Court itself similarly illuminated. I think that until I was conducted by officers into the Old Court and saw its crowded state, I did not know that the Murderer was to be tried that day. I think that until I was so helped into the Old Court with considerable difficulty, I did not know into which of the two Courts sitting, my summons would take me. But this must not be received as a positive assertion, for I am not completely satisfied in my mind on either point. I took my seat in the place appropriated to Jurors in waiting, and I looked about the Court as well as I could through the cloud of fog and breath that was heavy in it. I noticed the black vapour hanging like a murky curtain outside the great windows, and I noticed the stifled sound of wheels on the straw or tan that was littered in the street; also, the hum of the people gathered there, which a shrill whistle, or a louder song or hail than the rest, occasionally pierced. Soon afterwards the Judges, two in number, entered and took their seats. The buzz in the Court was awfully hushed. The direction was given to put the Murderer to the bar. He appeared there. And in that same instant I recognised in him, the first of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly. If my name had been called then, I doubt if I could have answered to it audibly. But it was called about sixth or eighth in the panel, and I was by that time able to say "Here!" Now, observe. As I stepped into the box, the prisoner, who had been looking on attentively but with no sign of concern, became violently agitated, and beckoned to his attorney. The prisoner's wish to challenge me was so manifest, that it occasioned a pause, during which the attorney, with his hand upon the dock, whispered with his client, and shook his head. I afterwards had it from that gentleman, that the prisoner's first affrighted words to him were, "At all hazards challenge that man!" But, that as he would give no reason for it, and admitted that he had not even known my name until he heard it called and I appeared, it was not done. Both on the ground already explained, that I wish to avoid reviving the unwholesome memory of that Murderer, and also because a detailed account of his long trial is by no means indispensable to my narrative, I shall confine myself closely to such incidents in the ten days and nights during which we, the Jury, were kept together, as directly bear on my own curious personal experience. It is in that, and not in the Murderer, that I seek to interest my reader. It is to that, and not to a page of the Newgate Calendar, that I beg attention. I was chosen Foreman of the Jury. On the second morning of the trial, after evidence had been taken for two hours (I heard the church clocks strike), happening to cast my eyes over my brother-jurymen, I found an inexplicable difficulty in counting them. I counted them several times, yet always with the same difficulty. In short, I made them one too many. I touched the brother-juryman whose place was next me, and I whispered to him, "Oblige me by counting us." He looked surprised by the request, but turned his head and counted. "Why," says he, suddenly, "we are Thirt—; but no, it's not possible. No. We are twelve." According to my counting that day, we were always right in detail, but in the gross we were always one too many. There was no appearance—no figure—to account for it; but I had now an inward foreshadowing of the figure that was surely coming. The Jury were housed at the London Tavern. We all slept in one large room on separate tables, and we were constantly in the charge and under the eye of the officer sworn to hold us in safe-keeping. I see no reason for suppressing the real name of that officer. He was intelligent, highly polite, and obliging, and (I was glad to hear) much respected in the City. He had an agreeable presence, good eyes, enviable black whiskers, and a fine sonorous voice. His name was Mr. Harker. When we turned into our twelve beds at night, Mr. Harker's bed was drawn across the door. On the night of the second day, not being disposed to lie down, and seeing Mr. Harker sitting on his bed, I went and sat beside him, and offered him a pinch of snuff. As Mr. Harker's hand touched mine in taking it from my box, a peculiar shiver crossed him, and he said: "Who is this!" Following Mr. Harker's eyes and looking along the room, I saw again the figure I expected—the second of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly. I rose, and advanced a few steps; then stopped, and looked round at Mr. Harker. He was quite unconcerned, laughed, and said in a pleasant way, "I thought for a moment we had a thirteenth juryman, without a bed. But I see it is the moonlight." Making no revelation to Mr. Harker, but inviting him to take a walk with me to the end of the room, I watched what the figure did. It stood for a few moments by the bedside of each of my eleven brother-jurymen, close to the pillow. It always went to the right-hand side of the bed, and always passed out crossing the foot of the next bed. It seemed from the action of the head, merely to look down pensively at each recumbent figure. It took no notice of me, or of my bed, which was that nearest to Mr. Harker's. It seemed to go out where the moonlight came in, through a high window, as by an aërial flight of stairs. Next morning at breakfast, it appeared that everybody present had dreamed of the murdered man last night, except myself and Mr. Harker. I now felt as convinced that the second man who had gone down Piccadilly was the murdered man (so to speak), as if it had been borne into my comprehension by his immediate testimony. But even this took place, and in a manner for which I was not at all prepared. On the fifth day of the trial, when the case for the prosecution was drawing to a close, a miniature of the murdered man, missing from his bedroom upon the discovery of the deed, and afterwards found in a hiding-place where the Murderer had been seen digging, was put in evidence. Having been identified by the witness under examination, it was handed up to the Bench, and thence handed down to be inspected by the Jury. As an officer in a black gown was making his way with it across to me, the figure of the second man who had gone down Piccadilly, impetuously started from the crowd, caught the miniature from the officer, and gave it to me with its own hands, at the same time saying in a low and hollow tone—before I saw the miniature, which was in a locket—"I was younger then, and my face was not then drained of blood." It also came between me and the brother juryman to whom I would have given the miniature, and between him and the brother juryman to whom he would have given it, and so passed it on through the whole of our number, and back into my possession. Not one of them, however, detected this. At table, and generally when we were shut up together in Mr. Harker's custody, we had from the first naturally discussed the day's proceedings a good deal. On that fifth day, the case for the prosecution being closed, and we having that side of the question in a completed shape before us, our discussion was more animated and serious. Among our number was a vestryman—the densest idiot I have ever seen at large—who met the plainest evidence with the most preposterous objections, and who was sided with by two flabby parochial parasites; all the three empanelled from a district so delivered over to Fever that they ought to have been upon their own trial, for five hundred Murders. When these mischievous blockheads were at their loudest, which was towards midnight while some of us were already preparing for bed, I again saw the murdered man. He stood grimly behind them, beckoning to me. On my going towards them and striking into the conversation, he immediately retired. This was the beginning of a separate series of appearances, confined to that long room in which we were confined. Whenever a knot of my brother jurymen laid their heads together, I saw the head of the murdered man among theirs. Whenever their comparison of notes was going against him, he would solemnly and irresistibly beckon to me. It will be borne in mind that down to the production of the miniature on the fifth day of the trial, I had never seen the Appearance in Court. Three changes occurred, now that we entered on the case for the defence. Two of them I will mention together, first. The figure was now in Court continually, and it never there addressed itself to me, but always to the person who was speaking at the time. For instance. The throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech, for the defence, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat. At that very moment, the figure with its throat in the dreadful condition referred to (this it had concealed before) stood at the speaker's elbow, motioning across and across its windpipe, now with the right hand, now with the left, vigorously suggesting to the speaker himself, the impossibility of such a wound having been self-inflicted by either hand. For another instance. A witness to character, a woman, deposed to the prisoner's being the most amiable of mankind. The figure at that instant stood on the floor before her, looking her full in the face, and pointing out the prisoner's evil countenance with an extended arm and an outstretched finger. The third change now to be added, impressed me strongly, as the most marked and striking of all. I do not theorise upon it; I accurately state it, and there leave it. Although the Appearance was not itself perceived by those whom it addressed, its coming close to such persons was invariably attended by some trepidation or disturbance on their part. It seemed to me as if it were prevented by laws to which I was not amenable, from fully revealing itself to others, and yet as if it could, invisibly, dumbly and darkly, overshadow their minds. When the leading counsel for the defence suggested that hypothesis of suicide and the figure stood at the learned gentleman's elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed throat, it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a few seconds the thread of his ingenious discourse, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and turned extremely pale. When the witness to character was confronted by the Appearance, her eyes most certainly did follow the direction of its pointed finger, and rest in great hesitation and trouble upon the prisoner's face. Two additional illustrations will suffice. On the eighth day of the trial, after the pause which was every day made early in the afternoon for a few minutes' rest and refreshment, I came back into Court with the rest of the Jury, some little time before the return of the Judges. Standing up in the box and looking about me, I thought the figure was not there, until, chancing to raise my eyes to the gallery, I saw it bending forward and leaning over a very decent woman, as if to assure itself whether the Judges had resumed their seats or not. Immediately afterwards, that woman screamed, fainted, and was carried out. So with the venerable, sagacious, and patient Judge who conducted the trial. When the case was over, and he settled himself and his papers to sum up, the murdered man entering by the Judges' door, advanced to his Lordship's desk, and looked eagerly over his shoulder at the pages of his notes which he was turning. A change came over his Lordship's face; his hand stopped; the peculiar shiver that I knew so well, passed over him; he faltered, "Excuse me, gentlemen, for a few moments. I am somewhat oppressed by the vitiated air;" and did not recover until he had drunk a glass of water. Through all the monotony of six of those interminable ten days—the same Judges and others on the bench, the same Murderer in the dock, the same lawyers at the table, the same tones of question and answer rising to the roof of the court, the same scratching of the Judge's pen, the same ushers going in and out, the same lights kindled at the same hour when there had been any natural light of day, the same foggy curtain outside the great windows when it was foggy, the same rain pattering and dripping when it was rainy, the same footmarks of turnkeys and prisoner day after day on the same sawdust, the same keys locking and unlocking the same heavy doors—through all the wearisome monotony which made me feel as if I had been Foreman of the Jury for a vast period of time, and Piccadilly had flourished coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost one trace of his distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less distinct than anybody else. I must not omit, as a matter of fact, that I never once saw the Appearance which I call by the name of the murdered man, look at the Murderer. Again and again I wondered, "Why does he not?" But he never did. Nor did he look at me, after the production of the miniature, until the last closing minutes of the trial arrived. We retired to consider, at seven minutes before ten at night. The idiotic vestryman and his two parochial parasites gave us so much trouble, that we twice returned into Court, to beg to have certain extracts from the Judge's notes re-read. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believe, had any one in Court; the dunderheaded triumvirate however, having no idea but obstruction, disputed them for that very reason. At length we prevailed, and finally the Jury returned into Court at ten minutes past twelve. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the Jury-box, on the other side of the Court. As I took my place, his eyes rested on me, with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. As I gave in our verdict "Guilty," the veil collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. The Murderer being asked by the Judge, according to usage, whether he had anything to say before sentence of Death should be passed upon him, indistinctly muttered something which was described in the leading newspapers of the following day as "a few rambling, incoherent, and half-audible words, in which he was understood to complain that he had not had a fair trial, because the Foreman of the Jury was prepossessed against him." The remarkable declaration that he really made, was this: "My Lord, I knew I was a doomed man when the Foreman of my Jury came into the box. My Lord, I knew he would never let me off, because, before I was taken, he somehow got to my bedside in the night, woke me, and put a rope round my neck." Sophy read through the whole of the foregoing several times over, and I sat in my seat in the Library Cart (that's the name we give it) seeing her read, and I was as pleased and as proud as a Pug-Dog with his muzzle black-leaded for an evening party and his tail extra curled by machinery. Every item of my plan was crowned with success. Our reunited life was more than all that we had looked forward to. Content and joy went with us as the wheels of the two carts went round, and the same stopped with us when the two carts stopped. But I had left something out of my calculations. Now, what had I left out? To help you to a guess, I'll say, a figure. Come. Make a guess, and guess right. Nought? No. Nine? No. Eight? No. Seven? No. Six? No. Five? No. Four? No. Three? No. Two? No. One? No. Now I'll tell you what I'll do with you. I'll say it's another sort of figure altogether. There. Why then, says you, it's a mortal figure. No nor yet a mortal figure. By such means you get yourself penned into a corner, and you can't help guessing a immortal figure. That's about it. Why didn't you say so sooner? Yes. It was a immortal figure that I had altogether left out of my calculations. Neither man's nor woman's, but a child's. Girl's, or boy's? Boy's. "I says the sparrow, with my bow and arrow." Now you have got it. We were down at Lancaster, and I had done two nights' more than fair average business (though I cannot in honour recommend them as a quick audience) in the open square there, near the end of the street where Mr. Sly's King's Arms and Royal Hotel stands. Mim's travelling giant otherwise Pickleson happened at the self-same time to be a trying it on in the town. The genteel lay was adopted with him. No hint of a van. Green baize alcove leading up to Pickleson in a Auction Room. Printed poster "Free list suspended, with the exception of that proud boast of an enlightened country, a free press. Schools admitted by private arrangement. Nothing to raise a blush in the cheek of youth or shock the most fastidious." Mim swearing most horrible and terrific in a pink calico pay-place, at the slackness of the public. Serious hand-bill in the shops, importing that it was all but impossible to come to a right understanding of the history of David, without seeing Pickleson. I went to the Auction Room in question, and I found it entirely empty of everything but echoes and mouldiness, with the single exception of Pickleson on a piece of red drugget. This suited my purpose, as I wanted a private and confidential word with him, which was: "Pickleson. Owing much happiness to you, I put you in my will for a fypunnote; but, to save trouble here's fourpunten down, which may equally suit your views, and let us so conclude the transaction." Pickleson, who up to that remark had had the dejected appearance of a long Roman rushlight that couldn't anyhow get lighted, brightened up at his top extremity and made his acknowledgments in a way which (for him) was parliamentary eloquence. He likewise did add, that, having ceased to draw as a Roman, Mim had made proposals for his going in as a conwerted Indian Giant worked upon by The Dairyman's Daughter. This, Pickleson, having no acquaintance with the tract named after that young woman, and not being willing to couple gag with his serious views, had declined to do, thereby leading to words and the total stoppage of the unfortunate young man's beer. All of which, during the whole of the interview, was confirmed by the ferocious growling of Mim down below in the pay-place, which shook the giant like a leaf. But what was to the present point in the remarks of the travelling giant otherwise Pickleson, was this: "Doctor Marigold"—I give his words without a hope of conweying their feebleness—"who is the strange young man that hangs about your carts?"—"The strange young man?" I gives him back, thinking that he meant her, and his languid circulation had dropped a syllable. "Doctor," he returns, with a pathos calculated to draw a tear from even a manly eye, "I am weak, but not so weak yet as that I don't know my words. I repeat them, Doctor. The strange young man." It then appeared that Pickleson being forced to stretch his legs (not that they wanted it) only at times when he couldn't be seen for nothing, to wit in the dead of the night and towards daybreak, had twice seen hanging about my carts, in that same town of Lancaster where I had been only two nights, this same unknown young man. It put me rather out of sorts. What it meant as to particulars I no more foreboded then, than you forebode now, but it put me rather out of sorts. Howsoever, I made light of it to Pickleson, and I took leave of Pickleson advising him to spend his legacy in getting up his stamina, and to continue to stand by his religion. Towards morning I kept a look-out for the strange young man, and what was more—I saw the strange young man. He was well dressed and well looking. He loitered very nigh my carts, watching them like as if he was taking care of them, and soon after daybreak turned and went away. I sent a hail after him, but he never started or looked round, or took the smallest notice. We left Lancaster within an hour or two, on our way towards Carlisle. Next morning at daybreak, I looked out again for the strange young man. I did not see him. But next morning I looked out again, and there he was once more. I sent another hail after him, but as before he gave not the slightest sign of being anyways disturbed. This put a thought into my head. Acting on it, I watched him in different manners and at different times not necessary to enter into, till I found that this strange young man was deaf and dumb. The discovery turned me over, because I knew that a part of that establishment where she had been, was allotted to young men (some of them well off), and I thought to myself "If she favours him, where am I, and where is all that I have worked and planned for?" Hoping—I must confess to the selfishness—that she might not favour him. I set myself to find out. At last I was by accident present at a meeting between them in the open air, looking on leaning behind a fir-tree without their knowing of it. It was a moving meeting for all the three parties concerned. I knew every syllable that passed between them, as well as they did. I listened with my eyes, which had come to be as quick and true with deaf and dumb conversation, as my ears with the talk of people that can speak. He was a going out to China as clerk in a merchant's house, which his father had been before him. He was in circumstances to keep a wife, and he wanted her to marry him and go along with him. She persisted, no. He asked if she didn't love him? Yes, she loved him dearly, dearly, but she could never disappoint her beloved good noble generous and I don't-know-what-all father (meaning me, the Cheap Jack in the sleeved waistcoat), and she would stay with him, Heaven bless him, though it was to break her heart! Then she cried most bitterly, and that made up my mind. While my mind had been in an unsettled state about her favouring this young man, I had felt that unreasonable towards Pickleson, that it was well for him he had got his legacy down. For I often thought "If it hadn't been for this same weak-minded giant, I might never have come to trouble my head and wex my soul about the young man." But, once that I knew she loved him—once that I had seen her weep for him—it was a different thing. I made it right in my mind with Pickleson on the spot, and I shook myself together to do what was right by all. She had left the young man by that time (for it took a few minutes to get me thoroughly well shook together), and the young man was leaning against another of the fir-trees—of which there was a cluster—with his face upon his arm. I touched him on the back. Looking up and seeing me, he says, in our deaf and dumb talk: "Do not be angry." "I am not angry, good boy. I am your friend. Come with me." I left him at the foot of the steps of the Library Cart, and I went up alone. She was drying her eyes. "You have been crying, my dear." "Yes, father." "Why?" "A head-ache." "Not a heart-ache?" "I said a head-ache, father." "Doctor Marigold must prescribe for that head-ache." She took up the book of my Prescriptions, and held it up with a forced smile; but seeing me keep still and look earnest, she softly laid it down again, and her eyes were very attentive. "The Prescription is not there, Sophy." "Where is it?" "Here, my dear." I brought her young husband in, and I put her hand in his, and my only further words to both of them were these: "Doctor Marigold's last prescription. To be taken for life." After which I bolted. When the wedding come off, I mounted a coat (blue, and bright buttons), for the first and last time in all my days, and I give Sophy away with my own hand. There were only us three and the gentleman who had had charge of her for those two years. I give the wedding dinner of four in the Library Cart. Pigeon pie, a leg of pickled pork, a pair of fowls, and suitable garden-stuff. The best of drinks. I give them a speech, and the gentlemen give us a speech, and all our jokes told, and the whole went off like a sky-rocket. In the course of the entertainment I explained to Sophy that I should keep the Library Cart as my living-cart when not upon the road, and that I should keep all her books for her just as they stood, till she come back to claim them. So she went to China with her young husband, and it was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I got the boy I had another service, and so as of old when my child and wife were gone, I went plodding along alone, with my whip over my shoulder, at the old horse's head. Sophy wrote me many letters, and I wrote her many letters. About the end of the first year she sent me one in an unsteady hand: "Dearest father, not a week ago I had a darling little daughter, but I am so well that they let me write these words to you. Dearest and best father, I hope my child may not be deaf and dumb, but I do not yet know." When I wrote back, I hinted the question; but as Sophy never answered that question, I felt it to be a sad one, and I never repeated it. For a long time our letters were regular, but then they got irregular through Sophy's husband being moved to another station, and through my being always on the move. But we were in one another's thoughts, I was equally sure, letters or no letters. Five years, odd months, had gone since Sophy went away. I was still the King of the Cheap Jacks, and at a greater heighth of popularity than ever. I had had a first-rate autumn of it, and on the twenty-third of December, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four, I found myself at Uxbridge, Middlesex, clean sold out. So I jogged up to London with the old horse, light and easy, to have my Christmas-Eve and Christmas Day alone by the fire in the Library Cart, and then to buy a regular new stock of goods all round, to sell 'em again and get the money. I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas-Eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms, thrown in. It's a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat. Having relished that pudding and cleared away, I turned the lamp low, and sat down by the light of the fire, watching it as it shone upon the backs of Sophy's books. Sophy's books so brought up Sophy's self, that I saw her touching face quite plainly, before I dropped off dozing by the fire. This may be a reason why Sophy, with her deaf and dumb child in her arms, seemed to stand silent by me all through my nap. I was on the road, off the road, in all sorts of places, North and South and West and East, Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone astray, Over the hills and far away, and still she stood silent by me, with her silent child in her arms. Even when I woke with a start, she seemed to vanish, as if she had stood by me in that very place only a single instant before. I had started at a real sound, and the sound was on the steps of the cart. It was the light hurried tread of a child, coming clambering up. That tread of a child had once been so familiar to me, that for half a moment I believed I was a going to see a little ghost. But the touch of a real child was laid upon the outer handle of the door, and the handle turned and the door opened a little way, and a real child peeped in. A bright little comely girl with large dark eyes. Looking full at me, the tiny creature took off her mite of a straw hat, and a quantity of dark curls fell all about her face. Then she opened her lips, and said in a pretty voice: "Grandfather!" "Ah my God!" I cries out. "She can speak!" "Yes, dear grandfather. And I am to ask you whether there was ever any one that I remind you of?" In a moment Sophy was round my neck as well as the child, and her husband was a wringing my hand with his face hid, and we all had to shake ourselves together before we could get over it. And when we did begin to get over it, and I saw the pretty child a talking, pleased and quick and eager and busy, to her mother, in the signs that I had first taught her mother, the happy and yet pitying tears fell rolling down my face. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions (1865 Christmas Number) Description An account of the resource Published in All the Year Round, Vol. XIV, Extra Christmas Number, 7 December 1865, pp. 1-48. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xiv/page-573.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xiv/page-573.html</a>. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xiv/page-605.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xiv/page-605.html</a>. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xiv/page-618.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xiv/page-618.html</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1865-12-07 Type The nature or genre of the resource Christmas Number Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1865-12-07-Doctor_Marigolds_Prescriptions Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles et. al. Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions (7 December 1865). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1865-12-07-Doctor_Marigolds_Prescriptions">https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1865-12-07-Doctor_Marigolds_Prescriptions</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Scanned material from Dickens Journals Online, <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk" id="LPNoLPOWALinkPreview" contenteditable="false" title="http://www.djo.org.uk">www.djo.org.uk</a>. Available under CC BY licence. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. <ul> <li>Charles Dickens. 'To Be Taken Immediately' (No.1), pp. 1-9.</li> <li>Rosa Mulholland. 'Not to Be Taken at Bedtime' (No.2), pp. 9-15.</li> <li>Charles Allston Collins. 'To Be Taken at the Dinner Table' (No.3), pp. 15-20.</li> <li>Hesba Stretton. 'Not to Be Taken for Granted' (No.4), pp. 20-27.</li> <li>Walter Thornbury. 'To Be Taken in Water' (No.5), pp. 27-33.</li> <li>Charles Dickens. 'To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt' (No.6), pp. 33-38.</li> <li>Mrs. Gascoyne (Caroline Leigh Smith?). 'To Be Taken and Tried' (No.7), pp. 38-46.</li> <li>Charles Dickens. 'To Be Taken for Life' (No.8), pp. 46-48.</li> </ul> Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. I am a Cheap Jack, and my own father's name was Willum Marigold. It was in his lifetime supposed by some that his name was William, but my own father always consistently said, No, it was Willum. On which point I content myself with looking at the argument this way:—If a man is not allowed to know his own name in a free country, how much is he allowed to know in a land of slavery? As to looking at the argument through the medium of the Register, Willum Marigold come into the world before Registers come up much—and went out of it too. They wouldn't have been greatly in his line neither, if they had chanced to come up before him. I was born on the Queen's highway, but it was the King's at that time. A doctor was fetched to my own mother by my own father, when it took place on a common; and in consequence of his being a very kind gentleman, and accepting no fee but a tea-tray, I was named Doctor, out of gratitude and compliment to him. There you have me. Doctor Marigold. I am at present a middle-aged man of a broadish build, in cords, leggings, and a sleeved waistcoat the strings of which is always gone behind. Repair them how you will, they go like fiddle-strings. You have been to the theatre, and you have seen one of the wiolin-players screw up his wiolin, after listening to it as if it had been whispering the secret to him that it feared it was out of order, and then you have heard it snap. That's as exactly similar to my waistcoat, as a waistcoat and a wiolin can be like one another. I am partial to a white hat, and I like a shawl round my neck wore loose and easy. Sitting down is my favourite posture. If I have a taste in point of personal jewellery, it is mother-of-pearl buttons. There you have me again, as large as life. The doctor having accepted a tea-tray, you'll guess that my father was a Cheap Jack before me. You are right. He was. It was a pretty tray. It represented a large lady going along a serpentining up-hill gravel-walk, to attend a little church. Two swans had likewise come astray with the same intentions. When I call her a large lady, I don't mean in point of breadth, for there she fell below my views, but she more than made it up in heighth; her heighth and slimness was—in short THE heighth of both. I often saw that tray, after I was the innocently smiling cause (or more likely screeching one) of the doctor's standing it up on a table against the wall in his consulting-room. Whenever my own father and mother were in that part of the country, I used to put my head (I have heard my own mother say it was flaxen curls at that time, though you wouldn't know an old hearth-broom from it now, till you come to the handle and found it wasn't me) in at the doctor's door, and the doctor was always glad to see me, and said, "Aha, my brother practitioner! Come in, little M.D. How are your inclinations as to sixpence?" You can't go on for ever, you'll find, nor yet could my father nor yet my mother. If you don't go off as a whole when you are about due, you're liable to go off in part and two to one your head's the part. Gradually my father went off his, and my mother went off hers. It was in a harmless way, but it put out the family where I boarded them. The old couple, though retired, got to be wholly and solely devoted to the Cheap Jack business, and were always selling the family off. Whenever the cloth was laid for dinner, my father began rattling the plates and dishes, as we do in our line when we put up crockery for a bid, only he had lost the trick of it, and mostly let 'em drop and broke 'em. As the old lady had been used to sit in the cart, and hand the articles out one by one to the old gentleman on the footboard to sell, just in the same way she handed him every item of the family's property, and they disposed of it in their own imaginations from morning to night. At last the old gentleman, lying bedridden in the same room with the old lady, cries out in the old patter, fluent, after having been silent for two days and nights: "Now here, my jolly companions every one—which the Nightingale club in a village was held, At the sign of the Cabbage and Shears, Where the singers no doubt would have greatly excelled, But for want of taste voices and ears—now here, my jolly companions every one, is a working model of a used-up old Cheap Jack, without a tooth in his head, and with a pain in every bone: so like life that it would be just as good if it wasn't better, just as bad if it wasn't worse, and just as new if it wasn't worn out. Bid for the working model of the old Cheap Jack, who has drunk more gunpowder-tea with the ladies in his time than would blow the lid off a washerwoman's copper, and carry it as many thousands of miles higher than the moon as nought nix nought, divided by the national debt, carry nothing to the poor-rates, three under, and two over. Now my hearts of oak and men of straw, what do you say for the lot? Two shillings, a shilling, tenpence, eightpence, sixpence, fourpence. Twopence? Who said twopence? The gentleman in the scarecrow's hat? I am ashamed of the gentleman in the scarecrow's hat. I really am ashamed of him for his want of public spirit. Now I'll tell you what I'll do with you. Come! I'll throw you in a working model of a old woman that was married to the old Cheap Jack so long ago, that upon my word and honour it took place in Noah's Ark, before the Unicorn could get in to forbid the banns by blowing a tune upon his horn. There now! Come! What do you say for both? I'll tell you what I'll do with you. I don't bear you malice for being so backward. Here! If you make me a bid that'll only reflect a little credit on your town, I'll throw you in a warming-pan for nothing, and lend you a toasting-fork for life. Now come; what do you say after that splendid offer? Say two pound, say thirty shillings, say a pound, say ten shillings, say five, say two and six. You don't say even two and six? You say two and three? No. You shan't have the lot for two and three. I'd sooner give it you, if you was good looking enough. Here! Missis! Chuck the old man and woman into the cart, put the horse to, and drive 'em away and bury 'em!" Such were the last words of Willum Marigold, my own father, and they were carried out, by him and by his wife my own mother on one and the same day, as I ought to know, having followed as mourner. My father had been a lovely one in his time at the Cheap Jack work, as his dying observations went to prove. But I top him. I don't say it because it's myself, but because it has been universally acknowledged by all that has had the means of comparison. I have worked at it. I have measured myself against other public speakers, Members of Parliament, Platforms, Pulpits, Counsel learned in the law—and where I have found 'em good, I have took a bit of imitation from 'em, and where I have found 'em bad, I have let 'em, alone. Now I'll tell you what. I mean to go down into my grave declaring that of all the callings ill used in Great Britain, the Cheap Jack calling is the worst used. Why ain't we a profession? Why ain't we endowed with privileges? Why are we forced to take out a hawkers' license, when no such thing is expected of the political hawkers? Where's the difference betwixt us? Except that we are Cheap Jacks and they are Dear Jacks, I don't see any difference but what's in our favour. For look here! Say it's election-time. I am on the footboard of my cart in the market-place on a Saturday night. I put up a general miscellaneous lot. I say: "Now here my free and independent woters, I'm a going to give you such a chance as you never had in all your born days, nor yet the days preceding. Now I'll show you what I am a going to do with you. Here's a pair of razors that'll shave you closer than the Board of Guardians, here's a flat-iron worth its weight in gold, here's a frying-pan artificially flavoured with essence of beefsteaks to that degree that you've only got for the rest of your lives to fry bread and dripping in it and there you are replete with animal food, here's a genuine chronometer watch in such a solid silver case that you may knock at the door with it when you come home late from a social meeting and rouse your wife and family and save up your knocker for the postman, and here's half a dozen dinner plates that you may play the cymbals with to charm the baby when it's fractious. Stop! I'll throw you in another article and I'll give you that, and it's a rolling-pin, and if the baby can only get it well into its mouth when its teeth is coming and rub the gums once with it, they'll come through double in a fit of laughter equal to being tickled. Stop again! I'll throw you in another article, because I don't like the looks of you, for you haven't the appearance of buyers unless I lose by you, and because I'd rather lose than not take money to-night, and that's a looking-glass in which you may see how ugly you look when you don't bid. What do you say now? Come! Do you say a pound? Not you, for you haven't got it. Do you say ten shillings? Not you, for you owe more to the tallyman. Well then, I'll tell you what I'll do with you. I'll heap 'em all on the footboard of the cart— there they are! razors, flat-iron, frying-pan, chronometer watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and looking-glass—take 'em all away for four shillings, and I'll give you sixpence for your trouble!" This is me, the Cheap Jack. But on the Monday morning, in the same marketplace, comes the Dear Jack on the hustings—his cart—and what does he say? "Now my free and independent woters, I am a going to give you such a chance" (he begins just like me) "as you never had in all your born days, and that's the chance of sending Myself to Parliament. Now I'll tell you what I am a going to do for you. Here's the interests of this magnificent town promoted above all the rest of the civilised and uncivilised earth. Here's your railways carried, and your neighbours' railways jockeyed. Here's all your sons in the Post-office. Here's Britannia smiling on you. Here's the eyes of Europe on you. Here's uniwersal prosperity for you, repletion of animal food, golden cornfields, gladsome homesteads, and rounds of applause from your own hearts, all in one lot and that's myself. Will you take me as I stand? You won't? Well then, I'll tell you what I'll do with you. Come now! I'll throw you in anything you ask for. There! Church-rates, abolition of church-rates, more malt tax, no malt tax, uniwersal education to the highest mark or uniwersal ignorance to the lowest, total abolition of flogging in the army or a dozen for every private once a month all round, Wrongs of Men or Rights of Women,—only say which it shall be, take 'em or leave 'em, and I'm of your opinion altogether, and the lot's your own on your own terms. There! You won't take it yet? Well then, I'll tell you what I'll do with you. Come! You are such free and independent woters, and I am so proud of you—you are such a noble and enlightened constituency, and I am so ambitious of the honour and dignity of being your member, which is by far the highest level to which the wings of the human mind can soar—that I'll tell you what I'll do with you. I'll throw you in all the public-houses in your magnificent town for nothing. Will that content you? It won't? You won't take the lot yet? Well then, before I put the horse in and drive away, and make the offer to the next most magnificent town that can be discovered, I'll tell you what I'll do. Take the lot, and I'll drop two thousand pound in the streets of your magnificent town for them to pick up that can. Not enough? Now look here. This is the very furthest that I'm a going to. I'll make it two thousand five hundred. And still you won't? Here, missis! Put the horse—no, stop half a moment, I shouldn't like to turn my back upon you neither for a trifle, I'll make it two thousand seven hundred and fifty pound. There! Take the lot on your own terms, and I'll count out two thousand seven hundred and fifty pound on the footboard of the cart, to be dropped in the streets of your magnificent town for them to pick up that can. What do you say? Come now! You won't do better, and you may do worse. You take it? Hooray! Sold again, and got the seat!" These Dear Jacks soap the people shameful, but we Cheap Jacks don't. We tell 'em the truth about themselves to their faces, and scorn to court 'em. As to wenturesomeness in the way of puffing up the lots, the Dear Jacks beat us hollow. It is considered in the Cheap Jack calling that better patter can be made out of a gun than any article we put up from the cart, except a pair of spectacles. I often hold forth about a gun for a quarter of an hour, and feel as if I need never leave off. But when I tell 'em what the gun can do, and what the gun has brought down, I never go half so far as the Dear Jacks do when they make speeches in praise of their guns—their great guns that set 'em on to do it. Besides, I'm in business for myself, I ain't sent down into the market-place to order, as they are. Besides again, my guns don't know what I say in their laudation, and their guns do, and the whole concern of 'em have reason to be sick and ashamed all round. These are some of my arguments for declaring that the Cheap Jack calling is treated ill in Great Britain, and for turning warm when I think of the other Jacks in question setting themselves up to pretend to look down upon it. I courted my wife from the footboard of the cart. I did indeed. She was a Suffolk young woman, and it was in Ipswich market-place right opposite the corn-chandler's shop. I had noticed her up at a window last Saturday that was, appreciating highly. I had took to her, and I had said to myself, "If not already disposed of, I'll have that lot." Next Saturday that come, I pitched the cart on the same pitch, and I was in very high feather indeed, keeping 'em laughing the whole of the time and getting off the goods briskly. At last I took out of my waistcoat-pocket, a small lot wrapped in soft paper, and I put it this way (looking up at the window where she was). "Now here my blooming English maidens is an article, the last article of the present evening's sale, which I offer to only you the lovely Suffolk Dumplings biling over with beauty, and I won't take a bid of a thousand pound for, from any man alive. Now what is it? Why, I'll tell you what it is. It's made of fine gold, and it's not broke though there's a hole in the middle of it, and it's stronger than any fetter that ever was forged, though it's smaller than any finger in my set of ten. Why ten? Because when my parents made over my property to me, I tell you true, there was twelve sheets, twelve towels, twelve tablecloths, twelve knives, twelve forks, twelve tablespoons, and twelve teaspoons, but my set of fingers was two short of a dozen and could never since be matched. Now what else is it? Come I'll tell you. It's a hoop of solid gold, wrapped in a silver curl-paper that I myself took off the shining locks of the ever beautiful old lady in Threadneedle-street, London city. I wouldn't tell you so if I hadn't the paper to show, or you mightn't believe it even of me. Now what else is it? It's a man-trap and a handcuff, the parish stocks and a leg-lock, all in gold and all in one. Now what else is it? It's a wedding ring. Now I'll tell you what I'm a-going to do with it. I'm not a-going to offer this lot for money, but I mean to give it to the next of you beauties that laughs, and I'll pay her a visit to-morrow morning at exactly half after nine o'clock as the chimes go, and I'll take her out for a walk to put up the banns." She laughed, and got the ring handed up to her. When I called in the morning, she says, "Oh dear! It's never you and you never mean it?" "It's ever me," says I, "and I am ever yours, and I ever mean it." So we got married, after being put up three times—which, by-the-by, is quite in the Cheap Jack way again, and shows once more how the Cheap Jack customs pervade society. She wasn't a bad wife, but she had a temper. If she could have parted with that one article at a sacrifice, I wouldn't have swopped her away in exchange for any other woman in England. Not that I ever did swop her away, for we lived together till she died, and that was thirteen year. Now my lords and ladies and gentlefolks all, I'll let you into a secret, though you won't believe it. Thirteen year of temper in a Palace would try the worst of you, but thirteen year of temper in a Cart would try the best of you. You are kept so very close to it in a cart, you see. There's thousands of couples among you, getting on like sweet ile upon a whetstone in houses five and six pairs of stairs high, that would go to the Divorce Court in a cart. Whether the jolting makes it worse, I don't undertake to decide, but in a cart it does come home to you and stick to you. Wiolence in a cart is so wiolent, and aggrawation in a cart is so aggrawating. We might have had such a pleasant life! A roomy cart, with the large goods hung outside and the bed slung underneath it when on the road, an iron pot and a kettle, a fireplace for the cold weather, a chimney for the smoke, a hanging shelf and a cupboard, a dog, and a horse. What more do you want? You draw off upon a bit of turf in a green lane or by the roadside, you hobble your old horse and turn him grazing, you light your fire upon the ashes of the last visitors, you cook your stew, and you wouldn't call the Emperor of France your father. But have a temper in the cart, flinging language and the hardest goods in stock at you, and where are you then? Put a name to your feelings. My dog knew as well when she was on the turn as I did. Before she broke out, he would give a howl, and bolt. How he knew it, was a mystery to me, but the sure and certain knowledge of it would wake him up out of his soundest sleep, and he would give a howl, and bolt. At such times I wished I was him. The worst of it was, we had a daughter born to us, and I love children with all my heart. When she was in her furies, she beat the child. This got to be so shocking as the child got to be four or five year old, that I have many a time gone on with my whip over my shoulder, at the old horse's head, sobbing and crying worse than ever little Sophy did. For how could I prevent it? Such a thing is not to be tried with such a temper—in a cart—without coming to a fight. It's in the natural size and formation of a cart to bring it to a fight. And then the poor child got worse terrified than before, as well as worse hurt generally, and her mother made complaints to the next people we lighted on, and the word went round, "Here's a wretch of a Cheap Jack been a beating his wife." Little Sophy was such a brave child! She grew to be quite devoted to her poor father, though he could do so little to help her. She had a wonderful quantity of shining dark hair, all curling natural about her. It is quite astonishing to me now, that I didn't go tearing mad when I used to see her run from her mother before the cart, and her mother catch her by this hair, and pull her down by it, and beat her. Such a brave child I said she was. Ah! with reason. "Don't you mind next time, father dear," she would whisper to me, with her little face still flushed, and her bright eyes still wet; "if I don't cry out, you may know I am not much hurt. And even if I do cry out, it will only be to get mother to let go and leave off." What I have seen the little spirit bear—for me—without crying out! Yet in other respects her mother took great care of her. Her clothes were always clean and neat, and her mother was never tired of working at 'em. Such is the inconsistency in things. Our being down in the marsh country in unhealthy weather, I consider the cause of Sophy's taking bad low fever; but however she took it, once she got it she turned away from her mother for evermore, and nothing would persuade her to be touched by her mother's hand. She would shiver and say "No, no, no," when it was offered at, and would hide her face on my shoulder, and hold me tighter round the neck. The Cheap Jack business had been worse than ever I had known it, what with one thing and what with another (and not least what with railroads, which will cut it all to pieces, I expect at last), and I was run dry of money. For which reason, one night at that period of little Sophy's being so bad, either we must have come to a dead-lock for victuals and drink, or I must have pitched the cart as I did. I couldn't get the dear child to lie down or leave go of me, and indeed I hadn't the heart to try, so I stepped out on the footboard with her holding round my neck. They all set up a laugh when they see us, and one chuckle-headed Joskin (that I hated for it) made the bidding, "tuppence for her!" "Now, you country boobies," says I, feeling as if my heart was a heavy weight at the end of a broken sash-line, "I give you notice that I am a going to charm the money out of your pockets, and to give you so much more than your money's worth that you'll only persuade yourselves to draw your Saturday night's wages ever again arterwards, by the hopes of meeting me to lay 'em out with, which you never will, and why not? Because I've made my fortune by selling my goods on a large scale for seventy-five per cent less than I give for 'em, and I am consequently to be elevated to the House of Peers next week, by the title of the Duke of Cheap and Markis Jackaloorul. Now let's know what you want to-night, and you shall have it. But first of all, shall I tell you why I have got this little girl round my neck? You don't want to know? Then you shall. She belongs to the Fairies. She's a fortune-teller. She can tell me all about you in a whisper, and can put me up to whether you're a-going to buy a lot or leave it. Now do you want a saw? No, she says you don't, because you're too clumsy to use one. Else here's a saw which would be a lifelong blessing to a handy man, at four shillings, at three and six, at three, at two and six, at two, at eighteenpence. But none of you shall have it at any price, on account of your well-known awkwardness which would make it manslaughter. The same objection applies to this set of three planes which I won't let you have neither, so don't bid for 'em. Now I am a-going to ask her what you do want. (Then I whispered, "Your head burns so, that I am afraid it hurts you bad, my pet," and she answered, without opening her heavy eyes, "Just a little, father.") Oh! This little fortune-teller says it's a memorandum-book you want. Then why didn't you mention it? Here it is. Look at it. Two hundred super-fine hot-pressed wire-wove pages—if you don't believe me, count 'em—ready ruled for your expenses, an everlastingly-pointed pencil to put 'em down with, a double-bladed penknife to scratch 'em out with, a book of printed tables to calculate your income with, and a camp-stool to sit down upon while you give your mind to it! Stop! And an umbrella to keep the moon off when you give your mind to it on a pitch dark night. Now I won't ask you how much for the lot, but how little? How little are you thinking of? Don't be ashamed to mention it, because my fortune-teller knows already. (Then making believe to whisper, I kissed her, and she kissed me.) Why, she says you're thinking of as little as three and threepence! I couldn't have believed it, even of you, unless she told me. Three and threepence! And a set of printed tables in the lot that'll calculate your income up to forty thousand a year! With an income of forty thousand a year, you grudge three and sixpence. Well then, I'll tell you my opinion. I so despise the threepence, that I'd sooner take three shillings. There. For three shillings, three shillings, three shillings! Gone. Hand 'em over to the lucky man." As there had been no bid at all, everybody looked about and grinned at everybody, while I touched little Sophy's face and asked her if she felt faint or giddy. "Not very, father. It will soon be over." Then turning from the pretty patient eyes, which were opened now, and seeing nothing but grins across my lighted grease-pot, I went on again in my Cheap Jack style. "Where's the butcher?" (My sorrowful eye had just caught sight of a fat young butcher on the outside of the crowd.) She says the good luck is the butcher's. "Where is he?" Everybody handed on the blushing butcher to the front, and there was a roar, and the butcher felt himself obliged to put his hand in his pocket and take the lot. The party so picked out, in general does feel obliged to take the lot—good four times out of six. Then we had another lot the counterpart of that one, and sold it sixpence cheaper, which is always wery much enjoyed. Then we had the spectacles. It ain't a special profitable lot, but I put 'em on, and I see what the Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to take off the taxes, and I see what the sweetheart of the young woman in the shawl is doing at home, and I see what the Bishops has got for dinner, and a deal more that seldom fails to fetch 'em up in their spirits; and the better their spirits, the better their bids. Then we had the ladies' lot—the teapot, tea-caddy, glass sugar basin, half a dozen spoons, and caudle-cup—and all the time I was making similar excuses to give a look or two and say a word or two to my poor child. It was while the second ladies' lot was holding 'em enchained that I felt her lift herself a little on my shoulder, to look across the dark street. "What troubles you, darling?" "Nothing troubles me, father. I am not at all troubled. But don't I see a pretty churchyard over there?" "Yes, my dear." "Kiss me twice, dear father, and lay me down to rest upon that churchyard grass so soft and green." I staggered back into the cart with her head dropped on my shoulder, and I says to her mother, "Quick. Shut the door! Don't let those laughing people see!" "What's the matter?" she cries. "O, woman, woman," I tells her, "you'll never catch my little Sophy by her hair again, for she has flown 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 further 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 heighth 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 below your sort. And this giant when on view figured as a Roman. He was a languid young man, which I attribute to the distance betwixt his extremities. He had a little head and less in it, he had weak eyes and weak knees, and altogether you couldn't look at him without feeling that there was greatly too much of him both for his joints and his mind. But he was an amiable though timid young man (his mother let him out, and spent the money), and we come acquainted when he was walking to ease the horse betwixt two fairs. He was called Rinaldo di Velasco, his name being Pickleson. This giant otherwise Pickleson mentioned to me under the seal of confidence, that beyond his being a burden to himself, his life was made a burden to him, by the cruelty of his master towards a step-daughter who was deaf and dumb. Her mother was dead, and she had no living soul to take her part, and was used most hard. She travelled with his master's caravan only because there was nowhere to leave her, and this giant otherwise Pickleson did go so far as to believe that his master often tried to lose her. He was such a very languid young man, that I don't know how long it didn't take him to get this story out, but it passed through his defective circulation to his top extremity in course of time. When I heard this account from the giant otherwise Pickleson, and likewise that the poor girl had beautiful long dark hair, and was often pulled down by it and beaten, I couldn't see the giant through what stood in my eyes. Having wiped 'em, I give him sixpence (for he was kept as short as he was long), and he laid it out in two threepennorths of gin-and-water, which so brisked him up, that he sang the Favourite Comic of Shivery Shakey, ain't it cold. A popular effect which his master had tried every other means to get out of him as a Roman, wholly in vain. His master's name was Mim, a wery hoarse man and I knew him to speak to. I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart outside the town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the performing was going on, and at last sitting dozing against a muddy cart-wheel, I come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the first look I might almost have judged that she had escaped from the Wild Beast Show, but at the second I thought better of her, and thought that if she was more cared for and more kindly used she would be like my child. She was just the same age that my own daughter would have been, if her pretty head had not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate night. To cut it short, I spoke confidential to Mim while he was beating the gong outside betwixt two lots of Pickleson's publics, and I put it to him, "She lies heavy on your own hands; what'll you take for her?" Mim was a most ferocious swearer. Suppressing that part of his reply, which was much the longest part, his reply was, "A pair of braces." "Now I'll tell you," says I, "what I'm a going to do with you. I'm a going to fetch you half a dozen pair of the primest braces in the cart, and then to take her away with me." Says Mim (again ferocious), "I'll believe it when I've got the goods, and no sooner." I made all the haste I could, lest he should think twice of it, and the bargain was completed, which Pickleson he was thereby so relieved in his mind that he come out at his little back door, longways like a serpent, and give us Shivery Shakey in a whisper among the wheels at parting. It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in the cart. I at once give her the name of Sophy, to put her ever towards me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to understand one another through the goodness of the Heavens, when she knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have any body wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me. You'd have laughed—or the rewerse—it's according to your disposition—if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first I was helped—you'd never guess by what—milestones. I got some large alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and say we was going to WINDSOR, I give her those letters in that order, and then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same order again, and pointed towards the abode of royalty. Another time I give her C A R T, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I give her D O C T O R M A R I G O L D, and hung a corresponding inscription outside my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what did I care if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off. We had our signs, too, and they was hundreds in number. Sometimes, she would sit looking at me and considering hard how to communicate with me about something fresh—how to ask me what she wanted explained—and then she was (or I thought she was; what does it signify?) so like my child with those years added to her, that I half believed it was herself, trying to tell me where she had been to up in the skies, and what she had seen since that unhappy night when she flied away. She had a pretty face, and now that there was no one to drag at her bright dark hair and it was all in order, there was a something touching in her looks that made the cart most peaceful and most quiet, though not at all melancolly. [N.B. In the Cheap Jack patter, we generally sound it, lemonjolly, and it gets a laugh.] The way she learnt to understand any look of mine was truly surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart unseen by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles I wanted. And then she would clap her hands and laugh for joy. And as for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep against the muddy cart-wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a greater heighth of reputation than ever, and I put Pickleson down (by the name of Mim's Travelling Giant otherwise Pickleson) for a fypunnote in my will. This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen year old. By which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced explaining my views to her, but what's right is right and you can't neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character. So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak to us, I says to him: "Now I'll tell you what I'll do with you sir. I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted) and you can't produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be taught her, in the shortest separation that can be named—state the figure for it—and I am game to put the money down. I won't bate you a single farthing sir but I'll put down the money here and now, and I'll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!" The gentleman smiled, and then, "Well, well," says he, "I must first know what she has learnt already. How do you communicate with her?" Then I showed him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so forth, and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a little story in a book which the gentleman showed her and which she was able to read. "This is most extraordinary," says the gentleman; "is it possible that you have been her only teacher?" "I have been her only teacher, sir," I says, "besides herself." "Then," says the gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, "you're a clever fellow, and a good fellow." This he makes known to Sophy, who kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it. We saw the gentleman four times in all, and when he took down my name and asked how in the world it ever chanced to be Doctor, it come out that he was own nephew by the sister's side, if you'll believe me, to the very Doctor that I was called after. This made our footing still easier, and he says to me: "Now Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to know?" "I want her sir to be cut off from the world as little as can be, considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read whatever is wrote, with perfect ease and pleasure." "My good fellow," urges the gentleman, opening his eyes wide, "why I can't do that myself!" I took his joke and give him a laugh (knowing by experience how flat you fall without it) and I mended my words accordingly. "What do you mean to do with her afterwards?" asks the gentleman, with a sort of a doubtful eye. "To take her about the country?" "In the cart sir, but only in the cart. She will live a private life, you understand, in the cart. I should never think of bringing her infirmities before the public. I wouldn't make a show of her, for any money." The gentleman nodded and seemed to approve. "Well," says he, "can you part with her for two years?" "To do her that good—yes, sir." "There's another question," says the gentleman, looking towards her: "Can she part with you for two years?" I don't know that it was a harder matter of itself (for the other was hard enough to me), but it was harder to get over. However, she was pacified to it at last, and the separation betwixt us was settled. How it cut up both of us when it took place, and when I left her at the door in the dark of an evening, I don't tell. But I know this:— remembering that night, I shall never pass that same establishment without a heart-ache and a swelling in the throat, and I couldn't put you up the best of lots in sight of it with my usual spirit—no, not even the gun, nor the pair of spectacles—for five hundred pound reward from the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and throw in the honour of putting my legs under his mahogany arterwards. Still, the loneliness that followed in the cart was not the old loneliness, because there was a term put to it however long to look forward to, and because I could think, when I was anyways down, that she belonged to me and I belonged to her. Always planning for her coming back, I bought in a few months' time another cart, and what do you think I planned to do with it? I'll tell you. I planned to fit it up with shelves, and books for her reading, and to have a seat in it where I could sit and see her read, and think that I had been her first teacher. Not hurrying over the job, I had the fittings knocked together in contriving ways under my own inspection, and here was her bed in a berth with curtains, and there was her reading-table, and here was her writing-desk, and elsewhere was her books in rows upon rows, picters and no picters, bindings and no bindings, gilt-edged and plain, just as I could pick 'em up for her in lots up and down the country, North and South and West and East, Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone astray, Over the hills and far away. And when I had got together pretty well as many books as the cart would neatly hold, a new scheme come into my head which, as it turned out, kept my time and attention a good deal employed and helped me over the two years stile. Without being of an awaricious temper, I like to be the owner of things. I shouldn't wish, for instance, to go partners with yourself in the Cheap Jack cart. It's not that I mistrust you, but that I'd rather know it was mine. Similarly, very likely you'd rather know it was yours. Well! A kind of a jealousy began to creep into my mind when I reflected that all those books would have been read by other people long before they was read by her. It seemed to take away from her being the owner of 'em like. In this way, the question got into my head:—Couldn't I have a book new-made express for her, which she should be the first to read? It pleased me, that thought did, and as I never was a man to let a thought sleep (you must wake up all the whole family of thoughts you've got and burn their nightcaps, or you won't do in the cheap Jack line), I set to work at it. Considering that I was in the habit of changing so much about the country, and that I should have to find out a literary character here to make a deal with, and another literary character there to make a deal with, as opportunities presented, I hit on the plan that this same book should be a general miscellaneous lot—like the razors, flat-iron, chronometer watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and looking-glass—and shouldn't be offered as a single indiwidual article like the spectacles or the gun. When I had come to that conclusion, I come to another, which shall likewise be yours. Often had I regretted that she never had heard me on the footboard, and that she never could hear me. It ain't that I am vain, but that you don't like to put your own light under a bushel. What's the worth of your reputation, if you can't convey the reason for it to the person you most wish to value it? Now I'll put it to you. Is it worth sixpence, fippence, fourpence, threepence, twopence, a penny, a halfpenny, a farthing? No, it ain't. Not worth a farthing. Very well then. My conclusion was, that I would begin her book with some account of myself. So that, through reading a specimen or two of me on the footboard, she might form an idea of my merits there. I was aware that I couldn't do myself justice. A man can't write his eye (at least I don't know how to), nor yet can a man write his voice, nor the rate of his talk, nor the quickness of his action, nor his general spicy way. But he can write his turns of speech, when he is a public speaker—and indeed I have heard that he very often does, before he speaks 'em. Well! Having formed that resolution, then come the question of a name. How did I hammer that hot iron into shape? This way. The most difficult explanation I had ever had with her was, how I come to be called Doctor, and yet was no Doctor. After all, I felt that I had failed of getting it correctly into her mind, with my utmost pains. But trusting to her improvement in the two years, I thought that I might trust to her understanding it when she should come to read it as put down by my own hand. Then I thought I would try a joke with her and watch how it took, by which of itself I might fully judge of her understanding it. We had first discovered the mistake we had dropped into, through her having asked me to prescribe for her when she had supposed me to be a Doctor in a medical point of view, so thinks I, "Now, if I give this book the name of my Prescriptions, and if she catches the idea that my only Prescriptions are for her amusement and interest—to make her laugh in a pleasant way, or to make her cry in a pleasant way—it will be a delightful proof to both of us that we have got over our difficulty. It fell out to absolute perfection. For when she saw the book, as I had it got up—the printed and pressed book—lying on her desk in her cart, and saw the title, DOCTOR MARIGOLD'S PRESCRIPTIONS, she looked at me for a moment with astonishment, then fluttered the leaves, then broke out a laughing in the charmingest way, then felt her pulse and shook her head, then turned the pages pretending to read them most attentive, then kissed the book to me, and put it to her bosom with both her hands. I never was better pleased in all my life! But let me not anticipate. (I take that expression out of a lot of romances I bought for her. I never opened a single one of 'em—and I have opened many—but I found the romancer saying "let me not anticipate." Which being so, I wonder why he did anticipate, or who asked him to it.) Let me not, I say, anticipate. This same book took up all my spare time. It was no play to get the other articles together in the general miscellaneous lot, but when it come to my own article! There! I couldn't have believed the blotting, nor yet the buckling to at it, nor the patience over it. Which again is like the footboard. The public have no idea. At last it was done, and the two years' time was gone after all the other time before it, and where it's all gone to, Who knows? The new cart was finished—yellow outside, relieved with wermillion and brass fittings—the old horse was put in it, a new 'un and a boy being laid on for the Cheap Jack cart—and I cleaned myself up to go and fetch her. Bright cold weather it was, cart-chimneys smoking, carts pitched private on a piece of waste ground over at Wandsworth where you may see 'em from the Sou' Western Railway when not upon the road. (Look out of the right-hand window going down.) "Marigold," says the gentleman, giving his hand hearty, "I am very glad to see you." "Yet I have my doubts, sir," says I, "if you can be half as glad to see me, as I am to see you." "The time has appeared so long; has it, Marigold?" "I won't say that, sir, considering its real length; but—" "What a start, my good fellow!" Ah! I should think it was! Grown such a woman, so pretty, so intelligent, so expressive! I knew then that she must be really like my child, or I could never have known her, standing quiet by the door. "You are affected," says the gentleman in a kindly manner. "I feel, sir," says I, "that I am but a rough chap in a sleeved waistcoat." "I feel," says the gentleman, "that it was you who raised her from misery and degradation, and brought her into communication with her kind. But why do we converse alone together, when we can converse so well with her? Address her in your own way." "I am such a rough chap in a sleeved waistcoat, sir," says I, "and she is such a graceful woman, and she stands so quiet at the door!" "Try if she moves at the old sign," says the gentleman. They had got it up together o' purpose to please me! For when I give her the old sign, she rushed to my feet, and dropped upon her knees, holding up her hands to me with pouring tears of love and joy; and when I took her hands and lifted her, she clasped me round the neck and lay there; and I don't know what a fool I didn't make of myself, until we all three settled down into talking without sound, as if there was a something soft and pleasant spread over the whole world for us. Now I'll tell you what I am a going to do with you. I am a going to offer you the general miscellaneous lot, her own book, never read by anybody else but me, added to and completed by me after her first reading of it, eight-and-forty printed pages, six-and-ninety columns, Whiting's own work, Beaufort House to wit, thrown off by the steam-ingine, best of paper, beautiful green wrapper, folded like clean linen come home from the clear-starcher's, and so exquisitely stitched that, regarded as a piece of needlework alone it's better than the sampler of a seamstress undergoing a Competitive Examination for Starvation before the Civil Service Commissioners—and I offer the lot for what? For eight pound? Not so much. For six pound? Less. For four pound? Why, I hardly expect you to believe me, but that's the sum. Four pound! The stitching alone cost half as much again. Here's forty-eight original pages, ninety-six original columns, for four pound. You want more for the money? Take it. Three whole pages of advertisements of thrilling interest thrown in for nothing. Read 'em and believe 'em. More? My best of wishes for your merry Christmases and your happy New Years, your long lives and your true prosperities. Worth twenty pound good if they are delivered as I send them. Remember! Here's a final prescription added, "To be taken for life," which will tell you how the cart broke down, and where the journey ended. You think Four Pound too much? And still you think so? Come! I'll tell you what then. Say Four Pence, and keep the secret. I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener's internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. In what I am going to relate I have no intention of setting up, opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever. I know the history of the Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a late Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have followed the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of Spectral Illusion occurring within my private circle of friends. It may be necessary to state as to this last that the sufferer (a lady) was in no degree, however distant, related to me. A mistaken assumption on that head, might suggest an explanation of a part of my own case—but only a part—which would be wholly without foundation. It cannot be referred to my inheritance of any developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at all similar experience, nor have I ever had any at all similar experience since. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in England, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murderers as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and I would bury the memory of this particular brute, if I could, as his body was buried, in Newgate Jail. I purposely abstain from giving any direct clue to the criminal's individuality. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicion fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. As no reference was at that time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him can at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but in chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of Saint James's-street. It was entirely new to me. I was in my easy-chair at the moment, and the sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver which started the chair from its position. (But it is to be noted that the chair ran easily on castors.) I went to one of the windows (there are two in the room, and the room is on the second floor) to refresh my eyes with the moving objects down in Piccadilly. It was a bright autumn morning, and the street was sparkling and cheerful. The wind was high. As I looked out, it brought down from the Park a quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and whirled into a spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I saw two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East. They were one behind the other. The foremost man often looked back over his shoulder. The second man followed him, at a distance of some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised. First, the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so public a thoroughfare, attracted my attention; and next, the more remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded their way among the other passengers, with a smoothness hardly consistent even with the action of walking on a pavement, and no single creature that I could see, gave them place, touched them, or looked after them. In passing before my windows, they both stared up at me. I saw their two faces very distinctly, and I knew that I could recognise them anywhere. Not that I had consciously noticed anything very remarkable in either face, except that the man who went first had an unusually lowering appearance, and that the face of the man who followed him was of the colour of impure wax. I am a bachelor, and my valet and his wife constitute my whole establishment. My occupation is in a certain Branch Bank, and I wish that my duties as head of a Department were as light as they are popularly supposed to be. They kept me in town that autumn, when I stood in need of change. I was not ill, but I was not well. My reader is to make the most that can be reasonably made of my feeling jaded, having a depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being "slightly dyspeptic." I am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of health at that time justifies no stronger description, and I quote his own from his written answer to my request for it. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger possession of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. But I knew that a verdict of Wilful Murder had been found against the suspected Murderer, and that he had been committed to Newgate for trial. I also knew that his trial had been postponed over one Sessions of the Central Criminal Court, on the ground of general prejudice and want of time for the preparation of the defence. I may further have known, but I believe I did not, when, or about when, the Sessions to which his trial stood postponed would come on. My sitting-room, bedroom, and dressing-room, are all on one floor. With the last, there is no communication but through the bedroom. True, there is a door in it, once communicating with the staircase; but a part of the fitting of my bath has been—and had then been for some years—fixed across it. At the same period, and as a part of the same arrangement, the door had been nailed up and canvased over. I was standing in my bedroom late one night, giving some directions to my servant before he went to bed. My face was towards the only available door of communication with the dressing-room, and it was closed. My servant's back was towards that door. While I was speaking to him I saw it open, and a man look in, who very earnestly and mysteriously beckoned to me. That man was the man who had gone second of the two along Piccadilly, and whose face was of the colour of impure wax. The figure, having beckoned, drew back and closed the door. With no longer pause than was made by my crossing the bedroom, I opened the dressing-room door, and looked in. I had a lighted candle already in my hand. I felt no inward expectation of seeing the figure in the dressing-room, and I did not see it there. Conscious that my servant stood amazed, I turned round to him, and said: "Derrick, could you believe that in my cool senses I fancied I saw a—" As I there laid my hand upon his breast, with a sudden start he trembled violently, and said, "O Lord yes, sir! A dead man beckoning!" Now, I do not believe that this John Derrick, my trusty and attached servant for more than twenty years, had any impression whatever of having seen any such figure, until I touched him. The change in him was so startling when I touched him, that I fully believe he derived his impression in some occult manner from me at that instant. I bade John Derrick bring some brandy, and I gave him a dram, and was glad to take one myself. Of what had preceded that night's phenomenon, I told him not a single word. Reflecting on it, I was absolutely certain that I had never seen that face before, except on the one occasion in Piccadilly. Comparing its expression when beckoning at the door, with its expression when it had stared up at me as I stood at my window, I came to the conclusion that on the first occasion it had sought to fasten itself upon my memory, and that on the second occasion it had made sure of being immediately remembered. I was not very comfortable that night, though I felt a certainty, difficult to explain, that the figure would not return. At daylight, I fell into a heavy sleep, from which I was awakened by John Derrick's coming to my bedside with a paper in his hand. This paper, it appeared, had been the subject of an altercation at the door between its bearer and my servant. It was a summons to me to serve upon a Jury at the forthcoming Sessions of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. I had never before been summoned on such a Jury, as John Derrick well knew. He believed—I am not certain at this hour whether with reason or otherwise—that that class of Jurors were customarily chosen on a lower qualification than mine, and he had at first refused to accept the summons. The man who served it had taken the matter very coolly. He had said that my attendance or non-attendance was nothing to him; there the summons was; and I should deal with it at my own peril, and not at his. For a day or two I was undecided whether to respond to this call, or take no notice of it. I was not conscious of the slightest mysterious bias, influence, or attraction, one way or other. Of that I am as strictly sure as of every other statement that I make here. Ultimately I decided, as a break in the monotony of my life, that I would go. The appointed morning was a raw morning in the month of November. There was a dense brown fog in Piccadilly, and it became positively black and in the last degree oppressive East of Temple Bar. I found the passages and staircases of the Court House flaringly lighted with gas, and the Court itself similarly illuminated. I think that until I was conducted by officers into the Old Court and saw its crowded state, I did not know that the Murderer was to be tried that day. I think that until I was so helped into the Old Court with considerable difficulty, I did not know into which of the two Courts sitting, my summons would take me. But this must not be received as a positive assertion, for I am not completely satisfied in my mind on either point. I took my seat in the place appropriated to Jurors in waiting, and I looked about the Court as well as I could through the cloud of fog and breath that was heavy in it. I noticed the black vapour hanging like a murky curtain outside the great windows, and I noticed the stifled sound of wheels on the straw or tan that was littered in the street; also, the hum of the people gathered there, which a shrill whistle, or a louder song or hail than the rest, occasionally pierced. Soon afterwards the Judges, two in number, entered and took their seats. The buzz in the Court was awfully hushed. The direction was given to put the Murderer to the bar. He appeared there. And in that same instant I recognised in him, the first of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly. If my name had been called then, I doubt if I could have answered to it audibly. But it was called about sixth or eighth in the panel, and I was by that time able to say "Here!" Now, observe. As I stepped into the box, the prisoner, who had been looking on attentively but with no sign of concern, became violently agitated, and beckoned to his attorney. The prisoner's wish to challenge me was so manifest, that it occasioned a pause, during which the attorney, with his hand upon the dock, whispered with his client, and shook his head. I afterwards had it from that gentleman, that the prisoner's first affrighted words to him were, "At all hazards challenge that man!" But, that as he would give no reason for it, and admitted that he had not even known my name until he heard it called and I appeared, it was not done. Both on the ground already explained, that I wish to avoid reviving the unwholesome memory of that Murderer, and also because a detailed account of his long trial is by no means indispensable to my narrative, I shall confine myself closely to such incidents in the ten days and nights during which we, the Jury, were kept together, as directly bear on my own curious personal experience. It is in that, and not in the Murderer, that I seek to interest my reader. It is to that, and not to a page of the Newgate Calendar, that I beg attention. I was chosen Foreman of the Jury. On the second morning of the trial, after evidence had been taken for two hours (I heard the church clocks strike), happening to cast my eyes over my brother-jurymen, I found an inexplicable difficulty in counting them. I counted them several times, yet always with the same difficulty. In short, I made them one too many. I touched the brother-juryman whose place was next me, and I whispered to him, "Oblige me by counting us." He looked surprised by the request, but turned his head and counted. "Why," says he, suddenly, "we are Thirt—; but no, it's not possible. No. We are twelve." According to my counting that day, we were always right in detail, but in the gross we were always one too many. There was no appearance—no figure—to account for it; but I had now an inward foreshadowing of the figure that was surely coming. The Jury were housed at the London Tavern. We all slept in one large room on separate tables, and we were constantly in the charge and under the eye of the officer sworn to hold us in safe-keeping. I see no reason for suppressing the real name of that officer. He was intelligent, highly polite, and obliging, and (I was glad to hear) much respected in the City. He had an agreeable presence, good eyes, enviable black whiskers, and a fine sonorous voice. His name was Mr. Harker. When we turned into our twelve beds at night, Mr. Harker's bed was drawn across the door. On the night of the second day, not being disposed to lie down, and seeing Mr. Harker sitting on his bed, I went and sat beside him, and offered him a pinch of snuff. As Mr. Harker's hand touched mine in taking it from my box, a peculiar shiver crossed him, and he said: "Who is this!" Following Mr. Harker's eyes and looking along the room, I saw again the figure I expected—the second of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly. I rose, and advanced a few steps; then stopped, and looked round at Mr. Harker. He was quite unconcerned, laughed, and said in a pleasant way, "I thought for a moment we had a thirteenth juryman, without a bed. But I see it is the moonlight." Making no revelation to Mr. Harker, but inviting him to take a walk with me to the end of the room, I watched what the figure did. It stood for a few moments by the bedside of each of my eleven brother-jurymen, close to the pillow. It always went to the right-hand side of the bed, and always passed out crossing the foot of the next bed. It seemed from the action of the head, merely to look down pensively at each recumbent figure. It took no notice of me, or of my bed, which was that nearest to Mr. Harker's. It seemed to go out where the moonlight came in, through a high window, as by an aërial flight of stairs. Next morning at breakfast, it appeared that everybody present had dreamed of the murdered man last night, except myself and Mr. Harker. I now felt as convinced that the second man who had gone down Piccadilly was the murdered man (so to speak), as if it had been borne into my comprehension by his immediate testimony. But even this took place, and in a manner for which I was not at all prepared. On the fifth day of the trial, when the case for the prosecution was drawing to a close, a miniature of the murdered man, missing from his bedroom upon the discovery of the deed, and afterwards found in a hiding-place where the Murderer had been seen digging, was put in evidence. Having been identified by the witness under examination, it was handed up to the Bench, and thence handed down to be inspected by the Jury. As an officer in a black gown was making his way with it across to me, the figure of the second man who had gone down Piccadilly, impetuously started from the crowd, caught the miniature from the officer, and gave it to me with its own hands, at the same time saying in a low and hollow tone—before I saw the miniature, which was in a locket—"I was younger then, and my face was not then drained of blood." It also came between me and the brother juryman to whom I would have given the miniature, and between him and the brother juryman to whom he would have given it, and so passed it on through the whole of our number, and back into my possession. Not one of them, however, detected this. At table, and generally when we were shut up together in Mr. Harker's custody, we had from the first naturally discussed the day's proceedings a good deal. On that fifth day, the case for the prosecution being closed, and we having that side of the question in a completed shape before us, our discussion was more animated and serious. Among our number was a vestryman—the densest idiot I have ever seen at large—who met the plainest evidence with the most preposterous objections, and who was sided with by two flabby parochial parasites; all the three empanelled from a district so delivered over to Fever that they ought to have been upon their own trial, for five hundred Murders. When these mischievous blockheads were at their loudest, which was towards midnight while some of us were already preparing for bed, I again saw the murdered man. He stood grimly behind them, beckoning to me. On my going towards them and striking into the conversation, he immediately retired. This was the beginning of a separate series of appearances, confined to that long room in which we were confined. Whenever a knot of my brother jurymen laid their heads together, I saw the head of the murdered man among theirs. Whenever their comparison of notes was going against him, he would solemnly and irresistibly beckon to me. It will be borne in mind that down to the production of the miniature on the fifth day of the trial, I had never seen the Appearance in Court. Three changes occurred, now that we entered on the case for the defence. Two of them I will mention together, first. The figure was now in Court continually, and it never there addressed itself to me, but always to the person who was speaking at the time. For instance. The throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech, for the defence, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat. At that very moment, the figure with its throat in the dreadful condition referred to (this it had concealed before) stood at the speaker's elbow, motioning across and across its windpipe, now with the right hand, now with the left, vigorously suggesting to the speaker himself, the impossibility of such a wound having been self-inflicted by either hand. For another instance. A witness to character, a woman, deposed to the prisoner's being the most amiable of mankind. The figure at that instant stood on the floor before her, looking her full in the face, and pointing out the prisoner's evil countenance with an extended arm and an outstretched finger. The third change now to be added, impressed me strongly, as the most marked and striking of all. I do not theorise upon it; I accurately state it, and there leave it. Although the Appearance was not itself perceived by those whom it addressed, its coming close to such persons was invariably attended by some trepidation or disturbance on their part. It seemed to me as if it were prevented by laws to which I was not amenable, from fully revealing itself to others, and yet as if it could, invisibly, dumbly and darkly, overshadow their minds. When the leading counsel for the defence suggested that hypothesis of suicide and the figure stood at the learned gentleman's elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed throat, it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a few seconds the thread of his ingenious discourse, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and turned extremely pale. When the witness to character was confronted by the Appearance, her eyes most certainly did follow the direction of its pointed finger, and rest in great hesitation and trouble upon the prisoner's face. Two additional illustrations will suffice. On the eighth day of the trial, after the pause which was every day made early in the afternoon for a few minutes' rest and refreshment, I came back into Court with the rest of the Jury, some little time before the return of the Judges. Standing up in the box and looking about me, I thought the figure was not there, until, chancing to raise my eyes to the gallery, I saw it bending forward and leaning over a very decent woman, as if to assure itself whether the Judges had resumed their seats or not. Immediately afterwards, that woman screamed, fainted, and was carried out. So with the venerable, sagacious, and patient Judge who conducted the trial. When the case was over, and he settled himself and his papers to sum up, the murdered man entering by the Judges' door, advanced to his Lordship's desk, and looked eagerly over his shoulder at the pages of his notes which he was turning. A change came over his Lordship's face; his hand stopped; the peculiar shiver that I knew so well, passed over him; he faltered, "Excuse me, gentlemen, for a few moments. I am somewhat oppressed by the vitiated air;" and did not recover until he had drunk a glass of water. Through all the monotony of six of those interminable ten days—the same Judges and others on the bench, the same Murderer in the dock, the same lawyers at the table, the same tones of question and answer rising to the roof of the court, the same scratching of the Judge's pen, the same ushers going in and out, the same lights kindled at the same hour when there had been any natural light of day, the same foggy curtain outside the great windows when it was foggy, the same rain pattering and dripping when it was rainy, the same footmarks of turnkeys and prisoner day after day on the same sawdust, the same keys locking and unlocking the same heavy doors—through all the wearisome monotony which made me feel as if I had been Foreman of the Jury for a vast period of time, and Piccadilly had flourished coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost one trace of his distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less distinct than anybody else. I must not omit, as a matter of fact, that I never once saw the Appearance which I call by the name of the murdered man, look at the Murderer. Again and again I wondered, "Why does he not?" But he never did. Nor did he look at me, after the production of the miniature, until the last closing minutes of the trial arrived. We retired to consider, at seven minutes before ten at night. The idiotic vestryman and his two parochial parasites gave us so much trouble, that we twice returned into Court, to beg to have certain extracts from the Judge's notes re-read. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believe, had any one in Court; the dunderheaded triumvirate however, having no idea but obstruction, disputed them for that very reason. At length we prevailed, and finally the Jury returned into Court at ten minutes past twelve. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the Jury-box, on the other side of the Court. As I took my place, his eyes rested on me, with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. As I gave in our verdict "Guilty," the veil collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. The Murderer being asked by the Judge, according to usage, whether he had anything to say before sentence of Death should be passed upon him, indistinctly muttered something which was described in the leading newspapers of the following day as "a few rambling, incoherent, and half-audible words, in which he was understood to complain that he had not had a fair trial, because the Foreman of the Jury was prepossessed against him." The remarkable declaration that he really made, was this: "My Lord, I knew I was a doomed man when the Foreman of my Jury came into the box. My Lord, I knew he would never let me off, because, before I was taken, he somehow got to my bedside in the night, woke me, and put a rope round my neck." Sophy read through the whole of the foregoing several times over, and I sat in my seat in the Library Cart (that's the name we give it) seeing her read, and I was as pleased and as proud as a Pug-Dog with his muzzle black-leaded for an evening party and his tail extra curled by machinery. Every item of my plan was crowned with success. Our reunited life was more than all that we had looked forward to. Content and joy went with us as the wheels of the two carts went round, and the same stopped with us when the two carts stopped. But I had left something out of my calculations. Now, what had I left out? To help you to a guess, I'll say, a figure. Come. Make a guess, and guess right. Nought? No. Nine? No. Eight? No. Seven? No. Six? No. Five? No. Four? No. Three? No. Two? No. One? No. Now I'll tell you what I'll do with you. I'll say it's another sort of figure altogether. There. Why then, says you, it's a mortal figure. No nor yet a mortal figure. By such means you get yourself penned into a corner, and you can't help guessing a immortal figure. That's about it. Why didn't you say so sooner? Yes. It was a immortal figure that I had altogether left out of my calculations. Neither man's nor woman's, but a child's. Girl's, or boy's? Boy's. "I says the sparrow, with my bow and arrow." Now you have got it. We were down at Lancaster, and I had done two nights' more than fair average business (though I cannot in honour recommend them as a quick audience) in the open square there, near the end of the street where Mr. Sly's King's Arms and Royal Hotel stands. Mim's travelling giant otherwise Pickleson happened at the self-same time to be a trying it on in the town. The genteel lay was adopted with him. No hint of a van. Green baize alcove leading up to Pickleson in a Auction Room. Printed poster "Free list suspended, with the exception of that proud boast of an enlightened country, a free press. Schools admitted by private arrangement. Nothing to raise a blush in the cheek of youth or shock the most fastidious." Mim swearing most horrible and terrific in a pink calico pay-place, at the slackness of the public. Serious hand-bill in the shops, importing that it was all but impossible to come to a right understanding of the history of David, without seeing Pickleson. I went to the Auction Room in question, and I found it entirely empty of everything but echoes and mouldiness, with the single exception of Pickleson on a piece of red drugget. This suited my purpose, as I wanted a private and confidential word with him, which was: "Pickleson. Owing much happiness to you, I put you in my will for a fypunnote; but, to save trouble here's fourpunten down, which may equally suit your views, and let us so conclude the transaction." Pickleson, who up to that remark had had the dejected appearance of a long Roman rushlight that couldn't anyhow get lighted, brightened up at his top extremity and made his acknowledgments in a way which (for him) was parliamentary eloquence. He likewise did add, that, having ceased to draw as a Roman, Mim had made proposals for his going in as a conwerted Indian Giant worked upon by The Dairyman's Daughter. This, Pickleson, having no acquaintance with the tract named after that young woman, and not being willing to couple gag with his serious views, had declined to do, thereby leading to words and the total stoppage of the unfortunate young man's beer. All of which, during the whole of the interview, was confirmed by the ferocious growling of Mim down below in the pay-place, which shook the giant like a leaf. But what was to the present point in the remarks of the travelling giant otherwise Pickleson, was this: "Doctor Marigold"—I give his words without a hope of conweying their feebleness—"who is the strange young man that hangs about your carts?"—"The strange young man?" I gives him back, thinking that he meant her, and his languid circulation had dropped a syllable. "Doctor," he returns, with a pathos calculated to draw a tear from even a manly eye, "I am weak, but not so weak yet as that I don't know my words. I repeat them, Doctor. The strange young man." It then appeared that Pickleson being forced to stretch his legs (not that they wanted it) only at times when he couldn't be seen for nothing, to wit in the dead of the night and towards daybreak, had twice seen hanging about my carts, in that same town of Lancaster where I had been only two nights, this same unknown young man. It put me rather out of sorts. What it meant as to particulars I no more foreboded then, than you forebode now, but it put me rather out of sorts. Howsoever, I made light of it to Pickleson, and I took leave of Pickleson advising him to spend his legacy in getting up his stamina, and to continue to stand by his religion. Towards morning I kept a look-out for the strange young man, and what was more—I saw the strange young man. He was well dressed and well looking. He loitered very nigh my carts, watching them like as if he was taking care of them, and soon after daybreak turned and went away. I sent a hail after him, but he never started or looked round, or took the smallest notice. We left Lancaster within an hour or two, on our way towards Carlisle. Next morning at daybreak, I looked out again for the strange young man. I did not see him. But next morning I looked out again, and there he was once more. I sent another hail after him, but as before he gave not the slightest sign of being anyways disturbed. This put a thought into my head. Acting on it, I watched him in different manners and at different times not necessary to enter into, till I found that this strange young man was deaf and dumb. The discovery turned me over, because I knew that a part of that establishment where she had been, was allotted to young men (some of them well off), and I thought to myself "If she favours him, where am I, and where is all that I have worked and planned for?" Hoping—I must confess to the selfishness—that she might not favour him. I set myself to find out. At last I was by accident present at a meeting between them in the open air, looking on leaning behind a fir-tree without their knowing of it. It was a moving meeting for all the three parties concerned. I knew every syllable that passed between them, as well as they did. I listened with my eyes, which had come to be as quick and true with deaf and dumb conversation, as my ears with the talk of people that can speak. He was a going out to China as clerk in a merchant's house, which his father had been before him. He was in circumstances to keep a wife, and he wanted her to marry him and go along with him. She persisted, no. He asked if she didn't love him? Yes, she loved him dearly, dearly, but she could never disappoint her beloved good noble generous and I don't-know-what-all father (meaning me, the Cheap Jack in the sleeved waistcoat), and she would stay with him, Heaven bless him, though it was to break her heart! Then she cried most bitterly, and that made up my mind. While my mind had been in an unsettled state about her favouring this young man, I had felt that unreasonable towards Pickleson, that it was well for him he had got his legacy down. For I often thought "If it hadn't been for this same weak-minded giant, I might never have come to trouble my head and wex my soul about the young man." But, once that I knew she loved him—once that I had seen her weep for him—it was a different thing. I made it right in my mind with Pickleson on the spot, and I shook myself together to do what was right by all. She had left the young man by that time (for it took a few minutes to get me thoroughly well shook together), and the young man was leaning against another of the fir-trees—of which there was a cluster—with his face upon his arm. I touched him on the back. Looking up and seeing me, he says, in our deaf and dumb talk: "Do not be angry." "I am not angry, good boy. I am your friend. Come with me." I left him at the foot of the steps of the Library Cart, and I went up alone. She was drying her eyes. "You have been crying, my dear." "Yes, father." "Why?" "A head-ache." "Not a heart-ache?" "I said a head-ache, father." "Doctor Marigold must prescribe for that head-ache." She took up the book of my Prescriptions, and held it up with a forced smile; but seeing me keep still and look earnest, she softly laid it down again, and her eyes were very attentive. "The Prescription is not there, Sophy." "Where is it?" "Here, my dear." I brought her young husband in, and I put her hand in his, and my only further words to both of them were these: "Doctor Marigold's last prescription. To be taken for life." After which I bolted. When the wedding come off, I mounted a coat (blue, and bright buttons), for the first and last time in all my days, and I give Sophy away with my own hand. There were only us three and the gentleman who had had charge of her for those two years. I give the wedding dinner of four in the Library Cart. Pigeon pie, a leg of pickled pork, a pair of fowls, and suitable garden-stuff. The best of drinks. I give them a speech, and the gentlemen give us a speech, and all our jokes told, and the whole went off like a sky-rocket. In the course of the entertainment I explained to Sophy that I should keep the Library Cart as my living-cart when not upon the road, and that I should keep all her books for her just as they stood, till she come back to claim them. So she went to China with her young husband, and it was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I got the boy I had another service, and so as of old when my child and wife were gone, I went plodding along alone, with my whip over my shoulder, at the old horse's head. Sophy wrote me many letters, and I wrote her many letters. About the end of the first year she sent me one in an unsteady hand: "Dearest father, not a week ago I had a darling little daughter, but I am so well that they let me write these words to you. Dearest and best father, I hope my child may not be deaf and dumb, but I do not yet know." When I wrote back, I hinted the question; but as Sophy never answered that question, I felt it to be a sad one, and I never repeated it. For a long time our letters were regular, but then they got irregular through Sophy's husband being moved to another station, and through my being always on the move. But we were in one another's thoughts, I was equally sure, letters or no letters. Five years, odd months, had gone since Sophy went away. I was still the King of the Cheap Jacks, and at a greater heighth of popularity than ever. I had had a first-rate autumn of it, and on the twenty-third of December, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four, I found myself at Uxbridge, Middlesex, clean sold out. So I jogged up to London with the old horse, light and easy, to have my Christmas-Eve and Christmas Day alone by the fire in the Library Cart, and then to buy a regular new stock of goods all round, to sell 'em again and get the money. I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas-Eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms, thrown in. It's a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat. Having relished that pudding and cleared away, I turned the lamp low, and sat down by the light of the fire, watching it as it shone upon the backs of Sophy's books. Sophy's books so brought up Sophy's self, that I saw her touching face quite plainly, before I dropped off dozing by the fire. This may be a reason why Sophy, with her deaf and dumb child in her arms, seemed to stand silent by me all through my nap. I was on the road, off the road, in all sorts of places, North and South and West and East, Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone astray, Over the hills and far away, and still she stood silent by me, with her silent child in her arms. Even when I woke with a start, she seemed to vanish, as if she had stood by me in that very place only a single instant before. I had started at a real sound, and the sound was on the steps of the cart. It was the light hurried tread of a child, coming clambering up. That tread of a child had once been so familiar to me, that for half a moment I believed I was a going to see a little ghost. But the touch of a real child was laid upon the outer handle of the door, and the handle turned and the door opened a little way, and a real child peeped in. A bright little comely girl with large dark eyes. Looking full at me, the tiny creature took off her mite of a straw hat, and a quantity of dark curls fell all about her face. Then she opened her lips, and said in a pretty voice: "Grandfather!" "Ah my God!" I cries out. "She can speak!" "Yes, dear grandfather. And I am to ask you whether there was ever any one that I remind you of?" In a moment Sophy was round my neck as well as the child, and her husband was a wringing my hand with his face hid, and we all had to shake ourselves together before we could get over it. And when we did begin to get over it, and I saw the pretty child a talking, pleased and quick and eager and busy, to her mother, in the signs that I had first taught her mother, the happy and yet pitying tears fell rolling down my face. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mugby_Junction_[1866_Christmas_Number]/1866-12-10-Mugby_Junction.pdf d12eac7e6e483f7513d98d7d76ef17ba https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mugby_Junction_[1866_Christmas_Number]/1866-12-10-Barbox_Brothers.pdf 5e6e9281ba48c6394fe150bd0942db6d https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mugby_Junction_[1866_Christmas_Number]/1866-12-10-Barbox_Brothers_and_Co.pdf 9dbd5437956b75e09913d9a9bd7ddb02 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mugby_Junction_[1866_Christmas_Number]/1866-12-10-Main_Line_The_Boy_at_Mugby.pdf 402f9c81bbc7e58c683e0e4c552d2d4a https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/Mugby_Junction_[1866_Christmas_Number]/1866-12-10-No_1_Branch_Line_The_Signalman.pdf a794eebb6bd8aea07690730453ff0292 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christmas Numbers Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context christmas-numbers Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites the eighteen Christmas numbers that Dickens orchestrated between 1850 and 1867 in conjunction with multiple Victorian authors, notably Wilkie Collins, and published in his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round. After writing five Christmas books and multiple sketches on Yuletide cheer - notably 'Scenes and Characters, No. 10, Christmas Festivities', published as 'A Christmas Dinner' in Sketches by Boz (1836) - not to mention the holiday merry-making described in Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Charles Dickens might reasonably be supposed to have had his fill of seasonal writing. However, he published a Christmas number in 1850 in HW that contained a series of sketches about Christmas, contributing 'A Christmas Tree' (1850). In the next year's Christmas number, he included the short piece 'What Christmas is, as we Grow Older' (1851). Holiday fiction, though, was what Dickens's readership seemed to crave, and the author, editor, and entrepreneur in Dickens all recognised the opportunity. In 1852, Dickens decided to develop an extra Christmas number for HW which would harness the creative talents of other writers for a series of unrelated stories told within a frame narrative of his own composition. Each year he himself would write several of these parts, generally two to three. Soon, the Christmas number became as much of an expected holiday tradition among Victorian subscribers as had been the Christmas books. All in all, eighteen Christmas numbers of this kind resulted (1850-1867); nine published in HW and nine in ATYR.  <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - Household Words</div> On 24 December 1852, Dickens published A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. Personally, he had written 'The Poor Relation's Story' (No.1) and 'The Child's Story' (No.2) with successive stories authored by other contributors, though no names appeared. What would have been the 1853 extra number was late, published instead on 18 February 1854, a circumstance that would not occur again until the 1864 Christmas number. This time, Dickens published more short stories by himself and others, contributing 'The Schoolboy's Story' and 'Nobody's Story', but the Christmas number, for once, lacked a frame narrative or overarching title, though it would come to be known as Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. 25 December 1854 saw The Seven Poor Travellers, with Dickens penning 'The First' (No.1) and 'The Road' (No.7). By writing the first and last stories in the collection, he, as editor, might steer the entire composition towards a cohesive conclusion.  Next, Dickens wrote 'The Guest' (No.1), 'The Boots' (No.3), and 'The Bill' (No.7) as part of The Holly-Tree Inn (15 December 1855). The Wreck of the 'Golden Mary' followed on 25 December 1856, with Dickens composing only 'The Wreck' (No.1), a lengthy description of a shipwreck which sets up the framing narrative. Next, Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels (7 December 1857), Dickens writing 'The Island of Silver-Store' (No.1) and 'The Rafts on the River' (No.3) with Collins contributing the second chapter. Rounding out the extra Christmas numbers for HW, A House to Let appeared on 7 December 1858, with Dickens authoring 'Going into Society' (No.3). The last issue of HW appeared on 28 May 1859, with the journal virtually concluded, due to disagreements with Dickens's publishers Bradbury and Evans, though it was symbolically folded into ATYR. <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - All the Year Round</div> After Dickens launched his new journal ATYR on 30 April 1859, Christmas remained house-themed with the extra Christmas number The Haunted House (13 December 1859). It featured three offerings from him, 'The Mortals in the House' (No.1), 'The Ghost in Master B's Room' (No.6), and 'The Ghost in the Corner Room' (No.8). Yet Dickens continued to experiment with his holiday themes. He would write 'The Village' (No.1), 'The Money' (No.2), and 'The Restitution' (No.5) for A Message from the Sea, published on 25 December 1860, a story about a New England mariner, Captain Jorgan, who seeks to discover the truth about the origin of a Welsh family's mysterious nest-egg.  For Tom Tiddler's Ground, published 25 December 1861, Dickens produced 'Picking up Soot and Cinders' (No.1), 'Picking up Miss Kimmeens' (No.6), and 'Picking up the Tinker' (No. 7). An impressive four parts of Somebody's Luggage (4 December 1862), 'His Leaving it Till Called For' (No.1), 'His Boots' (No.2), 'His Brown-Paper Parcel' (No.7), and 'His Wonderful End' (No. 10) were produced by Dickens, who notably portrays himself in the story as a character, in his capacity as AYTR editor, to amusing effect. Two subsequent Christmas numbers, Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (25 December 1863) and Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy' (12 January 1864), concern the life and activities of a generous landlady who adopts a young boy and raises him with the help of her gallant lodger, Major Jackman. The former contained Dickens's two introductory and conclusion chapters, 'How Mrs. Lirriper carried on the Business' (No.1) and 'How the Parlours added a few words' (No.6), while the latter featured 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how she went on, and went over' (No.1) and 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how Jimmy topped up' (No.7), a story including a jaunt to France, with identical placement at the beginning and end of the number. Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions appeared in 1865, with Mugby Junction following in 1866; both frame narratives deal with themes of disability and poverty. For the first, Dickens contributed 'To be Taken Immediately' (No.1), 'To be Taken with a Grain of Salt' (No.6), and 'To be Taken for Life' (No.8); for the latter, he wrote 'Barbox Brothers' (No.1), 'Barbox Brothers and Co.' (No.2), 'Main Line. The Boy at Mugby' (No.3), and 'No.1 Branch Line. The Signal-man' (No.4). For the final Christmas number, No Thoroughfare (12 December 1867), Dickens collaborated with Collins on an imaginative European thriller that ranges from orphanages and offices in London to hotels and precipices in the Swiss Alps. Dickens is known to have primarily written most of The Overture, Act I, Act III, with Collins taking Act 2. Both collaborated on Acts IV and V. However, they deliberately interspersed passages into each other's parts to confuse readers as to which author had written which 'Acts' (Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 569-573). Consequently, we have merely transcribed the Christmas number in its entirety, as a collaboration. Though Dickens considered beginning a Christmas number in 1868, his other activities, coupled with failing health, led him to gratefully relinquish the idea. Instead, he would eventually go on to attempt another novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), evidently sensing the public's interest in the detective genre, one which he and Collins had, more or less, pioneered with their respective novels Bleak House (1853) (Inspector Bucket) and The Moonstone (1868) (Sergeant Cuff). His mind may also have been running on the mysterious plot of No Thoroughfare, with its malevolent villain, though he did not live to see the plot through to its conclusion. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans from Dickens Journals Online; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. With the exception of No Thoroughfare, transcripts have been made only of parts of numbers Dickens is known to have authored. Lists of writers known to have authored chapters or portions of these extra Christmas numbers have been added to the metadata of each item (Klimaszewski, Appendix A).  Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions. 1. See Melisa Klimaszewski. Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals (Ohio University Press, 2019); Jude Piesse. 'Dreaming Across Oceans: Emigration and Nation in the Mid-Victorian Christmas Issue'. Victorian Periodicals Review 46.1 (Spring 2013): 37-60; Robert Tracy. '"A Whimsical Kind of Masque": The Christmas Books and Victorian Spectacle'. Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1998): 113-30; Deborah A. Thomas. 'The Chord of the Christmas Season'. In Dickens and the Short Story (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982): pp. 62-93; Sarah A. Solberg. '"Text Dropped into the Woodcuts": Dickens's Christmas Books'. Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): pp. 103-18; Ruth Glancy. 'Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes'. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35.1 (June 1980): pp. 53-72; Thomas. 'Contributors to the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round, 1850-1867.' Part I. The Dickensian 70.372 (1973): pp. 163-72. and Part II. TD 70 (1974): pp. 21-29; 'Messages in Bottles and Collins's Seafaring Man'. Anthea Trodd. SEL: Studies in English Literature 41.4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 751-64; Susan Shatto. 'Miss Havisham and Mr. Mopes the Hermit: Dickens and the Mentally Ill'. (Part One) Dickens Quarterly 2.2 (June 1985): pp. 43-50 and (Part Two) DQ 2.3 (September 1985): pp. 79-84; Molly Boggs. '"Given to you by nature for an enemy": The landlady in mid-century London'. Journal of Victorian Culture 23.3 (2018): pp. 310-331; Thomas. 'Dickens' Mrs. Lirriper and the Evolution of a Feminine Stereotype'. Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977): 154-169; Martha Stoddard Holmes. '"Happy and Yet Pitying Tears": Deafness and Affective Disjuncture in Dickens's Doctor Marigold'. Victorian Review 35.2 (Fall 2009): 53-64; Diana C. Archibald. 'Dickens's Visit to the Perkins School and Doctor Marigold'. Dickens and Massachusetts: The Lasting Legacy of the Commonwealth Visits. Eds. Archibald and Joel J. Brattin (University of Massachusetts, 2015): pp. 123-33; Anne Chapman. '"I am not going on": Negotiating Christmas Publishing Rhythms with Dickens's Mugby Junction'. Victorian Periodicals Review 51.1 (2018): 70-85; Samia Ounoughi. 'The Swiss Alps and Character Framing in No Thoroughfare'. Ed. Maxime Leroy. In Charles Dickens and Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2013. pp. 114-25; Lillian Nayder. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Cornell University Press, 2002). Michael Hollington. '"To the Droodstone": Or, From The Moonstone to Edwin Drood via No Thoroughfare'. Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 5 (1995): 141-9.  Short Story Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Periodical Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) All the Year Round Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18661210 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. "Guard! What place is this?" "Mugby Junction, sir." "A windy place!" "Yes, it mostly is, sir." "And looks comfortless indeed!" "Yes, it generally does, sir." "Is it a rainy night still?" "Pours, sir." "Open the door. I'll get out." "You'll have, sir," said the guard, glistening with drops of wet, and looking at the tearful face of his watch by the light of his lantern as the traveller descended, "three minutes here." "More, I think.— For I am not going on." "Thought you had a through ticket, sir?" "So I have, but I shall sacrifice the rest of it. I want my luggage." "Please to come to the van and point it out sir. Be good enough to look very sharp, sir. Not a moment to spare." The guard hurried to the luggage van, and the traveller hurried after him. The guard got into it, and the traveller looked into it. "Those two large black portmanteaus in the corner where your light shines. Those are mine." "Name upon 'em, sir?" "Barbox Brothers." "Stand clear, sir, if you please. One. Two Right!" Lamp waved. Signal lights ahead already changing. Shriek from engine. Train gone. "Mugby Junction!" said the traveller, pulling up the woollen muffler round his throat with both hands. "At past three o'clock of a tempestuous morning! So!" He spoke to himself. There was no one else to speak to. Perhaps, though there had been any one else to speak to, he would have preferred to speak to himself. Speaking to himself, he spoke to a man within five years of fifty either way, who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire; a man of pondering habit, brooding carriage of the head, and suppressed internal voice; a man with many indications on him of having been much alone. He stood unnoticed on the dreary platform, except by the rain and by the wind. Those two vigilant assailants made a rush at him. "Very well," said he, yielding. "It signifies nothing to me, to what quarter I turn my face." Thus, at Mugby Junction, at past three o'clock of a tempestuous morning, the traveller went where the weather drove him. Not but what he could make a stand when he was so minded, for, coming to the end of the roofed shelter (it is of considerable extent at Mugby Junction) and looking out upon the dark night, with a yet darker spirit-wing of storm beating its wild way through it, he faced about, and held his own as ruggedly in the difficult direction, as he had held it in the easier one. Thus, with a steady step, the traveller went up and down, up and down, up and down, seeking nothing, and finding it. A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the black hours of the four-and-twenty. Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves guiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful end. Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when they stop, backing when they back. Red hot embers showering out upon the ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths too: at least they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from from their lips. Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white, characters. An earthquake accompanied with thunder and lightning, going up express to London. Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsumrnoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had. never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of a solitary and unhappy existence. "—Yours, sir?" The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the chance appropriateness, of the question. "O! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those two portmanteaus are mine. Are you a Porter?" "On Porter's wages, sir. But I am Lamps." The traveller looked a little confused. "Who did you say you are?" "Lamps, sir," showing an oily cloth in his hand, as further explanation. "Surely, surely. Is there any hotel or tavern here?" "Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but—" Lamps, with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that plainly added—"but it's a blessed circumstance for you that it's not open." "You couldn't recommend it, I see, if it was available?" "Ask your pardon, sir. If it was—?" "Open?" "It ain't my place, as a paid servant of the company to give my opinion on any of the company's toepics," he pronounced it more like toothpicks, "beyond lamp-ile and cottons," returned Lamps, in a confidential tone; "but speaking as a man, I wouldn't recommend my father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he'd be treated at the Refreshment Room. Not speaking as a man, no, I would not." The traveller nodded conviction. "I suppose I can put up in the town? There is a town here?" For the traveller (though a-stay-at-home compared with most travellers) had been like many others, carried on the steam winds and the iron tides through that Junction before, without having ever, as one might gone ashore there. "O yes, there's a town, sir. Anyways there's town enough to put up in. But," following the glance of the other at his luggage, "this is a very dead time of the night with us, sir. The deadest, time. I might a'most call it our deadest and buriedest time." "No porters about?" "Well, sir, you see," returned Lamps, confidential again, "they in general goes off with the gas. That's how it is. And they seem to have overlooked you, through your walking to the furder end of the platform. But in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up." "Who may be up?" "The three forty-two, sir. She goes off in a sidin' till the Up X passes, and then she," here an air of hopeful vagueness pervaded Lamps, "doos all as lays in her power." "I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement." "I doubt if anybody do, sir. She's a Parliamentary, sir. And, you see, a Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun—" "Do you mean an Excursion?" "That's it, sir.— A Parliamentary or a Skirmishun, she mostly doos go off into a sidin'. But when she can get a chance, she's whistled out of it, and she's whistled up into doin' all as," Lamps again wore the air of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best, "all as lays in her power." He then explained that porters on duty being required to be in attendance on the Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtless turn up with the gas. In the mean time, if the gentleman would not very much object to the smell of lamp-oil, and would accept the warmth of his little room.— The gentleman being by this time very cold, instantly closed with the proposal. A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive to the sense of smell, of a cabin in a Whaler. But there was a bright fire burning in its rusty grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden stand of newly trimmed and lighted lamps, ready for carriage service. They made a bright show, and their light, and the warmth, accounted for the popularity of the room, as borne witness to by many impressions of velveteen trousers on a form by the fire, and many rounded smears and smudges of stooping velveteen shoulders on the adjacent wall. Various untidy shelves accommodated a quantity of lamps and oil-cans, and also a fragrant collection of what looked like the pocket-handkerchiefs of the whole lamp family. As Barbox Brothers (so to call the traveller on the warranty of his luggage) took his seat upon the form, and warmed his now ungloved hands at the fire, he glanced aside at a little deal desk, much blotched with ink, which his elbow touched. Upon it, were some scraps of coarse paper, and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances. From glancing at the scraps of paper, he turned involuntarily to his host, and said, with some roughness: "Why, you are never a poet, man!" Lamps had certainly not the conventional appearance of one, as he stood modestly rubbing his squab nose with a handkerchief so exceedingly oily, that he might have been in the act of mistaking himself for one of his charges. He was a spare man of about the Barbox Brothers time of life, with his features whimsically drawn upward as if they were attracted by the roots of his hair. He had a peculiarly shining transparent complexion, probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application; and his attractive hair, being cut short, and being grizzled, and standing straight up on end as if it in its turn were attracted by some invisible magnet above it, the top of his head was not very unlike a lamp-wick. "But to be sure it's no business of mine," said Barbox Brothers. "That was an impertinent observation on my part. Be what you like." "Some people, sir," remarked Lamps, in a tone of apology, "are sometimes what they don't like." "Nobody knows that better than I do," sighed the other. "I 'have been what I don't like, all my life." "When I first took, sir," resumed Lamps, "to composing little Comic-Songs-like—" Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour. "—To composing little Comic-Songs—like and what was more hard—to singing 'em afterwards," said Lamps, "it went against the grain at that time, it did indeed." Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps's eye, Barbox Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and put a foot on the top bar. "Why did you do it, then?" he asked, after a short pause; abruptly enough but in a softer tone. "If you didn't want to do it, why did you do it? Where did you sing them? Public-house?" To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: "Bedside." At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes. "She's got up!" Lamps announced, excited. "What lays in her power is sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it's laid in her power to get up to-night, by George!" The legend "Barbox Brothers" in large white letters on two black surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement half an hour, what time the porter's knocks at the Inn Door knocked up the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made. II. "You remember me, Young Jackson?" "What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called a birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!" "What am I like, Young Jackson?" "You are like a blight all through the year, to me. You hard-lined, thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on. You are like the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for you make me abhor them." "You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In another voice from another quarter. "Most gratefully, sir. You were the ray of hope and prospering ambition in my life. When I attended your course, I believed that I should come to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy—even though I was still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day. As I had done every, every, every, day, through my school-time and from my earliest recollection." "What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?" "You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to reveal herself to me. I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in them." "You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In a grating voice from quite another quarter. "Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox Brothers. (When they were, if they ever were, is unknown to me; there was nothing of them but the name when I bent to the oar.) You told me what I was to do, and what to be paid; you told me, afterwards, at intervals of years, when I was to sign for the Firm, when I became a partner, when I became the Firm. I know no more of it, or of myself." "What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?" "You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and cold enough so to have brought up an unacknowledged son. I see your scanty figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but you, too, wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a chance remove it—it never by a chance falls off—and I know no more of you." Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his window in the morning, as he had spoken to himself at the Junction overnight. And as he had then looked in the darkness, a man who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire: so he now looked in the sunlight, an ashier grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out. The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of the Public Notary and bill-broking tree. It had gained for itself a griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation had stuck to it and to him. As he had imperceptibly come into possession of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard-street, on whose grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so ho had insensibly found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was never to be taken without his attested bond whom all dealers with openly set up guards and wards against. This character had come upon him through no act of his own. It was as if the original Barbox had stretched himself down upon the office-floor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him. The discovery—aided in its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the deceit of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be married together—the discovery, so followed up, completed what his earliest rearing had begun. He shrank, abashed, within the form of Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart no more. But he did at last effect one great release in his condition. He broke the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley. He prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventional business from him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it. With enough to live on (though after all with not too much), he obliterated the firm of Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-office Directory and the face of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus. "For one must have some name in going about, for people to pick up," he explained to Mugby High-street, through the Inn-window, "and that name at least was real once. Whereas, Young Jackson! Not to mention its being a sadly satirical misnomer for Old Jackson." He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing along on the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day's dinner in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicion of gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace. "There's Lamps!" said Barbox Brothers. "And by-the-by—" Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs. "Bedside?" said Barbox Brothers, testily. "Sings them at the bedside? Why at the bedside, unless he goes to bed drunk? Does, I shouldn't wonder. But it's no business of mine. Let me see. Mugby Junction, Mugby Junction. Where shall I go next? As it came into my head lust night when I woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, I can go anywhere from here. Where shall I go? I'll go and look at the Junction by daylight. There's no hurry, and I may like the look of one Line better than another." But there were so many Lines. Gazing down upon them from a bridge at the Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formed a great Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground-spiders that spun iron. And then so many of the Lines went such wonderful ways, so crossing and curving among one another, that the eye lost them. And then some of them appeared to start with the fixed intention of going five hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificant barrier, or turned off into a workshop. And then others, like intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly slued round and came back again. And then others were so chock-full of trucks of coal, others were so blocked with trucks of casks, others were so gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled objects like immense iron cotton-reels: while others were so bright and clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (looking much like their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle, or end, to the bewilderment. Barbox Brothers stood puzzled on the bridge, passing his right hand across the lines on his forehead, which multiplied while he looked down, as if the railway Lines were getting themselves photographed on that sensitive plate. Then, was heard a distant ringing of bells and blowing of whistles. Then, puppet-looking heads of men popped out of boxes in perspective, aud popped in again. Then, prodigious wooden razors set up on end, began shaving the atmosphere. Then, several locomotive engines in several directions began to scream and be agitated. Then, along one avenue a train came in. Then, along another two trains appeared that didn't come in, but stopped without. Then, bits of trains broke off. Then, a struggling horse became involved with them. Then, the locomotives shared the bits of trains, and ran away with the whole. "I have not made my next move much clearer by this. No hurry. No need to make up my mind to-day, or to-morrow, nor yet the day after. I'll take a walk." It fell out somehow (perhaps he meant it should) that the walk tended to the platform at which he had alighted, and to Lamps's room. But Lamps was not in his room. A pair of velveteen shoulders were adapting themselves to one of the impressions on the wall by Lamps's fireplace, but otherwise the room was void. In passing back to get out of the station again, he learnt the cause of this vacancy, by catching sight of Lamps on the opposite line of railway, skipping along the top of a train, from carriage to carriage, and catching lighted namesakes thrown up to him by a coadjutor. "He is busy. He has not much time for composing or singing Comic Songs this moming, I take it." The direction he pursued now, was into the country, keeping very near to the side of one great Line ot railway, and within easy view of others. "I have half a mind," he said, glancing around, "to settle the question from this point, by saying, 'I'll take this set of rails, or that, or t'other, and stick to it. They separate themselves from the confusion, out here, and go their ways." Ascending a gentle hill of some extent, he came to a few cottages. There, looking about him as a very reserved man might who had never looked about him in his life before, he saw some six or eight young children come merrily trooping and whooping from one of the cottages, and disperse. But not until they had all turned at the little garden gate, and kissed their hands to a face at the upper window: a low window enough, although the upper, for the cottage had but a story of one room above the ground. Now, that the children should do this was nothing; but that they should do this to a face lying on the sill of the open window, turned towards them in a horizontal position, and apparently only a face, was something noticeable. He looked up at the window again. Could only see a very fragile though a very bright face, lying on one cheek on the window-sill. The delicate smiling face of a girl or woman. Framed in long bright brown hair, round which was tied a light blue band or fillet, passing under the chin. He walked on, turned back, passed the window again, shyly glanced up again. No change. He struck off by a winding branch-road at the top of the hill—which he must otherwise have descended—kept the cottages in view, worked his way round at a distance so as to come out once more into the main road and be obliged to pass the cottages again. The face still lay on the window-sill, but not so much inclined towards him. And now there were a pair of delicate hands too. They had the action of performing on some musical instrument, and yet it produced no sound that reached his ears. "Mugby Junction must be the maddest place in England," said Barbox Brothers, pursuing his way down the hill. "The first thing I find here is a Railway Porter who composes comic songs to sing at his bedside. The second thing I find here is a face, and a pair of hands playing a musical instrument that don't play!" The day was a fine bright day in the early beginning of November, the air was clear and inspiriting, and the landscape was rich in beautiful colours. The prevailing colours in the court off Lombard-street, London city, had been few and sombre. Sometimes, when the weather elsewhere was very bright indeed, the dwellers in those tents enjoyed a pepper-and-salt-coloured day or two, but their atmosphere's usual wear was slate, or snuff colour. He relished his walk so well, that he repeated it next day. He was a little earlier at the cottage than on the day before, and he could hear the children up-stairs singing to a regular measure and clapping out the time with their hands. "Still, there is no sound of any musical instrument," he said, listening at the corner, "and yet I saw the performing hands again, as I came by. What are the children singing? Why, good Lord, they can never be singing the multiplication-table!" They were though, and with infinite enjoyment. The mysterious face had a voice attached to it which occasionally led or set the children right. Its musical cheerfulness was delightful. The measure at length stopped, and was succeeded by a murmuring of young voices, and then by a short song which he made out to be about the current month of the year, and about what work it yielded to the labourers in the fields and farm-yards. Then, there was a stir of little feet, and the children came trooping and whooping out, as on the previous day. And again, as on the previous day, they all turned at the garden gate, and kissed their hands— evidently to the face on the window-sill, though Barbox Brothers from his retired post of disadvantage at the corner could not see it. But as the children dispersed, he cut off one small straggler a brown-faced boy with flaxen hair and said to him: "Come here, little one. Tell me whose house is that?" The child, with one swarthy arm held up across his eyes, half in shyness, and half ready for defence, said from behind the inside of his elbow: '"Phoebe's." "And who," said Barbox Brothers, quite as much embarrassed by his part in the dialogue as the child could possibly be by his, "is Phoebe?" To which the child made answer: "Why, Phoebe, of course." The small but sharp observer had eyed his questioner closely, and had taken, his moral measure. He lowered his guard, and rather assumed a tone with him: as having discovered him to be an unaccustomed person in the art of polite conversation. "Phoebe," said the child, "can't be anybobby else but Phoebe. Can she?" "No, I suppose not." "Well," returned the child, "then why did you ask me?" Deeming it prudent to shift his ground, Barbox Brothers took up a new position. "What do you do there? Up there in that room where the open window is. What do you do there?" "Cool," said the child. "Eh?" "Co-o-ol," the child repeated in a louder voice, lengthening out the word with a fixed look and great emphasis, as much as to say: "What's the use of your having grown up, if you're such a donkey as not to understand me?" "Ah! School, school," said Barbox Brothers. "Yes, yes, yes. And Phoebe teaches you?" The child nodded. "Good boy." "Tound it out, have you?" said the child. "Yes, I have found it out. What would you do with twopence, if I gave it you?" "Pend it." The knock-down promptitude of this reply leaving him not a leg to stand upon, Barbox Brothers produced the twopence with great lameness, and withdrew in a state of humiliation. But, seeing the face on the window-sill as he passed the cottage, he acknowledged its presence there with a gesture, which was not a nod, not a bow, not a removal of his hat from his head, but was a diffident compromise between or struggle with all three. The eyes in the face seemed amused, or cheered, or both, and the lips modestly said: "Good day to you, sir." "I find I must stick for a time to Mugby Junction," said Barbox Brothers, with much gravity, after once more stopping on his return road to look at the Lines where they went their several ways so quietly. "I can't make up my mind yet, which iron road to take. In fact, I must get a little accustomed to the Junction before I can decide." So, he announced at the Inn that he was "going to stay on, for the present," and improved his acquaintance with the Junction that night, and again next morning, and again next night and morning: going down to the station, mingling with the people there, looking about him down all the avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interest in the incomings and outgoings of the trains. At first, he often put his head into Lamps's little room, but he never found Lamps there. A pair or two of velveteen shoulders he usually found there, stooping over the fire, sometimes in connexion with a clasped knife and a piece of bread and meat; but the answer to his inquiry, "Where's Lamps?" was, either that he was "t'other side the line," or, that it was his off-time, or (in the latter case), his own personal introduction to another Lamps who was not his Lamps. However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now, but he bore the disappointment. Nor did he so wholly devote himself to his severe application to the study of Mugby Junction, as to neglect exercise. On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and always the same walk. But the weather turned cold and wet again, and the window was never open. iii At length, after a lapse of some days, there came another streak of fine bright hardy autumn weather. It was a Saturday. The window was open, and the children were gone. Not surprising, this, for he had patiently watched and waited at the corner, until they were gone. "Good day," he said to the face; absolutely getting his hat clear off his head this time. "Good day to you, sir." "I am glad you have a fine sky again, to look at." "Thank you, sir. It is kind of you." "You are an invalid, I fear?" "No, sir. I have very good health." "But are you not always lying down?" "O yes, I am always lying down, because I cannot sit up. But I am not an invalid." The laughing eyes seemed highly to enjoy his great mistake. "Would you mind taking the trouble to come in, sir? There is a beautiful view from this window. And you would see that I am not at all ill—being so good as to care." It was said to help him, as he stood irresolute, but evidently desiring to enter, with his diffident hand on the latch of the garden gate. It did help him, and he went in. The room up-stairs was a very clean white room with a low roof. Its only inmate lay on a couch that brought her face to a level with the window. The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapper being light blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereal look, and a fanciful appearance of lying among clouds. He felt that she instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturn man; it was another help to him to have established that understanding so easily, and got it over. There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch. "I see now," he began, not at all fluently, "how you occupy your hands. Only seeing you from the path outside, I thought you were playing upon something." She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace. A lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of her hands upon it as she worked, had given them the action he had misinterpreted. "That is curious," she answered, with a bright smile. "For I often fancy, myself, that I play tunes while I am at work." "Have you any musical knowledge?" She shook her head. "I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be made as handy to me as my lace-pillow. But I dare say I deceive myself. At all events, I shall never know." "You have a musical voice. Excuse me; I have heard you sing." "With the children?" she answered, slightly colouring. "O yes. I sing with the dear children, if it can be called singing." Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned in new systems of teaching them? "Very fond of them," she said, shaking her head again; "but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons, has led you so far astray as to think me a grand teacher? Ah! I thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. You don't need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir," she added, with a glance at the small forms and round the room. All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow. As they still continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes, was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an impertinence. He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his towards the prospect, saying: "Beautiful indeed!" "Most beautiful, sir. I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head. But what a foolish fancy that would be to encourage! It cannot look more lovely to any one than it does to me." Her eyes were turned to it as she spoke, with most delighted admiration and enjoyment. There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation. "And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke and steam changing places so fast, make it so lively for me," she went on. "I think of the number of people who can go where they wish, on their business, or their pleasure; I remember that the puffs make signs to me that they are actually going while I look; and that enlivens the prospect with abundance of company, if I want company. There is the great Junction, too. I don't see it under the foot of the hill, but I can very often hear it, and I always know it is there. It seems to join me, in a way, to I don't know how many places and things that I shall never see." With an abashed kind of idea that it might have already joined himself to something he had never seen, he said constrainedly: "Just so." "And so you see, sir," pursued Phoebe, "I am not the invalid you thought me, and I am very well off indeed." "You have a happy disposition," said Barbox Brothers: perhaps with a slight excusatory touch for his own disposition. "Ah! But you should know my father," she replied. "His is the happy disposition!—Don't mind, sir!" For his reserve took the alarm at a step upon the stairs, and he distrusted that he would be set down for a troublesome intruder. "This is my father coming." The door opened, and the father paused there. "Why, Lamps!" exclaimed Barbox Brothers, starting from his chair. "How do you do, Lamps?" To which, Lamps responded: "The gentleman for Nowhere! How do you DO, sir?" And they shook hands, to the greatest admiration and surprise of Lamps's daughter. "I have looked you up, half a dozen times since that night," said Barbox Brothers, but have never found you." "So I've heerd on, sir, so I've heerd on," returned Lamps. "It's your being noticed so often down at the Junction, without taking any train, that has begun to get you the name among us of the gentleman for Nowhere. No offence in my having called you by it when took by surprise, I hope, sir?" "None at all. It's as good a name for me as any other you could call me by. But may I ask you a question in the corner here?" Lamps suffered himself to be led aside from his daughter's couch, by one of the buttons of his velveteen jacket. "Is this the bedside where you sing your songs?" Lamps nodded. The gentleman for Nowhere clapped him on the shoulder, and they faced about again. "Upon my word, my dear," said Lamps then to his daughter, looking from her to her visitor, "it is such an amaze to me, to find you brought acquainted with this gentleman, that I must (if this gentleman will excuse me) take a rounder." Mr. Lamps demonstrated in action what this meant, by pulling out his oily handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, and giving himself an elaborate smear, from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the other cheek to behind his left ear. After this operation, he shone exceedingly. "It's according to my custom when par-ticular warmed up by any agitation, sir," he offered by way of apology. "And really, I am throwed into that state of amaze by finding you brought acquainted with Phoebe, that I—that I think I will, if you'll excuse me, take another rounder." Which he did, seeming to be greatly restored by it. They were now both standing by the side of her couch, and she was working at her lace-pillow. "Your daughter tells me," said Barbox Brothers, still in a half reluctant shamefaced way, "that she never sits up." "No, sir, nor never has done. You see, her mother (who died when she was a year and two months old) was subject to very bad fits, and as she had never mentioned to me that she was subject to fits, they couldn't be guarded against. Consequently, she dropped the baby when took, and thishappened." "It was very wrong of her," said Barbox Brothers, with a knitted brow, "to marry you, making a secret of her infirmity." "Well, sir," pleaded Lamps, in behalf of the long-deceased. "You see, Phoebe and me, we have talked that over too. And Lord bless us! Such a number on us has our infirmities, what with fits, and what with misfits, of one sort and another, that if we confessed to 'em all before we got married, most of us might never get married." "Might not that be for the better?" "Not in this case, sir," said Phoebe, giving her hand to her father. "No, not in this case, sir," said her father, patting it between his own. "You correct me" returned Barbox Brothers, with a blush; "and I must look so like a Brute, that at all events it would be superfluous in me to confess to that infirmity. I wish you would tell me a little more about yourselves. I hardly know how to ask it of you, for I am conscious that I have a bad stiff manner, a dull discouraging way with me, but I wish you would." "With all our hearts, sir," returned Lamps, gaily, for both. "And first of all, that you may know my name—" "Stay!" interposed the visitor, with a slight flush. "What signifies your name! Lamps is name enough for me. I like it. It is bright and expressive. What do I want more!" "Why to be sure, sir," returned Lamps. "I have in general no other name down at the Junction; but I thought, on account of your being here as a first-class single, in a private character, that you might—" The visitor waved the thought away with his hand, and Lamps acknowledged the mark of confidence by taking another rounder. "You are hard-worked, I take for granted?" said Barbox Brothers, when the subject of the rounder came out of it much dirtier than he went into it. Lamps was beginning, " Not particular so"— when his daughter took him up. "O yes, sir, he is very hard-worked. Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, hours a day. Sometimes twenty-four hours at a time." "And you," said Barbox Brothers, "what with your school, Phoebe, and what with your lace-making—" "But my school is a pleasure to me," she interrupted, opening her brown eyes wider, as if surprised to find him so obtuse. "I began it when I was but a child, because it brought me and other children into company, don't you see? That was not work. I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. That is not work. I do it as love, not as work. Then my lace-pillow;" her busy hands had stopped, as if her argument required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at the name; " it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my tunes when I hum any, and that's not work. Why, you yourself thought it was music, you know, sir. And so it is, to me." "Everything is!" cried Lamps, radiantly. "Everything is music to her, sir." "My father is, at any rate," said Phoebe, exultingly pointing her thin forefinger at him. "There is more music in my father than there is in a brass band." "I say! My dear! It's very fillyillially done, you know; but you are flattering your father," he protested, sparkling. "No I am not, sir, I assure you. No I am not. If you could hear my father sing, you would know I am not. But you never will hear him sing, because he never sings to any one but me. However tired he is, he always sings to me when he comes home. When I lay here long ago, quite a poor little broken doll, he used to sing to me. More than that, he used to make songs, bringing in whatever little jokes we had between us. More than that, he often does so to this day. O! I'll tell of you, father, as the gentleman has asked about you. He is a poet, sir." "I shouldn't wish the gentleman, my dear," observed Lamps, for the moment turning grave, "to carry away that opinion of your father, because it might look as if I was given to asking the stars in a molloncolly manner what they was up to. Which I wouldn't at once waste the time, and take the liberty, my dear." "My father," resumed Phoebe, amending her text, "is always on the bright side, and the good side. You told me just now, I had a happy disposition. How can I help it?" "Well; but my dear," returned Lamps argumentatively, " how can I help it,? Put it to yourself, sir. Look at her. Always as you see her now. Always working—and after all, sir, for but a very few shillings a week—always contented, always lively, always interested in others, of all sorts. I said, this moment, she was always as you see her now. So she is, with a difference that comes to much the same. For, when it's my Sunday off and the morning bells have done ringing, I hear the prayers and thanks read in the touchingest way, and I have the hymns sung to me so soft, sir, that you couldn't hear 'em out of this room—in notes that seem to me, I am sure, to come from Heaven and go back to it." It might have been merely through the association of these words with their sacredly quiet time, or it might have been through the larger association of the words with the Redeemer's presence beside the bedridden; but here her dexterous fingers came to a stop on the lace-pillow, and clasped themselves around his neck as he bent down. There was great natural sensibility in both father and daughter, the visitor could easily see; but each made it, for the other's sake, retiring, not demonstrative; and perfect cheerfulness, intuitive or acquired, was either the first or second nature of both. In a very few moments, Lamps was taking another rounder with his comical features beaming, while Phoebe's laughing eyes (just a glistening speck or so upon their lashes) were again directed by turns to him, and to her work, and to Barbox Brothers. "When my father, sir," she said brightly, "tells you about my being interested in other people even though they know nothing about me—which, by-the-by, I told you myself—you ought to know how that comes about. That's my father's doing." "No, it isn't!" he protested. "Don't you believe him, sir; yes, it is. He tells me of everything he sees down at his work. You would be surprised what a quantity he gels together for me, every day. He looks into the carriages, and tells me how the ladies are drest—so that I know all the fashions! He looks into the carriages, and tells me what pairs of lovers he sees, and what new-married couples on their wedding trip—so that I know all about that! He collects chance newspapers and books—so that I have plenty to read! He tells me. about the sick people who are travelling to try to get better—so that I know all about them! In short, as I began by saying, he tells me everything he sees and makes out, down at his work, and you can't think what a quantity he does see and make out." "As to collecting newspapers and books, my dear," said Lamps, " it's clear I can have no merit in that, because they're not my perquisites. You see, sir, it's this way: A Guard, he'll say to me, 'Hallo, here you are, Lamps. I've saved this paper for your daughter. How is she agoing on?' A Head-Porter, he'll say to me, 'Here! Catch hold, Lamps. Here's a couple of wollumes for your daughter. Is she pretty much where she were?' And that's what makes it double welcome, you see. If she had a thousand pound in a box, they wouldn't trouble themselves about her; but being what she is—that is, you understand," Lamps added, somewhat hurriedly, "not having a thousand pound in a box—they take thought for her. And as concerning the young pairs, married and unmarried, it's only natural I should bring home what little I can about them, seeing that there's not a Couple of either sort in the neighbourhood that don't come of their own accord to confide in Phoebe." She raised her eyes triumphantly to Barbox Brothers, as she said: "Indeed, sir, that is true. If I could have got up and gone to church, I don't know how often I should have been a bridesmaid. But if I could have done that, some girls in love might have been jealous of me, and as it is, no girl is jealous of me. And my pillow would not have been half as ready to put the piece of cake under, as I always find it," she added, turning her face on it with a light sigh, and a smile at her father. The arrival of a little girl, the biggest of the scholars, now led to an understanding on the part of Barbox Brothers, that she was the domestic of the cottage, and had come to take active measures in it, attended by a pail that might have extinguished her, and a broom three times her height. He therefore rose to take his leave, and took it; saying that if Phoebe had no objection, he would come again. He had muttered that he would come "in the. course of his walks." The course of his walks must have been highly favourable to his return, for he returned after an interval of a single day. "You thought you would never see me any more, I suppose?" he said to Phoebe as he touched her hand, and sat down by her couch. "Why should I think so!" was her surprised rejoinder. "I took it for granted you would mistrust me." "For granted, sir? Have you been so much mistrusted?" "I think I am justified in answering yes. But I may have mistrusted too, on my part. No matter just now. We were speaking of the Junction last time. I have passed hours there since the day before yesterday." "Are you now the gentleman for Somewhere?" she asked with a smile. "Certainly for Somewhere; but I don't yet know Where. You would never guess what I am travelling from. Shall I tell you? I am travelling from my birthday." Her hands stopped in her work, and she looked at him with incredulous astonishment. "Yes," said Barbox Brothers, not quite easy in his chair, "from my birthday. I am, to myself, an unintelligible book with the earlier chapters all torn out, and thrown away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?" His eyes meeting hers as they were addressed intently to him, something seemed to stir within his breast, whispering: "Was this bed a place for the graces of childhood and the charms of youth to take to, kindly? O shame, shame!" "It is a disease with me," said Barbox Brothers, checking himself, and making as though he had a difficulty in swallowing something, "to go wrong about that. I don't know how I came to speak of that. I hope it is because of an old misplaced confidence in one of your sex involving an old bitter treachery. I don't know. I am all wrong together." Her hands quietly and slowly resumed their work. Glancing at her, he saw that her eyes were thoughtfully following them. "I am travelling from my birthday," he resumed, "because it has always been a dreary day to me. My first free birthday coming round some five or six weeks hence, I am travelling to put its predecessors far behind me, and to try to crush the day—or, at all events, put it out of my sigh—by heaping new objects on it." As he paused, she looked at him; but only shook her head as being quite at a loss. "This is unintelligible to your happy disposition," he pursued, abiding by his former phrase as if there were some lingering virtue of self-defence in it: "I knew it would be, and am glad it is. However, on this travel of mine (in which I mean to pass the rest of my days, having abandoned all thought of a fixed home), I stopped, as you heard from your father, at the Junction here. The extent of its ramifications quite confused me as to whither I should go, from here. I have not yet settled, being still perplexed among so many roads. What do you think I mean to do? How many of the branching roads can you see from your window?" Looking out, full of interest, she answered, "Seven." "Seven," said Barbox Brothers, watching her with a grave smile. "Well! I propose to myself, at once to reduce the gross number to those very seven, and gradually to fine them down to one—the most. promising for me—and to take that," "But how will you know, sir, which is the most promising?" she asked, with her brightened eyes roving over the view. "Ah!" said Barbox Brothers, with another grave smile, and considerably improving in his ease of speech. "To be sure. In this way. Where your father can pick up so much every clay for a good purpose,I may once and again pick up a little for an indifferent purpose. The gentleman for Nowhere must become still better known at the Junction. He shall continue to explore it, until he attaches something that he has seen, heard, or found out, at the head of each of the seven roads, to the road itself. And so his choice of a road shall be determined by his choice among his discoveries." Her hands still busy, she again glanced at the prospect, as if it comprehended something that had not been in it before, and laughed as if it yielded her new pleasure. "But I must not forget," said Barbox Brothers, "(having got so far) to ask a favour. I want your help in this expedient of mine. I want to bring you what I pick up at the heads of the seven roads that you lie here looking out at, and to compare notes with you about it. May I? They say two heads are better than one. I should say myself that probably depends upon the heads concerned. But I am quite sure, though we are so newly acquainted, that your head and your father's have found out better things, Phoebe, than ever mine of itself discovered." She gave him her sympathetic right hand, in perfect rapture with his proposal, and eagerly and gratefully thanked him. "That's well!" said Barbox Brothers. "Again I must not forget (having got so far) to ask a favour. Will you shut your eyes?" Laughing playfully at the strange nature of the request, she did so. "Keep them shut," said Barbox Brothers, going softly to the door, and coming back. "You are on your honour, mind, not to open your eyes until I tell you that you may?" "Yes! On my honour." "Good. May I take your lace-pillow from you for a minute?" Still laughing and wondering, she removed her hands trom it, and he put it aside. "Tell me. Did you see the puffs of smoke and steam made by the morning fast-train yesterday on road number seven from here?" "Behind the elm-trees and the spire?" "That's the road," said Barbox Brothers, directing his eyes towards it. "Yes. I watched them melt away." "Anything unusual in what they expressed?" "No!" she answered, merrily. "Not complimentary to me, for I was in that train. I went—don't open your eyes—to fetch you this, from the great ingenious town. It is not half so large as your lace-pillow, and lies easily and lightly in its place. These little keys are like the keys of a miniature piano, and you supply the air required with your left hand. May you pick out delightful music from it, my dear! For the present you—can open your eyes now—good-bye!" In his embarrassed way, he closed the door upon himself, and only saw, in doing so, that she ecstatically took the present to her her bosom and caressed it. The glimpse, gladdened his heart, and yet saddened it; for so might, she, if her youth had flourished in its natural course, have taken to her breast that day the slumbering music of her own child's voice. With good will and earnest purpose, the gentleman for Nowhere began, on the very next day, his researches at the heads of the seven roads. The results of his researches, as he and Phoebe afterwards set them down in fair writing, hold their due places in this veracious chronicle, from its seventeenth page, onward. But they occupied a much longer time in the getting together than they ever will in the perusal. And this is probably the case with most reading matter, except when it is of that highly beneficial kind (for Posterity) which is "thrown off in a few moments of leisure" by the superior poetic geniuses who scorn to take prose pains. It must be admitted, however, that Barbox by no means hurried himself. His heart being in his work of good-nature, he revelled in it. There was the joy, too (it was a true joy to him), of sometimes sitting by, listening to Phoebe as she picked out more and more discourse from her musical instrument, and as her natural taste and ear refined daily upon her first discoveries. Besides being a pleasure, this was an occupation, and in the course of weeks it consumed hours. It resulted that his dreaded birthday was close upon him before he had troubled himself any more about it. The matter was made more pressing by the unforeseen circumstance that the councils held (at which Mr. Lamps, beaming most brilliantly, on a few rare occasions assisted) respecting the road to be selected, were, after all, in no wise assisted by his investigations. For, he had connected this interest with this road, or that interest with the other, but could deduce no reason from, it for giving any road the preference. Consequently, when the last council was holden, that part of the business stood, in the end, exactly where it had stood in the beginning. "But, sir," remarked Phoebe, "we have only six roads after all. Is the seventh road dumb?" "The seventh road? O!" said Barbox Brothers, rubbing his chin. "That is the road I took, you know, when I went to get your little present. That is its story, Phoebe.'' "Would you mind taking that road again, sir?" she asked with hesitation. "Not in the least; it is a great high road after all." "I should like you to take it," returned Phoebe, with a persuasive smile, "for the love of that little present which must ever be so dear to me. I should like you to take it, because that road can never. be again, like any other road to me. I should like you to take it, in remembrance of your having done me so much good: of your having made me so much happier! If you leave me by the road you travelled when you went to do me this great kindness," sounding a faint chord as she spoke, "I shall feel, lying here watching at my window, as if it must conduct you to a prosperous end, and bring you back some day." "It shall be done, my dear; it shall be done." So at last the gentleman for Nowhere took a ticket for Somewhere, and his destination was the great ingenious town. He had loitered so long about the Junction that it was the eighteenth of December when he left it. "High time," he reflected, as he seated himself in the train, "that I started in earnest! Only one clear day remains between me and the day I am running away from. I'll push onward for the hill-country to-morrow. I'll go to Wales." It was with some pains that he placed before himself the undeniable advantages to be gained in the way of novel occupation for his senses from misty mountains, swollen streams, rain, cold, a wild seashore, and rugged roads. And yet he scarcely made them out as distinctly as he could have wished. Whether the poor girl, in spite of her new resource, her music, would have any feeling of loneliness upon her now—just at first—that she had not had before; whether she saw those very puffs of steam and smoke that he saw, as he sat in the train thinking of her; whether her face would have any pensive shadow on it as they died out of the distant view from her window; whether, in telling him he had done her so much good, she had not unconsciously corrected his old moody bemoaning of his station in life, by setting him thinking that a man might be a great healer, if he would, and yet not be a great doctor; these and other similar meditations got between him and his Welsh picture. There was within him, too, that dull sense of vacuity which follows separation from an object of interest, and cessation of a pleasant pursuit; and this sense, being quite new to him, made him restless. Further, in losing Mugby Junction he had found himself again; and he was not the more enamoured of himself for having lately passed his time in better company. But surely, here not far ahead, must be the great ingenious town. This crashing and clashing that the train was undergoing, and this coupling on to it of a multitude of new echoes, could mean nothing less than approach to the great station. It did mean nothing less. After some stormy flashes of town lightning, in the way of swift revelations of red-brick blocks of houses, high red-brick chimney-shafts, vistas of red-brick railway arches, tongues of fire, blots of smoke, valleys of canal, and hills of coal, there came the thundering in at the journey's end. Having seen his portmanteaus safely housed in the hotel he chose, and having appointed his dinner-hour, Barbox Brothers went out for a walk in the busy streets. And now it began to be suspected by him that Mugby Junction was a Junction of many branches, invisible as well as visible, and had joined him to an endless number of byways. For, whereas he would, but a little while ago, have walked these streets blindly brooding, he now had eyes and thoughts for a new external world. How the many toiling people lived, and loved, and died; how wonderful it was to consider the various trainings of eye and hand, the nice distinctions of sight and touch, that separated them into classes of workers, and even into classes of workers at subdivisions of one complete whole which combined their many intelligences and forces, though of itself but some cheap object of use or ornament in common life; how good it was to know that such assembling in a multitude on their part, and such contribution of their several dexterities towards a civilising end, did not deteriorate them as it was the fashion of the supercilious Mayflies of humanity to pretend, but engendered among them a self-respect and yet a modest desire to be much wiser than they were (the first, evinced in their well-balanced bearing and manner of speech when he stopped to ask a question; the second, in the announcements of their popular studies and amusements on the public walls); these considerations, and a host of such, made his walk a memorable one." I too am but a little part of a great whole," he began to think; "and to be serviceable to myself and others, or to be happy, I must cast my interest into, and draw it out of, the common stock." Although he had arrived at his journey's end for the day by noon, he had since insensibly walked about the town so far and so long that the lamplighters were now at their work in the streets, and the shops were sparkling up brilliantly. Thus reminded to turn towards his quarters, he was in the act of doing so, when a very little hand crept into his, and a very little voice said: "O! If you please, I am lost!" He looked down, and saw a very little fair-haired girl. "Yes," she said, confirming her words with a serious nod. "I am indeed. I am lost." Greatly perplexed, he stopped, looked about him for help, descried none, and said, bending low: "Where do you, live, my child?" "I don't know where I live," she returned. "I am lost." "What is your name?" "Polly." "What is your other name?" The reply was prompt, but unintelligible. Imitating the sound, as he caught it, he hazarded the guess, "Trivits?" "O no!" said the child, shaking her head. "Nothing like that." "Say it again, little one." An unpromising business. For this time it had quite a different sound. He made the venture: "Paddens?" "O no!" said the child. " Nothing like that," "Once more. Let us try it again, dear." A most hopeless business. This time it swelled into four syllables. "It can't be Tappitarver?" said Barbox Brothers, rubbing his head with his hat in discomfiture. "No! It ain't," the child quietly assented. On her trying this unfortunate name once more, with extraordinary efforts at distinctness, it swelled into eight syllables at least. "Ah! I think," said Barbox Brothers, with a desperate air of resignation, "that we had better give it up." "But I am lost," said the child, nestling her little hand more closely in his, " and you'll take care of me, won't you?" If ever a man were disconcerted by division between compassion on the one hand, and the very imbecility of irresolution on the other, here the man was. "Lost!" he repeated, looking down at the child. "I am sure I am. What is to be done!" "Where do you live?" asked the child, looking up at him, wistfully. "Over there," he answered, pointing vaguely in the direction of his hotel. "Hadn't we better go there?" said the child. "Really," he replied, "I don't know but what we had." So they set off, hand in hand. He, through comparison of himself against his little companion, with a clumsy feeling on him as if he had just developed into a foolish giant. She, clearly elevated in her own tiny opinion by having got him so neatly out of his embarrassment. "We are going to have dinner when we get there, I suppose?" said Polly. "Well," he rejoined, " I—yes, I suppose we are." "Do you like your dinner?" asked the child. "Why, on the whole," said Barbox Brothers, "yes, I think I do." "I do mine," said Polly. " Have you any brothers and sisters?" "No. Have you?" "Mine are dead." "O!" said Barbox Brothers. With that absurd sense of unwieldiness of mind and body weighing him down, he would have not known how to pursue the conversation beyond this curt rejoinder, but that the child was always ready for him. "What," she asked, turning her soft hand coaxingly in his, "are you going to do to amuse me, after dinner?" "Upon my soul, Polly," exclaimed Barbox Brothers, very much at a loss, "I have not the slightest idea!" "Then I tell you what," said Polly. "Have you got any cards at your house?" "Plenty," said Barbox Brothers, in a boastful vein. "Very well. Then I'll build houses, and you shall look at me. You mustn't blow, you know." "O no!" said Barbox Brothers. "No, no, no. No blowing. Blowing's not fair." He flattered himself that he had said this pretty well for an idiotic monster; but the child, instantly perceiving the awkwardness of his attempt to adapt himself to her level, utterly destroyed his hopeful opinion of himself by saying, compassionately: "What a funny man you are!" Feeling, after this melancholy failure, as if he every minute grew bigger and heavier in person, and weaker in mind, Barbox gave himself up for a bad job. No giant ever submitted more meekly to be led in triumph by all-conquering Jack, than he to be bound in slavery to Polly. "Do you know any stories?" she asked him. He was reduced to the humiliating confession: "No." "What a dunce you must be, mustn't you?" said Polly. He was reduced to the humiliating confession: "Yes." "Would you like me to teach you a story? But you must remember it, you know, and be able to tell it right to somebody else afterwards?" He professed that it would afford him the highest mental gratification to be taught a story, and that he would humbly endeavour to retain it in his mind. Whereupon Polly, giving her hand a new little turn in his, expressive of settling down for enjoyment, commenced a long romance, of which every relishing clause began with the words: "So this" or "And so this." As, "So this boy;" or, "So this fairy;" or, "And so this pie was four yards round, and two yards and a quarter deep." The interest of the romance was derived from the intervention of this fairy to punish this boy for having a greedy appetite. To achieve which purpose, this fairy made this pie, and this boy ate and ate and ate, and his cheeks swelled and swelled and swelled. There were many tributary circumstances, but the forcible interest culminated in the total consumption of this pie, and the bursting of this boy. Truly he was a fine sight, Barbox Brothers, witk serious attentive face, and ear bent down, much jostled on the pavements of the busy town, but afraid of losing a single incident of the epic, lest he should be examined in it by-and-by and found deficient. Thus they arrived at the hotel. And there he had to say at the bar, and said awkwardly enough: "I have found a little girl!" The whole establishment turned out to look at the little girl. Nobody knew her; nobody could make out her name, as she set it forth—except one chambermaid, who said it was Constantinople—which it wasn't. "I will dine with my young friend in a private room," said Barbox Brothers to the hotel authorities, "and perhaps you will be so good as let the police know that the pretty baby is here. I suppose she is sure to be inquired for, soon, if she has not been already. Come along, Polly." Perfectly at ease and peace, Polly came along, but, finding the stairs rather stiff work, was carried up by Barbox Brothers. The dinner was a most transcendent success, and the Barbox sheepishness, under Polly's directions how to mince her meat for her, and how to diffuse gravy over the plate with a liberal and equal hand, was another fine sight. "And now," said Polly, "while we are at dinner, you be good, and tell me that story I taught you." With the tremors of a civil service examination on him, and very uncertain indeed, not only as to the epoch at which the pie appeared in history, but also as to the measurements of that indispensable fact, Barbox Brothers made a shaky beginning, but under encouragement did very fairly. There was a want of breadth observable in his rendering of the cheeks, as well as the appetite, of the boy; and there was a certain tameness in his fairy, referable to an under-current of desire to account for her. Still, as the first lumbering performance of a good-humoured monster, it passed muster. "I told you to be good," said Polly, "and you are good, ain't you?" "I hope so," replied Barbox Brothers. Such was his deference that Polly, elevated on a platform of sofa-cushions in a chair at his right hand, encouraged him with a pat or two on the face from the greasy bowl of her spoon, and even, with a gracious kiss. In getting on her feet upon her chair, however, to give him this last reward, she toppled forward among the dishes, and caused him to exclaim as he effected her rescue: "Gracious Angels! Whew! I thought we were in the fire, Polly!" "What a coward you are, ain't you?" said Polly, when replaced. "Yes, I am rather nervous," he replied. "Whew! Don't, Polly! Don't flourish your spoon, or you'll go over sideways. Don't tilt up your legs when you laugh, Polly, or you'll go over backwards. Whew! Polly, Polly, Polly," said Barbox Brothers, nearly succumbing to despair," we are environed with dangers!" Indeed, he could descry no security from the pitfalls that were yawning for Polly, but in proposing to her, after dinner, to sit upon a low stool. "I will, if you will," said Polly. So, as peace of mind should go before all, he begged the waiter to wheel aside the table, bring a pack of cards, a couple of footstools, and a screen, and close in Polly and himself before the fire, as it were in a snug room within the room. Then, finest sight of all, was Barbox Brothers on his footstool, with a pint decanter on the rug, contemplating Polly as she built successfully, and growing blue in the face with holding his breath, lest he should blow the house down. "How you stare, don't you?" said Polly, in a houseless pause. Detected in the ignoble fact, he felt obliged to admit, apologetically: "I am afraid I was looking rather hard at you, Polly." "Why do you stare?" asked Polly. "I cannot," he murmured to himself, "recall why.—I don't know, Polly.' "You must be a simpleton to do things and not know why, mustn't you?" said Polly. In spite or which reproof, he looked at the child again, intently, as she bent her head over her card-structure, her rich curls shading her face. "It is impossible," he thought, "that I can ever have seen this pretty baby before. Can I have dreamed of her? In some sorrowful dream?" He could make nothing of it. So he went into the building trade as a journeyman under Polly, and they built three stories high, four stories high: even five. "I say. Who do you think is coming?" asked Polly, rubbing her eyes after tea. He guessed: "The waiter?" "No," said Polly, "the dustman. I am getting sleepy." A new embarrassment for Barbox Brothers! "I don't think I am going to be fetched tonight," said Polly; "what do you think?" He thought not, either. After another quarter of an hour, the dustman not merely impending but actually arriving, recourse was had to the Constantinopolitan chambermaid: who cheerily undertook that the child should sleep in a comfortable and wholesome room, which she herself would share. "And I know you will be careful, won't you," said Barbox Brothers, as a new fear dawned upon him, "that she don't fall out of bed." Polly found this so highly entertaining that she was under the necessity of clutching him round the neck with both arms as he sat on his footstool picking up the cards, and rocking him to and fro, with her dimpled chin on his shoulder. "O what a coward you are, ain't you!" said Polly. "Do you fall out of bed?" "N—not generally, Polly." "No more do I."" With that, Polly gave him a reassuring hug or two to keep him going, and then giving that confiding mite of a hand of hers to be swallowed up in the hand of the Constantinopolitan chambermaid, trotted off, chattering, without a vestige of anxiety. He looked after her, had the screen removed and the table and chairs replaced, and still looked after her. He paced the room for half an hour. A most engaging little creature, but it's not that. A most winning little voice, but it's not that. That has much to do with it, but there is something more. How can it be that I seem to know this child? What was it she imperfectly recalled to me when I felt her touch in the street, and, looking down at her, saw her looking up at me?" "Mr. Jackson!" With a start he turned towards the sound of the subdued voice, and saw his answer standing at the door. "O Mr. Jackson, do not be severe with me. Speak a word of encouragement to me, I beseech you." "You are Polly's mother." "Yes." Yes Polly herself might come to this, one day. As you see what the rose was, in its faded leaves; as you see what the summer growth of the woods was, in their wintry branches; so Polly might be traced, one day, in a care-worn woman like this, with her hair turned grey. Before him, were the ashes of a dead fire that had once burned bright. This was the woman he had loved. This was the woman he had lost. Such had been the constancy of his imagination to her, so had Time spared her under its withholding, that now, seeing how roughly the inexorable hand had struck her, his soul was filled with pity and amazement. He led her to a chair, and stood leaning on a comer of the chimney-piece, with his head resting on his hand, and his face half averted. "Did you see me in the street, and show me to your child?" he asked. "Yes." "Is the little creature, then, a party to deceit?" "I hope there is no deceit. I said to her, 'We have lost our way. and I must try to find mine by myself. Go to that gentleman and tell him you are lost. You shall be fetched by-and-by.' Perhaps you have not thought how very young she, is?" "She is very self-reliant." "Perhaps because she is so young?" He asked, after a short pause, "Why did you do this?" "O Mr. Jackson, do you ask me? In the hope that you might see something in my innocent child to soften your heart, towards me. Not only towards me, but towards my husband." He suddenly turned about, and walked to the opposite end of the room. He came back again with a slower step, and resumed his former attitude, saying: "I thought you had emigrated to America?" "We did. But life went ill with us there, and we came back." "Do you live in this town?" "Yes. I am a daily teacher of music here. My husband is a book-keeper." "Are you—forgive me asking—poor?" "We earn enough for our wants. That is not our distress. My husband is very, very ill of a lingering disorder. He will never recover—." "You check yourself. If it, is for want of the encouraging word you spoke of, take it from me. I cannot forget the old time, Beatrice." "God bless you!" she replied, with a burst of tears, and gave him her trembling hand. Compose yourself. I cannot be composed if you are not, for to see you weep distresses me beyond expression. Speak freely to me. Trust me." She shaded her face with her veil, and after a little while spoke calmly. Her voice had the ring of Polly's. "It is not that my husband's mind is at all impaired by his bodily suffering, for I assure you that is not the case. But in his weakness, and in his knowledge that, he is incurably ill, he cannot overcome the ascendancy of one idea. It preys upon him, embitters every moment of his painful life, and will shorten it." She stopping, he said again: "Speak freely to me. Trust me." "We have had five children before this darling, and they all lie in their little graves.He believes that they have withered away under a curse, and that it will blight this child like the rest." "Under what curse?" "Both I and he have it on our conscience that we tried you very heavily, and I do not know but. that, if I were as ill as he, I might, suffer in my mind as he does. This is the constant burden:—' I believe, Beatrice, I was the only friend that Mr. Jackson ever cared to make, though I was so much his junior. The more influence he acquired in the business the higher he advanced me, and I was alone in his private confidence. I came between him and you, and I took you from him. We were both secret, and the blow fell when he was wholly unprepared. The anguish it caused a man so compressed, must have been terrible; the wrath it awakened, inappeasable. So, a curse came to be invoked on our poor pretty little flowers, and they fall.'" "And you, Beatrice," he asked, when she had ceased to speak, and there had been a silence afterwards: "how say you?'' "Until within these few weeks I was afraid of you, and I believed that you would never, never, forgive." "Until within these few weeks," he repeated. "Have you changed your opinion of me within these few weeks?" "Yes." "For what reason?" "I was getting some pieces of music in a shop in this town, when, to my terror, you came in. As I veiled my face and stood in the dark end of the shop, I heard you explain that you wanted a musical instrument, for a bedridden girl. Your voice and manner were so softened, you showed such interest in its selection, you took it away yourself with so much tenderness of care and pleasure, that I knew you were a man with a most gentle heart. O Mr. Jackson, Mr. Jackson, if you could have felt the refreshing rain of tears that followed for me I" Was Phoebe playing at that moment, on her distant couch? He seemed to hear her. "I inquired in the shop where you lived, but could get no information. As I had heard you say that you were going back by the next train (but you did not say where), I resolved to visit the station at about that time of day, as often as I could, between my lessons on the chance of seeing you again. I have been there very often, but saw you no more until yesterday. You were meditating as you walked the street, but the calm expression of your face emboldened me to send my child to you. And when I saw you bend your head to speak tenderly to her, I prayed to GOD to forgive me for having ever brought a sorrow on it. I now pray to you to forgive me, and to forgive my husband. I was very young, he was young too, and in the ignorant hardihood of such a time of life we don't know what we do to those who have undergone more discipline. You generous man! You good man! So to raise me up and make nothing of my crime against you!"—for he would not see her on her knees, and soothed her as a kind father might have soothed an erring daughter—"thank you, bless you, thank you!" When he next spoke, it was after having drawn aside the window-curtain and looked out a while. Then, he only said: "Is Polly asleep?" "Yes. As I came in, I met her going away upstairs, and put her to bed myself." "Leave her with me for to-morrow, Beatrice, and write me your address on this leaf of my pocket-book. In the evening I will bring her home to you—and to her father." * * * * "Hallo!" cried Polly, putting her saucy sunny face in at the door next morning when breakfast was ready: "I thought I was fetched last night?" "So you were, Polly, but I asked leave to keep you here for the day, and to take you home in the evening." "Upon my word!" said Polly. "You are very cool, ain't you?" However, Polly seemed to think it a good idea, and added, "I suppose I must give you a kiss though you are cool." The kiss given and taken, they sat down to breakfast in a highly conversational tone. "Of course, you are going to amuse me?" said Polly. "Oh, of course," said Barbox Brothers. In the pleasurable height of her anticipations, Polly found it indispensable to put down her piece of toast, cross one of her little fat knees over the other, and bring her little fat right hand down into her left hand with a business-like slap. After this gathering of herself together, Polly, by that time, a mere heap of dimples asked in a wheedling manner: "What are we going to do, you dear old thing?" "Why, I was thinking," said Barbox Brothers, "—but are you fond of horses, Polly?" "Ponies, I am," said Polly, "especially when their tails are long. But horses—n—no—too big, you know." "Well," pursued Barbox Brothers, in a spirit of grave mysterious confidence adapted to the importance of the consultation, "I did see yesterday,Polly, on the walls, pictures of two long-tailed ponies, speckled all over—" "No, no, NO!" cried Polly, in an ecstatic desire to linger on the charming details. "Not speckled all over!" "Speckled all over. Which ponies jump through hoops—" "No, no, NO!" cried Polly, as before. "They never jump through hoops!" "Yes, they do. O I assure you they do. And eat pie in pinafores—" "Ponies eating pie in pinafores!" said Polly. "What a story-teller you are, ain't you?" "Upon my honour—. And fire off guns." (Polly hardly seemed to see the force of the ponies resorting to fire-arms.) "And I was thinking," pursued the exemplary Barbox, "that if you and I were to go to the Circus where these ponies are, it would do our constitutions good." "Does that mean, amuse us?" inquired Polly. "What long words you do use, don't you?" Apologetic for having wandered out of his depth, he replied: "That means amuse us. That is exactly what it means. There are many other wonders besides the ponies, and we, shall see them all. Ladies and gentlemen in spangled dresses, and elephants and lions and tigers." Polly became observant of the teapot, with a curled-up nose indicating some uneasiness of mind. "They never get out, of course," she remarked as a mere truism. "The elephants and lions and tigers? O dear no!" "O dear no!" said Polly. "And of course nobody's afraid of the ponies shooting anybody." "Not the least in the world." "No, no, not the least in the world," said Polly. "I was also thinking," proceeded Barbox, "that if we were to look in at the toy-shop, to choose a doll—" "Not dressed!" cried Polly, with a clap of her hands. "No, no, NO, not dressed!" "Full dressed. Together with a house, and all things necessary for housekeeping—" Polly gave a little scream, and seemed in danger of falling into a swoon of bliss. "What a darling you are!" she languidly exclaimed, leaning back in her chair. "Come and be hugged, or I must come and hug you." This resplendent programme was carried into execution with the utmost rigour of the law. It being essential to make the purchase of the doll its first feature—or that lady would have lost the ponies—the toy-shop expedition took precedence. Polly in the magic warehouse, with a doll as large as herself under each arm, and a neat assortment of some twenty more on view upon the counter, did indeed present a spectacle of indecision not quite compatible with unalloyed happiness, but the light cloud passed. The lovely specimen oftenest chosen, oftenest rejected, and finally abided by, was of Circassian descent, possessing as much boldness of beauty as was reconcilable with extreme feebleness of mouth, and combining a sky-blue silk pelisse with rose-coloured satin trousers, and a black velvet hat: which this fair stranger to our northern shores would seem to have founded on the portraits of the late Duchess of Kent. The name this distinguished foreigner brought with her from beneath the glowing skies of a sunny clime was (on Polly's authority) Miss Melluka, and the costly nature of her outfit as a housekeeper, from the Barbox coffers, may be inferred from the two facts that her silver teaspoons were as large as her kitchen poker, and that the proportions of her watch exceeded those of her frying-pan. Miss Melluka was graciously pleased to express her entire approbation of the Circus, and so was Polly; for the ponies were speckled, and brought down nobody when they fired, and the savagery of the wild beasts appeared to be mere smoke—which article, in fact, they did produce in large quantities from their insides. The Barbox absorption in the general subject throughout the realisation of these delights was again a sight to see, nor was it less worthy to behold at dinner, when he drank to Miss Melluka, tied stiff in a chair opposite to Polly (the fair Circassian possessing an unbendable spine), and even induced the waiter to assist in carrying out with due decorum the prevailing glorious idea. To wind up, there came the agreeable fever of getting Miss Melluka and all her wardrobe and rich possesions into a fly with Polly, to be taken home. But by that time Polly had become unable to look upon such accumulated joys with waking eyes, and had withdrawn her consciousness into the wonderful Paradise of a child's sleep. "Sleep, Polly, sleep," said Barbox Brothers, as her head dropped on his shoulder; "you shall not fall out of this bed, easily, at any rate!" What rustling piece of paper he took from his pocket, and carefully folded into the bosom of Polly's frock, shall not be mentioned. He said nothing about it, and nothing shall be said about it. They drove to a modest suburb of the great ingenious town, and stopped at the fore-court of a small house. "Do not wake the child," said Barbox Brothers, softly, to the driver, " I will carry her in as she is." Greeting the light at the opened door which was held by Polly's mother, Polly's bearer passed on with mother and child into a ground-floor room. There, stretched on a sofa, lay a sick man, sorely wasted, who covered his eyes with his emaciated hands. "Tresham," said Barbox, in a kindly voice, "I have brought you back your Polly, fast asleep. Give me your hand, and tell me you are better." The sick man reached forth his right hand, and bowed his head over the hand into which it taken, and kissed it. "Thank you, thank you! I may say that I am well and happy." "That's brave," said Barbox. "Tresham, I have a fancy—can you make room for me beside you here?" He sat down on the sofa as he said the words, cherishing the plump peachy cheek that lay uppermost on his shoulder. "I have a fancy, Tresham (I am getting quite an old fellow now, you know, and old fellows may take fancies into their heads sometimes) to give up Polly, having found her, to no one but you. Will you take her from me?" As the father held out his arms for the child, each of the two men looked steadily at the other. "She is very dear to you, Tresham?" "Unutterably dear." "God bless her! It is not much, Polly," he continued, turning his eyes upon her peaceful face as he apostrophised her, "it is not much, Polly, for a blind and sinful man to invoke a blessing on something so far better than himself as a little child is; but it would be much—much upon his cruel head, and much upon, his guilty soul—if he could be so wicked as to invoke a curse. He had better have a millstone round his neck, and be cast into the deepest sea. Live and thrive, my pretty baby!" Here he kissed her. "Live and prosper, and become in time the mother of other little children, like the Angels who behold The Father's face!" He kissed her again, gave her up gently to both her parents, and went out. But he went not to Wales. No, he never went to Wales. He went straightway for another stroll about the town, and he looked in upon the people at their work, and at their play, here, there, everywhere, and where not. For he was Barbox Brothers and Co. now, and had taken thousands of partners into the solitary firm. He had at length got back to his hotel room, and was standing before his fire refreshing himself with a glass of hot drink which he had stood upon the chimney-piece, when he heard the town clocks striking, and, referring to his watch, found the evening to have so slipped away, that they were striking twelve. As he put up his watch again, his eyes met those of his reflection in the chimney-glass. "Why it's your birthday already," he said, smiling. "You are looking very well. I wish you many happy returns of the day." He had never before bestowed that wish upon himself. "By Jupiter!" he discovered, "it alters the whole case of running away from one's birthday! It's a thing to explain to Phoebe. Besides, here is quite a long story to tell her, that has sprung out of the road with no story. I'll go back, instead of going on. I'll go back by my friend Lamps's Up X presently." He went back to Mugby Junction, and in point of fact he established himself at Mugby Junction. It was the convenient place to live in, for brightening Phoebe's life. It was the convenient place to live in, for having her taught music by Beatrice. It was the convenient place to live in, for occasionally borrowing Polly. It was the convenient place to live in, for being joined at will to all sorts of agreeable places and persons. So, he became settled there, and, his house, standing in an elevated situation, it is noteworthy of him in conclusion, as Polly herself might (not irreverently) have put it: There was an Old Barbox who lived on a hill, And if he ain't gone, he lives there still. I am The Boy at Mugby. That's about what I am. You don't know what I mean? What a pity! But I think you do. I think you must. Look here. I am the Boy at what is called The Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, and what's proudest boast is, that it never yet refreshed a mortal being. Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, in the height of twenty-seven cross draughts (I've often counted 'em while they brush the First Class hair twenty-seven ways), behind the bottles, among the glasses, bounded on the nor'-west by the beer, stood pretty far to the right of a metallic object that's at times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to its contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways to the glare of Our Missis's eye—you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next time you stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take particular notice that he'll try to seem not to hear you, that he'll appear in a Absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body, and that he won't serve you as long as you can possibly bear it. That's Me. What a lark it is! We are the Model Establishment, we are, at Mugby. Other Refreshment Rooms send their imperfect young ladies up to be finished off by our Missis. For some of the young ladies, when they're new to the business, come into it mild! Ah! Our Missis, she soon takes that out of 'em. Why, I originally come into the business meek myself. But Our Missis she soon took that out of me. What a delightful lark it is! I look upon us Refreshmenters as ockipying the only proudly independent footing on the Line. There's Papers for instance—my honourable friend if he will allow me to call him so—him as belongs to Smith's bookstall. Why he no more dares to be up to our Refreshmenting games, than he dares to jump atop of a locomotive with her steam at full pressure, and cut away upon her alone, driving himself, at limited-mail speed. Papers, he'd get his head punched at every compartment, first second and third, the whole length of a train, if he was to ventur to imitate my demeanour. It's the same with the porters, the same with the guards, the same with the ticket clerks, the same the whole way up to the secretary, traffic manager, or very chairman. There ain't a one among 'em on the nobly independent footing we are. Did you ever catch one of them, when you wanted anything of him, making a system of surveying the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body? I should hope not. You should see our Bandolining Room at Mugby Junction. It's led to, by the door behind the counter which you'll notice usually stands ajar, and it's the room where Our Missis and our young ladies Bandolines their hair. You should see 'em at it, betwixt trains, Bandolining away, as if they was anointing themselves for the combat. When you're telegraphed, you should see their noses all a going up with scorn, as if it was a part of the working of the same Cooke and Wheatstone electrical machinery. You should hear Our Missis give the word "Here comes the Beast to be Fed!" and then you should see 'em indignantly skipping across the Line, from the Up to the Down, or Wicer Warsaw, and begin to pitch the stale pastry into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sangwiches under the glass covers, and get out the—ha ha ha!—the Sherry—O my eye, my eye!—for your Refreshment. It's only in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which of course I mean to say Britannia) that Refreshmenting is so effective, so 'olesome, so constitutional, a check upon the public. There was a foreigner, which having politely, with his hat off, beseeched our young ladies and Our Missis for "a leetel gloss hoff prarndee," and having had the Line surveyed through him by all and no other acknowledgment, was a proceeding at last to help himself, as seems to be the custom in his own country, when Our Missis with her hair almost a coming un-Bandolined with rage, and her eyes omitting sparks flew at him, cotched the decanter out of his hand, and said: "Put it down! I won't allow that!" The foreigner turned pale, stepped back with his arms stretched out in front of him, his hands clasped, and his shoulders riz, and exclaimed: "Ah! Is it possible this! That these disdaineous females and this ferocious old woman are placed here by the administration, not only to empoison the voyagers, but to affront them! Great Heaven! How arrives it? The English people. Or is he then a slave? Or idiot?" Another time, a merry wideawake American gent had tried the sawdust and spit it out, and had tried the Sherry and spit that out, and had tried in vain to sustain exhausted natur upon Butter-Scotch, and had been rather extra Bandolined and Line-surveyed through, when, as the bell was ringing and he paid Our Missis, he says, very loud and good-tempered: "I tell Yew what 'tis, ma'arm. I la'af. Theer! I la'af. I Dew. I oughter ha,' seen most things, for I hail from the Onlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haive travelled right slick over the Limited, head on through Jee-rusalemm and the East, and likeways France and Italy, Europe Old World, and am now upon the track to the Chief Europian Village; but such an institution as Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin's solid and liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never did see yet! And if I hain't found the eighth wonder of monarchical Creation, in finding Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin's solid and liquid, all as aforesaid, established in a country where the people air not absolute Loo-naticks, I am Extra Double Darned with a Nip and Frizzle to the innermostest grit! Wheerfur—T heer!—I la'af! I Dew, ma'arm. I la'af!" And so he went, stamping and shaking his sides along the platform all the way to his own compartment. I think it was her standing up agin the Foreigner, as giv' Our Missis the idea of going over to France, and droring a comparison betwixt Refreshmenting as followed among the frog-eaters, and Refreshmenting as triumphant in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which of course I mean to say agin, Britannia). Our young ladies, Miss Whiff, Miss Piff, and Mrs. Sniff, was unanimous opposed to her going; for, as they says to Our Missis one and all, it is well In-known to the hends of the herth as no other nation except Britain has a idea of anythink, but above all of business. "Why then should you tire yourself to prove what is already proved? Our Missis however (being a teazer at all pints) stood out grim obstinate, and got a return pass by South-Eastern Tidal, to go right through, if such should be her dispositions, to Marseilles. Sniff is husband to Mrs. Sniff, and is a regular insignificant cove. He looks arter the sawdust department in a back room, and is sometimes when we are very hard put to it let in behind the counter with a corkscrew; but never when it can be helped, his demeanour towards the public being disgusting servile. How Mrs. Sniff ever come so far to lower herself as to marry him, I don't know; but I suppose he does, and I should think he wished he didn't, for he leads a awful life. Mrs. Sniff couldn't be much harder with him if he was public. Similarly, Miss Whiff and Miss Piff, taking the tone of Mrs. Sniff, they shoulder Sniff about when he is let in with a corkscrew, and they whisk things out of his hands when in his servility he is a going to let the public have 'em, and they snap him up when in the crawling baseness of his spirit he is a going to answer a public question, and they drore more tears into his eyes than ever the mustard does which he all day long lays on to the sawdust. (But it ain't strong.) Once, when Sniff had the repulsiveness to reach across to get the milk-pot to hand over for a baby, I see Our Missis in her rage catch him by both his shoulders and spin him out into the Bandolining Room. But Mrs. Sniff. How different! She's the one! She's the one as you'll notice to be always looking another way from you, when you look at her. She's the one with the small waist buckled in tight in front, and with the lace cuffs at her wrists, which she puts on the edge of the counter before her, and stands a smoothing while the public foams. This smoothing the cuffs and looking another way while the public foam is the last accomplishment taught to the young ladies as come to Mugby to be finished by Our Missis; and it's always taught by Mrs. Sniff. When Our Missis went away upon her journey, Mrs. Sniff was left in charge. She did hold the public in cheek most beautiful! In all my time, I never see half so many cups of tea given without milk to people as wanted it with, nor half so many cups of tea with milk given to people as wanted it without. When foaming ensued, Mrs. Sniff would say: "Then you'd better settle it among yourselves, and change with one another." It was a most highly delicious lark. I enjoyed the Refreshmenting business more than ever, and was so glad I had took to it when young. Our Missis returned. It got circulated among the young ladies, and it as if might be penetrated to me through the crevices of the Bandolining Room, that she had Orrors to reveal, if revelations so contemptible could be dignfied with the name. Agitation become awakened. Excitement was up in the stirrups. Expectations stood a tiptoe. At length it was put forth that on our slackest evening in the week, and at our slackest time of that evening betwixt trains, Our Missis would give her views of foreign Refreshmenting, in the Bandolining Room. It was arranged tasteful for the purpose. The Bandolining table and glass was hid in a corner, a arm-chair was elevated on a packing-case for Our Missis's ockypation, a table and a tumbler of water (no sherry in it, thankee) was placed beside it. Two of the pupils, the season being autumn, and hollyhocks and daliahs being in, ornamented the wall with three devices in those flowers. On one might be read, "MAY ALBION NEVER LEARN;" on another, "KEEP THE PUBLIC DOWN;" on another, "OUR REFRESHMENTING CHARTER." The whole had a beautiful appearance, with which the beauty of the sentiments corresponded. On Our Missis's brow was wrote Severity, as she ascended the. fatal platform. (Not that that was anythink new.) Miss Whiff and Miss Piff sat at her feet. Three chairs from the Waiting Room might have been perceived by a average eye, in front of her, on which the pupils was accommodated. Behind them, a very close observer might have discerned a Boy. Myself. "Where," said Our Missis, glancing gloomily around, "is Sniff?" "I thought it better," answered Mrs. Sniff, "that he should not be let to come in. He is such an Ass." "No doubt," assented Our Missis. "But for that reason is it not desirable to improve his mind?" "O! Nothing will ever improve him," said Mrs. Sniff. "However," pursued Our Missis, "call him in, Ezekiel." I called him in. The appearance of the low-minded cove was hailed wilh disapprobation from all sides, on account of his having brought his corkscrew with him. He pleaded "the force of habit.'' "The force!" said Mrs. Sniff. "Don't let us have you talking about force, for Gracious sake. There! Do stand still where you are, with your back against the wall." He is a smiling piece of vacancy, and he smiled in the mean way in which he will even smile at the public if he gets a chance (language can say no meaner of him), and he stood upright near the door with the back of his head agin the wall, as if he was a waiting for somebody to come and measure his heighth for the Army. "I should not enter, ladies," says Our Missis, "on the revolting disclosures I am about to make, if it was not in the hope that they will cause you to be yet more implacable in the exercise of the power you wield in a constitutional country, and yet more devoted to the constitutional motto which I see before me;" it was behind her, but the words sounded better so; "'May Albion never learn!'" Here the pupils as had made the motto, admired it, and cried, "Hear! Hear! Hear!" Sniff, showing an inclination to join in chorus, got himself frowned down by every brow. "The baseness of the French," pursued Our Missis, "as displayed in the fawning nature of their Refreshmenting, equals, if not surpasses, anythink as was ever heard of the baseness of the celebrated Buonaparte." Miss Whiff, Miss Piff and me, we drored a heavy breath, equal to saying, "We thought as much!" Miss Whiff and Miss Piff seeming to object to my droring mine along with theirs, I drored another, to aggravate 'em. "Shall I be believed," says Our Missis, with flashing eyes, "when I tell you that no sooner had I set my foot upon that treacherous shore—" Here Sniff, either busting out mad, or thinking aloud, says, in a low voice: "Feet. Plural, you know." The cowering that come upon him when he was spurned by all eyes, added to his being beneath contempt, was sufficient punishment for a cove so grovelling. In the midst of a silence rendered more impressive by the turned-up female noses with which it was pervaded, Our Missis went on: "Shall I be believed when I tell you that no sooner had I landed," this word with a killing look at Sniff, "on that treacherous shore, than I was ushered into a Refreshment Room where there were, I do not exaggerate, actually eatable things to eat?" A groan burst from the ladies. I not only did myself the honour of jining, but also of lengthening it out. "Where there were," Our Missis added, "not only eatable things to eat, but also drinkable things to drink?" A murmur, swelling almost into a scream, ariz. Miss Piff, trembling with indignation, called out: "Name!" "I will name," said Our Missis. "There was roast fowls, hot and cold; there was smoking roast veal surrounded with browned potatoes; there was hot soup with (again I ask shall I be credited?) nothing bitter in it, and no flour to choke off the consumer; there was a variety of cold dishes set off with jelly; there was salad; there was—mark me!—fresh pastry, and that of a light construction; there was a luscious show of fruit. There was bottles and decanters of sound small wine, of every size and adapted to every pocket; the same odious statement will apply to brandy; and these were set out upon the counter so that all could help themselves." Our Missis's lips so quivered, that Mrs. Sniff, though scarcely less convulsed than she were, got up and held the tumbler to them. "This," proceeds Our Missis, "was my first unconstitutional experience. Well would it have been, if it had been my last and worst. But no. As I proceeded further into that enslaved and ignorant land, its aspect became more hideous. I need not explain to this assembly, the ingredients and formation of the British Refreshment sangwich?" Universal laughter—except from Sniff, who, as sangwich-cutter, shook his head in a state of the utmost dejection as he stood with it agin the wall. "Well!" said Our Missis, with dilated nostrils." Take a fresh crisp long crusty penny loaf made of the whitest and best flour. Cut it longwise through the middle. Insert a fair and nicely fitting slice of ham. Tie a smart piece of ribbon round the middle of the whole to bind it together. Add at one end a neat wrapper of clean white paper by which to hold it. And the universal French Refreshment sangwich busts on your disgusted vision." A cry of "Shame!" from all—except Sniff, which rubbed his stomach with a soothing hand. "I need not," said Our Missis, "explain to this assembly, the usual formation and fitting of the British Refreshment Room?" No, no, and laughter. Sniff agin shaking his head in low spirits agin the wall. "Well," said Our Missis, "what would you say to a general decoration of everythink, to hangings (sometimes elegant), to easy velvet furniture, to abundance of little tables, to abundance of little seats, to brisk bright waiters, to great convenience, to a pervading cleanliness and tastefulness positively addressing the public and making the Beast thinking itself worth the pains?" Contemptous fury on the part of all the ladies. Mrs. Sniff looking as if she wanted somebody to hold her, and everybody else looking as if they'd rayther not. "Three times," said Our Missis, working herself into a truly terrimcnjious state, "three times did I see these shamful things, only between the coast and Paris, and not counting either: at Hazebrouckc, at Arras, at Amiens. But worse remains. Tell me, what would you call a person who should propose in England that there should be kept, say at our own model Mugby Junction, pretty baskets, each holding an assorted cold lunch and dessert for one, each at a certain fixed price, and each within a passenger's power to take away, to empty in the carriage at perfect leisure, and to return at another station fifty or a hundred miles further on?" There was disagreement that such a person should he called. Whether revolutionist, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: "A malignant maniac!" "I adopt," says Our Missis, "the brand set upon such a person by the righteous indignation of my friend Miss Plff. A malignant maniac. Know then, that that malignant maniac has sprung from the congenial soil of France, and that his malignant madness was unchecked action on this same part of my journey." I noticed that Snilf was a rubbing his hands, and that Mrs. Sniff had got her eye upon him. But I did not take more particular notice, owing to the excited state in which the young ladies was, and to feeling myself called upon to keep it up with a howl. "On my experience south of Paris," said Our Missis, in a deep tone, "I will not expatiate. Too loathsome were the task! But fancy this. Fancy a guard coming round, with the train at full speed, to inquire how many for dinner. Fancy his telegraphing forward, the number of diners. Fancy every one expected, and the table elegantly laid for the complete party. Fancy a charming dinner, in a charming room, and the head-cook, concerned for the honour of every dish, superintending in his clean white jacket and cap. Fancy the Beast travelling six hundred miles on end, very fast, and with great punctuality, yet being taught to expect all this to be done for it!" A spirited chorus of "The Beast!" I noticed that Sniff was agin a rubbing his stomach with a soothing hand, and that he had drored up one leg. But agin I didn't take particular notice, looking on myself as called upon to stimilate public feeling. It being a lark besides. "Putting everything together," said Our Missis, "French Refreshmenting comes to this, and O it conies to a nice total! First: eatable things to eat, and drinkable things to drink." A groan from the young ladies, kep' up by me. "Second: convenience, and even elegance." Another groan from the young ladies, kep' up by me. "Third: moderate charges." This time, a groan from me, kep' up by the young ladies. "Fourth:—and here," says Our Missis, "I claim your angriest sympathy—attention, common civility, nay, even politeness!" Me, and the young ladies regularly raging mad all together. "And I cannot in conclusion," says Our Missis, with her spitefullest sneer, "give you a completer pictur of that despicable nation (after what I have related), than assuring you that they wouldn't bear our constitutional ways and noble independence at Mugby Junction, for a single mouth, and that they would turn us to the right-about and put another system in our places, as soon as look at us; perhaps sooner, for I do not believe they have the good taste to care to look at us twice." The swelling tumult was arrested in its rise. Sniff, bore away by his servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher and a higher relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew over his head. It was at this moment, that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep' her eye upon him like the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim. Our Missis followed them both out, and cries was heard in the sawdust department. You come into the Down Refreshment Room, at the Junction, making believe you don't know me, and I'll pint you out with my right, thumb over my shoulder which is Our Missis, and which is Miss Whiff, and which is Miss Piff, and which is Mrs. Sniff. But you won't get a chance to see Sniff, because he disappeared that night. Whether he perished, tore to pieces, I cannot say; but his corkscrew alone remains, to bear witness to the servility of his disposition. "Halloa! Below there!" When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but, instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said, for my life, what. But, I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all. "Halloa! Below!" From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him. "Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?" He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without, pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then, there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train, had passed me and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him re-furling the flag he had shown while the train went by. I repeated my inquiry. After a pause, during which he seemed to regard me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag towards a point on my level, some two or three hundred yards distant. I called down to him, "All right!" and made for that point. There, by dint of looking closely about me, I found a rough zig-zag descending path notched out: which I followed. The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone that became oozier and wetter as I went down. For these reasons, I found the way long enough to give me time to recal a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which he had pointed out the path. When I came down low enough upon the zigzag descent, to see him again, I saw that he was standing between the rails on the way by which the train had lately passed, in an attitude as if he were waiting for me to appear. He had his left hand at his chin, and that left elbow rested on his right hand crossed over his breast. His attitude was one of such expectation and watchfulness, that I stopped a moment, wondering at it. I resumed my downward way, and, stepping out upon the level of the railroad and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way, only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction, terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world. Before he stirred, I was near enough to him to have touched him. Not even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step, and lifted his hand. This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my attention when I looked down from up yonder. A visitor was a rarity, I should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped? In me, he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who, being at last set free, had a newly-awakened interest in these great works. To such purpose I spoke to him; but I am far from sure of the terms I used, for, besides that I am not happy in opening any conversation, there was something in the man that daunted me. He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the tunnel's mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were missing from it, and then looked at me. That light was part of his charge? Was it not? He answered in a low voice: "Don't you know it is?" The monstrous thought came into my mind as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since, whether there may have been infection in his mind. In my turn, I stepped back. But in making the action, I detected in his eyes some latent fear of me. This put the monstrous thought to flight. "You look at me," I said, forcing a smile, "as if you had a dread of me." "I was doubtful," he returned, "whether I had seen you before." "Where?" He pointed to the red light he had looked at. "There?" I said. Intently watchful of me, he replied (but without sound), Yes. "My good fellow, what should I do there? However, be that as it may, I never was there, you may swear." "I think I may," he rejoined. "Yes. I am sure I may." His manner cleared, like my own. He replied to my remarks with readiness, and in well-chosen words. Had he much to do there? Yes; that was to say, he had enough responsibility to bear; but exactness and watchfulness were what was required of him, and of actual work—manual labour—he had next to none. To change that signal, to trim those lights, and to turn this iron handle now and then, was all he had to do under that head. Regarding those many long and lonely hours of which I seemed to make so much, he could only say that the routine of his life had shaped itself into that form, and he had grown used to it. He had taught himself a language down here—if only to know it by sight, and to have formed his own crude ideas of its pronunciation, could be called learning it. He had also worked at fractions and decimals, and tried a little algebra; but he was, and had been as a boy, a poor hand at figures. Was it necessary for him when on duty, always to remain in that channel of damp air, and could he never rise into the sunshine from between those high stone walls? Why, that depended upon times and circumstances. Under some conditions there would be less upon the Line than under others, and the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night. In bright weather, he did choose occasions for getting a little above these lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by his electric bell, and at such times listening for it with redoubled anxiety, the relief was less than I would suppose. He took me into his box, where there was a fire, a desk for an official book in which he had to make certain entries, a telegraphic instrument with its dial face and needles, and the little bell of which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence), perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such-wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any great railway staff. He had been, when young (if I could believe it, sitting in that hut; he scarcely could), a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no complaint to offer about that. He had made his bed, and he lay upon it. It was far too late to make another. All that I have here condensed, he said in a quiet manner, with his grave dark regards divided between me and the fire. He threw in the word "Sir," from time to time, and especially when he referred to his youth: as though to request me to understand that he claimed to be nothing but what I found him. He was several times interrupted by the little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies. Once, he had to stand without the door, and display a flag as a train passed, and make some verbal communication to the driver. ln the discharge of his duties I observed him to be remarkably exact and vigilant, breaking off his discourse at a syllable, and remaining silent until what he had to do was done. In a word, I should have set this man down as one of the safest of men to be employed in that capacity, but for the circumstance that while he was speaking to me he twice broke off with a fallen colour, turned his face towards the little bell when it did NOT ring, opened the door of the hut (which was kept shut to exclude the unhealthy damp), and looked out towards the red light near the mouth of the tunnel. On both of those occasions, he came back to the fire with the inexplicable air upon him which I had remarked, without being able to define, when we were so far asunder. Said I when I rose to leave him: "You almost make me think that I have met with a contented man." (I am afraid I must acknowledge that I said it to lead him on.) "I believe I used to be so," he rejoined, in the low voice in which he had first spoken; "but I am troubled, sir, I am troubled." He would have recalled the words if he could. He had said them, however, and I took them up quickly. With what? What is your trouble?" "It is very difficult to impart, sir. It is very, very, difficult to speak of. If ever you make me another visit, I will try to tell you." "But I expressly intend to make you another visit. Say, when shall it be?" "I go off early in the morning, and I shall be on again at ten to-morrow night, sir." "I will come at eleven." He thanked me, and went out at the door with me. "I'll show my white light, sir," he said, in his peculiar low voice, "till you have found the way up. When you have found it, don't call out! And when you are at the top, don't call out!" His manner seemed to make the place strike colder to me, but I said no more than "Very well." "And when you come down to-morrow night, don't call out! Let me ask you a parting question. What made you cry 'Halloa! Below there!' to-night?" "Heaven knows," said I. "I cried something to that effect—" Not to that effect, sir. Those were the very words. I know them well.'' "Admit those were the very words. | them, no doubt, because I saw you below." "For no other reason?" "What other reason could I possibly have!" "You had no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural way?" "No." He wished me good night, and held up his light. I walked by the side of the down Line of rails (with a very disagreeable sensation of a train coming behind me), until I found the path. It was easier to mount than to descend, and I got back to my inn without any adventure. Punctual to my appointment, I placed my foot on the first notch of the zig-zag next night, as the distant clocks were striking eleven. He was waiting for me at the bottom, with his white light on. "I have not called out," I said, when we came close together; "may I speak now?" "By all means, sir." "Good night then, and here's my hand." "Good night, sir, and here's mine." With that, we walked side by side to his box, entered it, closed the door, and sat down by the fire. "I have made up my mind, sir," he began, bending forward as soon as we were seated, and speaking in a tone but a little above a whisper, "that, you shall not have to ask me twice what troubles me. I took you for some one else yesterday evening. That troubles me." "That mistake?" "No. That some one else." "Who is it?" "I don't know." "Like me?" "I don't know. I never saw the face. The left arm is across the face, and the right arm is waved. Violently waved. This way." I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm gesticulating with the utmost passion and vehemence: "For God's sake clear the way!" "One moonlight night," said the man, "I was sitting here, when I heard a voice cry 'Halloa! Below there!' I started up, looked from that door, and saw this Some one else standing by the red light near the tunnel waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried, 'Look out! Look out!' And then again 'Halloa! Below there! Look out!' I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran towards the figure, calling, 'What's wrong? What has happened? Where?' It stood just outside the blackness of the tunnel. I advanced so close upon it that I wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes. I ran right up at it, and had my hand lied out to pull the sleeve away, when it was gone." "Into the tunnel,'' said I. "No. I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped and held my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again, faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again, and ran back here. I telegraphed both ways: 'An alarm has been given, is anything wrong?' The answer came back, both ways: 'All well.'" Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight, and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon themselves. "As to an imaginary cry," said I, "do but listen for a moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to the wild harp it makes of the telegraph wires!" That was all very well, he returned, after we had sat listening for a while, and he ought to know something of the wind and the wires, he who so often passed long winter nights there, alone and watching. But he would beg to remark that he had not finished. I asked his pardon, and he slowly added these words, touching my arm: "Within six hours after the Appearance, the memorable accident on this Line happened, and within ten hours the dead and wounded were brought along through the tunnel over the spot where the figure had stood." A disagreeable shudder crept over me, but I did my best against it. It was not to be denied, I rejoined, that this was a remarkable coincidence, calculated deeply to impress his mind. But, it was unquestionable that remarkable coincidences did continually occur, and they must be taken into account in dealing with such a subject. Though to be sure I must admit, I added (for I thought I saw that he was going to bring the objection to bear upon me), men of common sense did not allow much for coincidences in making the ordinary calculations of life. He again begged to remark that he had not finished. I again begged his pardon for being betrayed into interruptions. "This," he said, again laying his hand upon my arm, and glancing over his shoulder with hollow eyes, "was just a year ago. Six or seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at that door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again," He stopped, with a fixed look at me. "Did it cry out?" "No. It was silent." "Did it wave its arm?" "No. It leaned against the shaft of the light, with both hands before the face. Like this." Once more, I followed his action with my eyes. It was an action of mourning. I have seen such an attitude in stone figures on tombs. "Did you go up to it?" "I came in and sat down, partly to collect my thoughts, partly because it had turned me faint. When I went to the door again, daylight was above me, and the ghost was gone." "But nothing followed? Nothing came of this?" He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice, giving a ghastly nod each time: "That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and heads, and something waved. I saw it, just in time to signal the driver, Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it, and, as I went along, heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and laid down on this floor between us." Involuntarily, I pushed my chair back, as I looked from the boards at which he pointed, to himself. "True, sir. True. Precisely as it happened, so I tell it you." I could think of nothing to say, to any purpose, and my mouth was very dry. The wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail. He resumed. "Now, sir, mark this, and judge how my mind is troubled. The spectre came back, a week ago. Ever since, it has been there, now and again, by fits and starts." "At the light?" "At the Danger-light." "What does it seem to do?" He repeated, if possible with increased passion and vehemence, that former gesticulation of "For God's sake clear the way!" Then, he went on. "I have no peace or rest for it. It calls to me, for many minutes together, in an agonised in manner, 'Below there! Look out! Look out!' It stands waving to me. It rings my little bell—" I caught at that. "Did it ring your bell yesterday evening when I was here, and you went to the door?"' "Twice." "Why, see," said I, "how your imagination misleads you. My eyes were on the bell, and my ears were open to the bell, and if I am a living man, it did NOT ring at those times. No, nor at any other time, except when it was rung in the natural course of physical things by the station communicating with you." He shook his head. "I have never made a mistake as to that, yet, sir. I have never confused the spectre's ring with the man's. The ghost's ring is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from nothing else, and I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the eye. I don't wonder that you failed to hear it. But I heard it." "And did the spectre seem to be there, when you looked out?'' "It WAS there." "Both times?" He repeated firmly: "Both times." "Will you come to the door with me, and look for it now?" He bit his under-lip as though he were somewhat unwilling, but arose. I opened the door, and stood on the step, while he stood in the doorway. There, was the Danger-light. There, the dismal mouth of the tunnel. There, were the high wet stone walls of the cutting. There, were the stars above them. "Do you see it?" I asked him, taking particular note of his face. His eyes were prominent and strained; but not very much more so, perhaps, than my own had been when I had directed them earnestly towards the same spot. "No," he answered. "It is not there." "Agreed," said I. We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats. I was thinking how best to improve this advantage, if it might be called one, when he took up the conversation in such a matter of course way, so assuming that there could be no serious question of fact between us, that I felt myself placed in the weakest of positions. "By this time you will fully understand, sir," he said, "that what troubles me so dreadfully, is the question, What does the spectre mean?" I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand. "What is its warning against?" he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the fire, and only by times turning them on me. "What is the danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging, somewhere on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be doubted this third time, after what has gone before. But surely this is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do!" He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated forehead. "If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no reason for it," he went on, wiping the palms of his hands. "I should get into trouble, and do no good. They would think I was mad. This is the way it would work:— Message: 'Danger! Take care!' Answer: 'What Danger? Where?' Message: 'Don't know. But for God's sake take care!' They would displace me. What else could they do?" His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life. "When it first stood under the Danger-light," he went on, putting his dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, " why not tell me where that accident was to happen—if it must happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted if—it could have been averted? When on its second coming hid its face, why not tell me instead: 'She is going to die. Let them keep her at home'? If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signalman on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act!" When I saw him in this state, I saw that, for the poor man's sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was, to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty, must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances. In this effort I succeeded far better than in the attempt to reason him out of his conviction. He became calm; the occupations incidental to his post as the night advanced, began to make larger demands on his attention; and I left him at two in the morning. I had offered to stay through the night, but he would not hear of it. That I more than once looked back at the red light as I ascended the pathway, that I did not like the red light, and that I should have slept but poorly if my bed had been under it, I see no reason to conceal. Nor, did I like the two sequences of the accident and the dead girl. I see no reason to conceal that, either. But, what ran most in my thoughts was the consideration how ought I to act, having become the recipient of this disclosure? I had proved the man to be intelligent, vigilant, painstaking, and exact; but how long might he remain so, in his state of mind? Though in a subordinate position, still he held a most important trust, and would I (for instance) like to stake my own life on the chances of his continuing to execute it with precision? Unable to overcome a feeling that there would be something treacherous in my communicating what he had told me, to his superiors in the Company, without first being plain with himself and proposing a middle course to him, I ultimately resolved to offer to accompany him (otherwise keeping his secret for the present) to the wisest medical practitioner we could hear of in those parts, and to take his opinion. A change in his time of duty would come round next night, he had apprised me, and he would be off an hour or two after sunrise, and on again soon after sunset. I had appointed to return accordingly. Next evening was a lovely evening, and I walked out early to enjoy it. The sun was not yet quite down when I traversed the field-path near the top of the deep cutting. I would extend my walk for an hour, I said to myself, half an hour on and half an hour back, and it would then be time to go to my signalman's box. Before pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically looked down, from the point from which I had first seen him. I cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the mouth of the tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm. The nameless horror that oppressed me, passed in a moment, for in a moment I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and that there was a little group of other men standing at a short distance, to whom he seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made. The Danger-light was not yet lighted. Against its shaft, a little low hut, entirely new to me, had been made of some wooden supports and tarpaulin. It looked no bigger than a bed. With an irresistible sense that something was wrong—with a flashing self-reproachful fear that fatal mischief had come of my leaving the man there, and causing no one to be sent to overlook or correct what he did—I descended the notched path with all the speed I could make. "What is the matter?" I asked the men. "Signalman killed this morning, sir." "Not the man belonging to that box?" "Yes, sir.""Not the man I know?" "You will recognise him, sir, if you knew him," said the man who spoke for the others, solemnly uncovering his own head and raising an end of the tarpaulin, " for his face is quite composed." "O! how did this happen, how did this happen?" I asked, turning from one to another as the hut closed in again. "He was cut down by an engine, sir. No man in England knew his work better. But somehow he was not clear of the outer rail. It was just at broad day. He had struck the light, and had the lamp in his hand. As the engine came out of the tunnel, his back was towards her, and she cut him down. That man drove her, and was showing how it happened. Show the gentleman, Tom." The man, who wore a rough dark dress, stepped back to his former place at the mouth of the tunnel: "Coming round the curve in the tunnel, sir," he said, "I saw him at the end, like as if I saw him down a perspective-glass. There was no time to cheek speed, and I knew him to be very careful. As he didn't seem to take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were running down upon him, and called to him as loud as I could call." "What did you say?" "I said, Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake clear the way!" I started. "All! it was a dreadful time, sir. I never left off calling to him. I put this arm before my eyes, not to see, and I waved this arm to the last; but it was no use." Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious circumstances more than on any other, I may, in closing it, point out the coincidence that the warning of the Engine-Driver included, not only the words which the unfortunate Signalman had repeated to me as haunting him, but also the words which I myself—not—he had attached, and that only in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mugby Junction (1866 Christmas Number) Description An account of the resource Published in All the Year Round, Vol. XVI, Extra Christmas Number, 10 December 1866, pp. 1-48. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xvi/page-573.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xvi/page-573.html</a>.* Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xvi/page-582.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xvi/page-582.html</a>. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xvi/page-589.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xvi/page-589.html</a>. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xvi/page-592.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-xvi/page-592.html</a>. *DJO is lacking pp. 41-42. Eventually, these pages will be added to the scan on Dickens Search. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1866-12-10 Type The nature or genre of the resource Christmas Number Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1866-12-10-Mugby_Junction Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles et. al. Mugby Junction (10 December 1866). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1866-12-10-Mugby_Junction" title="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1866-12-10-Mugby_Junction">https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1866-12-</a><a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1866-12-10-Mugby_Junction" title="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1866-12-10-Mugby_Junction">10-Mugby_Junction</a>. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <ul> <li>Charles Dickens. 'Barbox Brothers' (No.1), pp. 1-10.</li> <li>Charles Dickens. 'Barbox Brothers and Co.' (No.2), pp. 10-16.</li> <li>Charles Dickens. 'Main Line. The Boy at Mugby' (No.3), pp. 17-20.</li> <li>Charles Dickens, 'No. 1 Branch Line. The Signalman' (No.4), pp. 20-25.</li> <li>Andrew Halliday. 'No. 2 Branch Line. The Engine-Driver' (No.5), pp. 25-28.</li> <li>Charles Allston Collins. 'No. 3 Branch Line. The Compensation House' (No.6), pp. 28-35.</li> <li>Hesba Stretton. 'No. 4 Branch Line. The Travelling Post-Office' (No.7), pp. 35-42.</li> <li>Amelia B. Edwards. 'No. 5 Branch Line. The Engineer' (No.8), pp. 42-48.</li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Scanned material from Dickens Journals Online, <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk" id="LPNoLPOWALinkPreview" contenteditable="false" title="http://www.djo.org.uk">www.djo.org.uk</a>. Available under CC BY licence. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. "Guard! What place is this?" "Mugby Junction, sir." "A windy place!" "Yes, it mostly is, sir." "And looks comfortless indeed!" "Yes, it generally does, sir." "Is it a rainy night still?" "Pours, sir." "Open the door. I'll get out." "You'll have, sir," said the guard, glistening with drops of wet, and looking at the tearful face of his watch by the light of his lantern as the traveller descended, "three minutes here." "More, I think.— For I am not going on." "Thought you had a through ticket, sir?" "So I have, but I shall sacrifice the rest of it. I want my luggage." "Please to come to the van and point it out sir. Be good enough to look very sharp, sir. Not a moment to spare." The guard hurried to the luggage van, and the traveller hurried after him. The guard got into it, and the traveller looked into it. "Those two large black portmanteaus in the corner where your light shines. Those are mine." "Name upon 'em, sir?" "Barbox Brothers." "Stand clear, sir, if you please. One. Two Right!" Lamp waved. Signal lights ahead already changing. Shriek from engine. Train gone. "Mugby Junction!" said the traveller, pulling up the woollen muffler round his throat with both hands. "At past three o'clock of a tempestuous morning! So!" He spoke to himself. There was no one else to speak to. Perhaps, though there had been any one else to speak to, he would have preferred to speak to himself. Speaking to himself, he spoke to a man within five years of fifty either way, who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire; a man of pondering habit, brooding carriage of the head, and suppressed internal voice; a man with many indications on him of having been much alone. He stood unnoticed on the dreary platform, except by the rain and by the wind. Those two vigilant assailants made a rush at him. "Very well," said he, yielding. "It signifies nothing to me, to what quarter I turn my face." Thus, at Mugby Junction, at past three o'clock of a tempestuous morning, the traveller went where the weather drove him. Not but what he could make a stand when he was so minded, for, coming to the end of the roofed shelter (it is of considerable extent at Mugby Junction) and looking out upon the dark night, with a yet darker spirit-wing of storm beating its wild way through it, he faced about, and held his own as ruggedly in the difficult direction, as he had held it in the easier one. Thus, with a steady step, the traveller went up and down, up and down, up and down, seeking nothing, and finding it. A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the black hours of the four-and-twenty. Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves guiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful end. Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when they stop, backing when they back. Red hot embers showering out upon the ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths too: at least they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from from their lips. Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white, characters. An earthquake accompanied with thunder and lightning, going up express to London. Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsumrnoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had. never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of a solitary and unhappy existence. "—Yours, sir?" The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the chance appropriateness, of the question. "O! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those two portmanteaus are mine. Are you a Porter?" "On Porter's wages, sir. But I am Lamps." The traveller looked a little confused. "Who did you say you are?" "Lamps, sir," showing an oily cloth in his hand, as further explanation. "Surely, surely. Is there any hotel or tavern here?" "Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but—" Lamps, with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that plainly added—"but it's a blessed circumstance for you that it's not open." "You couldn't recommend it, I see, if it was available?" "Ask your pardon, sir. If it was—?" "Open?" "It ain't my place, as a paid servant of the company to give my opinion on any of the company's toepics," he pronounced it more like toothpicks, "beyond lamp-ile and cottons," returned Lamps, in a confidential tone; "but speaking as a man, I wouldn't recommend my father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he'd be treated at the Refreshment Room. Not speaking as a man, no, I would not." The traveller nodded conviction. "I suppose I can put up in the town? There is a town here?" For the traveller (though a-stay-at-home compared with most travellers) had been like many others, carried on the steam winds and the iron tides through that Junction before, without having ever, as one might gone ashore there. "O yes, there's a town, sir. Anyways there's town enough to put up in. But," following the glance of the other at his luggage, "this is a very dead time of the night with us, sir. The deadest, time. I might a'most call it our deadest and buriedest time." "No porters about?" "Well, sir, you see," returned Lamps, confidential again, "they in general goes off with the gas. That's how it is. And they seem to have overlooked you, through your walking to the furder end of the platform. But in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up." "Who may be up?" "The three forty-two, sir. She goes off in a sidin' till the Up X passes, and then she," here an air of hopeful vagueness pervaded Lamps, "doos all as lays in her power." "I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement." "I doubt if anybody do, sir. She's a Parliamentary, sir. And, you see, a Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun—" "Do you mean an Excursion?" "That's it, sir.— A Parliamentary or a Skirmishun, she mostly doos go off into a sidin'. But when she can get a chance, she's whistled out of it, and she's whistled up into doin' all as," Lamps again wore the air of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best, "all as lays in her power." He then explained that porters on duty being required to be in attendance on the Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtless turn up with the gas. In the mean time, if the gentleman would not very much object to the smell of lamp-oil, and would accept the warmth of his little room.— The gentleman being by this time very cold, instantly closed with the proposal. A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive to the sense of smell, of a cabin in a Whaler. But there was a bright fire burning in its rusty grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden stand of newly trimmed and lighted lamps, ready for carriage service. They made a bright show, and their light, and the warmth, accounted for the popularity of the room, as borne witness to by many impressions of velveteen trousers on a form by the fire, and many rounded smears and smudges of stooping velveteen shoulders on the adjacent wall. Various untidy shelves accommodated a quantity of lamps and oil-cans, and also a fragrant collection of what looked like the pocket-handkerchiefs of the whole lamp family. As Barbox Brothers (so to call the traveller on the warranty of his luggage) took his seat upon the form, and warmed his now ungloved hands at the fire, he glanced aside at a little deal desk, much blotched with ink, which his elbow touched. Upon it, were some scraps of coarse paper, and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances. From glancing at the scraps of paper, he turned involuntarily to his host, and said, with some roughness: "Why, you are never a poet, man!" Lamps had certainly not the conventional appearance of one, as he stood modestly rubbing his squab nose with a handkerchief so exceedingly oily, that he might have been in the act of mistaking himself for one of his charges. He was a spare man of about the Barbox Brothers time of life, with his features whimsically drawn upward as if they were attracted by the roots of his hair. He had a peculiarly shining transparent complexion, probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application; and his attractive hair, being cut short, and being grizzled, and standing straight up on end as if it in its turn were attracted by some invisible magnet above it, the top of his head was not very unlike a lamp-wick. "But to be sure it's no business of mine," said Barbox Brothers. "That was an impertinent observation on my part. Be what you like." "Some people, sir," remarked Lamps, in a tone of apology, "are sometimes what they don't like." "Nobody knows that better than I do," sighed the other. "I 'have been what I don't like, all my life." "When I first took, sir," resumed Lamps, "to composing little Comic-Songs-like—" Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour. "—To composing little Comic-Songs—like and what was more hard—to singing 'em afterwards," said Lamps, "it went against the grain at that time, it did indeed." Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps's eye, Barbox Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and put a foot on the top bar. "Why did you do it, then?" he asked, after a short pause; abruptly enough but in a softer tone. "If you didn't want to do it, why did you do it? Where did you sing them? Public-house?" To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: "Bedside." At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes. "She's got up!" Lamps announced, excited. "What lays in her power is sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it's laid in her power to get up to-night, by George!" The legend "Barbox Brothers" in large white letters on two black surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement half an hour, what time the porter's knocks at the Inn Door knocked up the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made. II. "You remember me, Young Jackson?" "What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called a birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!" "What am I like, Young Jackson?" "You are like a blight all through the year, to me. You hard-lined, thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on. You are like the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for you make me abhor them." "You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In another voice from another quarter. "Most gratefully, sir. You were the ray of hope and prospering ambition in my life. When I attended your course, I believed that I should come to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy—even though I was still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day. As I had done every, every, every, day, through my school-time and from my earliest recollection." "What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?" "You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to reveal herself to me. I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in them." "You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In a grating voice from quite another quarter. "Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox Brothers. (When they were, if they ever were, is unknown to me; there was nothing of them but the name when I bent to the oar.) You told me what I was to do, and what to be paid; you told me, afterwards, at intervals of years, when I was to sign for the Firm, when I became a partner, when I became the Firm. I know no more of it, or of myself." "What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?" "You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and cold enough so to have brought up an unacknowledged son. I see your scanty figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but you, too, wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a chance remove it—it never by a chance falls off—and I know no more of you." Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his window in the morning, as he had spoken to himself at the Junction overnight. And as he had then looked in the darkness, a man who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire: so he now looked in the sunlight, an ashier grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out. The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of the Public Notary and bill-broking tree. It had gained for itself a griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation had stuck to it and to him. As he had imperceptibly come into possession of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard-street, on whose grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so ho had insensibly found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was never to be taken without his attested bond whom all dealers with openly set up guards and wards against. This character had come upon him through no act of his own. It was as if the original Barbox had stretched himself down upon the office-floor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him. The discovery—aided in its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the deceit of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be married together—the discovery, so followed up, completed what his earliest rearing had begun. He shrank, abashed, within the form of Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart no more. But he did at last effect one great release in his condition. He broke the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley. He prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventional business from him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it. With enough to live on (though after all with not too much), he obliterated the firm of Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-office Directory and the face of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus. "For one must have some name in going about, for people to pick up," he explained to Mugby High-street, through the Inn-window, "and that name at least was real once. Whereas, Young Jackson! Not to mention its being a sadly satirical misnomer for Old Jackson." He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing along on the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day's dinner in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicion of gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace. "There's Lamps!" said Barbox Brothers. "And by-the-by—" Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs. "Bedside?" said Barbox Brothers, testily. "Sings them at the bedside? Why at the bedside, unless he goes to bed drunk? Does, I shouldn't wonder. But it's no business of mine. Let me see. Mugby Junction, Mugby Junction. Where shall I go next? As it came into my head lust night when I woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, I can go anywhere from here. Where shall I go? I'll go and look at the Junction by daylight. There's no hurry, and I may like the look of one Line better than another." But there were so many Lines. Gazing down upon them from a bridge at the Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formed a great Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground-spiders that spun iron. And then so many of the Lines went such wonderful ways, so crossing and curving among one another, that the eye lost them. And then some of them appeared to start with the fixed intention of going five hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificant barrier, or turned off into a workshop. And then others, like intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly slued round and came back again. And then others were so chock-full of trucks of coal, others were so blocked with trucks of casks, others were so gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled objects like immense iron cotton-reels: while others were so bright and clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (looking much like their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle, or end, to the bewilderment. Barbox Brothers stood puzzled on the bridge, passing his right hand across the lines on his forehead, which multiplied while he looked down, as if the railway Lines were getting themselves photographed on that sensitive plate. Then, was heard a distant ringing of bells and blowing of whistles. Then, puppet-looking heads of men popped out of boxes in perspective, aud popped in again. Then, prodigious wooden razors set up on end, began shaving the atmosphere. Then, several locomotive engines in several directions began to scream and be agitated. Then, along one avenue a train came in. Then, along another two trains appeared that didn't come in, but stopped without. Then, bits of trains broke off. Then, a struggling horse became involved with them. Then, the locomotives shared the bits of trains, and ran away with the whole. "I have not made my next move much clearer by this. No hurry. No need to make up my mind to-day, or to-morrow, nor yet the day after. I'll take a walk." It fell out somehow (perhaps he meant it should) that the walk tended to the platform at which he had alighted, and to Lamps's room. But Lamps was not in his room. A pair of velveteen shoulders were adapting themselves to one of the impressions on the wall by Lamps's fireplace, but otherwise the room was void. In passing back to get out of the station again, he learnt the cause of this vacancy, by catching sight of Lamps on the opposite line of railway, skipping along the top of a train, from carriage to carriage, and catching lighted namesakes thrown up to him by a coadjutor. "He is busy. He has not much time for composing or singing Comic Songs this moming, I take it." The direction he pursued now, was into the country, keeping very near to the side of one great Line ot railway, and within easy view of others. "I have half a mind," he said, glancing around, "to settle the question from this point, by saying, 'I'll take this set of rails, or that, or t'other, and stick to it. They separate themselves from the confusion, out here, and go their ways." Ascending a gentle hill of some extent, he came to a few cottages. There, looking about him as a very reserved man might who had never looked about him in his life before, he saw some six or eight young children come merrily trooping and whooping from one of the cottages, and disperse. But not until they had all turned at the little garden gate, and kissed their hands to a face at the upper window: a low window enough, although the upper, for the cottage had but a story of one room above the ground. Now, that the children should do this was nothing; but that they should do this to a face lying on the sill of the open window, turned towards them in a horizontal position, and apparently only a face, was something noticeable. He looked up at the window again. Could only see a very fragile though a very bright face, lying on one cheek on the window-sill. The delicate smiling face of a girl or woman. Framed in long bright brown hair, round which was tied a light blue band or fillet, passing under the chin. He walked on, turned back, passed the window again, shyly glanced up again. No change. He struck off by a winding branch-road at the top of the hill—which he must otherwise have descended—kept the cottages in view, worked his way round at a distance so as to come out once more into the main road and be obliged to pass the cottages again. The face still lay on the window-sill, but not so much inclined towards him. And now there were a pair of delicate hands too. They had the action of performing on some musical instrument, and yet it produced no sound that reached his ears. "Mugby Junction must be the maddest place in England," said Barbox Brothers, pursuing his way down the hill. "The first thing I find here is a Railway Porter who composes comic songs to sing at his bedside. The second thing I find here is a face, and a pair of hands playing a musical instrument that don't play!" The day was a fine bright day in the early beginning of November, the air was clear and inspiriting, and the landscape was rich in beautiful colours. The prevailing colours in the court off Lombard-street, London city, had been few and sombre. Sometimes, when the weather elsewhere was very bright indeed, the dwellers in those tents enjoyed a pepper-and-salt-coloured day or two, but their atmosphere's usual wear was slate, or snuff colour. He relished his walk so well, that he repeated it next day. He was a little earlier at the cottage than on the day before, and he could hear the children up-stairs singing to a regular measure and clapping out the time with their hands. "Still, there is no sound of any musical instrument," he said, listening at the corner, "and yet I saw the performing hands again, as I came by. What are the children singing? Why, good Lord, they can never be singing the multiplication-table!" They were though, and with infinite enjoyment. The mysterious face had a voice attached to it which occasionally led or set the children right. Its musical cheerfulness was delightful. The measure at length stopped, and was succeeded by a murmuring of young voices, and then by a short song which he made out to be about the current month of the year, and about what work it yielded to the labourers in the fields and farm-yards. Then, there was a stir of little feet, and the children came trooping and whooping out, as on the previous day. And again, as on the previous day, they all turned at the garden gate, and kissed their hands— evidently to the face on the window-sill, though Barbox Brothers from his retired post of disadvantage at the corner could not see it. But as the children dispersed, he cut off one small straggler a brown-faced boy with flaxen hair and said to him: "Come here, little one. Tell me whose house is that?" The child, with one swarthy arm held up across his eyes, half in shyness, and half ready for defence, said from behind the inside of his elbow: '"Phoebe's." "And who," said Barbox Brothers, quite as much embarrassed by his part in the dialogue as the child could possibly be by his, "is Phoebe?" To which the child made answer: "Why, Phoebe, of course." The small but sharp observer had eyed his questioner closely, and had taken, his moral measure. He lowered his guard, and rather assumed a tone with him: as having discovered him to be an unaccustomed person in the art of polite conversation. "Phoebe," said the child, "can't be anybobby else but Phoebe. Can she?" "No, I suppose not." "Well," returned the child, "then why did you ask me?" Deeming it prudent to shift his ground, Barbox Brothers took up a new position. "What do you do there? Up there in that room where the open window is. What do you do there?" "Cool," said the child. "Eh?" "Co-o-ol," the child repeated in a louder voice, lengthening out the word with a fixed look and great emphasis, as much as to say: "What's the use of your having grown up, if you're such a donkey as not to understand me?" "Ah! School, school," said Barbox Brothers. "Yes, yes, yes. And Phoebe teaches you?" The child nodded. "Good boy." "Tound it out, have you?" said the child. "Yes, I have found it out. What would you do with twopence, if I gave it you?" "Pend it." The knock-down promptitude of this reply leaving him not a leg to stand upon, Barbox Brothers produced the twopence with great lameness, and withdrew in a state of humiliation. But, seeing the face on the window-sill as he passed the cottage, he acknowledged its presence there with a gesture, which was not a nod, not a bow, not a removal of his hat from his head, but was a diffident compromise between or struggle with all three. The eyes in the face seemed amused, or cheered, or both, and the lips modestly said: "Good day to you, sir." "I find I must stick for a time to Mugby Junction," said Barbox Brothers, with much gravity, after once more stopping on his return road to look at the Lines where they went their several ways so quietly. "I can't make up my mind yet, which iron road to take. In fact, I must get a little accustomed to the Junction before I can decide." So, he announced at the Inn that he was "going to stay on, for the present," and improved his acquaintance with the Junction that night, and again next morning, and again next night and morning: going down to the station, mingling with the people there, looking about him down all the avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interest in the incomings and outgoings of the trains. At first, he often put his head into Lamps's little room, but he never found Lamps there. A pair or two of velveteen shoulders he usually found there, stooping over the fire, sometimes in connexion with a clasped knife and a piece of bread and meat; but the answer to his inquiry, "Where's Lamps?" was, either that he was "t'other side the line," or, that it was his off-time, or (in the latter case), his own personal introduction to another Lamps who was not his Lamps. However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now, but he bore the disappointment. Nor did he so wholly devote himself to his severe application to the study of Mugby Junction, as to neglect exercise. On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and always the same walk. But the weather turned cold and wet again, and the window was never open. iii At length, after a lapse of some days, there came another streak of fine bright hardy autumn weather. It was a Saturday. The window was open, and the children were gone. Not surprising, this, for he had patiently watched and waited at the corner, until they were gone. "Good day," he said to the face; absolutely getting his hat clear off his head this time. "Good day to you, sir." "I am glad you have a fine sky again, to look at." "Thank you, sir. It is kind of you." "You are an invalid, I fear?" "No, sir. I have very good health." "But are you not always lying down?" "O yes, I am always lying down, because I cannot sit up. But I am not an invalid." The laughing eyes seemed highly to enjoy his great mistake. "Would you mind taking the trouble to come in, sir? There is a beautiful view from this window. And you would see that I am not at all ill—being so good as to care." It was said to help him, as he stood irresolute, but evidently desiring to enter, with his diffident hand on the latch of the garden gate. It did help him, and he went in. The room up-stairs was a very clean white room with a low roof. Its only inmate lay on a couch that brought her face to a level with the window. The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapper being light blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereal look, and a fanciful appearance of lying among clouds. He felt that she instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturn man; it was another help to him to have established that understanding so easily, and got it over. There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch. "I see now," he began, not at all fluently, "how you occupy your hands. Only seeing you from the path outside, I thought you were playing upon something." She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace. A lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of her hands upon it as she worked, had given them the action he had misinterpreted. "That is curious," she answered, with a bright smile. "For I often fancy, myself, that I play tunes while I am at work." "Have you any musical knowledge?" She shook her head. "I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be made as handy to me as my lace-pillow. But I dare say I deceive myself. At all events, I shall never know." "You have a musical voice. Excuse me; I have heard you sing." "With the children?" she answered, slightly colouring. "O yes. I sing with the dear children, if it can be called singing." Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned in new systems of teaching them? "Very fond of them," she said, shaking her head again; "but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons, has led you so far astray as to think me a grand teacher? Ah! I thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. You don't need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir," she added, with a glance at the small forms and round the room. All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow. As they still continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes, was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an impertinence. He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his towards the prospect, saying: "Beautiful indeed!" "Most beautiful, sir. I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head. But what a foolish fancy that would be to encourage! It cannot look more lovely to any one than it does to me." Her eyes were turned to it as she spoke, with most delighted admiration and enjoyment. There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation. "And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke and steam changing places so fast, make it so lively for me," she went on. "I think of the number of people who can go where they wish, on their business, or their pleasure; I remember that the puffs make signs to me that they are actually going while I look; and that enlivens the prospect with abundance of company, if I want company. There is the great Junction, too. I don't see it under the foot of the hill, but I can very often hear it, and I always know it is there. It seems to join me, in a way, to I don't know how many places and things that I shall never see." With an abashed kind of idea that it might have already joined himself to something he had never seen, he said constrainedly: "Just so." "And so you see, sir," pursued Phoebe, "I am not the invalid you thought me, and I am very well off indeed." "You have a happy disposition," said Barbox Brothers: perhaps with a slight excusatory touch for his own disposition. "Ah! But you should know my father," she replied. "His is the happy disposition!—Don't mind, sir!" For his reserve took the alarm at a step upon the stairs, and he distrusted that he would be set down for a troublesome intruder. "This is my father coming." The door opened, and the father paused there. "Why, Lamps!" exclaimed Barbox Brothers, starting from his chair. "How do you do, Lamps?" To which, Lamps responded: "The gentleman for Nowhere! How do you DO, sir?" And they shook hands, to the greatest admiration and surprise of Lamps's daughter. "I have looked you up, half a dozen times since that night," said Barbox Brothers, but have never found you." "So I've heerd on, sir, so I've heerd on," returned Lamps. "It's your being noticed so often down at the Junction, without taking any train, that has begun to get you the name among us of the gentleman for Nowhere. No offence in my having called you by it when took by surprise, I hope, sir?" "None at all. It's as good a name for me as any other you could call me by. But may I ask you a question in the corner here?" Lamps suffered himself to be led aside from his daughter's couch, by one of the buttons of his velveteen jacket. "Is this the bedside where you sing your songs?" Lamps nodded. The gentleman for Nowhere clapped him on the shoulder, and they faced about again. "Upon my word, my dear," said Lamps then to his daughter, looking from her to her visitor, "it is such an amaze to me, to find you brought acquainted with this gentleman, that I must (if this gentleman will excuse me) take a rounder." Mr. Lamps demonstrated in action what this meant, by pulling out his oily handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, and giving himself an elaborate smear, from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the other cheek to behind his left ear. After this operation, he shone exceedingly. "It's according to my custom when par-ticular warmed up by any agitation, sir," he offered by way of apology. "And really, I am throwed into that state of amaze by finding you brought acquainted with Phoebe, that I—that I think I will, if you'll excuse me, take another rounder." Which he did, seeming to be greatly restored by it. They were now both standing by the side of her couch, and she was working at her lace-pillow. "Your daughter tells me," said Barbox Brothers, still in a half reluctant shamefaced way, "that she never sits up." "No, sir, nor never has done. You see, her mother (who died when she was a year and two months old) was subject to very bad fits, and as she had never mentioned to me that she was subject to fits, they couldn't be guarded against. Consequently, she dropped the baby when took, and thishappened." "It was very wrong of her," said Barbox Brothers, with a knitted brow, "to marry you, making a secret of her infirmity." "Well, sir," pleaded Lamps, in behalf of the long-deceased. "You see, Phoebe and me, we have talked that over too. And Lord bless us! Such a number on us has our infirmities, what with fits, and what with misfits, of one sort and another, that if we confessed to 'em all before we got married, most of us might never get married." "Might not that be for the better?" "Not in this case, sir," said Phoebe, giving her hand to her father. "No, not in this case, sir," said her father, patting it between his own. "You correct me" returned Barbox Brothers, with a blush; "and I must look so like a Brute, that at all events it would be superfluous in me to confess to that infirmity. I wish you would tell me a little more about yourselves. I hardly know how to ask it of you, for I am conscious that I have a bad stiff manner, a dull discouraging way with me, but I wish you would." "With all our hearts, sir," returned Lamps, gaily, for both. "And first of all, that you may know my name—" "Stay!" interposed the visitor, with a slight flush. "What signifies your name! Lamps is name enough for me. I like it. It is bright and expressive. What do I want more!" "Why to be sure, sir," returned Lamps. "I have in general no other name down at the Junction; but I thought, on account of your being here as a first-class single, in a private character, that you might—" The visitor waved the thought away with his hand, and Lamps acknowledged the mark of confidence by taking another rounder. "You are hard-worked, I take for granted?" said Barbox Brothers, when the subject of the rounder came out of it much dirtier than he went into it. Lamps was beginning, " Not particular so"— when his daughter took him up. "O yes, sir, he is very hard-worked. Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, hours a day. Sometimes twenty-four hours at a time." "And you," said Barbox Brothers, "what with your school, Phoebe, and what with your lace-making—" "But my school is a pleasure to me," she interrupted, opening her brown eyes wider, as if surprised to find him so obtuse. "I began it when I was but a child, because it brought me and other children into company, don't you see? That was not work. I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. That is not work. I do it as love, not as work. Then my lace-pillow;" her busy hands had stopped, as if her argument required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at the name; " it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my tunes when I hum any, and that's not work. Why, you yourself thought it was music, you know, sir. And so it is, to me." "Everything is!" cried Lamps, radiantly. "Everything is music to her, sir." "My father is, at any rate," said Phoebe, exultingly pointing her thin forefinger at him. "There is more music in my father than there is in a brass band." "I say! My dear! It's very fillyillially done, you know; but you are flattering your father," he protested, sparkling. "No I am not, sir, I assure you. No I am not. If you could hear my father sing, you would know I am not. But you never will hear him sing, because he never sings to any one but me. However tired he is, he always sings to me when he comes home. When I lay here long ago, quite a poor little broken doll, he used to sing to me. More than that, he used to make songs, bringing in whatever little jokes we had between us. More than that, he often does so to this day. O! I'll tell of you, father, as the gentleman has asked about you. He is a poet, sir." "I shouldn't wish the gentleman, my dear," observed Lamps, for the moment turning grave, "to carry away that opinion of your father, because it might look as if I was given to asking the stars in a molloncolly manner what they was up to. Which I wouldn't at once waste the time, and take the liberty, my dear." "My father," resumed Phoebe, amending her text, "is always on the bright side, and the good side. You told me just now, I had a happy disposition. How can I help it?" "Well; but my dear," returned Lamps argumentatively, " how can I help it,? Put it to yourself, sir. Look at her. Always as you see her now. Always working—and after all, sir, for but a very few shillings a week—always contented, always lively, always interested in others, of all sorts. I said, this moment, she was always as you see her now. So she is, with a difference that comes to much the same. For, when it's my Sunday off and the morning bells have done ringing, I hear the prayers and thanks read in the touchingest way, and I have the hymns sung to me so soft, sir, that you couldn't hear 'em out of this room—in notes that seem to me, I am sure, to come from Heaven and go back to it." It might have been merely through the association of these words with their sacredly quiet time, or it might have been through the larger association of the words with the Redeemer's presence beside the bedridden; but here her dexterous fingers came to a stop on the lace-pillow, and clasped themselves around his neck as he bent down. There was great natural sensibility in both father and daughter, the visitor could easily see; but each made it, for the other's sake, retiring, not demonstrative; and perfect cheerfulness, intuitive or acquired, was either the first or second nature of both. In a very few moments, Lamps was taking another rounder with his comical features beaming, while Phoebe's laughing eyes (just a glistening speck or so upon their lashes) were again directed by turns to him, and to her work, and to Barbox Brothers. "When my father, sir," she said brightly, "tells you about my being interested in other people even though they know nothing about me—which, by-the-by, I told you myself—you ought to know how that comes about. That's my father's doing." "No, it isn't!" he protested. "Don't you believe him, sir; yes, it is. He tells me of everything he sees down at his work. You would be surprised what a quantity he gels together for me, every day. He looks into the carriages, and tells me how the ladies are drest—so that I know all the fashions! He looks into the carriages, and tells me what pairs of lovers he sees, and what new-married couples on their wedding trip—so that I know all about that! He collects chance newspapers and books—so that I have plenty to read! He tells me. about the sick people who are travelling to try to get better—so that I know all about them! In short, as I began by saying, he tells me everything he sees and makes out, down at his work, and you can't think what a quantity he does see and make out." "As to collecting newspapers and books, my dear," said Lamps, " it's clear I can have no merit in that, because they're not my perquisites. You see, sir, it's this way: A Guard, he'll say to me, 'Hallo, here you are, Lamps. I've saved this paper for your daughter. How is she agoing on?' A Head-Porter, he'll say to me, 'Here! Catch hold, Lamps. Here's a couple of wollumes for your daughter. Is she pretty much where she were?' And that's what makes it double welcome, you see. If she had a thousand pound in a box, they wouldn't trouble themselves about her; but being what she is—that is, you understand," Lamps added, somewhat hurriedly, "not having a thousand pound in a box—they take thought for her. And as concerning the young pairs, married and unmarried, it's only natural I should bring home what little I can about them, seeing that there's not a Couple of either sort in the neighbourhood that don't come of their own accord to confide in Phoebe." She raised her eyes triumphantly to Barbox Brothers, as she said: "Indeed, sir, that is true. If I could have got up and gone to church, I don't know how often I should have been a bridesmaid. But if I could have done that, some girls in love might have been jealous of me, and as it is, no girl is jealous of me. And my pillow would not have been half as ready to put the piece of cake under, as I always find it," she added, turning her face on it with a light sigh, and a smile at her father. The arrival of a little girl, the biggest of the scholars, now led to an understanding on the part of Barbox Brothers, that she was the domestic of the cottage, and had come to take active measures in it, attended by a pail that might have extinguished her, and a broom three times her height. He therefore rose to take his leave, and took it; saying that if Phoebe had no objection, he would come again. He had muttered that he would come "in the. course of his walks." The course of his walks must have been highly favourable to his return, for he returned after an interval of a single day. "You thought you would never see me any more, I suppose?" he said to Phoebe as he touched her hand, and sat down by her couch. "Why should I think so!" was her surprised rejoinder. "I took it for granted you would mistrust me." "For granted, sir? Have you been so much mistrusted?" "I think I am justified in answering yes. But I may have mistrusted too, on my part. No matter just now. We were speaking of the Junction last time. I have passed hours there since the day before yesterday." "Are you now the gentleman for Somewhere?" she asked with a smile. "Certainly for Somewhere; but I don't yet know Where. You would never guess what I am travelling from. Shall I tell you? I am travelling from my birthday." Her hands stopped in her work, and she looked at him with incredulous astonishment. "Yes," said Barbox Brothers, not quite easy in his chair, "from my birthday. I am, to myself, an unintelligible book with the earlier chapters all torn out, and thrown away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?" His eyes meeting hers as they were addressed intently to him, something seemed to stir within his breast, whispering: "Was this bed a place for the graces of childhood and the charms of youth to take to, kindly? O shame, shame!" "It is a disease with me," said Barbox Brothers, checking himself, and making as though he had a difficulty in swallowing something, "to go wrong about that. I don't know how I came to speak of that. I hope it is because of an old misplaced confidence in one of your sex involving an old bitter treachery. I don't know. I am all wrong together." Her hands quietly and slowly resumed their work. Glancing at her, he saw that her eyes were thoughtfully following them. "I am travelling from my birthday," he resumed, "because it has always been a dreary day to me. My first free birthday coming round some five or six weeks hence, I am travelling to put its predecessors far behind me, and to try to crush the day—or, at all events, put it out of my sigh—by heaping new objects on it." As he paused, she looked at him; but only shook her head as being quite at a loss. "This is unintelligible to your happy disposition," he pursued, abiding by his former phrase as if there were some lingering virtue of self-defence in it: "I knew it would be, and am glad it is. However, on this travel of mine (in which I mean to pass the rest of my days, having abandoned all thought of a fixed home), I stopped, as you heard from your father, at the Junction here. The extent of its ramifications quite confused me as to whither I should go, from here. I have not yet settled, being still perplexed among so many roads. What do you think I mean to do? How many of the branching roads can you see from your window?" Looking out, full of interest, she answered, "Seven." "Seven," said Barbox Brothers, watching her with a grave smile. "Well! I propose to myself, at once to reduce the gross number to those very seven, and gradually to fine them down to one—the most. promising for me—and to take that," "But how will you know, sir, which is the most promising?" she asked, with her brightened eyes roving over the view. "Ah!" said Barbox Brothers, with another grave smile, and considerably improving in his ease of speech. "To be sure. In this way. Where your father can pick up so much every clay for a good purpose,I may once and again pick up a little for an indifferent purpose. The gentleman for Nowhere must become still better known at the Junction. He shall continue to explore it, until he attaches something that he has seen, heard, or found out, at the head of each of the seven roads, to the road itself. And so his choice of a road shall be determined by his choice among his discoveries." Her hands still busy, she again glanced at the prospect, as if it comprehended something that had not been in it before, and laughed as if it yielded her new pleasure. "But I must not forget," said Barbox Brothers, "(having got so far) to ask a favour. I want your help in this expedient of mine. I want to bring you what I pick up at the heads of the seven roads that you lie here looking out at, and to compare notes with you about it. May I? They say two heads are better than one. I should say myself that probably depends upon the heads concerned. But I am quite sure, though we are so newly acquainted, that your head and your father's have found out better things, Phoebe, than ever mine of itself discovered." She gave him her sympathetic right hand, in perfect rapture with his proposal, and eagerly and gratefully thanked him. "That's well!" said Barbox Brothers. "Again I must not forget (having got so far) to ask a favour. Will you shut your eyes?" Laughing playfully at the strange nature of the request, she did so. "Keep them shut," said Barbox Brothers, going softly to the door, and coming back. "You are on your honour, mind, not to open your eyes until I tell you that you may?" "Yes! On my honour." "Good. May I take your lace-pillow from you for a minute?" Still laughing and wondering, she removed her hands trom it, and he put it aside. "Tell me. Did you see the puffs of smoke and steam made by the morning fast-train yesterday on road number seven from here?" "Behind the elm-trees and the spire?" "That's the road," said Barbox Brothers, directing his eyes towards it. "Yes. I watched them melt away." "Anything unusual in what they expressed?" "No!" she answered, merrily. "Not complimentary to me, for I was in that train. I went—don't open your eyes—to fetch you this, from the great ingenious town. It is not half so large as your lace-pillow, and lies easily and lightly in its place. These little keys are like the keys of a miniature piano, and you supply the air required with your left hand. May you pick out delightful music from it, my dear! For the present you—can open your eyes now—good-bye!" In his embarrassed way, he closed the door upon himself, and only saw, in doing so, that she ecstatically took the present to her her bosom and caressed it. The glimpse, gladdened his heart, and yet saddened it; for so might, she, if her youth had flourished in its natural course, have taken to her breast that day the slumbering music of her own child's voice. With good will and earnest purpose, the gentleman for Nowhere began, on the very next day, his researches at the heads of the seven roads. The results of his researches, as he and Phoebe afterwards set them down in fair writing, hold their due places in this veracious chronicle, from its seventeenth page, onward. But they occupied a much longer time in the getting together than they ever will in the perusal. And this is probably the case with most reading matter, except when it is of that highly beneficial kind (for Posterity) which is "thrown off in a few moments of leisure" by the superior poetic geniuses who scorn to take prose pains. It must be admitted, however, that Barbox by no means hurried himself. His heart being in his work of good-nature, he revelled in it. There was the joy, too (it was a true joy to him), of sometimes sitting by, listening to Phoebe as she picked out more and more discourse from her musical instrument, and as her natural taste and ear refined daily upon her first discoveries. Besides being a pleasure, this was an occupation, and in the course of weeks it consumed hours. It resulted that his dreaded birthday was close upon him before he had troubled himself any more about it. The matter was made more pressing by the unforeseen circumstance that the councils held (at which Mr. Lamps, beaming most brilliantly, on a few rare occasions assisted) respecting the road to be selected, were, after all, in no wise assisted by his investigations. For, he had connected this interest with this road, or that interest with the other, but could deduce no reason from, it for giving any road the preference. Consequently, when the last council was holden, that part of the business stood, in the end, exactly where it had stood in the beginning. "But, sir," remarked Phoebe, "we have only six roads after all. Is the seventh road dumb?" "The seventh road? O!" said Barbox Brothers, rubbing his chin. "That is the road I took, you know, when I went to get your little present. That is its story, Phoebe.'' "Would you mind taking that road again, sir?" she asked with hesitation. "Not in the least; it is a great high road after all." "I should like you to take it," returned Phoebe, with a persuasive smile, "for the love of that little present which must ever be so dear to me. I should like you to take it, because that road can never. be again, like any other road to me. I should like you to take it, in remembrance of your having done me so much good: of your having made me so much happier! If you leave me by the road you travelled when you went to do me this great kindness," sounding a faint chord as she spoke, "I shall feel, lying here watching at my window, as if it must conduct you to a prosperous end, and bring you back some day." "It shall be done, my dear; it shall be done." So at last the gentleman for Nowhere took a ticket for Somewhere, and his destination was the great ingenious town. He had loitered so long about the Junction that it was the eighteenth of December when he left it. "High time," he reflected, as he seated himself in the train, "that I started in earnest! Only one clear day remains between me and the day I am running away from. I'll push onward for the hill-country to-morrow. I'll go to Wales." It was with some pains that he placed before himself the undeniable advantages to be gained in the way of novel occupation for his senses from misty mountains, swollen streams, rain, cold, a wild seashore, and rugged roads. And yet he scarcely made them out as distinctly as he could have wished. Whether the poor girl, in spite of her new resource, her music, would have any feeling of loneliness upon her now—just at first—that she had not had before; whether she saw those very puffs of steam and smoke that he saw, as he sat in the train thinking of her; whether her face would have any pensive shadow on it as they died out of the distant view from her window; whether, in telling him he had done her so much good, she had not unconsciously corrected his old moody bemoaning of his station in life, by setting him thinking that a man might be a great healer, if he would, and yet not be a great doctor; these and other similar meditations got between him and his Welsh picture. There was within him, too, that dull sense of vacuity which follows separation from an object of interest, and cessation of a pleasant pursuit; and this sense, being quite new to him, made him restless. Further, in losing Mugby Junction he had found himself again; and he was not the more enamoured of himself for having lately passed his time in better company. But surely, here not far ahead, must be the great ingenious town. This crashing and clashing that the train was undergoing, and this coupling on to it of a multitude of new echoes, could mean nothing less than approach to the great station. It did mean nothing less. After some stormy flashes of town lightning, in the way of swift revelations of red-brick blocks of houses, high red-brick chimney-shafts, vistas of red-brick railway arches, tongues of fire, blots of smoke, valleys of canal, and hills of coal, there came the thundering in at the journey's end. Having seen his portmanteaus safely housed in the hotel he chose, and having appointed his dinner-hour, Barbox Brothers went out for a walk in the busy streets. And now it began to be suspected by him that Mugby Junction was a Junction of many branches, invisible as well as visible, and had joined him to an endless number of byways. For, whereas he would, but a little while ago, have walked these streets blindly brooding, he now had eyes and thoughts for a new external world. How the many toiling people lived, and loved, and died; how wonderful it was to consider the various trainings of eye and hand, the nice distinctions of sight and touch, that separated them into classes of workers, and even into classes of workers at subdivisions of one complete whole which combined their many intelligences and forces, though of itself but some cheap object of use or ornament in common life; how good it was to know that such assembling in a multitude on their part, and such contribution of their several dexterities towards a civilising end, did not deteriorate them as it was the fashion of the supercilious Mayflies of humanity to pretend, but engendered among them a self-respect and yet a modest desire to be much wiser than they were (the first, evinced in their well-balanced bearing and manner of speech when he stopped to ask a question; the second, in the announcements of their popular studies and amusements on the public walls); these considerations, and a host of such, made his walk a memorable one." I too am but a little part of a great whole," he began to think; "and to be serviceable to myself and others, or to be happy, I must cast my interest into, and draw it out of, the common stock." Although he had arrived at his journey's end for the day by noon, he had since insensibly walked about the town so far and so long that the lamplighters were now at their work in the streets, and the shops were sparkling up brilliantly. Thus reminded to turn towards his quarters, he was in the act of doing so, when a very little hand crept into his, and a very little voice said: "O! If you please, I am lost!" He looked down, and saw a very little fair-haired girl. "Yes," she said, confirming her words with a serious nod. "I am indeed. I am lost." Greatly perplexed, he stopped, looked about him for help, descried none, and said, bending low: "Where do you, live, my child?" "I don't know where I live," she returned. "I am lost." "What is your name?" "Polly." "What is your other name?" The reply was prompt, but unintelligible. Imitating the sound, as he caught it, he hazarded the guess, "Trivits?" "O no!" said the child, shaking her head. "Nothing like that." "Say it again, little one." An unpromising business. For this time it had quite a different sound. He made the venture: "Paddens?" "O no!" said the child. " Nothing like that," "Once more. Let us try it again, dear." A most hopeless business. This time it swelled into four syllables. "It can't be Tappitarver?" said Barbox Brothers, rubbing his head with his hat in discomfiture. "No! It ain't," the child quietly assented. On her trying this unfortunate name once more, with extraordinary efforts at distinctness, it swelled into eight syllables at least. "Ah! I think," said Barbox Brothers, with a desperate air of resignation, "that we had better give it up." "But I am lost," said the child, nestling her little hand more closely in his, " and you'll take care of me, won't you?" If ever a man were disconcerted by division between compassion on the one hand, and the very imbecility of irresolution on the other, here the man was. "Lost!" he repeated, looking down at the child. "I am sure I am. What is to be done!" "Where do you live?" asked the child, looking up at him, wistfully. "Over there," he answered, pointing vaguely in the direction of his hotel. "Hadn't we better go there?" said the child. "Really," he replied, "I don't know but what we had." So they set off, hand in hand. He, through comparison of himself against his little companion, with a clumsy feeling on him as if he had just developed into a foolish giant. She, clearly elevated in her own tiny opinion by having got him so neatly out of his embarrassment. "We are going to have dinner when we get there, I suppose?" said Polly. "Well," he rejoined, " I—yes, I suppose we are." "Do you like your dinner?" asked the child. "Why, on the whole," said Barbox Brothers, "yes, I think I do." "I do mine," said Polly. " Have you any brothers and sisters?" "No. Have you?" "Mine are dead." "O!" said Barbox Brothers. With that absurd sense of unwieldiness of mind and body weighing him down, he would have not known how to pursue the conversation beyond this curt rejoinder, but that the child was always ready for him. "What," she asked, turning her soft hand coaxingly in his, "are you going to do to amuse me, after dinner?" "Upon my soul, Polly," exclaimed Barbox Brothers, very much at a loss, "I have not the slightest idea!" "Then I tell you what," said Polly. "Have you got any cards at your house?" "Plenty," said Barbox Brothers, in a boastful vein. "Very well. Then I'll build houses, and you shall look at me. You mustn't blow, you know." "O no!" said Barbox Brothers. "No, no, no. No blowing. Blowing's not fair." He flattered himself that he had said this pretty well for an idiotic monster; but the child, instantly perceiving the awkwardness of his attempt to adapt himself to her level, utterly destroyed his hopeful opinion of himself by saying, compassionately: "What a funny man you are!" Feeling, after this melancholy failure, as if he every minute grew bigger and heavier in person, and weaker in mind, Barbox gave himself up for a bad job. No giant ever submitted more meekly to be led in triumph by all-conquering Jack, than he to be bound in slavery to Polly. "Do you know any stories?" she asked him. He was reduced to the humiliating confession: "No." "What a dunce you must be, mustn't you?" said Polly. He was reduced to the humiliating confession: "Yes." "Would you like me to teach you a story? But you must remember it, you know, and be able to tell it right to somebody else afterwards?" He professed that it would afford him the highest mental gratification to be taught a story, and that he would humbly endeavour to retain it in his mind. Whereupon Polly, giving her hand a new little turn in his, expressive of settling down for enjoyment, commenced a long romance, of which every relishing clause began with the words: "So this" or "And so this." As, "So this boy;" or, "So this fairy;" or, "And so this pie was four yards round, and two yards and a quarter deep." The interest of the romance was derived from the intervention of this fairy to punish this boy for having a greedy appetite. To achieve which purpose, this fairy made this pie, and this boy ate and ate and ate, and his cheeks swelled and swelled and swelled. There were many tributary circumstances, but the forcible interest culminated in the total consumption of this pie, and the bursting of this boy. Truly he was a fine sight, Barbox Brothers, witk serious attentive face, and ear bent down, much jostled on the pavements of the busy town, but afraid of losing a single incident of the epic, lest he should be examined in it by-and-by and found deficient. Thus they arrived at the hotel. And there he had to say at the bar, and said awkwardly enough: "I have found a little girl!" The whole establishment turned out to look at the little girl. Nobody knew her; nobody could make out her name, as she set it forth—except one chambermaid, who said it was Constantinople—which it wasn't. "I will dine with my young friend in a private room," said Barbox Brothers to the hotel authorities, "and perhaps you will be so good as let the police know that the pretty baby is here. I suppose she is sure to be inquired for, soon, if she has not been already. Come along, Polly." Perfectly at ease and peace, Polly came along, but, finding the stairs rather stiff work, was carried up by Barbox Brothers. The dinner was a most transcendent success, and the Barbox sheepishness, under Polly's directions how to mince her meat for her, and how to diffuse gravy over the plate with a liberal and equal hand, was another fine sight. "And now," said Polly, "while we are at dinner, you be good, and tell me that story I taught you." With the tremors of a civil service examination on him, and very uncertain indeed, not only as to the epoch at which the pie appeared in history, but also as to the measurements of that indispensable fact, Barbox Brothers made a shaky beginning, but under encouragement did very fairly. There was a want of breadth observable in his rendering of the cheeks, as well as the appetite, of the boy; and there was a certain tameness in his fairy, referable to an under-current of desire to account for her. Still, as the first lumbering performance of a good-humoured monster, it passed muster. "I told you to be good," said Polly, "and you are good, ain't you?" "I hope so," replied Barbox Brothers. Such was his deference that Polly, elevated on a platform of sofa-cushions in a chair at his right hand, encouraged him with a pat or two on the face from the greasy bowl of her spoon, and even, with a gracious kiss. In getting on her feet upon her chair, however, to give him this last reward, she toppled forward among the dishes, and caused him to exclaim as he effected her rescue: "Gracious Angels! Whew! I thought we were in the fire, Polly!" "What a coward you are, ain't you?" said Polly, when replaced. "Yes, I am rather nervous," he replied. "Whew! Don't, Polly! Don't flourish your spoon, or you'll go over sideways. Don't tilt up your legs when you laugh, Polly, or you'll go over backwards. Whew! Polly, Polly, Polly," said Barbox Brothers, nearly succumbing to despair," we are environed with dangers!" Indeed, he could descry no security from the pitfalls that were yawning for Polly, but in proposing to her, after dinner, to sit upon a low stool. "I will, if you will," said Polly. So, as peace of mind should go before all, he begged the waiter to wheel aside the table, bring a pack of cards, a couple of footstools, and a screen, and close in Polly and himself before the fire, as it were in a snug room within the room. Then, finest sight of all, was Barbox Brothers on his footstool, with a pint decanter on the rug, contemplating Polly as she built successfully, and growing blue in the face with holding his breath, lest he should blow the house down. "How you stare, don't you?" said Polly, in a houseless pause. Detected in the ignoble fact, he felt obliged to admit, apologetically: "I am afraid I was looking rather hard at you, Polly." "Why do you stare?" asked Polly. "I cannot," he murmured to himself, "recall why.—I don't know, Polly.' "You must be a simpleton to do things and not know why, mustn't you?" said Polly. In spite or which reproof, he looked at the child again, intently, as she bent her head over her card-structure, her rich curls shading her face. "It is impossible," he thought, "that I can ever have seen this pretty baby before. Can I have dreamed of her? In some sorrowful dream?" He could make nothing of it. So he went into the building trade as a journeyman under Polly, and they built three stories high, four stories high: even five. "I say. Who do you think is coming?" asked Polly, rubbing her eyes after tea. He guessed: "The waiter?" "No," said Polly, "the dustman. I am getting sleepy." A new embarrassment for Barbox Brothers! "I don't think I am going to be fetched tonight," said Polly; "what do you think?" He thought not, either. After another quarter of an hour, the dustman not merely impending but actually arriving, recourse was had to the Constantinopolitan chambermaid: who cheerily undertook that the child should sleep in a comfortable and wholesome room, which she herself would share. "And I know you will be careful, won't you," said Barbox Brothers, as a new fear dawned upon him, "that she don't fall out of bed." Polly found this so highly entertaining that she was under the necessity of clutching him round the neck with both arms as he sat on his footstool picking up the cards, and rocking him to and fro, with her dimpled chin on his shoulder. "O what a coward you are, ain't you!" said Polly. "Do you fall out of bed?" "N—not generally, Polly." "No more do I."" With that, Polly gave him a reassuring hug or two to keep him going, and then giving that confiding mite of a hand of hers to be swallowed up in the hand of the Constantinopolitan chambermaid, trotted off, chattering, without a vestige of anxiety. He looked after her, had the screen removed and the table and chairs replaced, and still looked after her. He paced the room for half an hour. A most engaging little creature, but it's not that. A most winning little voice, but it's not that. That has much to do with it, but there is something more. How can it be that I seem to know this child? What was it she imperfectly recalled to me when I felt her touch in the street, and, looking down at her, saw her looking up at me?" "Mr. Jackson!" With a start he turned towards the sound of the subdued voice, and saw his answer standing at the door. "O Mr. Jackson, do not be severe with me. Speak a word of encouragement to me, I beseech you." "You are Polly's mother." "Yes." Yes Polly herself might come to this, one day. As you see what the rose was, in its faded leaves; as you see what the summer growth of the woods was, in their wintry branches; so Polly might be traced, one day, in a care-worn woman like this, with her hair turned grey. Before him, were the ashes of a dead fire that had once burned bright. This was the woman he had loved. This was the woman he had lost. Such had been the constancy of his imagination to her, so had Time spared her under its withholding, that now, seeing how roughly the inexorable hand had struck her, his soul was filled with pity and amazement. He led her to a chair, and stood leaning on a comer of the chimney-piece, with his head resting on his hand, and his face half averted. "Did you see me in the street, and show me to your child?" he asked. "Yes." "Is the little creature, then, a party to deceit?" "I hope there is no deceit. I said to her, 'We have lost our way. and I must try to find mine by myself. Go to that gentleman and tell him you are lost. You shall be fetched by-and-by.' Perhaps you have not thought how very young she, is?" "She is very self-reliant." "Perhaps because she is so young?" He asked, after a short pause, "Why did you do this?" "O Mr. Jackson, do you ask me? In the hope that you might see something in my innocent child to soften your heart, towards me. Not only towards me, but towards my husband." He suddenly turned about, and walked to the opposite end of the room. He came back again with a slower step, and resumed his former attitude, saying: "I thought you had emigrated to America?" "We did. But life went ill with us there, and we came back." "Do you live in this town?" "Yes. I am a daily teacher of music here. My husband is a book-keeper." "Are you—forgive me asking—poor?" "We earn enough for our wants. That is not our distress. My husband is very, very ill of a lingering disorder. He will never recover—." "You check yourself. If it, is for want of the encouraging word you spoke of, take it from me. I cannot forget the old time, Beatrice." "God bless you!" she replied, with a burst of tears, and gave him her trembling hand. Compose yourself. I cannot be composed if you are not, for to see you weep distresses me beyond expression. Speak freely to me. Trust me." She shaded her face with her veil, and after a little while spoke calmly. Her voice had the ring of Polly's. "It is not that my husband's mind is at all impaired by his bodily suffering, for I assure you that is not the case. But in his weakness, and in his knowledge that, he is incurably ill, he cannot overcome the ascendancy of one idea. It preys upon him, embitters every moment of his painful life, and will shorten it." She stopping, he said again: "Speak freely to me. Trust me." "We have had five children before this darling, and they all lie in their little graves.He believes that they have withered away under a curse, and that it will blight this child like the rest." "Under what curse?" "Both I and he have it on our conscience that we tried you very heavily, and I do not know but. that, if I were as ill as he, I might, suffer in my mind as he does. This is the constant burden:—' I believe, Beatrice, I was the only friend that Mr. Jackson ever cared to make, though I was so much his junior. The more influence he acquired in the business the higher he advanced me, and I was alone in his private confidence. I came between him and you, and I took you from him. We were both secret, and the blow fell when he was wholly unprepared. The anguish it caused a man so compressed, must have been terrible; the wrath it awakened, inappeasable. So, a curse came to be invoked on our poor pretty little flowers, and they fall.'" "And you, Beatrice," he asked, when she had ceased to speak, and there had been a silence afterwards: "how say you?'' "Until within these few weeks I was afraid of you, and I believed that you would never, never, forgive." "Until within these few weeks," he repeated. "Have you changed your opinion of me within these few weeks?" "Yes." "For what reason?" "I was getting some pieces of music in a shop in this town, when, to my terror, you came in. As I veiled my face and stood in the dark end of the shop, I heard you explain that you wanted a musical instrument, for a bedridden girl. Your voice and manner were so softened, you showed such interest in its selection, you took it away yourself with so much tenderness of care and pleasure, that I knew you were a man with a most gentle heart. O Mr. Jackson, Mr. Jackson, if you could have felt the refreshing rain of tears that followed for me I" Was Phoebe playing at that moment, on her distant couch? He seemed to hear her. "I inquired in the shop where you lived, but could get no information. As I had heard you say that you were going back by the next train (but you did not say where), I resolved to visit the station at about that time of day, as often as I could, between my lessons on the chance of seeing you again. I have been there very often, but saw you no more until yesterday. You were meditating as you walked the street, but the calm expression of your face emboldened me to send my child to you. And when I saw you bend your head to speak tenderly to her, I prayed to GOD to forgive me for having ever brought a sorrow on it. I now pray to you to forgive me, and to forgive my husband. I was very young, he was young too, and in the ignorant hardihood of such a time of life we don't know what we do to those who have undergone more discipline. You generous man! You good man! So to raise me up and make nothing of my crime against you!"—for he would not see her on her knees, and soothed her as a kind father might have soothed an erring daughter—"thank you, bless you, thank you!" When he next spoke, it was after having drawn aside the window-curtain and looked out a while. Then, he only said: "Is Polly asleep?" "Yes. As I came in, I met her going away upstairs, and put her to bed myself." "Leave her with me for to-morrow, Beatrice, and write me your address on this leaf of my pocket-book. In the evening I will bring her home to you—and to her father." * * * * "Hallo!" cried Polly, putting her saucy sunny face in at the door next morning when breakfast was ready: "I thought I was fetched last night?" "So you were, Polly, but I asked leave to keep you here for the day, and to take you home in the evening." "Upon my word!" said Polly. "You are very cool, ain't you?" However, Polly seemed to think it a good idea, and added, "I suppose I must give you a kiss though you are cool." The kiss given and taken, they sat down to breakfast in a highly conversational tone. "Of course, you are going to amuse me?" said Polly. "Oh, of course," said Barbox Brothers. In the pleasurable height of her anticipations, Polly found it indispensable to put down her piece of toast, cross one of her little fat knees over the other, and bring her little fat right hand down into her left hand with a business-like slap. After this gathering of herself together, Polly, by that time, a mere heap of dimples asked in a wheedling manner: "What are we going to do, you dear old thing?" "Why, I was thinking," said Barbox Brothers, "—but are you fond of horses, Polly?" "Ponies, I am," said Polly, "especially when their tails are long. But horses—n—no—too big, you know." "Well," pursued Barbox Brothers, in a spirit of grave mysterious confidence adapted to the importance of the consultation, "I did see yesterday,Polly, on the walls, pictures of two long-tailed ponies, speckled all over—" "No, no, NO!" cried Polly, in an ecstatic desire to linger on the charming details. "Not speckled all over!" "Speckled all over. Which ponies jump through hoops—" "No, no, NO!" cried Polly, as before. "They never jump through hoops!" "Yes, they do. O I assure you they do. And eat pie in pinafores—" "Ponies eating pie in pinafores!" said Polly. "What a story-teller you are, ain't you?" "Upon my honour—. And fire off guns." (Polly hardly seemed to see the force of the ponies resorting to fire-arms.) "And I was thinking," pursued the exemplary Barbox, "that if you and I were to go to the Circus where these ponies are, it would do our constitutions good." "Does that mean, amuse us?" inquired Polly. "What long words you do use, don't you?" Apologetic for having wandered out of his depth, he replied: "That means amuse us. That is exactly what it means. There are many other wonders besides the ponies, and we, shall see them all. Ladies and gentlemen in spangled dresses, and elephants and lions and tigers." Polly became observant of the teapot, with a curled-up nose indicating some uneasiness of mind. "They never get out, of course," she remarked as a mere truism. "The elephants and lions and tigers? O dear no!" "O dear no!" said Polly. "And of course nobody's afraid of the ponies shooting anybody." "Not the least in the world." "No, no, not the least in the world," said Polly. "I was also thinking," proceeded Barbox, "that if we were to look in at the toy-shop, to choose a doll—" "Not dressed!" cried Polly, with a clap of her hands. "No, no, NO, not dressed!" "Full dressed. Together with a house, and all things necessary for housekeeping—" Polly gave a little scream, and seemed in danger of falling into a swoon of bliss. "What a darling you are!" she languidly exclaimed, leaning back in her chair. "Come and be hugged, or I must come and hug you." This resplendent programme was carried into execution with the utmost rigour of the law. It being essential to make the purchase of the doll its first feature—or that lady would have lost the ponies—the toy-shop expedition took precedence. Polly in the magic warehouse, with a doll as large as herself under each arm, and a neat assortment of some twenty more on view upon the counter, did indeed present a spectacle of indecision not quite compatible with unalloyed happiness, but the light cloud passed. The lovely specimen oftenest chosen, oftenest rejected, and finally abided by, was of Circassian descent, possessing as much boldness of beauty as was reconcilable with extreme feebleness of mouth, and combining a sky-blue silk pelisse with rose-coloured satin trousers, and a black velvet hat: which this fair stranger to our northern shores would seem to have founded on the portraits of the late Duchess of Kent. The name this distinguished foreigner brought with her from beneath the glowing skies of a sunny clime was (on Polly's authority) Miss Melluka, and the costly nature of her outfit as a housekeeper, from the Barbox coffers, may be inferred from the two facts that her silver teaspoons were as large as her kitchen poker, and that the proportions of her watch exceeded those of her frying-pan. Miss Melluka was graciously pleased to express her entire approbation of the Circus, and so was Polly; for the ponies were speckled, and brought down nobody when they fired, and the savagery of the wild beasts appeared to be mere smoke—which article, in fact, they did produce in large quantities from their insides. The Barbox absorption in the general subject throughout the realisation of these delights was again a sight to see, nor was it less worthy to behold at dinner, when he drank to Miss Melluka, tied stiff in a chair opposite to Polly (the fair Circassian possessing an unbendable spine), and even induced the waiter to assist in carrying out with due decorum the prevailing glorious idea. To wind up, there came the agreeable fever of getting Miss Melluka and all her wardrobe and rich possesions into a fly with Polly, to be taken home. But by that time Polly had become unable to look upon such accumulated joys with waking eyes, and had withdrawn her consciousness into the wonderful Paradise of a child's sleep. "Sleep, Polly, sleep," said Barbox Brothers, as her head dropped on his shoulder; "you shall not fall out of this bed, easily, at any rate!" What rustling piece of paper he took from his pocket, and carefully folded into the bosom of Polly's frock, shall not be mentioned. He said nothing about it, and nothing shall be said about it. They drove to a modest suburb of the great ingenious town, and stopped at the fore-court of a small house. "Do not wake the child," said Barbox Brothers, softly, to the driver, " I will carry her in as she is." Greeting the light at the opened door which was held by Polly's mother, Polly's bearer passed on with mother and child into a ground-floor room. There, stretched on a sofa, lay a sick man, sorely wasted, who covered his eyes with his emaciated hands. "Tresham," said Barbox, in a kindly voice, "I have brought you back your Polly, fast asleep. Give me your hand, and tell me you are better." The sick man reached forth his right hand, and bowed his head over the hand into which it taken, and kissed it. "Thank you, thank you! I may say that I am well and happy." "That's brave," said Barbox. "Tresham, I have a fancy—can you make room for me beside you here?" He sat down on the sofa as he said the words, cherishing the plump peachy cheek that lay uppermost on his shoulder. "I have a fancy, Tresham (I am getting quite an old fellow now, you know, and old fellows may take fancies into their heads sometimes) to give up Polly, having found her, to no one but you. Will you take her from me?" As the father held out his arms for the child, each of the two men looked steadily at the other. "She is very dear to you, Tresham?" "Unutterably dear." "God bless her! It is not much, Polly," he continued, turning his eyes upon her peaceful face as he apostrophised her, "it is not much, Polly, for a blind and sinful man to invoke a blessing on something so far better than himself as a little child is; but it would be much—much upon his cruel head, and much upon, his guilty soul—if he could be so wicked as to invoke a curse. He had better have a millstone round his neck, and be cast into the deepest sea. Live and thrive, my pretty baby!" Here he kissed her. "Live and prosper, and become in time the mother of other little children, like the Angels who behold The Father's face!" He kissed her again, gave her up gently to both her parents, and went out. But he went not to Wales. No, he never went to Wales. He went straightway for another stroll about the town, and he looked in upon the people at their work, and at their play, here, there, everywhere, and where not. For he was Barbox Brothers and Co. now, and had taken thousands of partners into the solitary firm. He had at length got back to his hotel room, and was standing before his fire refreshing himself with a glass of hot drink which he had stood upon the chimney-piece, when he heard the town clocks striking, and, referring to his watch, found the evening to have so slipped away, that they were striking twelve. As he put up his watch again, his eyes met those of his reflection in the chimney-glass. "Why it's your birthday already," he said, smiling. "You are looking very well. I wish you many happy returns of the day." He had never before bestowed that wish upon himself. "By Jupiter!" he discovered, "it alters the whole case of running away from one's birthday! It's a thing to explain to Phoebe. Besides, here is quite a long story to tell her, that has sprung out of the road with no story. I'll go back, instead of going on. I'll go back by my friend Lamps's Up X presently." He went back to Mugby Junction, and in point of fact he established himself at Mugby Junction. It was the convenient place to live in, for brightening Phoebe's life. It was the convenient place to live in, for having her taught music by Beatrice. It was the convenient place to live in, for occasionally borrowing Polly. It was the convenient place to live in, for being joined at will to all sorts of agreeable places and persons. So, he became settled there, and, his house, standing in an elevated situation, it is noteworthy of him in conclusion, as Polly herself might (not irreverently) have put it: There was an Old Barbox who lived on a hill, And if he ain't gone, he lives there still. I am The Boy at Mugby. That's about what I am. You don't know what I mean? What a pity! But I think you do. I think you must. Look here. I am the Boy at what is called The Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, and what's proudest boast is, that it never yet refreshed a mortal being. Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, in the height of twenty-seven cross draughts (I've often counted 'em while they brush the First Class hair twenty-seven ways), behind the bottles, among the glasses, bounded on the nor'-west by the beer, stood pretty far to the right of a metallic object that's at times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to its contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways to the glare of Our Missis's eye—you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next time you stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take particular notice that he'll try to seem not to hear you, that he'll appear in a Absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body, and that he won't serve you as long as you can possibly bear it. That's Me. What a lark it is! We are the Model Establishment, we are, at Mugby. Other Refreshment Rooms send their imperfect young ladies up to be finished off by our Missis. For some of the young ladies, when they're new to the business, come into it mild! Ah! Our Missis, she soon takes that out of 'em. Why, I originally come into the business meek myself. But Our Missis she soon took that out of me. What a delightful lark it is! I look upon us Refreshmenters as ockipying the only proudly independent footing on the Line. There's Papers for instance—my honourable friend if he will allow me to call him so—him as belongs to Smith's bookstall. Why he no more dares to be up to our Refreshmenting games, than he dares to jump atop of a locomotive with her steam at full pressure, and cut away upon her alone, driving himself, at limited-mail speed. Papers, he'd get his head punched at every compartment, first second and third, the whole length of a train, if he was to ventur to imitate my demeanour. It's the same with the porters, the same with the guards, the same with the ticket clerks, the same the whole way up to the secretary, traffic manager, or very chairman. There ain't a one among 'em on the nobly independent footing we are. Did you ever catch one of them, when you wanted anything of him, making a system of surveying the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body? I should hope not. You should see our Bandolining Room at Mugby Junction. It's led to, by the door behind the counter which you'll notice usually stands ajar, and it's the room where Our Missis and our young ladies Bandolines their hair. You should see 'em at it, betwixt trains, Bandolining away, as if they was anointing themselves for the combat. When you're telegraphed, you should see their noses all a going up with scorn, as if it was a part of the working of the same Cooke and Wheatstone electrical machinery. You should hear Our Missis give the word "Here comes the Beast to be Fed!" and then you should see 'em indignantly skipping across the Line, from the Up to the Down, or Wicer Warsaw, and begin to pitch the stale pastry into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sangwiches under the glass covers, and get out the—ha ha ha!—the Sherry—O my eye, my eye!—for your Refreshment. It's only in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which of course I mean to say Britannia) that Refreshmenting is so effective, so 'olesome, so constitutional, a check upon the public. There was a foreigner, which having politely, with his hat off, beseeched our young ladies and Our Missis for "a leetel gloss hoff prarndee," and having had the Line surveyed through him by all and no other acknowledgment, was a proceeding at last to help himself, as seems to be the custom in his own country, when Our Missis with her hair almost a coming un-Bandolined with rage, and her eyes omitting sparks flew at him, cotched the decanter out of his hand, and said: "Put it down! I won't allow that!" The foreigner turned pale, stepped back with his arms stretched out in front of him, his hands clasped, and his shoulders riz, and exclaimed: "Ah! Is it possible this! That these disdaineous females and this ferocious old woman are placed here by the administration, not only to empoison the voyagers, but to affront them! Great Heaven! How arrives it? The English people. Or is he then a slave? Or idiot?" Another time, a merry wideawake American gent had tried the sawdust and spit it out, and had tried the Sherry and spit that out, and had tried in vain to sustain exhausted natur upon Butter-Scotch, and had been rather extra Bandolined and Line-surveyed through, when, as the bell was ringing and he paid Our Missis, he says, very loud and good-tempered: "I tell Yew what 'tis, ma'arm. I la'af. Theer! I la'af. I Dew. I oughter ha,' seen most things, for I hail from the Onlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haive travelled right slick over the Limited, head on through Jee-rusalemm and the East, and likeways France and Italy, Europe Old World, and am now upon the track to the Chief Europian Village; but such an institution as Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin's solid and liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never did see yet! And if I hain't found the eighth wonder of monarchical Creation, in finding Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin's solid and liquid, all as aforesaid, established in a country where the people air not absolute Loo-naticks, I am Extra Double Darned with a Nip and Frizzle to the innermostest grit! Wheerfur—T heer!—I la'af! I Dew, ma'arm. I la'af!" And so he went, stamping and shaking his sides along the platform all the way to his own compartment. I think it was her standing up agin the Foreigner, as giv' Our Missis the idea of going over to France, and droring a comparison betwixt Refreshmenting as followed among the frog-eaters, and Refreshmenting as triumphant in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which of course I mean to say agin, Britannia). Our young ladies, Miss Whiff, Miss Piff, and Mrs. Sniff, was unanimous opposed to her going; for, as they says to Our Missis one and all, it is well In-known to the hends of the herth as no other nation except Britain has a idea of anythink, but above all of business. "Why then should you tire yourself to prove what is already proved? Our Missis however (being a teazer at all pints) stood out grim obstinate, and got a return pass by South-Eastern Tidal, to go right through, if such should be her dispositions, to Marseilles. Sniff is husband to Mrs. Sniff, and is a regular insignificant cove. He looks arter the sawdust department in a back room, and is sometimes when we are very hard put to it let in behind the counter with a corkscrew; but never when it can be helped, his demeanour towards the public being disgusting servile. How Mrs. Sniff ever come so far to lower herself as to marry him, I don't know; but I suppose he does, and I should think he wished he didn't, for he leads a awful life. Mrs. Sniff couldn't be much harder with him if he was public. Similarly, Miss Whiff and Miss Piff, taking the tone of Mrs. Sniff, they shoulder Sniff about when he is let in with a corkscrew, and they whisk things out of his hands when in his servility he is a going to let the public have 'em, and they snap him up when in the crawling baseness of his spirit he is a going to answer a public question, and they drore more tears into his eyes than ever the mustard does which he all day long lays on to the sawdust. (But it ain't strong.) Once, when Sniff had the repulsiveness to reach across to get the milk-pot to hand over for a baby, I see Our Missis in her rage catch him by both his shoulders and spin him out into the Bandolining Room. But Mrs. Sniff. How different! She's the one! She's the one as you'll notice to be always looking another way from you, when you look at her. She's the one with the small waist buckled in tight in front, and with the lace cuffs at her wrists, which she puts on the edge of the counter before her, and stands a smoothing while the public foams. This smoothing the cuffs and looking another way while the public foam is the last accomplishment taught to the young ladies as come to Mugby to be finished by Our Missis; and it's always taught by Mrs. Sniff. When Our Missis went away upon her journey, Mrs. Sniff was left in charge. She did hold the public in cheek most beautiful! In all my time, I never see half so many cups of tea given without milk to people as wanted it with, nor half so many cups of tea with milk given to people as wanted it without. When foaming ensued, Mrs. Sniff would say: "Then you'd better settle it among yourselves, and change with one another." It was a most highly delicious lark. I enjoyed the Refreshmenting business more than ever, and was so glad I had took to it when young. Our Missis returned. It got circulated among the young ladies, and it as if might be penetrated to me through the crevices of the Bandolining Room, that she had Orrors to reveal, if revelations so contemptible could be dignfied with the name. Agitation become awakened. Excitement was up in the stirrups. Expectations stood a tiptoe. At length it was put forth that on our slackest evening in the week, and at our slackest time of that evening betwixt trains, Our Missis would give her views of foreign Refreshmenting, in the Bandolining Room. It was arranged tasteful for the purpose. The Bandolining table and glass was hid in a corner, a arm-chair was elevated on a packing-case for Our Missis's ockypation, a table and a tumbler of water (no sherry in it, thankee) was placed beside it. Two of the pupils, the season being autumn, and hollyhocks and daliahs being in, ornamented the wall with three devices in those flowers. On one might be read, "MAY ALBION NEVER LEARN;" on another, "KEEP THE PUBLIC DOWN;" on another, "OUR REFRESHMENTING CHARTER." The whole had a beautiful appearance, with which the beauty of the sentiments corresponded. On Our Missis's brow was wrote Severity, as she ascended the. fatal platform. (Not that that was anythink new.) Miss Whiff and Miss Piff sat at her feet. Three chairs from the Waiting Room might have been perceived by a average eye, in front of her, on which the pupils was accommodated. Behind them, a very close observer might have discerned a Boy. Myself. "Where," said Our Missis, glancing gloomily around, "is Sniff?" "I thought it better," answered Mrs. Sniff, "that he should not be let to come in. He is such an Ass." "No doubt," assented Our Missis. "But for that reason is it not desirable to improve his mind?" "O! Nothing will ever improve him," said Mrs. Sniff. "However," pursued Our Missis, "call him in, Ezekiel." I called him in. The appearance of the low-minded cove was hailed wilh disapprobation from all sides, on account of his having brought his corkscrew with him. He pleaded "the force of habit.'' "The force!" said Mrs. Sniff. "Don't let us have you talking about force, for Gracious sake. There! Do stand still where you are, with your back against the wall." He is a smiling piece of vacancy, and he smiled in the mean way in which he will even smile at the public if he gets a chance (language can say no meaner of him), and he stood upright near the door with the back of his head agin the wall, as if he was a waiting for somebody to come and measure his heighth for the Army. "I should not enter, ladies," says Our Missis, "on the revolting disclosures I am about to make, if it was not in the hope that they will cause you to be yet more implacable in the exercise of the power you wield in a constitutional country, and yet more devoted to the constitutional motto which I see before me;" it was behind her, but the words sounded better so; "'May Albion never learn!'" Here the pupils as had made the motto, admired it, and cried, "Hear! Hear! Hear!" Sniff, showing an inclination to join in chorus, got himself frowned down by every brow. "The baseness of the French," pursued Our Missis, "as displayed in the fawning nature of their Refreshmenting, equals, if not surpasses, anythink as was ever heard of the baseness of the celebrated Buonaparte." Miss Whiff, Miss Piff and me, we drored a heavy breath, equal to saying, "We thought as much!" Miss Whiff and Miss Piff seeming to object to my droring mine along with theirs, I drored another, to aggravate 'em. "Shall I be believed," says Our Missis, with flashing eyes, "when I tell you that no sooner had I set my foot upon that treacherous shore—" Here Sniff, either busting out mad, or thinking aloud, says, in a low voice: "Feet. Plural, you know." The cowering that come upon him when he was spurned by all eyes, added to his being beneath contempt, was sufficient punishment for a cove so grovelling. In the midst of a silence rendered more impressive by the turned-up female noses with which it was pervaded, Our Missis went on: "Shall I be believed when I tell you that no sooner had I landed," this word with a killing look at Sniff, "on that treacherous shore, than I was ushered into a Refreshment Room where there were, I do not exaggerate, actually eatable things to eat?" A groan burst from the ladies. I not only did myself the honour of jining, but also of lengthening it out. "Where there were," Our Missis added, "not only eatable things to eat, but also drinkable things to drink?" A murmur, swelling almost into a scream, ariz. Miss Piff, trembling with indignation, called out: "Name!" "I will name," said Our Missis. "There was roast fowls, hot and cold; there was smoking roast veal surrounded with browned potatoes; there was hot soup with (again I ask shall I be credited?) nothing bitter in it, and no flour to choke off the consumer; there was a variety of cold dishes set off with jelly; there was salad; there was—mark me!—fresh pastry, and that of a light construction; there was a luscious show of fruit. There was bottles and decanters of sound small wine, of every size and adapted to every pocket; the same odious statement will apply to brandy; and these were set out upon the counter so that all could help themselves." Our Missis's lips so quivered, that Mrs. Sniff, though scarcely less convulsed than she were, got up and held the tumbler to them. "This," proceeds Our Missis, "was my first unconstitutional experience. Well would it have been, if it had been my last and worst. But no. As I proceeded further into that enslaved and ignorant land, its aspect became more hideous. I need not explain to this assembly, the ingredients and formation of the British Refreshment sangwich?" Universal laughter—except from Sniff, who, as sangwich-cutter, shook his head in a state of the utmost dejection as he stood with it agin the wall. "Well!" said Our Missis, with dilated nostrils." Take a fresh crisp long crusty penny loaf made of the whitest and best flour. Cut it longwise through the middle. Insert a fair and nicely fitting slice of ham. Tie a smart piece of ribbon round the middle of the whole to bind it together. Add at one end a neat wrapper of clean white paper by which to hold it. And the universal French Refreshment sangwich busts on your disgusted vision." A cry of "Shame!" from all—except Sniff, which rubbed his stomach with a soothing hand. "I need not," said Our Missis, "explain to this assembly, the usual formation and fitting of the British Refreshment Room?" No, no, and laughter. Sniff agin shaking his head in low spirits agin the wall. "Well," said Our Missis, "what would you say to a general decoration of everythink, to hangings (sometimes elegant), to easy velvet furniture, to abundance of little tables, to abundance of little seats, to brisk bright waiters, to great convenience, to a pervading cleanliness and tastefulness positively addressing the public and making the Beast thinking itself worth the pains?" Contemptous fury on the part of all the ladies. Mrs. Sniff looking as if she wanted somebody to hold her, and everybody else looking as if they'd rayther not. "Three times," said Our Missis, working herself into a truly terrimcnjious state, "three times did I see these shamful things, only between the coast and Paris, and not counting either: at Hazebrouckc, at Arras, at Amiens. But worse remains. Tell me, what would you call a person who should propose in England that there should be kept, say at our own model Mugby Junction, pretty baskets, each holding an assorted cold lunch and dessert for one, each at a certain fixed price, and each within a passenger's power to take away, to empty in the carriage at perfect leisure, and to return at another station fifty or a hundred miles further on?" There was disagreement that such a person should he called. Whether revolutionist, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: "A malignant maniac!" "I adopt," says Our Missis, "the brand set upon such a person by the righteous indignation of my friend Miss Plff. A malignant maniac. Know then, that that malignant maniac has sprung from the congenial soil of France, and that his malignant madness was unchecked action on this same part of my journey." I noticed that Snilf was a rubbing his hands, and that Mrs. Sniff had got her eye upon him. But I did not take more particular notice, owing to the excited state in which the young ladies was, and to feeling myself called upon to keep it up with a howl. "On my experience south of Paris," said Our Missis, in a deep tone, "I will not expatiate. Too loathsome were the task! But fancy this. Fancy a guard coming round, with the train at full speed, to inquire how many for dinner. Fancy his telegraphing forward, the number of diners. Fancy every one expected, and the table elegantly laid for the complete party. Fancy a charming dinner, in a charming room, and the head-cook, concerned for the honour of every dish, superintending in his clean white jacket and cap. Fancy the Beast travelling six hundred miles on end, very fast, and with great punctuality, yet being taught to expect all this to be done for it!" A spirited chorus of "The Beast!" I noticed that Sniff was agin a rubbing his stomach with a soothing hand, and that he had drored up one leg. But agin I didn't take particular notice, looking on myself as called upon to stimilate public feeling. It being a lark besides. "Putting everything together," said Our Missis, "French Refreshmenting comes to this, and O it conies to a nice total! First: eatable things to eat, and drinkable things to drink." A groan from the young ladies, kep' up by me. "Second: convenience, and even elegance." Another groan from the young ladies, kep' up by me. "Third: moderate charges." This time, a groan from me, kep' up by the young ladies. "Fourth:—and here," says Our Missis, "I claim your angriest sympathy—attention, common civility, nay, even politeness!" Me, and the young ladies regularly raging mad all together. "And I cannot in conclusion," says Our Missis, with her spitefullest sneer, "give you a completer pictur of that despicable nation (after what I have related), than assuring you that they wouldn't bear our constitutional ways and noble independence at Mugby Junction, for a single mouth, and that they would turn us to the right-about and put another system in our places, as soon as look at us; perhaps sooner, for I do not believe they have the good taste to care to look at us twice." The swelling tumult was arrested in its rise. Sniff, bore away by his servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher and a higher relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew over his head. It was at this moment, that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep' her eye upon him like the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim. Our Missis followed them both out, and cries was heard in the sawdust department. You come into the Down Refreshment Room, at the Junction, making believe you don't know me, and I'll pint you out with my right, thumb over my shoulder which is Our Missis, and which is Miss Whiff, and which is Miss Piff, and which is Mrs. Sniff. But you won't get a chance to see Sniff, because he disappeared that night. Whether he perished, tore to pieces, I cannot say; but his corkscrew alone remains, to bear witness to the servility of his disposition. "Halloa! Below there!" When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but, instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said, for my life, what. But, I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all. "Halloa! Below!" From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him. "Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?" He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without, pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then, there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train, had passed me and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him re-furling the flag he had shown while the train went by. I repeated my inquiry. After a pause, during which he seemed to regard me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag towards a point on my level, some two or three hundred yards distant. I called down to him, "All right!" and made for that point. There, by dint of looking closely about me, I found a rough zig-zag descending path notched out: which I followed. The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone that became oozier and wetter as I went down. For these reasons, I found the way long enough to give me time to recal a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which he had pointed out the path. When I came down low enough upon the zigzag descent, to see him again, I saw that he was standing between the rails on the way by which the train had lately passed, in an attitude as if he were waiting for me to appear. He had his left hand at his chin, and that left elbow rested on his right hand crossed over his breast. His attitude was one of such expectation and watchfulness, that I stopped a moment, wondering at it. I resumed my downward way, and, stepping out upon the level of the railroad and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way, only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction, terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world. Before he stirred, I was near enough to him to have touched him. Not even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step, and lifted his hand. This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my attention when I looked down from up yonder. A visitor was a rarity, I should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped? In me, he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who, being at last set free, had a newly-awakened interest in these great works. To such purpose I spoke to him; but I am far from sure of the terms I used, for, besides that I am not happy in opening any conversation, there was something in the man that daunted me. He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the tunnel's mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were missing from it, and then looked at me. That light was part of his charge? Was it not? He answered in a low voice: "Don't you know it is?" The monstrous thought came into my mind as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since, whether there may have been infection in his mind. In my turn, I stepped back. But in making the action, I detected in his eyes some latent fear of me. This put the monstrous thought to flight. "You look at me," I said, forcing a smile, "as if you had a dread of me." "I was doubtful," he returned, "whether I had seen you before." "Where?" He pointed to the red light he had looked at. "There?" I said. Intently watchful of me, he replied (but without sound), Yes. "My good fellow, what should I do there? However, be that as it may, I never was there, you may swear." "I think I may," he rejoined. "Yes. I am sure I may." His manner cleared, like my own. He replied to my remarks with readiness, and in well-chosen words. Had he much to do there? Yes; that was to say, he had enough responsibility to bear; but exactness and watchfulness were what was required of him, and of actual work—manual labour—he had next to none. To change that signal, to trim those lights, and to turn this iron handle now and then, was all he had to do under that head. Regarding those many long and lonely hours of which I seemed to make so much, he could only say that the routine of his life had shaped itself into that form, and he had grown used to it. He had taught himself a language down here—if only to know it by sight, and to have formed his own crude ideas of its pronunciation, could be called learning it. He had also worked at fractions and decimals, and tried a little algebra; but he was, and had been as a boy, a poor hand at figures. Was it necessary for him when on duty, always to remain in that channel of damp air, and could he never rise into the sunshine from between those high stone walls? Why, that depended upon times and circumstances. Under some conditions there would be less upon the Line than under others, and the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night. In bright weather, he did choose occasions for getting a little above these lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by his electric bell, and at such times listening for it with redoubled anxiety, the relief was less than I would suppose. He took me into his box, where there was a fire, a desk for an official book in which he had to make certain entries, a telegraphic instrument with its dial face and needles, and the little bell of which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence), perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such-wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any great railway staff. He had been, when young (if I could believe it, sitting in that hut; he scarcely could), a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no complaint to offer about that. He had made his bed, and he lay upon it. It was far too late to make another. All that I have here condensed, he said in a quiet manner, with his grave dark regards divided between me and the fire. He threw in the word "Sir," from time to time, and especially when he referred to his youth: as though to request me to understand that he claimed to be nothing but what I found him. He was several times interrupted by the little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies. Once, he had to stand without the door, and display a flag as a train passed, and make some verbal communication to the driver. ln the discharge of his duties I observed him to be remarkably exact and vigilant, breaking off his discourse at a syllable, and remaining silent until what he had to do was done. In a word, I should have set this man down as one of the safest of men to be employed in that capacity, but for the circumstance that while he was speaking to me he twice broke off with a fallen colour, turned his face towards the little bell when it did NOT ring, opened the door of the hut (which was kept shut to exclude the unhealthy damp), and looked out towards the red light near the mouth of the tunnel. On both of those occasions, he came back to the fire with the inexplicable air upon him which I had remarked, without being able to define, when we were so far asunder. Said I when I rose to leave him: "You almost make me think that I have met with a contented man." (I am afraid I must acknowledge that I said it to lead him on.) "I believe I used to be so," he rejoined, in the low voice in which he had first spoken; "but I am troubled, sir, I am troubled." He would have recalled the words if he could. He had said them, however, and I took them up quickly. With what? What is your trouble?" "It is very difficult to impart, sir. It is very, very, difficult to speak of. If ever you make me another visit, I will try to tell you." "But I expressly intend to make you another visit. Say, when shall it be?" "I go off early in the morning, and I shall be on again at ten to-morrow night, sir." "I will come at eleven." He thanked me, and went out at the door with me. "I'll show my white light, sir," he said, in his peculiar low voice, "till you have found the way up. When you have found it, don't call out! And when you are at the top, don't call out!" His manner seemed to make the place strike colder to me, but I said no more than "Very well." "And when you come down to-morrow night, don't call out! Let me ask you a parting question. What made you cry 'Halloa! Below there!' to-night?" "Heaven knows," said I. "I cried something to that effect—" Not to that effect, sir. Those were the very words. I know them well.'' "Admit those were the very words. | them, no doubt, because I saw you below." "For no other reason?" "What other reason could I possibly have!" "You had no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural way?" "No." He wished me good night, and held up his light. I walked by the side of the down Line of rails (with a very disagreeable sensation of a train coming behind me), until I found the path. It was easier to mount than to descend, and I got back to my inn without any adventure. Punctual to my appointment, I placed my foot on the first notch of the zig-zag next night, as the distant clocks were striking eleven. He was waiting for me at the bottom, with his white light on. "I have not called out," I said, when we came close together; "may I speak now?" "By all means, sir." "Good night then, and here's my hand." "Good night, sir, and here's mine." With that, we walked side by side to his box, entered it, closed the door, and sat down by the fire. "I have made up my mind, sir," he began, bending forward as soon as we were seated, and speaking in a tone but a little above a whisper, "that, you shall not have to ask me twice what troubles me. I took you for some one else yesterday evening. That troubles me." "That mistake?" "No. That some one else." "Who is it?" "I don't know." "Like me?" "I don't know. I never saw the face. The left arm is across the face, and the right arm is waved. Violently waved. This way." I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm gesticulating with the utmost passion and vehemence: "For God's sake clear the way!" "One moonlight night," said the man, "I was sitting here, when I heard a voice cry 'Halloa! Below there!' I started up, looked from that door, and saw this Some one else standing by the red light near the tunnel waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried, 'Look out! Look out!' And then again 'Halloa! Below there! Look out!' I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran towards the figure, calling, 'What's wrong? What has happened? Where?' It stood just outside the blackness of the tunnel. I advanced so close upon it that I wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes. I ran right up at it, and had my hand lied out to pull the sleeve away, when it was gone." "Into the tunnel,'' said I. "No. I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped and held my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again, faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again, and ran back here. I telegraphed both ways: 'An alarm has been given, is anything wrong?' The answer came back, both ways: 'All well.'" Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight, and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon themselves. "As to an imaginary cry," said I, "do but listen for a moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to the wild harp it makes of the telegraph wires!" That was all very well, he returned, after we had sat listening for a while, and he ought to know something of the wind and the wires, he who so often passed long winter nights there, alone and watching. But he would beg to remark that he had not finished. I asked his pardon, and he slowly added these words, touching my arm: "Within six hours after the Appearance, the memorable accident on this Line happened, and within ten hours the dead and wounded were brought along through the tunnel over the spot where the figure had stood." A disagreeable shudder crept over me, but I did my best against it. It was not to be denied, I rejoined, that this was a remarkable coincidence, calculated deeply to impress his mind. But, it was unquestionable that remarkable coincidences did continually occur, and they must be taken into account in dealing with such a subject. Though to be sure I must admit, I added (for I thought I saw that he was going to bring the objection to bear upon me), men of common sense did not allow much for coincidences in making the ordinary calculations of life. He again begged to remark that he had not finished. I again begged his pardon for being betrayed into interruptions. "This," he said, again laying his hand upon my arm, and glancing over his shoulder with hollow eyes, "was just a year ago. Six or seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at that door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again," He stopped, with a fixed look at me. "Did it cry out?" "No. It was silent." "Did it wave its arm?" "No. It leaned against the shaft of the light, with both hands before the face. Like this." Once more, I followed his action with my eyes. It was an action of mourning. I have seen such an attitude in stone figures on tombs. "Did you go up to it?" "I came in and sat down, partly to collect my thoughts, partly because it had turned me faint. When I went to the door again, daylight was above me, and the ghost was gone." "But nothing followed? Nothing came of this?" He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice, giving a ghastly nod each time: "That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and heads, and something waved. I saw it, just in time to signal the driver, Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it, and, as I went along, heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and laid down on this floor between us." Involuntarily, I pushed my chair back, as I looked from the boards at which he pointed, to himself. "True, sir. True. Precisely as it happened, so I tell it you." I could think of nothing to say, to any purpose, and my mouth was very dry. The wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail. He resumed. "Now, sir, mark this, and judge how my mind is troubled. The spectre came back, a week ago. Ever since, it has been there, now and again, by fits and starts." "At the light?" "At the Danger-light." "What does it seem to do?" He repeated, if possible with increased passion and vehemence, that former gesticulation of "For God's sake clear the way!" Then, he went on. "I have no peace or rest for it. It calls to me, for many minutes together, in an agonised in manner, 'Below there! Look out! Look out!' It stands waving to me. It rings my little bell—" I caught at that. "Did it ring your bell yesterday evening when I was here, and you went to the door?"' "Twice." "Why, see," said I, "how your imagination misleads you. My eyes were on the bell, and my ears were open to the bell, and if I am a living man, it did NOT ring at those times. No, nor at any other time, except when it was rung in the natural course of physical things by the station communicating with you." He shook his head. "I have never made a mistake as to that, yet, sir. I have never confused the spectre's ring with the man's. The ghost's ring is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from nothing else, and I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the eye. I don't wonder that you failed to hear it. But I heard it." "And did the spectre seem to be there, when you looked out?'' "It WAS there." "Both times?" He repeated firmly: "Both times." "Will you come to the door with me, and look for it now?" He bit his under-lip as though he were somewhat unwilling, but arose. I opened the door, and stood on the step, while he stood in the doorway. There, was the Danger-light. There, the dismal mouth of the tunnel. There, were the high wet stone walls of the cutting. There, were the stars above them. "Do you see it?" I asked him, taking particular note of his face. His eyes were prominent and strained; but not very much more so, perhaps, than my own had been when I had directed them earnestly towards the same spot. "No," he answered. "It is not there." "Agreed," said I. We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats. I was thinking how best to improve this advantage, if it might be called one, when he took up the conversation in such a matter of course way, so assuming that there could be no serious question of fact between us, that I felt myself placed in the weakest of positions. "By this time you will fully understand, sir," he said, "that what troubles me so dreadfully, is the question, What does the spectre mean?" I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand. "What is its warning against?" he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the fire, and only by times turning them on me. "What is the danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging, somewhere on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be doubted this third time, after what has gone before. But surely this is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do!" He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated forehead. "If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no reason for it," he went on, wiping the palms of his hands. "I should get into trouble, and do no good. They would think I was mad. This is the way it would work:— Message: 'Danger! Take care!' Answer: 'What Danger? Where?' Message: 'Don't know. But for God's sake take care!' They would displace me. What else could they do?" His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life. "When it first stood under the Danger-light," he went on, putting his dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, " why not tell me where that accident was to happen—if it must happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted if—it could have been averted? When on its second coming hid its face, why not tell me instead: 'She is going to die. Let them keep her at home'? If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signalman on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act!" When I saw him in this state, I saw that, for the poor man's sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was, to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty, must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances. In this effort I succeeded far better than in the attempt to reason him out of his conviction. He became calm; the occupations incidental to his post as the night advanced, began to make larger demands on his attention; and I left him at two in the morning. I had offered to stay through the night, but he would not hear of it. That I more than once looked back at the red light as I ascended the pathway, that I did not like the red light, and that I should have slept but poorly if my bed had been under it, I see no reason to conceal. Nor, did I like the two sequences of the accident and the dead girl. I see no reason to conceal that, either. But, what ran most in my thoughts was the consideration how ought I to act, having become the recipient of this disclosure? I had proved the man to be intelligent, vigilant, painstaking, and exact; but how long might he remain so, in his state of mind? Though in a subordinate position, still he held a most important trust, and would I (for instance) like to stake my own life on the chances of his continuing to execute it with precision? Unable to overcome a feeling that there would be something treacherous in my communicating what he had told me, to his superiors in the Company, without first being plain with himself and proposing a middle course to him, I ultimately resolved to offer to accompany him (otherwise keeping his secret for the present) to the wisest medical practitioner we could hear of in those parts, and to take his opinion. A change in his time of duty would come round next night, he had apprised me, and he would be off an hour or two after sunrise, and on again soon after sunset. I had appointed to return accordingly. Next evening was a lovely evening, and I walked out early to enjoy it. The sun was not yet quite down when I traversed the field-path near the top of the deep cutting. I would extend my walk for an hour, I said to myself, half an hour on and half an hour back, and it would then be time to go to my signalman's box. Before pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically looked down, from the point from which I had first seen him. I cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the mouth of the tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm. The nameless horror that oppressed me, passed in a moment, for in a moment I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and that there was a little group of other men standing at a short distance, to whom he seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made. The Danger-light was not yet lighted. Against its shaft, a little low hut, entirely new to me, had been made of some wooden supports and tarpaulin. It looked no bigger than a bed. With an irresistible sense that something was wrong—with a flashing self-reproachful fear that fatal mischief had come of my leaving the man there, and causing no one to be sent to overlook or correct what he did—I descended the notched path with all the speed I could make. "What is the matter?" I asked the men. "Signalman killed this morning, sir." "Not the man belonging to that box?" "Yes, sir.""Not the man I know?" "You will recognise him, sir, if you knew him," said the man who spoke for the others, solemnly uncovering his own head and raising an end of the tarpaulin, " for his face is quite composed." "O! how did this happen, how did this happen?" I asked, turning from one to another as the hut closed in again. "He was cut down by an engine, sir. No man in England knew his work better. But somehow he was not clear of the outer rail. It was just at broad day. He had struck the light, and had the lamp in his hand. As the engine came out of the tunnel, his back was towards her, and she cut him down. That man drove her, and was showing how it happened. Show the gentleman, Tom." The man, who wore a rough dark dress, stepped back to his former place at the mouth of the tunnel: "Coming round the curve in the tunnel, sir," he said, "I saw him at the end, like as if I saw him down a perspective-glass. There was no time to cheek speed, and I knew him to be very careful. As he didn't seem to take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were running down upon him, and called to him as loud as I could call." "What did you say?" "I said, Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake clear the way!" I started. "All! it was a dreadful time, sir. I never left off calling to him. I put this arm before my eyes, not to see, and I waved this arm to the last; but it was no use." Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious circumstances more than on any other, I may, in closing it, point out the coincidence that the warning of the Engine-Driver included, not only the words which the unfortunate Signalman had repeated to me as haunting him, but also the words which I myself—not—he had attached, and that only in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/7/The_Haunted_Man_and_the_Ghost_s_Bargain/1848-12-The_Haunted_Man_and_the_Ghosts_Bargain.pdf 95a9ca9c61efc3da957f208ef2f2d4be Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christmas Books Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context christmas-books Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites the five Christmas books that Dickens wrote between 1843 and 1848 and published firstly with Chapman and Hall and secondly with Bradbury and Evans. Charles Dickens wrote the first of five Christmas books in 1843. A Christmas Carol, the story of a miser's slow repentance and decision to make amends, under the influence of the Ghosts of his old law partner Jacob Marley, Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future, would prove to be a timeless classic. In Scrooge's realization of his own selfishness, mortality, and responsibility towards both his impoverished employee and the faceless London poor, readers are compelled to reassess their own social actions evidenced over the course of a lifetime. Consequently, this Christmas book's cultural and academic legacy has overshadowed the other four subsequently penned by Dickens in response to public interest. Due to Dickens's use of various passages for public readings, it instantly commenced a theatrical life as well, and continues to be the most adapted of his works for film and stage. Though the financial success of A Christmas Carol did not benefit Dickens to the degree he had hoped, its immediate attraction to Victorians and enduring legacy opened up a seasonal niche that author and publishers were eager to exploit annually, for multiple reasons. The Christmas books provided Dickens with a way to morally encourage and exhort his readers to better themselves and society under the influence of holiday sentiment. They also offered the chance to acquire some much-needed revenue.  Next, he wrote The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (Chapman and Hall, 1844). Continuing to point out socioeconomic discrepancies between Victorian strata, Dickens induces sympathy for the straitened porter Toby Veck, and the endangered future life of his beloved daughter, Meg, who is headed for catastrophe unless she can marry her sweetheart despite the ill-intentioned advice of politicians and the barrier of her own poverty.  The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home (Bradbury and Evans, 1845) dealt with the spectre of adultery in an age-gap marriage, later to be explored with a similar resolution in Dickens's novel David Copperfield (1850). Due to the evil Mr. Tackleton, a sinister toy-merchant, John Peerybingle comes to doubt the fidelity of his beloved young wife, Dot. The cricket, a chirping guardian spirit of the home, plays a significant part in the action that ensues. In this story, Dickens also features a blind girl, Bertha Plummer, one of his most extensive explorations of disability.  In 1846, The Battle of Life. A Love Story was published by Bradbury and Evans, a romantic tale set in the eighteenth century on the site of an ancient battle-field. Interestingly, it centres around the relationship between two sisters, Grace and Marion Jeddler, and the latter's engagement to a childhood friend, Alfred Heathfield. Several characters in this tale elicit interest, such as the intimate partners-in-law Mr. Snitchey and Mr. Craggs and the semi-literate maid Clemency. What might be the reader's philosophy of life is brought into question under the influence of the dramatic events that so greatly unsettle the rural village.  The last of these Christmas books, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (Bradbury and Evans, 1848) represents a more sinister view of Christmas, with the full powers of a menacing double of the brooding Chemist Mr. Redlaw spiritually contending with the cheerful good-will of Milly Swidger. Like another of Dickens's domestic paragons, Esther Summerson, Milly endeavours to brighten the lives of those around her while the double seeks to provoke their regrets.  Ultimately, Dickens would never pen another Christmas book, though he wrote the short reflective pieces "A Christmas Tree" (1850) and "What Christmas is, as we Grow Older" (1851) for Household Words. However, between 1852 and 1867, he annually orchestrated and significantly contributed to a Christmas number, either published in his periodicals Household Words or All the Year Round. In most cases, a scan of each full number - and Dickens's specific contributions, transcribed - can be accessed in the Dickens Search collection <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/collections/show/8">Christmas Stories</a>. Before citing the five texts in this collection of the Christmas books, please consult the metadata and pdf scan. In most cases, the edition is not the first, but the earliest that can be found freely digitised on the internet. Eventually, these will hopefully be replaced by scans of first editions, with the transcriptions updated, when necessary. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans found on databases such as Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and Google Books; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions. 1. See Christine Schintgen. 'Dickens and the Specter of Materialism: The Spiritual Significance of Ghosts in the Christmas Books and Ghost Stories'. In The Theological Dickens. Routledge, 2021; Emily Moody. '"Implausible and inappropriate"?: A Defense of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Dickens Quarterly 37.4 (2020): pp. 393-408; Aubrey Plourde. '"Another Man from What I Was": Enchanted Reading and Ethical Selfhood in A Christmas Carol'. Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies 43.2 (Fall 2017): 271-286; Brandon Chitwood. 'Eternal Returns: A Christmas Carol's Ghosts of Repetition'. Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): pp. 675-687; Phillip V. Allingham. 'Charles "Carlo" Dickens In and Out of Italy in 1844: The Chimes'. Dickens Studies Annual 41 (2010): pp. 127-149; Michael Slater. 'Carlyle and Jerrold Into Dickens: A Study of The Chimes'. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24.4 (Mar 1970): pp. 506-52; David Raybin. 'Chaucer on the Hearth'. Dickens Studies Annual 49.1 (2018): pp. 1-25; Heather Anne Tilley. 'Sentiment and Vision in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth'. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 4 (2007): 1-22; Elisabeth G. Gitter. 'The Blind Daughter in Charles Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth'. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39.4 (Autumn 1999): pp. 675-689; Goldie Morgentaler. 'The Doppelganger Effect: Dickens, Heredity, and the Double in The Battle of Life'. Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 42 (2011): 159-175; Phillip V. Allingham. 'The Illustrations in Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain: Public and Private Spheres and Spaces'. Dickens Studies Annual 36 (2005): pp. 75-123. Short Story Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18481201 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. CHAPTER I The Gift Bestowed Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; "but that’s no rule," as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad. The dread word, Ghost, recals me. Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He did. Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity,—but might have said he looked like a haunted man? Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a byegone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man? Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a haunted man? Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory,—for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily,—who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour;—who that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too? Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on haunted ground? His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects, smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stacks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming top, when in all other places it was silent and still. His dwelling, at its heart and core—within doors—at his fireside—was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with its worm-eaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving downward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the town, yet so remote in fashion, age, and custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door was shut,—echoes, not confined to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth. You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the dead winter time. When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going down of the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that the forms of things were indistinct and big, but not wholly lost. When sitters by the fire began to see wild faces and figures, mountains and abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals. When people in the streets bent down their heads, and ran before the weather. When those who were obliged to meet it, were stopped at angry corners, stung by wandering snow-flakes alighting on the lashes of their eyes,—which fell too sparingly, and were blown away too quickly, to leave a trace upon the frozen ground. When windows of private houses closed up tight and warm. When lighted gas began to burst forth in the busy and the quiet streets, fast blackening otherwise. When stray pedestrians, shivering along the latter, looked down at the glowing fires in kitchens, and sharpened their sharp appetites by sniffing up the fragrance of whole miles of dinners. When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. When mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung above the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on rocks and headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birds breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead. When little readers of story-books, by the firelight, trembled to think of Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the Robbers’ Cave, or had some small misgivings that the fierce little old woman, with the crutch, who used to start out of the box in the merchant Abudah’s bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon the stairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey up to bed. When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of daylight died away from the ends of avenues; and the trees, arching overhead, were sullen and black. When, in parks and woods, the high wet fern and sodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks of trees, were lost to view, in masses of impenetrable shade. When mists arose from dyke, and fen, and river. When lights in old halls and in cottage windows, were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, the wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turnpike-gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in the fields, the labourer and team went home, and the striking of the church-clock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the church-yard wicket would be swung no more that night. When twilight everywhere released the shadows, prisoned up all day, that now closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts. When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowned out from behind half-opened doors. When they had full possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze. When they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself,—the very tongs upon the hearth, a straddling giant with his arms a-kimbo, evidently smelling the blood of Englishmen, and wanting to grind people’s bones to make his bread. When these shadows brought into the minds of older people, other thoughts, and showed them different images. When they stole from their retreats, in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past, from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things that might have been, and never were, are always wandering. When he sat, as already mentioned, gazing at the fire. When, as it rose and fell, the shadows went and came. When he took no heed of them, with his bodily eyes; but, let them come or let them go, looked fixedly at the fire. You should have seen him, then. When the sounds that had arisen with the shadows, and come out of their lurking-places at the twilight summons, seemed to make a deeper stillness all about him. When the wind was rumbling in the chimney, and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the house. When the old trees outside were so shaken and beaten, that one querulous old rook, unable to sleep, protested now and then, in a feeble, dozy, high-up "Caw!" When, at intervals, the window trembled, the rusty vane upon the turret-top complained, the clock beneath it recorded that another quarter of an hour was gone, or the fire collapsed and fell in with a rattle. —When a knock came at his door, in short, as he was sitting so, and roused him. "Who’s that?" said he. "Come in!" Surely there had been no figure leaning on the back of his chair; no face looking over it. It is certain that no gliding footstep touched the floor, as he lifted up his head, with a start, and spoke. And yet there was no mirror in the room on whose surface his own form could have cast its shadow for a moment; and Something had passed darkly and gone! "I’m humbly fearful, sir," said a fresh-coloured busy man, holding the door open with his foot for the admission of himself and a wooden tray he carried, and letting it go again by very gentle and careful degrees, when he and the tray had got in, lest it should close noisily, "that it’s a good bit past the time to-night. But Mrs. William has been taken off her legs so often"— "By the wind? Ay! I have heard it rising." "—By the wind, sir—that it’s a mercy she got home at all. Oh dear, yes. Yes. It was by the wind, Mr. Redlaw. By the wind." He had, by this time, put down the tray for dinner, and was employed in lighting the lamp, and spreading a cloth on the table. From this employment he desisted in a hurry, to stir and feed the fire, and then resumed it; the lamp he had lighted, and the blaze that rose under his hand, so quickly changing the appearance of the room, that it seemed as if the mere coming in of his fresh red face and active manner had made the pleasant alteration. "Mrs. William is of course subject at any time, sir, to be taken off her balance by the elements. She is not formed superior to that." "No," returned Mr. Redlaw good-naturedly, though abruptly. "No, sir. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Earth; as for example, last Sunday week, when sloppy and greasy, and she going out to tea with her newest sister-in-law, and having a pride in herself, and wishing to appear perfectly spotless though pedestrian. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Air; as being once over-persuaded by a friend to try a swing at Peckham Fair, which acted on her constitution instantly like a steam-boat. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Fire; as on a false alarm of engines at her mother’s, when she went two mile in her nightcap. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Water; as at Battersea, when rowed into the piers by her young nephew, Charley Swidger junior, aged twelve, which had no idea of boats whatever. But these are elements. Mrs. William must be taken out of elements for the strength of her character to come into play." As he stopped for a reply, the reply was "Yes," in the same tone as before. "Yes, sir. Oh dear, yes!" said Mr. Swidger, still proceeding with his preparations, and checking them off as he made them. "That’s where it is, sir. That’s what I always say myself, sir. Such a many of us Swidgers!—Pepper. Why there’s my father, sir, superannuated keeper and custodian of this Institution, eigh-ty-seven year old. He’s a Swidger!—Spoon." "True, William," was the patient and abstracted answer, when he stopped again. "Yes, sir," said Mr. Swidger. "That’s what I always say, sir. You may call him the trunk of the tree!—Bread. Then you come to his successor, my unworthy self—Salt—and Mrs. William, Swidgers both.—Knife and fork. Then you come to all my brothers and their families, Swidgers, man and woman, boy and girl. Why, what with cousins, uncles, aunts, and relationships of this, that, and t’other degree, and what-not degree, and marriages, and lyings-in, the Swidgers—Tumbler—might take hold of hands, and make a ring round England!" Receiving no reply at all here, from the thoughtful man whom he addressed, Mr. William approached him nearer, and made a feint of accidentally knocking the table with a decanter, to rouse him. The moment he succeeded, he went on, as if in great alacrity of acquiescence. "Yes, sir! That’s just what I say myself, sir. Mrs. William and me have often said so. ‘There’s Swidgers enough,’ we say, ‘without our voluntary contributions,’—Butter. In fact, sir, my father is a family in himself—Castors—to take care of; and it happens all for the best that we have no child of our own, though it’s made Mrs. William rather quiet-like, too. Quite ready for the fowl and mashed potatoes, sir? Mrs. William said she’d dish in ten minutes when I left the Lodge." "I am quite ready," said the other, waking as from a dream, and walking slowly to and fro. "Mrs. William has been at it again, sir!" said the keeper, as he stood warming a plate at the fire, and pleasantly shading his face with it. Mr. Redlaw stopped in his walking, and an expression of interest appeared in him. 'What I always say myself, sir. She will do it! There’s a motherly feeling in Mrs. William’s breast that must and will have went." "What has she done?" “Why, sir, not satisfied with being a sort of mother to all the young gentlemen that come up from a wariety of parts, to attend your courses of lectures at this ancient foundation—it's surprising how stone-chaney catches the heat this frosty weather, to be sure!” Here he turned the plate, and cooled his fingers. "Well?" said Mr. Redlaw. "That’s just what I say myself, sir," returned Mr. William, speaking over his shoulder, as if in ready and delighted assent. "That’s exactly where it is, sir! There ain’t one of our students but appears to regard Mrs. William in that light. Every day, right through the course, they puts their heads into the Lodge, one after another, and have all got something to tell her, or something to ask her. ‘Swidge’ is the appellation by which they speak of Mrs. William in general, among themselves, I’m told; but that’s what I say, sir. Better be called ever so far out of your name, if it’s done in real liking, than have it made ever so much of, and not cared about! What’s a name for? To know a person by. If Mrs. William is known by something better than her name—I allude to Mrs. William’s qualities and disposition—never mind her name, though it is Swidger, by rights. Let ’em call her Swidge, Widge, Bridge—Lord! London Bridge, Blackfriars', Chelsea, Putney, Waterloo, or Hammersmith Suspension—if they like!" The close of this triumphant oration brought him and the plate to the table, upon which he half laid and half dropped it, with a lively sense of its being thoroughly heated, just as the subject of his praises entered the room, bearing another tray and a lantern, and followed by a venerable old man with long grey hair. Mrs. William, like Mr. William, was a simple, innocent-looking person, in whose smooth cheeks the cheerful red of her husband’s official waistcoat was very pleasantly repeated. But whereas Mr. William’s light hair stood on end all over his head, and seemed to draw his eyes up with it in an excess of bustling readiness for anything, the dark brown hair of Mrs. William was carefully smoothed down, and waved away under a trim tidy cap, in the most exact and quiet manner imaginable. Whereas Mr. William’s very trousers hitched themselves up at the ankles, as if it were not in their iron-grey nature to rest without looking about them, Mrs. William’s neatly-flowered skirts—red and white, like her own pretty face—were as composed and orderly, as if the very wind that blew so hard out of doors could not disturb one of their folds. Whereas his coat had something of a fly-away and half-off appearance about the collar and breast, her little bodice was so placid and neat, that there should have been protection for her, in it, had she needed any, with the roughest people. Who could have had the heart to make so calm a bosom swell with grief, or throb with fear, or flutter with a thought of shame! To whom would its repose and peace have not appealed against disturbance, like the innocent slumber of a child! "Punctual, of course, Milly," said her husband, relieving her of the tray, "or it wouldn’t be you. Here’s Mrs. William, sir!—He looks lonelier than ever to-night," whispering to his wife, as he was taking the tray, "and ghostlier altogether." Without any show of hurry or noise, or any show of herself even, she was so calm and quiet, Milly set the dishes she had brought upon the table,—Mr. William, after much clattering and running about, having only gained possession of a butter-boat of gravy, which he stood ready to serve. "What is that the old man has in his arms?" asked Mr. Redlaw, as he sat down to his solitary meal. "Holly, sir," replied the quiet voice of Milly. "That’s what I say myself, sir," interposed Mr. William, striking in with the butter-boat. "Berries is so seasonable to the time of year!—Brown gravy!" "Another Christmas come, another year gone!" murmured the Chemist, with a gloomy sigh. "More figures in the lengthening sum of recollection that we work and work at to our torment, till Death idly jumbles all together, and rubs all out. So, Philip!" breaking off, and raising his voice as he addressed the old man, standing apart, with his glistening burden in his arms, from which the quiet Mrs. William took small branches, which she noiselessly trimmed with her scissors, and decorated the room with, while her aged father-in-law looked on much interested in the ceremony. "My duty to you, sir," returned the old man. "Should have spoke before, sir, but know your ways, Mr. Redlaw—proud to say—and wait till spoke to! Merry Christmas, sir, and Happy New Year, and many of ’em. Have had a pretty many of ’em myself—ha, ha!—and may take the liberty of wishing ’em. I’m eighty-seven!" "Have you had so many that were merry and happy?" asked the other. "Ay, sir, ever so many," returned the old man. "Is his memory impaired with age? It is to be expected now," said Mr. Redlaw, turning to the son, and speaking lower. "Not a morsel of it, sir," replied Mr. William. "That’s exactly what I say myself, sir. There never was such a memory as my father’s. He’s the most wonderful man in the world. He don’t know what forgetting means. It’s the very observation I’m always making to Mrs. William, sir, if you’ll believe me!" Mr. Swidger, in his polite desire to seem to acquiesce at all events, delivered this as if there were no iota of contradiction in it, and it were all said in unbounded and unqualified assent. The Chemist pushed his plate away, and, rising from the table, walked across the room to where the old man stood looking at a little sprig of holly in his hand. "It recalls the time when many of those years were old and new, then?" he said, observing him attentively, and touching him on the shoulder. "Does it?" "Oh many, many!" said Philip, half awaking from his reverie. 'I’m eighty-seven!" "Merry and happy, was it?" asked the Chemist in a low voice. "Merry and happy, old man?" "Maybe as high as that, no higher," said the old man, holding out his hand a little way above the level of his knee, and looking retrospectively at his questioner, "when I first remember ’em! Cold, sunshiny day it was, out a-walking, when some one—it was my mother as sure as you stand there, though I don’t know what her blessed face was like, for she took ill and died that Christmas-time—told me they were food for birds. The pretty little fellow thought—that’s me, you understand—that birds’ eyes were so bright, perhaps, because the berries that they lived on in the winter were so bright. I recollect that. And I’m eighty-seven!" "Merry and happy!" mused the other, bending his dark eyes upon the stooping figure, with a smile of compassion. "Merry and happy—and remember well?" "Ay, ay, ay!" resumed the old man, catching the last words. “I remember 'em well in my school time, year after year, and all the merry-making that used to come along with them. I was a strong chap then, Mr. Redlaw; and, if you'll believe me, hadn't my match at football within ten mile. Where's my son William? Hadn't my match at foot-ball, William, within ten mile!' "That's what I always say, father!" returned the son promptly, and with great respect. "You ARE a Swidger, if ever there was one of the family!" "Dear!" said the old man, shaking his head as he again looked at the holly. "His mother—my son William's my youngest son—and I, have sat among 'em all, boys and girls, little children and babies, many a year, when the berries like these were not shining half so bright all round us, as their bright faces. Many of 'em are gone; she's gone; and my son George (our eldest, who was her pride more than all the rest!) is fallen very low: but I can see them, when I look here, alive and healthy, as they used to be in those days; and I can see him, thank God, in his innocence. It's a blessed thing to me, at eighty-seven." The keen look that had been fixed upon him with so much earnestness, had gradually sought the ground. "When my circumstances got to be not so good as formerly, through not being honestly dealt by, and I first come here to be custodian," said the old man, "—which was upwards of fifty years ago—where's my son William? More than half a century ago, William!" "That’s what I say, father," replied the son, as promptly and dutifully as before, "that’s exactly where it is. Two times ought’s an ought, and twice five ten, and there's a hundred of ’em." "It was quite a pleasure to know that one of our founders—or more correctly speaking," said the old man, with a great glory in his subject and his knowledge of it, "one of the learned gentlemen that helped endow us in Queen Elizabeth’s time, for we were founded afore her day—left in his will, among the other bequests he made us, so much to buy holly, for garnishing the walls and windows, come Christmas. There was something homely and friendly in it. Being but strange here, then, and coming at Christmas time, we took a liking for his very picter that hangs in what used to be, anciently, afore our ten poor gentlemen commuted for an annual stipend in money, our great Dinner Hall.—A sedate gentleman in a peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck, and a scroll below him, in old English letters, 'Lord! keep my memory green!' You know all about him, Mr. Redlaw?" "I know the portrait hangs there, Philip." "Yes, sure, it's the second on the right, above the panelling. I was going to say—he has helped to keep my memory green, I thank him; for going round the building every year, as I'm a doing now, and freshening up the bare rooms with these branches and berries, freshens up my bare old brain. One year brings back another, and that year another, and those others numbers! At last, it seems to me as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in,—and they're a pretty many, for I’m eighty-seven!" "Merry and happy," murmured Redlaw to himself. The room began to darken strangely. "So you see, sir," pursued old Philip, whose hale wintry cheek had warmed into a ruddier glow, and whose blue eyes had brightened while he spoke, "I have plenty to keep, when I keep this present season. Now, where’s my quiet Mouse? Chattering's the sin of my time of life, and there's half the building to do yet, if the cold don't freeze us first, or the wind don't blow us away, or the darkness don't swallow us up." The quiet Mouse had brought her calm face to his side, and silently taken his arm, before he finished speaking. "Come away, my dear," said the old man. "Mr. Redlaw won't settle to his dinner, otherwise, till it's cold as the winter. I hope you'll excuse me rambling on, sir, and I wish you good night, and, once again, a merry—" "Stay!" said Mr. Redlaw, resuming his place at the table, more, it would have seemed from his manner, to reassure the old keeper, than in any remembrance of his own appetite. "Spare me another moment, Philip. William, you were going to tell me something to your excellent wife’s honour. It will not be disagreeable to her to hear you praise her. What was it?" "Why, that’s where it is, you see, sir," returned Mr. William Swidger, looking towards his wife in considerable embarrassment. "Mrs. William's got her eye upon me." "But you're not afraid of Mrs. William’s eye?" "Why, no, sir," returned Mr. Swidger, "that’s what I say myself. It wasn't made to be afraid of. It wouldn’t have been made so mild, if that was the intention. But I wouldn’t like to—Milly!—him, you know. Down in the Buildings." Mr. William, standing behind the table, and rummaging disconcertedly among the objects upon it, directed persuasive glances at Mrs. William, and secret jerks of his head and thumb at Mr. Redlaw, as alluring her towards him. "Him, you know, my love," said Mr. William. "Down in the Buildings. Tell, my dear! You’re the works of Shakespeare in comparison with myself. Down in the Buildings, you know, my love.—Student." "Student?" repeated Mr. Redlaw, raising his head. "That’s what I say, sir!" cried Mr. William, in the utmost animation of assent. "If it wasn't the poor student down in the Buildings, why should you wish to hear it from Mrs. William’s lips? Mrs. William, my dear—Buildings." "I didn’t know," said Milly, with a quiet frankness, free from any haste or confusion, "that William had said anything about it, or I wouldn't have come. I asked him not to. It's a sick young gentleman, sir—and very poor, I am afraid—who is too ill to go home this holiday-time, and lives, unknown to any one, in but a common kind of lodging for a gentleman, down in Jerusalem Buildings. That's all, sir." "Why have I never heard of him?" said the Chemist, rising hurriedly. "Why has he not made his situation known to me? Sick!—give me my hat and cloak. Poor!—what house?—what number?" "Oh, you mustn’t go there, sir," said Milly, leaving her father-in-law, and calmly confronting him with her collected little face and folded hands. "Not go there?" "Oh dear, no!" said Milly, shaking her head as at a most manifest and self-evident impossibility. "It couldn’t be thought of!" "What do you mean? Why not?" "Why, you see, sir," said Mr. William Swidger, persuasively and confidentially, "that's what I say. Depend upon it, the young gentleman would never have made his situation known to one of his own sex. Mrs. Williams has got into his confidence, but that's quite different. They all confide in Mrs. William; they all trust her. A man, sir, couldn't have got a whisper out of him; but woman, sir, and Mrs. William combined—!" "There is good sense and delicacy in what you say, William," returned Mr. Redlaw, observant of the gentle and composed face at his shoulder. And laying his finger on his lip, he secretly put his purse into her hand. "Oh dear no, sir!" cried Milly, giving it back again. "Worse and worse! Couldn’t be dreamed of!" Such a staid matter-of-fact housewife she was, and so unruffled by the momentary haste of this rejection, that, an instant afterwards, she was tidily picking up a few leaves which had strayed from between her scissors and her apron, when she had arranged the holly. Finding, when she rose from her stooping posture, that Mr. Redlaw was still regarding her with doubt and astonishment, she quietly repeated—looking about, the while, for any other fragments that might have escaped her observation: "Oh dear no, sir! He said that of all the world he would not be known to you, or receive help from you—though he is a student in your class. I have made no terms of secrecy with you, but I trust to your honour completely." "Why did he say so?" "Indeed I can’t tell, sir," said Milly, after thinking a little, "because I am not at all clever, you know; and I wanted to be useful to him in making things neat and comfortable about him, and employed myself that way. But I know he is poor, and lonely, and I think he is somehow neglected too.—How dark it is!" The room had darkened more and more. There was a very heavy gloom and shadow gathering behind the Chemist’s chair. "What more about him?" he asked. "He is engaged to be married when he can afford it," said Milly, "and is studying, I think, to qualify himself to earn a living. I have seen, a long time, that he has studied hard and denied himself much.—How very dark it is!" "It's turned colder, too," said the old man, rubbing his hands. "There’s a chill and dismal feeling in the room. Where's my son William? William, my boy, turn the lamp, and rouse the fire!" Milly’s voice resumed, like quiet music very softly played: "He muttered in his broken sleep yesterday afternoon, after talking to me" (this was to herself) "about some one dead, and some great wrong done that could never be forgotten; but whether to him or to another person, I don’t know. Not by him, I am sure." "And, in short, Mrs. William, you see—which she wouldn't say herself, Mr. Redlaw, if she was to stop here till the new year after this next one—" said Mr. William, coming up to him to speak in his ear, "has done him worlds of good! Bless you, worlds of good! All at home just the same as ever—my father made as snug and comfortable—not a crumb of litter to be found in the house, if you were to offer fifty pound ready money for it—Mrs. William apparently never out of the way—yet Mrs. William backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, up and down, up and down, a mother to him!" The room turned darker and colder, and the gloom and shadow gathering behind the chair was heavier. "Not content with this, sir, Mrs. William goes and finds, this very night, when she was coming home (why it's not above a couple of hours ago), a creature more like a young wild beast than a young child, shivering upon a door-step. What does Mrs. William do, but brings it home to dry it, and feed it, and keep it till our old Bounty of food and flannel is given away, on Christmas morning! If it ever felt a fire before, it's as much as ever it did; for it's sitting in the old Lodge chimney, staring at ours as if its ravenous eyes would never shut again. It's sitting there, at least," said Mr. William, correcting himself, on reflection, "unless it’s bolted!" "Heaven keep her happy!" said the Chemist aloud, "and you too, Philip! and you, William! I must consider what to do in this. I may desire to see this student, I’ll not detain you any longer now. Good-night!" "I thank’ee, sir, I thank’ee!" said the old man, "for Mouse, and for my son William, and for myself. Where's my son William? William, you take the lantern and go on first, through them long dark passages, as you did last year and the year afore. Ha ha! I remember—though I'm eighty-seven! 'Lord, keep my memory green!' It’s a very good prayer, Mr. Redlaw, that of the learned gentleman in the peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck—hangs up, second on the right above the panelling, in what used to be, afore our ten poor gentlemen commuted, our great Dinner Hall. 'Lord, keep my memory green!' It's very good and pious, sir. Amen! Amen!" As they passed out and shut the heavy door, which, however carefully withheld, fired a long train of thundering reverberations when it shut at last, the room turned darker. As he fell a-musing in his chair alone, the healthy holly withered on the wall, and dropped—dead branches. As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees,—or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process—not to be traced by any human sense,—an awful likeness of himself! Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound. As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with its appalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore. This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. This was the dread companion of the haunted man! It took, for some moments, no more apparent heed of him, than he of it. The Christmas Waits were playing somewhere in the distance, and, through his thoughtfulness, he seemed to listen to the music. It seemed to listen too. At length he spoke; without moving or lifting up his face. "Here again!" he said. "Here again," replied the Phantom. "I see you in the fire," said the haunted man; "I hear you in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night." The Phantom moved its head, assenting. "Why do you come, to haunt me thus?" "I come as I am called," replied the Ghost. "No. Unbidden," exclaimed the Chemist. "Unbidden be it," said the Spectre. "It is enough. I am here." Hitherto the light of the fire had shone on the two faces—if the dread lineaments behind the chair might be called a face—both addressed towards it, as at first, and neither looking at the other. But, now, the haunted man turned, suddenly, and stared upon the Ghost. The Ghost, as sudden in its motion, passed to before the chair, and stared on him. The living man, and the animated image of himself dead, might so have looked, the one upon the other. An awful survey, in a lonely and remote part of an empty old pile of building, on a winter night, with the loud wind going by upon its journey of mystery—whence or whither, no man knowing since the world began—and the stars, in unimaginable millions, glittering through it, from eternal space, where the world’s bulk is as a grain, and its hoary age is infancy. "Look upon me!" said the Spectre. "I am he, neglected in my youth, and miserably poor, who strove and suffered, and still strove and suffered, until I hewed out knowledge from the mine where it was buried, and made rugged steps thereof, for my worn feet to rest and rise on." "I am that man," returned the Chemist. "No mother’s self-denying love," pursued the Phantom, "no father’s counsel, aided me. A stranger came into my father’s place when I was but a child, and I was easily an alien from my mother’s heart. My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done; who cast their offspring loose, early, as birds do theirs; and, if they do well, claim the merit; and, if ill, the pity." It paused, and seemed to tempt and goad him with its look, and with the manner of its speech, and with its smile. "I am he," pursued the Phantom, "who, in this struggle upward, found a friend. I made him—won him—bound him to me! We worked together, side by side. All the love and confidence that in my earlier youth had had no outlet, and found no expression, I bestowed on him." "Not all," said Redlaw, hoarsely. 'No, not all," returned the Phantom. "I had a sister." The haunted man, with his head resting on his hands, replied "I had!" The Phantom, with an evil smile, drew closer to the chair, and resting its chin upon its folded hands, its folded hands upon the back, and looking down into his face with searching eyes, that seemed instinct with fire, went on: "Such glimpses of the light of home as I had ever known, had streamed from her. How young she was, how fair, how loving! I took her to the first poor roof that I was master of, and made it rich. She came into the darkness of my life, and made it bright.—She is before me!" "I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night," returned the haunted man. "Did he love her?" said the Phantom, echoing his contemplative tone. "I think he did, once. I am sure he did. Better had she loved him less—less secretly, less dearly, from the shallower depths of a more divided heart!" "Let me forget it!" said the Chemist, with an angry motion of his hand. "Let me blot it from my memory!" The Spectre, without stirring, and with its unwinking, cruel eyes still fixed upon his face, went on: "A dream, like hers, stole upon my own life." "It did," said Redlaw. "A love, as like hers," pursued the Phantom, "as my inferior nature might cherish, arose in my own heart. I was too poor to bind its object to my fortune then, by any thread of promise or entreaty. I loved her far too well, to seek to do it. But, more than ever I had striven in my life, I strove to climb! Only an inch gained, brought me something nearer to the height. I toiled up! In the late pauses of my labour at that time,—my sister (sweet companion!) still sharing with me the expiring embers and the cooling hearth,—when day was breaking, what pictures of the future did I see!" "I saw them, in the fire, but now," he murmured. "They come back to me in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years." "—Pictures of my own domestic life, in aftertime, with her who was the inspiration of my toil. Pictures of my sister, made the wife of my dear friend, on equal terms—for he had some inheritance, we none—pictures of our sobered age and mellowed happiness, and of the golden links, extending back so far, that should bind us, and our children, in a radiant garland," said the Phantom. "Pictures," said the haunted man, "that were delusions. Why is it my doom to remember them too well!" "Delusions," echoed the Phantom in its changeless voice, and glaring on him with its changeless eyes. "For my friend (in whose breast my confidence was locked as in my own), passing between me and the centre of the system of my hopes and struggles, won her to himself, and shattered my frail universe. My sister, doubly dear, doubly devoted, doubly cheerful in my home, lived on to see me famous, and my old ambition so rewarded when its spring was broken, and then—" "Then died," he interposed. "Died, gentle as ever; happy; and with no concern but for her brother. Peace!" The Phantom watched him silently. "Remembered!" said the haunted man, after a pause. "Yes. So well remembered, that even now, when years have passed, and nothing is more idle or more visionary to me than the boyish love so long outlived, I think of it with sympathy, as if it were a younger brother’s or a son’s. Sometimes I even wonder when her heart first inclined to him, and how it had been affected towards me.—Not lightly, once, I think.—But that is nothing. Early unhappiness, a wound from a hand I loved and trusted, and a loss that nothing can replace, outlive such fancies." "Thus," said the Phantom, "I bear within me a Sorrow and a Wrong. Thus I prey upon myself. Thus, memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!" "Mocker!" said the Chemist, leaping up, and making, with a wrathful hand, at the throat of his other self. "Why have I always that taunt in my ears?" "Forbear!" exclaimed the Spectre in an awful voice. "Lay a hand on Me, and die!" He stopped midway, as if its words had paralysed him, and stood looking on it. It had glided from him; it had its arm raised high in warning; and a smile passed over its unearthly features, as it reared its dark figure in triumph. "If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would," the Ghost repeated. "If I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!" "Evil spirit of myself," returned the haunted man, in a low, trembling tone, "my life is darkened by that incessant whisper." "It is an echo," said the Phantom. "If it be an echo of my thoughts—as now, indeed, I know it is," rejoined the haunted man, "why should I, therefore, be tormented? It is not a selfish thought. I suffer it to range beyond myself. All men and women have their sorrows,—most of them their wrongs; ingratitude, and sordid jealousy, and interest, besetting all degrees of life. Who would not forget their sorrows and their wrongs?" "Who would not, truly, and be happier and better for it?" said the Phantom. "These revolutions of years, which we commemorate," proceeded Redlaw, "what do they recall! Are there any minds in which they do not re-awaken some sorrow, or some trouble? What is the remembrance of the old man who was here to-night? A tissue of sorrow and trouble." "But common natures," said the Phantom, with its evil smile upon its glassy face, "unenlightened minds and ordinary spirits, do not feel or reason on these things like men of higher cultivation and profounder thought." "Tempter," answered Redlaw, "whose hollow look and voice I dread more than words can express, and from whom some dim foreshadowing of greater fear is stealing over me while I speak, I hear again an echo of my own mind." "Receive it as a proof that I am powerful," returned the Ghost. "Hear what I offer! Forget the sorrow, wrong, and trouble you have known!" "Forget them!" he repeated. "I have the power to cancel their remembrance—to leave but very faint, confused traces of them, that will die out soon," returned the Spectre. "Say! Is it done?" "Stay!" cried the haunted man, arresting by a terrified gesture the uplifted hand. "I tremble with distrust and doubt of you; and the dim fear you cast upon me deepens into a nameless horror I can hardly bear.—I would not deprive myself of any kindly recollection, or any sympathy that is good for me, or others. What shall I lose, if I assent to this? What else will pass from my remembrance?" "No knowledge; no result of study; nothing but the intertwisted chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn dependent on, and nourished by, the banished recollections. Those will go." "Are they so many?" said the haunted man, reflecting in alarm. "They have been wont to show themselves in the fire, in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years," returned the Phantom scornfully. "In nothing else?" The Phantom held its peace. But having stood before him, silent, for a little while, it moved towards the fire; then stopped. "Decide!" it said, "before the opportunity is lost!" "A moment! I call Heaven to witness," said the agitated man, "that I have never been a hater of any kind,—never morose, indifferent, or hard, to anything around me. If, living here alone, I have made too much of all that was and might have been, and too little of what is, the evil, I believe, has fallen on me, and not on others. But, if there were poison in my body, should I not, possessed of antidotes and knowledge how to use them, use them? If there be poison in my mind, and through this fearful shadow I can cast it out, shall I not cast it out?" "Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?" "A moment longer!" he answered hurriedly. "I would forget it if I could! Have I thought that, alone, or has it been the thought of thousands upon thousands, generation after generation? All human memory is fraught with sorrow and trouble. My memory is as the memory of other men, but other men have not this choice. Yes, I close the bargain. Yes! I WILL forget my sorrow, wrong, and trouble!" "Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?" "It is!" "It is. And take this with you, man whom I here renounce! The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will. Without recovering yourself the power that you have yielded up, you shall henceforth destroy its like in all whom you approach. Your wisdom has discovered that the memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble is the lot of all mankind, and that mankind would be the happier, in its other memories, without it. Go! Be its benefactor! Freed from such remembrance, from this hour, carry involuntarily the blessing of such freedom with you. Its diffusion is inseparable and inalienable from you. Go! Be happy in the good you have won, and in the good you do!" The Phantom, which had held its bloodless hand above him while it spoke, as if in some unholy invocation, or some ban; and which had gradually advanced its eyes so close to his, that he could see how they did not participate in the terrible smile upon its face, but were a fixed, unalterable, steady horror; melted before him and was gone. As he stood rooted to the spot, possessed by fear and wonder, and imagining he heard repeated in melancholy echoes, dying away fainter and fainter, the words, "Destroy its like in all whom you approach!" a shrill cry reached his ears. It came, not from the passages beyond the door, but from another part of the old building, and sounded like the cry of some one in the dark who had lost the way. He looked confusedly upon his hands and limbs, as if to be assured of his identity, and then shouted in reply, loudly and wildly; for there was a strangeness and terror upon him, as if he too were lost. The cry responding, and being nearer, he caught up the lamp, and raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to pass into and out of the theatre where he lectured,—which adjoined his room. Associated with youth and animation, and a high amphitheatre of faces which his entrance charmed to interest in a moment, it was a ghostly place when all this life was faded out of it, and stared upon him like an emblem of Death. "Halloa!" he cried. "Halloa! This way! Come to the light!" When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and crouched down in a corner. "What is it?" he said, hastily. He might have asked "What is it?" even had he seen it well, as presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered up in its corner. A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant’s, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man’s. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy,—ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast. Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow. "I’ll bite," he said, "if you hit me!" The time had been, and not many minutes since, when such a sight as this would have wrung the Chemist’s heart. He looked upon it now, coldly; but with a heavy effort to remember something—he did not know what—he asked the boy what he did there, and whence he came. "Where’s the woman?" he replied. "I want to find the woman." "Who?" "The woman. Her that brought me here, and set me by the large fire. She was so long gone, that I went to look for her, and lost myself. I don’t want you. I want the woman." He made a spring, so suddenly, to get away, that the dull sound of his naked feet upon the floor was near the curtain, when Redlaw caught him by his rags. "Come! you let me go!" muttered the boy, struggling, and clenching his teeth. "I’ve done nothing to you. Let me go, will you, to the woman!" "That is not the way. There is a nearer one," said Redlaw, detaining him, in the same blank effort to remember some association that ought, of right, to bear upon this monstrous object. "What is your name?" "Got none." "Where do you live?" "Live! What’s that?" The boy shook his hair from his eyes to look at him for a moment, and then, twisting round his legs and wrestling with him, broke again into his repetition of "You let me go, will you? I want to find the woman." The Chemist led him to the door. "This way," he said, looking at him still confusedly, but with repugnance and avoidance, growing out of his coldness. "I’ll take you to her." The sharp eyes in the child’s head, wandering round the room, lighted on the table where the remnants of the dinner were. "Give me some of that!" he said, covetously. "Has she not fed you?" "I shall be hungry again to-morrow, sha’n’t I? Ain’t I hungry every day?" Finding himself released, he bounded at the table like some small animal of prey, and hugging to his breast bread and meat, and his own rags, all together, said: "There! Now take me to the woman!" As the Chemist, with a new-born dislike to touch him, sternly motioned him to follow, and was going out of the door, he trembled and stopped. "The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!" The Phantom’s words were blowing in the wind, and the wind blew chill upon him. "I’ll not go there, to-night," he murmured faintly. "I’ll go nowhere to-night. Boy! straight down this long-arched passage, and past the great dark door into the yard,—you will see the fire shining on the window there." "The woman’s fire?" inquired the boy. He nodded, and the naked feet had sprung away. He came back with his lamp, locked his door hastily, and sat down in his chair, covering his face like one who was frightened at himself. For now he was, indeed, alone. Alone, alone. CHAPTER II The Gift Diffused A small man sat in a small parlour, partitioned off from a small shop by a small screen, pasted all over with small scraps of newspapers. In company with the small man, was almost any amount of small children you may please to name—at least it seemed so; they made, in that very limited sphere of action, such an imposing effect, in point of numbers. Of these small fry, two had, by some strong machinery, been got into bed in a corner, where they might have reposed snugly enough in the sleep of innocence, but for a constitutional propensity to keep awake, and also to scuffle in and out of bed. The immediate occasion of these predatory dashes at the waking world, was the construction of an oyster-shell wall in a corner, by two other youths of tender age; on which fortification the two in bed made harassing descents (like those accursed Picts and Scots who beleaguer the early historical studies of most young Britons), and then withdrew to their own territory. In addition to the stir attendant on these inroads, and the retorts of the invaded, who pursued hotly, and made lunges at the bed-clothes under which the marauders took refuge, another little boy, in another little bed, contributed his mite of confusion to the family stock, by casting his boots upon the waters; in other words, by launching these and several small objects, inoffensive in themselves, though of a hard substance considered as missiles, at the disturbers of his repose,—who were not slow to return these compliments. Besides which, another little boy—the biggest there, but still little—was tottering to and fro, bent on one side, and considerably affected in his knees by the weight of a large baby, which he was supposed by a fiction that obtains sometimes in sanguine families, to be hushing to sleep. But oh! the inexhaustible regions of contemplation and watchfulness into which this baby’s eyes were then only beginning to compose themselves to stare, over his unconscious shoulder! It was a very Moloch of a baby, on whose insatiate altar the whole existence of this particular young brother was offered up a daily sacrifice. Its personality may be said to have consisted in its never being quiet, in any one place, for five consecutive minutes, and never going to sleep when required. "Tetterby’s baby" was as well known in the neighbourhood as the postman or the pot-boy. It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the Tumblers or the Monkey, and came up, all on one side, a little too late for everything that was attractive, from Monday morning until Saturday night. Wherever childhood congregated to play, there was little Moloch making Johnny fag and toil. Wherever Johnny desired to stay, little Moloch became fractious, and would not remain. Whenever Johnny wanted to go out, Moloch was asleep, and must be watched. Whenever Johnny wanted to stay at home, Moloch was awake, and must be taken out. Yet Johnny was verily persuaded that it was a faultless baby, without its peer in the realm of England, and was quite content to catch meek glimpses of things in general from behind its skirts, or over its limp flapping bonnet, and to go staggering about with it like a very little porter with a very large parcel, which was not directed to anybody, and could never be delivered anywhere. The small man who sat in the small parlour, making fruitless attempts to read his newspaper peaceably in the midst of this disturbance, was the father of the family, and the chief of the firm described in the inscription over the little shop front, by the name and title of A. Tetterby and Co., Newsmen. Indeed, strictly speaking, he was the only personage answering to that designation, as Co. was a mere poetical abstraction, altogether baseless and impersonal. Tetterby’s was the corner shop in Jerusalem Buildings. There was a good show of literature in the window, chiefly consisting of picture-newspapers out of date, and serial pirates, and footpads. Walking-sticks, likewise, and marbles, were included in the stock in trade. It had once extended into the light confectionery line; but it would seem that those elegancies of life were not in demand about Jerusalem Buildings, for nothing connected with that branch of commerce remained in the window, except a sort of small glass lantern containing a languishing mass of bull’s-eyes, which had melted in the summer and congealed in the winter until all hope of ever getting them out, or of eating them without eating the lantern too, was gone for ever. Tetterby’s had tried its hand at several things. It had once made a feeble little dart at the toy business; for, in another lantern, there was a heap of minute wax dolls, all sticking together upside down, in the direst confusion, with their feet on one another’s heads, and a precipitate of broken arms and legs at the bottom. It had made a move in the millinery direction, which a few dry, wiry bonnet-shapes remained in a corner of the window to attest. It had fancied that a living might lie hidden in the tobacco trade, and had stuck up a representation of a native of each of the three integral portions of the British Empire, in the act of consuming that fragrant weed; with a poetic legend attached, importing that united in one cause they sat and joked, one chewed tobacco, one took snuff, one smoked: but nothing seemed to have come of it—except flies. Time had been when it had put a forlorn trust in imitative jewellery, for in one pane of glass there was a card of cheap seals, and another of pencil-cases, and a mysterious black amulet of inscrutable intention, labelled ninepence. But, to that hour, Jerusalem Buildings had bought none of them. In short, Tetterby’s had tried so hard to get a livelihood out of Jerusalem Buildings in one way or other, and appeared to have done so indifferently in all, that the best position in the firm was too evidently Co.’s; Co., as a bodiless creation, being untroubled with the vulgar inconveniences of hunger and thirst, being chargeable neither to the poor’s-rates nor the assessed taxes, and having no young family to provide for. Tetterby himself, however, in his little parlour, as already mentioned, having the presence of a young family impressed upon his mind in a manner too clamorous to be disregarded, or to comport with the quiet perusal of a newspaper, laid down his paper, wheeled, in his distraction, a few times round the parlour, like an undecided carrier-pigeon, made an ineffectual rush at one or two flying little figures in bed-gowns that skimmed past him, and then, bearing suddenly down upon the only unoffending member of the family, boxed the ears of little Moloch’s nurse. "You bad boy!" said Mr. Tetterby, "haven’t you any feeling for your poor father after the fatigues and anxieties of a hard winter’s day, since five o’clock in the morning, but must you wither his rest, and corrode his latest intelligence, with your wicious tricks? Isn’t it enough, sir, that your brother 'Dolphus is toiling and moiling in the fog and cold, and you rolling in the lap of luxury with a—with a baby, and everything you can wish for," said Mr. Tetterby, heaping this up as a great climax of blessings, "but must you make a wilderness of home, and maniacs of your parents? Must you, Johnny? Hey?" At each interrogation, Mr. Tetterby made a feint of boxing his ears again, but thought better of it, and held his hand. "Oh, father!" whimpered Johnny, "when I wasn’t doing anything, I'm sure, but taking such care of Sally, and getting her to sleep. Oh, father!" "I wish my little woman would come home!" said Mr. Tetterby, relenting and repenting, "I only wish my little woman would come home! I ain’t fit to deal with ’em. They make my head go round, and get the better of me. Oh, Johnny! Isn’t it enough that your dear mother has provided you with that sweet sister?" indicating Moloch; "isn’t it enough that you were seven boys before without a ray of gal, and that your dear mother went through what she did go through, on purpose that you might all of you have a little sister, but must you so behave yourself as to make my head swim?" Softening more and more, as his own tender feelings and those of his injured son were worked on, Mr. Tetterby concluded by embracing him, and immediately breaking away to catch one of the real delinquents. A reasonably good start occurring, he succeeded, after a short but smart run, and some rather severe cross-country work under and over the bedsteads, and in and out among the intricacies of the chairs, in capturing this infant, whom he condignly punished, and bore to bed. This example had a powerful, and apparently, mesmeric influence on him of the boots, who instantly fell into a deep sleep, though he had been, but a moment before, broad awake, and in the highest possible feather. Nor was it lost upon the two young architects, who retired to bed, in an adjoining closet, with great privacy and speed. The comrade of the Intercepted One also shrinking into his nest with similar discretion, Mr. Tetterby, when he paused for breath, found himself unexpectedly in a scene of peace. "My little woman herself," said Mr. Tetterby, wiping his flushed face, "could hardly have done it better! I only wish my little woman had had it to do, I do indeed!" Mr. Tetterby sought upon his screen for a passage appropriate to be impressed upon his children’s minds on the occasion, and read the following. "'It is an undoubted fact that all remarkable men have had remarkable mothers, and have respected them in after life as their best friends.' Think of your own remarkable mother, my boys," said Mr. Tetterby, "and know her value while she is still among you!" He sat down again in his chair by the fire, and composed himself, cross-legged, over his newspaper. "Let anybody, I don’t care who it is, get out of bed again," said Tetterby, as a general proclamation, delivered in a very soft-hearted manner, "and astonishment will be the portion of that respected contemporary!"—which expression Mr. Tetterby selected from his screen. "Johnny, my child, take care of your only sister, Sally; for she’s the brightest gem that ever sparkled on your early brow." Johnny sat down on a little stool, and devotedly crushed himself beneath the weight of Moloch. "Ah, what a gift that baby is to you, Johnny!" said his father, "and how thankful you ought to be! 'It is not generally known, Johnny,'" he was now referring to the screen again, "'but it is a fact ascertained, by accurate calculations, that the following immense percentage of babies never attain to two years old; that is to say—'" "Oh, don’t, father, please!" cried Johnny. "I can’t bear it, when I think of Sally." Mr. Tetterby desisting, Johnny, with a profound sense of his trust, wiped his eyes, and hushed his sister. "Your brother 'Dolphus," said his father, poking the fire, "is late to-night, Johnny, and will come home like a lump of ice. What's got your precious mother?" "Here's mother, and 'Dolphus too, father!" exclaimed Johnny, "I think." "You’re right!" returned his father, listening. "Yes, that’s the footstep of my little woman." The process of induction, by which Mr. Tetterby had come to the conclusion that his wife was a little woman, was his own secret. She would have made two editions of himself, very easily. Considered as an individual, she was rather remarkable for being robust and portly; but considered with reference to her husband, her dimensions became magnificent. Nor did they assume a less imposing proportion, when studied with reference to the size of her seven sons, who were but diminutive. In the case of Sally, however, Mrs. Tetterby had asserted herself, at last; as nobody knew better than the victim Johnny, who weighed and measured that exacting idol every hour in the day. Mrs. Tetterby, who had been marketing, and carried a basket, threw back her bonnet and shawl, and sitting down, fatigued, commanded Johnny to bring his sweet charge to her straightway, for a kiss. Johnny having complied, and gone back to his stool, and again crushed himself, Master Adolphus Tetterby, who had by this time unwound his torso out of a prismatic comforter, apparently interminable, requested the same favour. Johnny having again complied, and again gone back to his stool, and again crushed himself, Mr. Tetterby, struck by a sudden thought, preferred the same claim on his own parental part. The satisfaction of this third desire completely exhausted the sacrifice, who had hardly breath enough left to get back to his stool, crush himself again, and pant at his relations. "Whatever you do, Johnny," said Mrs. Tetterby, shaking her head, "take care of her, or never look your mother in the face again." "Nor your brother," said Adolphus. "Nor your father, Johnny," added Mr. Tetterby. Johnny, much affected by this conditional renunciation of him, looked down at Moloch's eyes to see that they were all right, so far, and skilfully patted her back (which was uppermost), and rocked her with his foot. "Are you wet, 'Dolphus, my boy?" said his father. "Come and take my chair, and dry yourself." "No, father, thank'ee," said Adolphus, smoothing himself down with his hands. "I an’t very wet, I don't think. Does my face shine much, father?" "Well, it does look waxy, my boy," returned Mr. Tetterby. "It's the weather, father," said Adolphus, polishing his cheeks on the worn sleeve of his jacket. "What with rain, and sleet, and wind, and snow, and fog, my face gets quite brought out into a rash sometimes. And shines, it does—oh, don't it, though!" Master Adolphus was also in the newspaper line of life, being employed, by a more thriving firm than his father and Co., to vend newspapers at a railway station, where his chubby little person, like a shabbily-disguised Cupid, and his shrill little voice (he was not much more than ten years old), were as well known as the hoarse panting of the locomotives, running in and out. His juvenility might have been at some loss for a harmless outlet, in this early application to traffic, but for a fortunate discovery he made of a means of entertaining himself, and of dividing the long day into stages of interest, without neglecting business. This ingenious invention, remarkable, like many great discoveries, for its simplicity, consisted in varying the first vowel in the word “paper,” and substituting, in its stead, at different periods of the day, all the other vowels in grammatical succession. Thus, before daylight in the winter-time, he went to and fro, in his little oilskin cap and cape, and his big comforter, piercing the heavy air with his cry of "Morn-ing Pa-per!" which, about an hour before noon, changed to "Morn-ing Pepper!" which, at about two, changed to "Morn-ing Pip-per!" which in a couple of hours changed to "Morn-ing Pop-per!" and so declined with the sun into "Eve-ning Pup-per!" to the great relief and comfort of this young gentleman’s spirits. Mrs. Tetterby, his lady-mother, who had been sitting with her bonnet and shawl thrown back, as aforesaid, thoughtfully turning her wedding-ring round and round upon her finger, now rose, and divesting herself of her out-of-door attire, began to lay the cloth for supper. "Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "That’s the way the world goes!" "Which is the way the world goes, my dear?" asked Mr. Tetterby, looking round. "Oh, nothing," said Mrs. Tetterby. Mr. Tetterby elevated his eyebrows, folded his newspaper afresh, and carried his eyes up it, and down it, and across it, but was wandering in his attention, and not reading it. Mrs. Tetterby, at the same time, laid the cloth, but rather as if she were punishing the table than preparing the family supper; hitting it unnecessarily hard with the knives and forks, slapping it with the plates, dinting it with the salt-cellar, and coming heavily down upon it with the loaf. "Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "That’s the way the world goes!" "My duck," returned her husband, looking round again, "you said that before. Which is the way the world goes?" "Oh, nothing!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "Sophia!" remonstrated her husband, "you said that before, too." "Well, I’ll say it again if you like," returned Mrs. Tetterby. "Oh nothing—there! And again if you like, oh nothing—there! And again if you like, oh nothing—now then!" Mr. Tetterby brought his eye to bear upon the partner of his bosom, and said, in mild astonishment: "My little woman, what has put you out?" "I’m sure I don’t know," she retorted. "Don’t ask me. Who said I was put out at all? I never did." Mr. Tetterby gave up the perusal of his newspaper as a bad job, and, taking a slow walk across the room, with his hands behind him, and his shoulders raised—his gait according perfectly with the resignation of his manner—addressed himself to his two eldest offspring. "Your supper will be ready in a minute, 'Dolphus," said Mr. Tetterby. "Your mother has been out in the wet, to the cook’s shop, to buy it. It was very good of your mother so to do. You shall get some supper too, very soon, Johnny. Your mother's pleased with you, my man, for being so attentive to your precious sister." Mrs. Tetterby, without any remark, but with a decided subsidence of her animosity towards the table, finished her preparations, and took, from her ample basket, a substantial slab of hot pease pudding wrapped in paper, and a basin covered with a saucer, which, on being uncovered, sent forth an odour so agreeable, that the three pair of eyes in the two beds opened wide and fixed themselves upon the banquet. Mr. Tetterby, without regarding this tacit invitation to be seated, stood repeating slowly, "Yes, yes, your supper will be ready in a minute, 'Dolphus—your mother went out in the wet, to the cook’s shop, to buy it. It was very good of your mother so to do"—until Mrs. Tetterby, who had been exhibiting sundry tokens of contrition behind him, caught him round the neck, and wept. "Oh, Dolphus!" said Mrs. Tetterby, "how could I go and behave so?" This reconciliation affected Adolphus the younger and Johnny to that degree, that they both, as with one accord, raised a dismal cry, which had the effect of immediately shutting up the round eyes in the beds, and utterly routing the two remaining little Tetterbys, just then stealing in from the adjoining closet to see what was going on in the eating way. "I am sure, 'Dolphus," sobbed Mrs. Tetterby, "coming home, I had no more idea than a child unborn—" Mr. Tetterby seemed to dislike this figure of speech, and observed, "Say than the baby, my dear." "—Had no more idea than the baby," said Mrs. Tetterby.—"Johnny, don’t look at me, but look at her, or she’ll fall out of your lap and be killed, and then you’ll die in agonies of a broken heart, and serve you right.—No more idea I hadn’t than that darling, of being cross when I came home; but somehow, 'Dolphus—" Mrs. Tetterby paused, and again turned her wedding-ring round and round upon her finger. "I see!" said Mr. Tetterby. "I understand! My little woman was put out. Hard times, and hard weather, and hard work, make it trying now and then. I see, bless your soul! No wonder! Dolf, my man," continued Mr. Tetterby, exploring the basin with a fork, "here’s your mother been and bought, at the cook’s shop, besides pease pudding, a whole knuckle of a lovely roast leg of pork, with lots of crackling left upon it, and with seasoning gravy and mustard quite unlimited. Hand in your plate, my boy, and begin while it's simmering." Master Adolphus, needing no second summons, received his portion with eyes rendered moist by appetite, and withdrawing to his particular stool, fell upon his supper tooth and nail. Johnny was not forgotten, but received his rations on bread, lest he should, in a flush of gravy, trickle any on the baby. He was required, for similar reasons, to keep his pudding, when not on active service, in his pocket. There might have been more pork on the knucklebone,—which knucklebone the carver at the cook's shop had assuredly not forgotten in carving for previous customers—but there was no stint of seasoning, and that is an accessory dreamily suggesting pork, and pleasantly cheating the sense of taste. The pease pudding, too, the gravy and mustard, like the Eastern rose in respect of the nightingale, if they were not absolutely pork, had lived near it; so, upon the whole, there was the flavour of a middle-sized pig. It was irresistible to the Tetterbys in bed, who, though professing to slumber peacefully, crawled out when unseen by their parents, and silently appealed to their brothers for any gastronomic token of fraternal affection. They, not hard of heart, presenting scraps in return, it resulted that a party of light skirmishers in nightgowns were careering about the parlour all through supper, which harassed Mr. Tetterby exceedingly, and once or twice imposed upon him the necessity of a charge, before which these guerilla troops retired in all directions and in great confusion. Mrs. Tetterby did not enjoy her supper. There seemed to be something on Mrs. Tetterby’s mind. At one time she laughed without reason, and at another time she cried without reason, and at last she laughed and cried together in a manner so very unreasonable that her husband was confounded. "My little woman," said Mr. Tetterby, "if the world goes that way, it appears to go the wrong way, and to choke you." "Give me a drop of water," said Mrs. Tetterby, struggling with herself, "and don’t speak to me for the present, or take any notice of me. Don’t do it!" Mr. Tetterby having administered the water, turned suddenly on the unlucky Johnny (who was full of sympathy), and demanded why he was wallowing there, in gluttony and idleness, instead of coming forward with the baby, that the sight of her might revive his mother. Johnny immediately approached, borne down by its weight; but Mrs. Tetterby holding out her hand to signify that she was not in a condition to bear that trying appeal to her feelings, he was interdicted from advancing another inch, on pain of perpetual hatred from all his dearest connections; and accordingly retired to his stool again, and crushed himself as before. After a pause, Mrs. Tetterby said she was better now, and began to laugh. "My little woman," said her husband, dubiously, "are you quite sure you're better? Or are you, Sophia, about to break out in a fresh direction?" "No, 'Dolphus, no," replied his wife. "I’m quite myself." With that, settling her hair, and pressing the palms of her hands upon her eyes, she laughed again. "What a wicked fool I was, to think so for a moment!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "Come nearer, 'Dolphus, and let me ease my mind, and tell you what I mean. Let me tell you all about it." Mr. Tetterby bringing his chair closer, Mrs. Tetterby laughed again, gave him a hug, and wiped her eyes. "You know, Dolphus, my dear," said Mrs. Tetterby, "that when I was single, I might have given myself away in several directions. At one time, four after me at once; two of them were sons of Mars." "We’re all sons of Ma's, my dear," said Mr. Tetterby, "jointly with Pa’s." "I don’t mean that," replied his wife, "I mean soldiers—serjeants." "Oh!" said Mr. Tetterby. "Well, 'Dolphus, I'm sure I never think of such things now, to regret them; and I'm sure I've got as good a husband, and would do as much to prove that I was fond of him, as—" "As any little woman in the world," said Mr. Tetterby. "Very good. Very good." If Mr. Tetterby had been ten feet high, he could not have expressed a gentler consideration for Mrs. Tetterby’s fairy-like stature; and if Mrs. Tetterby had been two feet high, she could not have felt it more appropriately her due. "But you see, 'Dolphus," said Mrs. Tetterby, "this being Christmas-time, when all people who can, make holiday, and when all people who have got money, like to spend some, I did, somehow, get a little out of sorts when I was in the streets just now. There were so many things to be sold—such delicious things to eat, such fine things to look at, such delightful things to have—and there was so much calculating and calculating necessary, before I durst lay out a sixpence for the commonest thing; and the basket was so large, and wanted so much in it; and my stock of money was so small, and would go such a little way;—you hate me, don’t you, 'Dolphus?" "Not quite," said Mr. Tetterby, "as yet." "Well! I'll tell you the whole truth," pursued his wife, penitently, "and then perhaps you will. I felt all this, so much, when I was trudging about in the cold, and when I saw a lot of other calculating faces and large baskets trudging about, too, that I began to think whether I mightn’t have done better, and been happier, if—I—hadn't—" the wedding-ring went round again, and Mrs. Tetterby shook her downcast head as she turned it. "I see," said her husband quietly; "if you hadn't married at all, or if you had married somebody else?" "Yes," sobbed Mrs. Tetterby. "That’s really what I thought. Do you hate me now, 'Dolphus?" "Why no," said Mr. Tetterby. "I don’t find that I do, as yet." Mrs. Tetterby gave him a thankful kiss, and went on. "I begin to hope you won't, now, 'Dolphus, though I’m afraid I haven't told you the worst. I can't think what came over me. I don't know whether I was ill, or mad, or what I was, but I couldn't call up anything that seemed to bind us to each other, or to reconcile me to my fortune. All the pleasures and enjoyments we had ever had—they seemed so poor and insignificant, I hated them. I could have trodden on them. And I could think of nothing else, except our being poor, and the number of mouths there were at home." "Well, well, my dear," said Mr. Tetterby, shaking her hand encouragingly, "that’s truth, after all. We are poor, and there are a number of mouths at home here." "Ah! but, Dolf, Dolf!" cried his wife, laying her hands upon his neck, "my good, kind, patient fellow, when I had been at home a very little while—how different! Oh, Dolf, dear, how different it was! I felt as if there was a rush of recollection on me, all at once, that softened my hard heart, and filled it up till it was bursting. All our struggles for a livelihood, all our cares and wants since we have been married, all the times of sickness, all the hours of watching, we have ever had, by one another, or by the children, seemed to speak to me, and say that they had made us one, and that I never might have been, or could have been, or would have been, any other than the wife and mother I am. Then, the cheap enjoyments that I could have trodden on so cruelly, got to be so precious to me—Oh so priceless, and dear!—that I couldn’t bear to think how much I had wronged them; and I said, and say again a hundred times, how could I ever behave so, 'Dolphus, how could I ever have the heart to do it!" The good woman, quite carried away by her honest tenderness and remorse, was weeping with all her heart, when she started up with a scream, and ran behind her husband. Her cry was so terrified, that the children started from their sleep and from their beds, and clung about her. Nor did her gaze belie her voice, as she pointed to a pale man in a black cloak who had come into the room. "Look at that man! Look there! What does he want?" "My dear," returned her husband, "I’ll ask him if you’ll let me go. What’s the matter! How you shake!" "I saw him in the street, when I was out just now. He looked at me, and stood near me. I am afraid of him." "Afraid of him! Why?" "I don’t know why—I—stop! husband!" for he was going towards the stranger. She had one hand pressed upon her forehead, and one upon her breast; and there was a peculiar fluttering all over her, and a hurried unsteady motion of her eyes, as if she had lost something. "Are you ill, my dear?" "What is it that is going from me again?" she muttered, in a low voice. "What is this that is going away?" Then she abruptly answered: 'Ill? No, I am quite well," and stood looking vacantly at the floor. Her husband, who had not been altogether free from the infection of her fear at first, and whom the present strangeness of her manner did not tend to reassure, addressed himself to the pale visitor in the black cloak, who stood still, and whose eyes were bent upon the ground. "What may be your pleasure, sir," he asked, "with us?" "I fear that my coming in unperceived," returned the visitor, "has alarmed you; but you were talking and did not hear me." "My little woman says—perhaps you heard her say it," returned Mr. Tetterby, "that it’s not the first time you have alarmed her to-night." "I am sorry for it. I remember to have observed her, for a few moments only, in the street. I had no intention of frightening her." As he raised his eyes in speaking, she raised hers. It was extraordinary to see what dread she had of him, and with what dread he observed it—and yet how narrowly and closely. "My name," he said, "is Redlaw. I come from the old college hard by. A young gentleman who is a student there, lodges in your house, does he not?" "Mr. Denham?" said Tetterby. "Yes." It was a natural action, and so slight as to be hardly noticeable; but the little man, before speaking again, passed his hand across his forehead, and looked quickly round the room, as though he were sensible of some change in its atmosphere. The Chemist, instantly transferring to him the look of dread he had directed towards the wife, stepped back, and his face turned paler. "The gentleman’s room," said Tetterby, "is upstairs, sir. There’s a more convenient private entrance; but as you have come in here, it will save your going out into the cold, if you’ll take this little staircase," showing one communicating directly with the parlour, "and go up to him that way, if you wish to see him." "Yes, I wish to see him," said the Chemist. "Can you spare a light?" The watchfulness of his haggard look, and the inexplicable distrust that darkened it, seemed to trouble Mr. Tetterby. He paused; and looking fixedly at him in return, stood for a minute or so, like a man stupefied, or fascinated. At length he said, "I’ll light you, sir, if you’ll follow me." "No," replied the Chemist, "I don’t wish to be attended, or announced to him. He does not expect me. I would rather go alone. Please to give me the light, if you can spare it, and I’ll find the way." In the quickness of his expression of this desire, and in taking the candle from the newsman, he touched him on the breast. Withdrawing his hand hastily, almost as though he had wounded him by accident (for he did not know in what part of himself his new power resided, or how it was communicated, or how the manner of its reception varied in different persons), he turned and ascended the stair. But when he reached the top, he stopped and looked down. The wife was standing in the same place, twisting her ring round and round upon her finger. The husband, with his head bent forward on his breast, was musing heavily and sullenly. The children, still clustering about the mother, gazed timidly after the visitor, and nestled together when they saw him looking down. "Come!" said the father, roughly. "There’s enough of this. Get to bed here!" "The place is inconvenient and small enough," the mother added, "without you. Get to bed!" The whole brood, scared and sad, crept away; little Johnny and the baby lagging last. The mother, glancing contemptuously round the sordid room, and tossing from her the fragments of their meal, stopped on the threshold of her task of clearing the table, and sat down, pondering idly and dejectedly. The father betook himself to the chimney-corner, and impatiently raking the small fire together, bent over it as if he would monopolise it all. They did not interchange a word. The Chemist, paler than before, stole upward like a thief; looking back upon the change below, and dreading equally to go on or return. "What have I done!" he said confusedly. "What am I going to do!" "To be the benefactor of mankind," he thought he heard a voice reply. He looked round, but there was nothing there; and a passage now shutting out the little parlour from his view, he went on, directing his eyes before him at the way he went. "It is only since last night," he muttered gloomily, "that I have remained shut up, and yet all things are strange to me. I am strange to myself. I am here, as in a dream. What interest have I in this place, or in any place that I can bring to my remembrance? My mind is going blind!" There was a door before him, and he knocked at it. Being invited, by a voice within, to enter, he complied. "Is that my kind nurse?" said the voice. "But I need not ask her. There is no one else to come here." It spoke cheerfully, though in a languid tone, and attracted his attention to a young man lying on a couch, drawn before the chimney-piece, with the back towards the door. A meagre scanty stove, pinched and hollowed like a sick man’s cheeks, and bricked into the centre of a hearth that it could scarcely warm, contained the fire, to which his face was turned. Being so near the windy house-top, it wasted quickly, and with a busy sound, and the burning ashes dropped down fast. "They chink when they shoot out here," said the student, smiling, "so, according to the gossips, they are not coffins, but purses. I shall be well and rich yet, some day, if it please God, and shall live perhaps to love a daughter Milly, in remembrance of the kindest nature and the gentlest heart in the world." He put up his hand as if expecting her to take it, but, being weakened, he lay still, with his face resting on his other hand, and did not turn round. The Chemist glanced about the room;—at the student’s books and papers, piled upon a table in a corner, where they, and his extinguished reading-lamp, now prohibited and put away, told of the attentive hours that had gone before this illness, and perhaps caused it;—at such signs of his old health and freedom, as the out-of-door attire that hung idle on the wall;—at those remembrances of other and less solitary scenes, the little miniatures upon the chimney-piece, and the drawing of home;—at that token of his emulation, perhaps, in some sort, of his personal attachment too, the framed engraving of himself, the looker-on. The time had been, only yesterday, when not one of these objects, in its remotest association of interest with the living figure before him, would have been lost on Redlaw. Now, they were but objects; or, if any gleam of such connexion shot upon him, it perplexed, and not enlightened him, as he stood looking round with a dull wonder. The student, recalling the thin hand which had remained so long untouched, raised himself on the couch, and turned his head. "Mr. Redlaw!" he exclaimed, and started up. Redlaw put out his arm. "Don’t come nearer to me. I will sit here. Remain you, where you are!" He sat down on a chair near the door, and having glanced at the young man standing leaning with his hand upon the couch, spoke with his eyes averted towards the ground. "I heard, by an accident, by what accident is no matter, that one of my class was ill and solitary. I received no other description of him, than that he lived in this street. Beginning my inquiries at the first house in it, I have found him." "I have been ill, sir," returned the student, not merely with a modest hesitation, but with a kind of awe of him, "but am greatly better. An attack of fever—of the brain, I believe—has weakened me, but I am much better. I cannot say I have been solitary, in my illness, or I should forget the ministering hand that has been near me." "You are speaking of the keeper’s wife," said Redlaw. "Yes." The student bent his head, as if he rendered her some silent homage. The Chemist, in whom there was a cold, monotonous apathy, which rendered him more like a marble image on the tomb of the man who had started from his dinner yesterday at the first mention of this student’s case, than the breathing man himself, glanced again at the student leaning with his hand upon the couch, and looked upon the ground, and in the air, as if for light for his blinded mind. "I remembered your name," he said, "when it was mentioned to me down stairs, just now; and I recollect your face. We have held but very little personal communication together?" "Very little." "You have retired and withdrawn from me, more than any of the rest, I think?" The student signified assent. "And why?" said the Chemist; not with the least expression of interest, but with a moody, wayward kind of curiosity. "Why? How comes it that you have sought to keep especially from me, the knowledge of your remaining here, at this season, when all the rest have dispersed, and of your being ill? I want to know why this is?" The young man, who had heard him with increasing agitation, raised his downcast eyes to his face, and clasping his hands together, cried with sudden earnestness and with trembling lips: "Mr. Redlaw! You have discovered me. You know my secret!" "Secret?" said the Chemist, harshly. “I know?” "Yes! Your manner, so different from the interest and sympathy which endear you to so many hearts, your altered voice, the constraint there is in everything you say, and in your looks," replied the student, "warn me that you know me. That you would conceal it, even now, is but a proof to me (God knows I need none!) of your natural kindness and of the bar there is between us." A vacant and contemptuous laugh, was all his answer. "But, Mr. Redlaw," said the student, "as a just man, and a good man, think how innocent I am, except in name and descent, of participation in any wrong inflicted on you or in any sorrow you have borne." "Sorrow!" said Redlaw, laughing. "Wrong! What are those to me?" "For Heaven’s sake," entreated the shrinking student, "do not let the mere interchange of a few words with me change you like this, sir! Let me pass again from your knowledge and notice. Let me occupy my old reserved and distant place among those whom you instruct. Know me only by the name I have assumed, and not by that of Longford—" "Longford!" exclaimed the other. He clasped his head with both his hands, and for a moment turned upon the young man his own intelligent and thoughtful face. But the light passed from it, like the sun-beam of an instant, and it clouded as before. "The name my mother bears, sir," faltered the young man, "the name she took, when she might, perhaps, have taken one more honoured. Mr. Redlaw," hesitating, "I believe I know that history. Where my information halts, my guesses at what is wanting may supply something not remote from the truth. I am the child of a marriage that has not proved itself a well-assorted or a happy one. From infancy, I have heard you spoken of with honour and respect—with something that was almost reverence. I have heard of such devotion, of such fortitude and tenderness, of such rising up against the obstacles which press men down, that my fancy, since I learnt my little lesson from my mother, has shed a lustre on your name. At last, a poor student myself, from whom could I learn but you?" Redlaw, unmoved, unchanged, and looking at him with a staring frown, answered by no word or sign. "I cannot say," pursued the other, "I should try in vain to say, how much it has impressed me, and affected me, to find the gracious traces of the past, in that certain power of winning gratitude and confidence which is associated among us students (among the humblest of us, most) with Mr. Redlaw’s generous name. Our ages and positions are so different, sir, and I am so accustomed to regard you from a distance, that I wonder at my own presumption when I touch, however lightly, on that theme. But to one who—I may say, who felt no common interest in my mother once—it may be something to hear, now that all is past, with what indescribable feelings of affection I have, in my obscurity, regarded him; with what pain and reluctance I have kept aloof from his encouragement, when a word of it would have made me rich; yet how I have felt it fit that I should hold my course, content to know him, and to be unknown. Mr. Redlaw," said the student, faintly, "what I would have said, I have said ill, for my strength is strange to me as yet; but for anything unworthy in this fraud of mine, forgive me, and for all the rest forget me!" The staring frown remained on Redlaw’s face, and yielded to no other expression until the student, with these words, advanced towards him, as if to touch his hand, when he drew back and cried to him: "Don’t come nearer to me!" The young man stopped, shocked by the eagerness of his recoil, and by the sternness of his repulsion; and he passed his hand, thoughtfully, across his forehead. "The past is past," said the Chemist. "It dies like the brutes. Who talks to me of its traces in my life? He raves or lies! What have I to do with your distempered dreams? If you want money, here it is. I came to offer it; and that is all I came for. There can be nothing else that brings me here," he muttered, holding his head again, with both his hands. "There can be nothing else, and yet—" He had tossed his purse upon the table. As he fell into this dim cogitation with himself, the student took it up, and held it out to him. "Take it back, sir," he said proudly, though not angrily. "I wish you could take from me, with it, the remembrance of your words and offer." "You do?" he retorted, with a wild light in his eyes. "You do?" "I do!" The Chemist went close to him, for the first time, and took the purse, and turned him by the arm, and looked him in the face. "There is sorrow and trouble in sickness, is there not?" he demanded, with a laugh. The wondering student answered, "Yes." "In its unrest, in its anxiety, in its suspense, in all its train of physical and mental miseries?" said the Chemist, with a wild unearthly exultation. "All best forgotten, are they not?" The student did not answer, but again passed his hand, confusedly, across his forehead. Redlaw still held him by the sleeve, when Milly’s voice was heard outside. "I can see very well now," she said, "thank you, Dolf. Don’t cry, dear. Father and mother will be comfortable again, to-morrow, and home will be comfortable too. A gentleman with him, is there!" Redlaw released his hold, as he listened. "I have feared, from the first moment," he murmured to himself, "to meet her. There is a steady quality of goodness in her, that I dread to influence. I may be the murderer of what is tenderest and best within her bosom." She was knocking at the door. "Shall I dismiss it as an idle foreboding, or still avoid her?" he muttered, looking uneasily around. She was knocking at the door again. "Of all the visitors who could come here," he said, in a hoarse alarmed voice, turning to his companion, "this is the one I should desire most to avoid. Hide me!" The student opened a frail door in the wall, communicating where the garret-roof began to slope towards the floor, with a small inner room. Redlaw passed in hastily, and shut it after him. The student then resumed his place upon the couch, and called to her to enter. "Dear Mr. Edmund," said Milly, looking round, "they told me there was a gentleman here." "There is no one here but I." "There has been some one?" "Yes, yes, there has been some one." She put her little basket on the table, and went up to the back of the couch, as if to take the extended hand—but it was not there. A little surprised, in her quiet way, she leaned over to look at his face, and gently touched him on the brow. "Are you quite as well to-night? Your head is not so cool as in the afternoon." "Tut!" said the student, petulantly, "very little ails me." A little more surprise, but no reproach, was expressed in her face, as she withdrew to the other side of the table, and took a small packet of needlework from her basket. But she laid it down again, on second thoughts, and going noiselessly about the room, set everything exactly in its place, and in the neatest order; even to the cushions on the couch, which she touched with so light a hand, that he hardly seemed to know it, as he lay looking at the fire. When all this was done, and she had swept the hearth, she sat down, in her modest little bonnet, to her work, and was quietly busy on it directly. "It’s the new muslin curtain for the window, Mr. Edmund," said Milly, stitching away as she talked. "It will look very clean and nice, though it costs very little, and will save your eyes, too, from the light. My William says the room should not be too light just now, when you are recovering so well, or the glare might make you giddy." He said nothing; but there was something so fretful and impatient in his change of position, that her quick fingers stopped, and she looked at him anxiously. "The pillows are not comfortable," she said, laying down her work and rising. "I will soon put them right." "They are very well," he answered. "Leave them alone, pray. You make so much of everything." He raised his head to say this, and looked at her so thanklessly, that, after he had thrown himself down again, she stood timidly pausing. However, she resumed her seat, and her needle, without having directed even a murmuring look towards him, and was soon as busy as before. "I have been thinking, Mr. Edmund, that you have been often thinking of late, when I have been sitting by, how true the saying is, that adversity is a good teacher. Health will be more precious to you, after this illness, than it has ever been. And years hence, when this time of year comes round, and you remember the days when you lay here sick, alone, that the knowledge of your illness might not afflict those who are dearest to you, your home will be doubly dear and doubly blest. Now, isn’t that a good, true thing?" She was too intent upon her work, and too earnest in what she said, and too composed and quiet altogether, to be on the watch for any look he might direct towards her in reply; so the shaft of his ungrateful glance fell harmless, and did not wound her. "Ah!" said Milly, with her pretty head inclining thoughtfully on one side, as she looked down, following her busy fingers with her eyes. "Even on me—and I am very different from you, Mr. Edmund, for I have no learning, and don’t know how to think properly—this view of such things has made a great impression, since you have been lying ill. When I have seen you so touched by the kindness and attention of the poor people down stairs, I have felt that you thought even that experience some repayment for the loss of health, and I have read in your face, as plain as if it was a book, that but for some trouble and sorrow we should never know half the good there is about us." His getting up from the couch, interrupted her, or she was going on to say more. "We needn’t magnify the merit, Mrs. William," he rejoined slightingly. "The people down stairs will be paid in good time I dare say, for any little extra service they may have rendered me; and perhaps they anticipate no less. I am much obliged to you, too." Her fingers stopped, and she looked at him. "I can’t be made to feel the more obliged by your exaggerating the case," he said. "I am sensible that you have been interested in me, and I say I am much obliged to you. What more would you have?" Her work fell on her lap, as she still looked at him walking to and fro with an intolerant air, and stopping now and then. "I say again, I am much obliged to you. Why weaken my sense of what is your due in obligation, by preferring enormous claims upon me? Trouble, sorrow, affliction, adversity! One might suppose I had been dying a score of deaths here!" "Do you believe, Mr. Edmund," she asked, rising and going nearer to him, "that I spoke of the poor people of the house, with any reference to myself? To me?" laying her hand upon her bosom with a simple and innocent smile of astonishment. "Oh! I think nothing about it, my good creature," he returned. "I have had an indisposition, which your solicitude—observe! I say solicitude—makes a great deal more of, than it merits; and it's over, and we can't perpetuate it." He coldly took a book, and sat down at the table. She watched him for a little while, until her smile was quite gone, and then, returning to where her basket was, said gently: "Mr. Edmund, would you rather be alone?" "There is no reason why I should detain you here," he replied. "Except—" said Milly, hesitating, and showing her work. "Oh! the curtain," he answered, with a supercilious laugh. "That’s not worth staying for." She made up the little packet again, and put it in her basket. Then, standing before him with such an air of patient entreaty that he could not choose but look at her, she said: "If you should want me, I will come back willingly. When you did want me, I was quite happy to come; there was no merit in it. I think you must be afraid, that, now you are getting well, I may be troublesome to you; but I should not have been, indeed. I should have come no longer than your weakness and confinement lasted. You owe me nothing; but it is right that you should deal as justly by me as if I was a lady—even the very lady that you love; and if you suspect me of meanly making much of the little I have tried to do to comfort your sick room, you do yourself more wrong than ever you can do me. That is why I am sorry. That is why I am very sorry." If she had been as passionate as she was quiet, as indignant as she was calm, as angry in her look as she was gentle, as loud of tone as she was low and clear, she might have left no sense of her departure in the room, compared with that which fell upon the lonely student when she went away. He was gazing drearily upon the place where she had been, when Redlaw came out of his concealment, and came to the door. "When sickness lays its hand on you again," he said, looking fiercely back at him, "—may it be soon!—Die here! Rot here!" "What have you done?" returned the other, catching at his cloak. "What change have you wrought in me? What curse have you brought upon me? Give me back myself!" "Give me back myself!" exclaimed Redlaw like a madman. "I am infected! I am infectious! I am charged with poison for my own mind, and the minds of all mankind. Where I felt interest, compassion, sympathy, I am turning into stone. Selfishness and ingratitude spring up in my blighting footsteps. I am only so much less base than the wretches whom I make so, that in the moment of their transformation I can hate them." As he spoke—the young man still holding to his cloak—he cast him off, and struck him: then, wildly hurried out into the night air where the wind was blowing, the snow falling, the cloud-drift sweeping on, the moon dimly shining; and where, blowing in the wind, falling with the snow, drifting with the clouds, shining in the moonlight, and heavily looming in the darkness, were the Phantom’s words, "The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!" Whither he went, he neither knew nor cared, so that he avoided company. The change he felt within him made the busy streets a desert, and himself a desert, and the multitude around him, in their manifold endurances and ways of life, a mighty waste of sand, which the winds tossed into unintelligible heaps and made a ruinous confusion of. Those traces in his breast which the Phantom had told him would "die out soon," were not, as yet, so far upon their way to death, but that he understood enough of what he was, and what he made of others, to desire to be alone. This put it in his mind—he suddenly bethought himself, as he was going along, of the boy who had rushed into his room. And then he recollected, that of those with whom he had communicated since the Phantom’s disappearance, that boy alone had shown no sign of being changed. Monstrous and odious as the wild thing was to him, he determined to seek it out, and prove if this were really so; and also to seek it with another intention, which came into his thoughts at the same time. So, resolving with some difficulty where he was, he directed his steps back to the old college, and to that part of it where the general porch was, and where, alone, the pavement was worn by the tread of the students’ feet. The keeper’s house stood just within the iron gates, forming a part of the chief quadrangle. There was a little cloister outside, and from that sheltered place he knew he could look in at the window of their ordinary room, and see who was within. The iron gates were shut, but his hand was familiar with the fastening, and drawing it back by thrusting in his wrist between the bars, he passed through softly, shut it again, and crept up to the window, crumbling the thin crust of snow with his feet. The fire, to which he had directed the boy last night, shining brightly through the glass, made an illuminated place upon the ground. Instinctively avoiding this, and going round it, he looked in at the window. At first, he thought that there was no one there, and that the blaze was reddening only the old beams in the ceiling and the dark walls; but peering in more narrowly, he saw the object of his search coiled asleep before it on the floor. He passed quickly to the door, opened it, and went in. The creature lay in such a fiery heat, that, as the Chemist stooped to rouse him, it scorched his head. So soon as he was touched, the boy, not half awake, clutching his rags together with the instinct of flight upon him, half rolled and half ran into a distant corner of the room, where, heaped upon the ground, he struck his foot out to defend himself. "Get up!" said the Chemist. "You have not forgotten me?" "You let me alone!" returned the boy. "This is the woman’s house—not yours." The Chemist’s steady eye controlled him somewhat, or inspired him with enough submission to be raised upon his feet, and looked at. "Who washed them, and put those bandages where they were bruised and cracked?" asked the Chemist, pointing to their altered state. "The woman did." "And is it she who has made you cleaner in the face, too?" "Yes, the woman." Redlaw asked these questions to attract his eyes towards himself, and with the same intent now held him by the chin, and threw his wild hair back, though he loathed to touch him. The boy watched his eyes keenly, as if he thought it needful to his own defence, not knowing what he might do next; and Redlaw could see well that no change came over him. "Where are they?" he inquired. "The woman’s out." "I know she is. Where is the old man with the white hair, and his son?" "The woman’s husband, d’ye mean?" inquired the boy. "Ay. Where are those two?" "Out. Something’s the matter, somewhere. They were fetched out in a hurry, and told me to stop here." "Come with me," said the Chemist, "and I’ll give you money." "Come where? and how much will you give?" "I’ll give you more shillings than you ever saw, and bring you back soon. Do you know your way to where you came from?" "You let me go," returned the boy, suddenly twisting out of his grasp. "I’m not a going to take you there. Let me be, or I’ll heave some fire at you!" He was down before it, and ready, with his savage little hand, to pluck the burning coals out. What the Chemist had felt, in observing the effect of his charmed influence stealing over those with whom he came in contact, was not nearly equal to the cold vague terror with which he saw this baby-monster put it at defiance. It chilled his blood to look on the immovable impenetrable thing, in the likeness of a child, with its sharp malignant face turned up to his, and its almost infant hand, ready at the bars. "Listen, boy!" he said. "You shall take me where you please, so that you take me where the people are very miserable or very wicked. I want to do them good, and not to harm them. You shall have money, as I have told you, and I will bring you back. Get up! Come quickly!" He made a hasty step towards the door, afraid of her returning. "Will you let me walk by myself, and never hold me, nor yet touch me?" said the boy, slowly withdrawing the hand with which he threatened, and beginning to get up. "I will!" "And let me go, before, behind, or anyways I like?" "I will!" "Give me some money first, then, and go." The Chemist laid a few shillings, one by one, in his extended hand. To count them was beyond the boy’s knowledge, but he said "one," every time, and avariciously looked at each as it was given, and at the donor. He had nowhere to put them, out of his hand, but in his mouth; and he put them there. Redlaw then wrote with his pencil on a leaf of his pocket-book, that the boy was with him; and laying it on the table, signed to him to follow. Keeping his rags together, as usual, the boy complied, and went out with his bare head and naked feet into the winter night. Preferring not to depart by the iron gate by which he had entered, where they were in danger of meeting her whom he so anxiously avoided, the Chemist led the way, through some of those passages among which the boy had lost himself, and by that portion of the building where he lived, to a small door of which he had the key. When they got into the street, he stopped to ask his guide—who instantly retreated from him—if he knew where they were. The savage thing looked here and there, and at length, nodding his head, pointed in the direction he designed to take. Redlaw going on at once, he followed, something less suspiciously; shifting his money from his mouth into his hand, and back again into his mouth, and stealthily rubbing it bright upon his shreds of dress, as he went along. Three times, in their progress, they were side by side. Three times they stopped, being side by side. Three times the Chemist glanced down at his face, and shuddered as it forced upon him one reflection. The first occasion was when they were crossing an old churchyard, and Redlaw stopped among the graves, utterly at a loss how to connect them with any tender, softening, or consolatory thought. The second was, when the breaking forth of the moon induced him to look up at the Heavens, where he saw her in her glory, surrounded by a host of stars he still knew by the names and histories which human science has appended to them; but where he saw nothing else he had been wont to see, felt nothing he had been wont to feel, in looking up there, on a bright night. The third was when he stopped to listen to a plaintive strain of music, but could only hear a tune, made manifest to him by the dry mechanism of the instruments and his own ears, with no address to any mystery within him, without a whisper in it of the past, or of the future, powerless upon him as the sound of last year’s running water, or the rushing of last year’s wind. At each of these three times, he saw with horror that, in spite of the vast intellectual distance between them, and their being unlike each other in all physical respects, the expression on the boy’s face was the expression on his own. They journeyed on for some time—now through such crowded places, that he often looked over his shoulder thinking he had lost his guide, but generally finding him within his shadow on his other side; now by ways so quiet, that he could have counted his short, quick, naked footsteps coming on behind—until they arrived at a ruinous collection of houses, and the boy touched him and stopped. "In there!" he said, pointing out one house where there were scattered lights in the windows, and a dim lantern in the doorway, with "Lodgings for Travellers" painted on it. Redlaw looked about him; from the houses to the waste piece of ground on which the houses stood, or rather did not altogether tumble down, unfenced, undrained, unlighted, and bordered by a sluggish ditch; from that, to the sloping line of arches, part of some neighbouring viaduct or bridge with which it was surrounded, and which lessened gradually towards them, until the last but one was a mere kennel for a dog, the last a plundered little heap of bricks; from that, to the child, close to him, cowering and trembling with the cold, and limping on one little foot, while he coiled the other round his leg to warm it, yet staring at all these things with that frightful likeness of expression so apparent in his face, that Redlaw started from him. "In there!" said the boy, pointing out the house again. "I’ll wait." "Will they let me in?" asked Redlaw. "Say you’re a doctor," he answered with a nod. "There’s plenty ill here." Looking back on his way to the house-door, Redlaw saw him trail himself upon the dust and crawl within the shelter of the smallest arch, as if he were a rat. He had no pity for the thing, but he was afraid of it; and when it looked out of its den at him, he hurried to the house as a retreat. "Sorrow, wrong, and trouble," said the Chemist, with a painful effort at some more distinct remembrance, "at least haunt this place darkly. He can do no harm, who brings forgetfulness of such things here!" With these words, he pushed the yielding door, and went in. There was a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or forlorn, whose head was bent down on her hands and knees. As it was not easy to pass without treading on her, and as she was perfectly regardless of his near approach, he stopped, and touched her on the shoulder. Looking up, she showed him quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the spring. With little or no show of concern on his account, she moved nearer to the wall to leave him a wider passage. "What are you?" said Redlaw, pausing, with his hand upon the broken stair-rail. "What do you think I am?" she answered, showing him her face again. He looked upon the ruined Temple of God, so lately made, so soon disfigured; and something, which was not compassion—for the springs in which a true compassion for such miseries has its rise, were dried up in his breast—but which was nearer to it, for the moment, than any feeling that had lately struggled into the darkening, but not yet wholly darkened, night of his mind—mingled a touch of softness with his next words. "I am come here to give relief, if I can," he said. "Are you thinking of any wrong?" She frowned at him, and then laughed; and then her laugh prolonged itself into a shivering sigh, as she dropped her head again, and hid her fingers in her hair. "Are you thinking of a wrong?" he asked once more. “I am thinking of my life,” she said, with a momentary look at him. He had a perception that she was one of many, and that he saw the type of thousands, when he saw her, drooping at his feet. “What are your parents?” he demanded. "I had a good home once. My father was a gardener, far away, in the country." "Is he dead?" "He’s dead to me. All such things are dead to me. You a gentleman, and not know that!" She raised her eyes again, and laughed at him. “Girl!” said Redlaw, sternly, “before this death, of all such things, was brought about, was there no wrong done to you? In spite of all that you can do, does no remembrance of wrong cleave to you? Are there not times upon times when it is misery to you?” So little of what was womanly was left in her appearance, that now, when she burst into tears, he stood amazed. But he was more amazed, and much disquieted, to note that in her awakened recollection of this wrong, the first trace of her old humanity and frozen tenderness appeared to show itself. He drew a little off, and in doing so, observed that her arms were black, her face cut, and her bosom bruised. “What brutal hand has hurt you so?” he asked. “My own. I did it myself!” she answered quickly. “It is impossible.” “I’ll swear I did! He didn’t touch me. I did it to myself in a passion, and threw myself down here. He wasn’t near me. He never laid a hand upon me!” In the white determination of her face, confronting him with this untruth, he saw enough of the last perversion and distortion of good surviving in that miserable breast, to be stricken with remorse that he had ever come near her. “Sorrow, wrong, and trouble!” he muttered, turning his fearful gaze away. “All that connects her with the state from which she has fallen, has those roots! In the name of God, let me go by!” Afraid to look at her again, afraid to touch her, afraid to think of having sundered the last thread by which she held upon the mercy of Heaven, he gathered his cloak about him, and glided swiftly up the stairs. Opposite to him, on the landing, was a door, which stood partly open, and which, as he ascended, a man with a candle in his hand, came forward from within to shut. But this man, on seeing him, drew back, with much emotion in his manner, and, as if by a sudden impulse, mentioned his name aloud. In the surprise of such a recognition there, he stopped, endeavouring to recollect the wan and startled face. He had no time to consider it, for, to his yet greater amazement, old Philip came out of the room, and took him by the hand. “Mr. Redlaw,” said the old man, “this is like you, this is like you, sir! you have heard of it, and have come after us to render any help you can. Ah, too late, too late!” Redlaw, with a bewildered look, submitted to be led into the room. A man lay there, on a truckle-bed, and William Swidger stood at the bedside. “Too late!” murmured the old man, looking wistfully into the Chemist’s face; and the tears stole down his cheeks. “That’s what I say, father,” interposed his son in a low voice. “That’s where it is, exactly. To keep as quiet as ever we can while he’s a dozing, is the only thing to do. You’re right, father!” Redlaw paused at the bedside, and looked down on the figure that was stretched upon the mattress. It was that of a man, who should have been in the vigour of his life, but on whom it was not likely the sun would ever shine again. The vices of his forty or fifty years’ career had so branded him, that, in comparison with their effects upon his face, the heavy hand of Time upon the old man’s face who watched him had been merciful and beautifying. “Who is this?” asked the Chemist, looking round. “My son George, Mr. Redlaw,” said the old man, wringing his hands. “My eldest son, George, who was more his mother’s pride than all the rest!” Redlaw’s eyes wandered from the old man’s grey head, as he laid it down upon the bed, to the person who had recognised him, and who had kept aloof, in the remotest corner of the room. He seemed to be about his own age; and although he knew no such hopeless decay and broken man as he appeared to be, there was something in the turn of his figure, as he stood with his back towards him, and now went out at the door, that made him pass his hand uneasily across his brow. “William,” he said in a gloomy whisper, “who is that man?” “Why you see, sir,” returned Mr. William, “that’s what I say, myself. Why should a man ever go and gamble, and the like of that, and let himself down inch by inch till he can’t let himself down any lower!” “Has he done so?” asked Redlaw, glancing after him with the same uneasy action as before. “Just exactly that, sir,” returned William Swidger, “as I’m told. He knows a little about medicine, sir, it seems; and having been wayfaring towards London with my unhappy brother that you see here,” Mr. William passed his coat-sleeve across his eyes, “and being lodging up stairs for the night—what I say, you see, is that strange companions come together here sometimes—he looked in to attend upon him, and came for us at his request. What a mournful spectacle, sir! But that’s where it is. It’s enough to kill my father!” Redlaw looked up, at these words, and, recalling where he was and with whom, and the spell he carried with him—which his surprise had obscured—retired a little, hurriedly, debating with himself whether to shun the house that moment, or remain. Yielding to a certain sullen doggedness, which it seemed to be a part of his condition to struggle with, he argued for remaining. “Was it only yesterday,” he said, “when I observed the memory of this old man to be a tissue of sorrow and trouble, and shall I be afraid, to-night, to shake it? Are such remembrances as I can drive away, so precious to this dying man that I need fear for him? No! I’ll stay here.” But he stayed in fear and trembling none the less for these words; and, shrouded in his black cloak with his face turned from them, stood away from the bedside, listening to what they said, as if he felt himself a demon in the place. “Father!” murmured the sick man, rallying a little from stupor. “My boy! My son George!” said old Philip. “You spoke, just now, of my being mother’s favourite, long ago. It’s a dreadful thing to think now, of long ago!” “No, no, no;” returned the old man. “Think of it. Don’t say it’s dreadful. It’s not dreadful to me, my son.” “It cuts you to the heart, father.” For the old man’s tears were falling on him. “Yes, yes,” said Philip, “so it does; but it does me good. It’s a heavy sorrow to think of that time, but it does me good, George. Oh, think of it too, think of it too, and your heart will be softened more and more! Where’s my son William? William, my boy, your mother loved him dearly to the last, and with her latest breath said, ‘Tell him I forgave him, blessed him, and prayed for him.’ Those were her words to me. I have never forgotten them, and I’m eighty-seven!” “Father!” said the man upon the bed, “I am dying, I know. I am so far gone, that I can hardly speak, even of what my mind most runs on. Is there any hope for me beyond this bed?” “There is hope,” returned the old man, “for all who are softened and penitent. There is hope for all such. Oh!” he exclaimed, clasping his hands and looking up, “I was thankful, only yesterday, that I could remember this unhappy son when he was an innocent child. But what a comfort it is, now, to think that even God himself has that remembrance of him!” Redlaw spread his hands upon his face, and shrank, like a murderer. “Ah!” feebly moaned the man upon the bed. “The waste since then, the waste of life since then!” “But he was a child once,” said the old man. “He played with children. Before he lay down on his bed at night, and fell into his guiltless rest, he said his prayers at his poor mother’s knee. I have seen him do it, many a time; and seen her lay his head upon her breast, and kiss him. Sorrowful as it was to her and me, to think of this, when he went so wrong, and when our hopes and plans for him were all broken, this gave him still a hold upon us, that nothing else could have given. Oh, Father, so much better than the fathers upon earth! Oh, Father, so much more afflicted by the errors of Thy children! take this wanderer back! Not as he is, but as he was then, let him cry to Thee, as he has so often seemed to cry to us!” As the old man lifted up his trembling hands, the son, for whom he made the supplication, laid his sinking head against him for support and comfort, as if he were indeed the child of whom he spoke. When did man ever tremble, as Redlaw trembled, in the silence that ensued! He knew it must come upon them, knew that it was coming fast. “My time is very short, my breath is shorter,” said the sick man, supporting himself on one arm, and with the other groping in the air, “and I remember there is something on my mind concerning the man who was here just now, Father and William—wait!—is there really anything in black, out there?” “Yes, yes, it is real,” said his aged father. “Is it a man?” “What I say myself, George,” interposed his brother, bending kindly over him. “It’s Mr. Redlaw.” “I thought I had dreamed of him. Ask him to come here.” The Chemist, whiter than the dying man, appeared before him. Obedient to the motion of his hand, he sat upon the bed. “It has been so ripped up, to-night, sir,” said the sick man, laying his hand upon his heart, with a look in which the mute, imploring agony of his condition was concentrated, “by the sight of my poor old father, and the thought of all the trouble I have been the cause of, and all the wrong and sorrow lying at my door, that—” Was it the extremity to which he had come, or was it the dawning of another change, that made him stop? “—that what I can do right, with my mind running on so much, so fast, I’ll try to do. There was another man here. Did you see him?” Redlaw could not reply by any word; for when he saw that fatal sign he knew so well now, of the wandering hand upon the forehead, his voice died at his lips. But he made some indication of assent. “He is penniless, hungry, and destitute. He is completely beaten down, and has no resource at all. Look after him! Lose no time! I know he has it in his mind to kill himself.” It was working. It was on his face. His face was changing, hardening, deepening in all its shades, and losing all its sorrow. “Don’t you remember? Don’t you know him?” he pursued. He shut his face out for a moment, with the hand that again wandered over his forehead, and then it lowered on Redlaw, reckless, ruffianly, and callous. “Why, d-n you!” he said, scowling round, “what have you been doing to me here! I have lived bold, and I mean to die bold. To the Devil with you!” And so lay down upon his bed, and put his arms up, over his head and ears, as resolute from that time to keep out all access, and to die in his indifference. If Redlaw had been struck by lightning, it could not have struck him from the bedside with a more tremendous shock. But the old man, who had left the bed while his son was speaking to him, now returning, avoided it quickly likewise, and with abhorrence. “Where’s my boy William?” said the old man hurriedly. “William, come away from here. We’ll go home.” “Home, father!” returned William. “Are you going to leave your own son?” “Where’s my own son?” replied the old man. “Where? why, there!” “That’s no son of mine,” said Philip, trembling with resentment. “No such wretch as that, has any claim on me. My children are pleasant to look at, and they wait upon me, and get my meat and drink ready, and are useful to me. I’ve a right to it! I’m eighty-seven!” “You’re old enough to be no older,” muttered William, looking at him grudgingly, with his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know what good you are, myself. We could have a deal more pleasure without you.” “My son, Mr. Redlaw!” said the old man. “My son, too! The boy talking to me of my son! Why, what has he ever done to give me any pleasure, I should like to know?” “I don’t know what you have ever done to give me any pleasure,” said William, sulkily. “Let me think,” said the old man. “For how many Christmas times running, have I sat in my warm place, and never had to come out in the cold night air; and have made good cheer, without being disturbed by any such uncomfortable, wretched sight as him there? Is it twenty, William?” “Nigher forty, it seems,” he muttered. “Why, when I look at my father, sir, and come to think of it,” addressing Redlaw, with an impatience and irritation that were quite new, “I’m whipped if I can see anything in him but a calendar of ever so many years of eating and drinking, and making himself comfortable, over and over again.” “I—I’m eighty-seven,” said the old man, rambling on, childishly and weakly, “and I don’t know as I ever was much put out by anything. I’m not going to begin now, because of what he calls my son. He’s not my son. I’ve had a power of pleasant times. I recollect once—no I don’t—no, it’s broken off. It was something about a game of cricket and a friend of mine, but it’s somehow broken off. I wonder who he was—I suppose I liked him? And I wonder what became of him—I suppose he died? But I don’t know. And I don’t care, neither; I don’t care a bit.” In his drowsy chuckling, and the shaking of his head, he put his hands into his waistcoat pockets. In one of them he found a bit of holly (left there, probably last night), which he now took out, and looked at. “Berries, eh?” said the old man. “Ah! It’s a pity they’re not good to eat. I recollect, when I was a little chap about as high as that, and out a walking with—let me see—who was I out a walking with?—no, I don’t remember how that was. I don’t remember as I ever walked with any one particular, or cared for any one, or any one for me. Berries, eh? There’s good cheer when there’s berries. Well; I ought to have my share of it, and to be waited on, and kept warm and comfortable; for I’m eighty-seven, and a poor old man. I’m eigh-ty-seven. Eigh-ty-seven!” The drivelling, pitiable manner in which, as he repeated this, he nibbled at the leaves, and spat the morsels out; the cold, uninterested eye with which his youngest son (so changed) regarded him; the determined apathy with which his eldest son lay hardened in his sin; impressed themselves no more on Redlaw’s observation,—for he broke his way from the spot to which his feet seemed to have been fixed, and ran out of the house. His guide came crawling forth from his place of refuge, and was ready for him before he reached the arches. “Back to the woman’s?” he inquired. “Back, quickly!” answered Redlaw. “Stop nowhere on the way!” For a short distance the boy went on before; but their return was more like a flight than a walk, and it was as much as his bare feet could do, to keep pace with the Chemist’s rapid strides. Shrinking from all who passed, shrouded in his cloak, and keeping it drawn closely about him, as though there were mortal contagion in any fluttering touch of his garments, he made no pause until they reached the door by which they had come out. He unlocked it with his key, went in, accompanied by the boy, and hastened through the dark passages to his own chamber. The boy watched him as he made the door fast, and withdrew behind the table, when he looked round. “Come!” he said. “Don’t you touch me! You’ve not brought me here to take my money away.” Redlaw threw some more upon the ground. He flung his body on it immediately, as if to hide it from him, lest the sight of it should tempt him to reclaim it; and not until he saw him seated by his lamp, with his face hidden in his hands, began furtively to pick it up. When he had done so, he crept near the fire, and, sitting down in a great chair before it, took from his breast some broken scraps of food, and fell to munching, and to staring at the blaze, and now and then to glancing at his shillings, which he kept clenched up in a bunch, in one hand. “And this,” said Redlaw, gazing on him with increased repugnance and fear, “is the only one companion I have left on earth!” How long it was before he was aroused from his contemplation of this creature, whom he dreaded so—whether half-an-hour, or half the night—he knew not. But the stillness of the room was broken by the boy (whom he had seen listening) starting up, and running towards the door. “Here’s the woman coming!” he exclaimed. The Chemist stopped him on his way, at the moment when she knocked. “Let me go to her, will you?” said the boy. “Not now,” returned the Chemist. “Stay here. Nobody must pass in or out of the room now. Who’s that?” “It’s I, sir,” cried Milly. “Pray, sir, let me in!” “No! not for the world!” he said. “Mr. Redlaw, Mr. Redlaw, pray, sir, let me in.” “What is the matter?” he said, holding the boy. “The miserable man you saw, is worse, and nothing I can say will wake him from his terrible infatuation. William’s father has turned childish in a moment, William himself is changed. The shock has been too sudden for him; I cannot understand him; he is not like himself. Oh, Mr. Redlaw, pray advise me, help me!” “No! No! No!” he answered. “Mr. Redlaw! Dear sir! George has been muttering, in his doze, about the man you saw there, who, he fears, will kill himself.” “Better he should do it, than come near me!” “He says, in his wandering, that you know him; that he was your friend once, long ago; that he is the ruined father of a student here—my mind misgives me, of the young gentleman who has been ill. What is to be done? How is he to be followed? How is he to be saved? Mr. Redlaw, pray, oh, pray, advise me! Help me!” All this time he held the boy, who was half-mad to pass him, and let her in. “Phantoms! Punishers of impious thoughts!” cried Redlaw, gazing round in anguish, “look upon me! From the darkness of my mind, let the glimmering of contrition that I know is there, shine up and show my misery! In the material world as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made in the great universe. I know, now, that it is the same with good and evil, happiness and sorrow, in the memories of men. Pity me! Relieve me!” There was no response, but her “Help me, help me, let me in!” and the boy’s struggling to get to her. “Shadow of myself! Spirit of my darker hours!” cried Redlaw, in distraction, “come back, and haunt me day and night, but take this gift away! Or, if it must still rest with me, deprive me of the dreadful power of giving it to others. Undo what I have done. Leave me benighted, but restore the day to those whom I have cursed. As I have spared this woman from the first, and as I never will go forth again, but will die here, with no hand to tend me, save this creature’s who is proof against me,—hear me!” The only reply still was, the boy struggling to get to her, while he held him back; and the cry, increasing in its energy, “Help! let me in. He was your friend once, how shall he be followed, how shall he be saved? They are all changed, there is no one else to help me, pray, pray, let me in!” CHAPTER III The Gift Reversed Night was still heavy in the sky. On open plains, from hill-tops, and from the decks of solitary ships at sea, a distant low-lying line, that promised by-and-by to change to light, was visible in the dim horizon; but its promise was remote and doubtful, and the moon was striving with the night-clouds busily. The shadows upon Redlaw’s mind succeeded thick and fast to one another, and obscured its light as the night-clouds hovered between the moon and earth, and kept the latter veiled in darkness. Fitful and uncertain as the shadows which the night-clouds cast, were their concealments from him, and imperfect revelations to him; and, like the night-clouds still, if the clear light broke forth for a moment, it was only that they might sweep over it, and make the darkness deeper than before. Without, there was a profound and solemn hush upon the ancient pile of building, and its buttresses and angles made dark shapes of mystery upon the ground, which now seemed to retire into the smooth white snow and now seemed to come out of it, as the moon’s path was more or less beset. Within, the Chemist’s room was indistinct and murky, by the light of the expiring lamp; a ghostly silence had succeeded to the knocking and the voice outside; nothing was audible but, now and then, a low sound among the whitened ashes of the fire, as of its yielding up its last breath. Before it on the ground the boy lay fast asleep. In his chair, the Chemist sat, as he had sat there since the calling at his door had ceased—like a man turned to stone. At such a time, the Christmas music he had heard before, began to play. He listened to it at first, as he had listened in the church-yard; but presently—it playing still, and being borne towards him on the night air, in a low, sweet, melancholy strain—he rose, and stood stretching his hands about him, as if there were some friend approaching within his reach, on whom his desolate touch might rest, yet do no harm. As he did this, his face became less fixed and wondering; a gentle trembling came upon him; and at last his eyes filled with tears, and he put his hands before them, and bowed down his head. His memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble, had not come back to him; he knew that it was not restored; he had no passing belief or hope that it was. But some dumb stir within him made him capable, again, of being moved by what was hidden, afar off, in the music. If it were only that it told him sorrowfully the value of what he had lost, he thanked Heaven for it with a fervent gratitude. As the last chord died upon his ear, he raised his head to listen to its lingering vibration. Beyond the boy, so that his sleeping figure lay at its feet, the Phantom stood, immovable and silent, with its eyes upon him. Ghastly it was, as it had ever been, but not so cruel and relentless in its aspect—or he thought or hoped so, as he looked upon it trembling. It was not alone, but in its shadowy hand it held another hand. And whose was that? Was the form that stood beside it indeed Milly’s, or but her shade and picture? The quiet head was bent a little, as her manner was, and her eyes were looking down, as if in pity, on the sleeping child. A radiant light fell on her face, but did not touch the Phantom; for, though close beside her, it was dark and colourless as ever. “Spectre!” said the Chemist, newly troubled as he looked, “I have not been stubborn or presumptuous in respect of her. Oh, do not bring her here. Spare me that!” “This is but a shadow,” said the Phantom; “when the morning shines seek out the reality whose image I present before you.” “Is it my inexorable doom to do so?” cried the Chemist. “It is,” replied the Phantom. “To destroy her peace, her goodness; to make her what I am myself, and what I have made of others!” “I have said seek her out,” returned the Phantom. “I have said no more.” “Oh, tell me,” exclaimed Redlaw, catching at the hope which he fancied might lie hidden in the words. “Can I undo what I have done?” “No,” returned the Phantom. “I do not ask for restoration to myself,” said Redlaw. “What I abandoned, I abandoned of my own free will, and have justly lost. But for those to whom I have transferred the fatal gift; who never sought it; who unknowingly received a curse of which they had no warning, and which they had no power to shun; can I do nothing?” “Nothing,” said the Phantom. “If I cannot, can any one?” The Phantom, standing like a statue, kept its gaze upon him for a while; then turned its head suddenly, and looked upon the shadow at its side. “Ah! Can she?” cried Redlaw, still looking upon the shade. The Phantom released the hand it had retained till now, and softly raised its own with a gesture of dismissal. Upon that, her shadow, still preserving the same attitude, began to move or melt away. “Stay,” cried Redlaw with an earnestness to which he could not give enough expression. “For a moment! As an act of mercy! I know that some change fell upon me, when those sounds were in the air just now. Tell me, have I lost the power of harming her? May I go near her without dread? Oh, let her give me any sign of hope!” The Phantom looked upon the shade as he did—not at him—and gave no answer. “At least, say this—has she, henceforth, the consciousness of any power to set right what I have done?” “She has not,” the Phantom answered. “Has she the power bestowed on her without the consciousness?” The phantom answered: “Seek her out.” And her shadow slowly vanished. They were face to face again, and looking on each other, as intently and awfully as at the time of the bestowal of the gift, across the boy who still lay on the ground between them, at the Phantom’s feet. “Terrible instructor,” said the Chemist, sinking on his knee before it, in an attitude of supplication, “by whom I was renounced, but by whom I am revisited (in which, and in whose milder aspect, I would fain believe I have a gleam of hope), I will obey without inquiry, praying that the cry I have sent up in the anguish of my soul has been, or will be, heard, in behalf of those whom I have injured beyond human reparation. But there is one thing—” “You speak to me of what is lying here,” the phantom interposed, and pointed with its finger to the boy. “I do,” returned the Chemist. “You know what I would ask. Why has this child alone been proof against my influence, and why, why, have I detected in its thoughts a terrible companionship with mine?” “This,” said the Phantom, pointing to the boy, “is the last, completest illustration of a human creature, utterly bereft of such remembrances as you have yielded up. No softening memory of sorrow, wrong, or trouble enters here, because this wretched mortal from his birth has been abandoned to a worse condition than the beasts, and has, within his knowledge, no one contrast, no humanising touch, to make a grain of such a memory spring up in his hardened breast. All within this desolate creature is barren wilderness. All within the man bereft of what you have resigned, is the same barren wilderness. Woe to such a man! Woe, tenfold, to the nation that shall count its monsters such as this, lying here, by hundreds and by thousands!” Redlaw shrank, appalled, from what he heard. “There is not,” said the Phantom, “one of these—not one—but sows a harvest that mankind MUST reap. From every seed of evil in this boy, a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world, until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another Deluge. Open and unpunished murder in a city’s streets would be less guilty in its daily toleration, than one such spectacle as this.” It seemed to look down upon the boy in his sleep. Redlaw, too, looked down upon him with a new emotion. “There is not a father,” said the Phantom, “by whose side in his daily or his nightly walk, these creatures pass; there is not a mother among all the ranks of loving mothers in this land; there is no one risen from the state of childhood, but shall be responsible in his or her degree for this enormity. There is not a country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse. There is no religion upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people upon earth it would not put to shame.” The Chemist clasped his hands, and looked, with trembling fear and pity, from the sleeping boy to the Phantom, standing above him with his finger pointing down. “Behold, I say,” pursued the Spectre, “the perfect type of what it was your choice to be. Your influence is powerless here, because from this child’s bosom you can banish nothing. His thoughts have been in ‘terrible companionship’ with yours, because you have gone down to his unnatural level. He is the growth of man’s indifference; you are the growth of man’s presumption. The beneficent design of Heaven is, in each case, overthrown, and from the two poles of the immaterial world you come together.” The Chemist stooped upon the ground beside the boy, and, with the same kind of compassion for him that he now felt for himself, covered him as he slept, and no longer shrank from him with abhorrence or indifference. Soon, now, the distant line on the horizon brightened, the darkness faded, the sun rose red and glorious, and the chimney stacks and gables of the ancient building gleamed in the clear air, which turned the smoke and vapour of the city into a cloud of gold. The very sun-dial in his shady corner, where the wind was used to spin with such unwindy constancy, shook off the finer particles of snow that had accumulated on his dull old face in the night, and looked out at the little white wreaths eddying round and round him. Doubtless some blind groping of the morning made its way down into the forgotten crypt so cold and earthy, where the Norman arches were half buried in the ground, and stirred the dull sap in the lazy vegetation hanging to the walls, and quickened the slow principle of life within the little world of wonderful and delicate creation which existed there, with some faint knowledge that the sun was up. The Tetterbys were up, and doing. Mr. Tetterby took down the shutters of the shop, and, strip by strip, revealed the treasures of the window to the eyes, so proof against their seductions, of Jerusalem Buildings. Adolphus had been out so long already, that he was halfway on to “Morning Pepper.” Five small Tetterbys, whose ten round eyes were much inflamed by soap and friction, were in the tortures of a cool wash in the back kitchen; Mrs. Tetterby presiding. Johnny, who was pushed and hustled through his toilet with great rapidity when Moloch chanced to be in an exacting frame of mind (which was always the case), staggered up and down with his charge before the shop door, under greater difficulties than usual; the weight of Moloch being much increased by a complication of defences against the cold, composed of knitted worsted-work, and forming a complete suit of chain-armour, with a head-piece and blue gaiters. It was a peculiarity of this baby to be always cutting teeth. Whether they never came, or whether they came and went away again, is not in evidence; but it had certainly cut enough, on the showing of Mrs. Tetterby, to make a handsome dental provision for the sign of the Bull and Mouth. All sorts of objects were impressed for the rubbing of its gums, notwithstanding that it always carried, dangling at its waist (which was immediately under its chin), a bone ring, large enough to have represented the rosary of a young nun. Knife-handles, umbrella-tops, the heads of walking-sticks selected from the stock, the fingers of the family in general, but especially of Johnny, nutmeg-graters, crusts, the handles of doors, and the cool knobs on the tops of pokers, were among the commonest instruments indiscriminately applied for this baby’s relief. The amount of electricity that must have been rubbed out of it in a week, is not to be calculated. Still Mrs. Tetterby always said “it was coming through, and then the child would be herself;” and still it never did come through, and the child continued to be somebody else. The tempers of the little Tetterbys had sadly changed with a few hours. Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby themselves were not more altered than their offspring. Usually they were an unselfish, good-natured, yielding little race, sharing short commons when it happened (which was pretty often) contentedly and even generously, and taking a great deal of enjoyment out of a very little meat. But they were fighting now, not only for the soap and water, but even for the breakfast which was yet in perspective. The hand of every little Tetterby was against the other little Tetterbys; and even Johnny’s hand—the patient, much-enduring, and devoted Johnny—rose against the baby! Yes, Mrs. Tetterby, going to the door by mere accident, saw him viciously pick out a weak place in the suit of armour where a slap would tell, and slap that blessed child. Mrs. Tetterby had him into the parlour by the collar, in that same flash of time, and repaid him the assault with usury thereto. “You brute, you murdering little boy,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Had you the heart to do it?” “Why don’t her teeth come through, then,” retorted Johnny, in a loud rebellious voice, “instead of bothering me? How would you like it yourself?” “Like it, sir!” said Mrs. Tetterby, relieving him of his dishonoured load. “Yes, like it,” said Johnny. “How would you? Not at all. If you was me, you’d go for a soldier. I will, too. There an’t no babies in the Army.” Mr. Tetterby, who had arrived upon the scene of action, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, instead of correcting the rebel, and seemed rather struck by this view of a military life. “I wish I was in the Army myself, if the child’s in the right,” said Mrs. Tetterby, looking at her husband, “for I have no peace of my life here. I’m a slave—a Virginia slave:” some indistinct association with their weak descent on the tobacco trade perhaps suggested this aggravated expression to Mrs. Tetterby. “I never have a holiday, or any pleasure at all, from year’s end to year’s end! Why, Lord bless and save the child,” said Mrs. Tetterby, shaking the baby with an irritability hardly suited to so pious an aspiration, “what’s the matter with her now?” Not being able to discover, and not rendering the subject much clearer by shaking it, Mrs. Tetterby put the baby away in a cradle, and, folding her arms, sat rocking it angrily with her foot. “How you stand there, ’Dolphus,” said Mrs. Tetterby to her husband. “Why don’t you do something?” “Because I don’t care about doing anything,” Mr. Tetterby replied. “I am sure I don’t,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “I’ll take my oath I don’t,” said Mr. Tetterby. A diversion arose here among Johnny and his five younger brothers, who, in preparing the family breakfast table, had fallen to skirmishing for the temporary possession of the loaf, and were buffeting one another with great heartiness; the smallest boy of all, with precocious discretion, hovering outside the knot of combatants, and harassing their legs. Into the midst of this fray, Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby both precipitated themselves with great ardour, as if such ground were the only ground on which they could now agree; and having, with no visible remains of their late soft-heartedness, laid about them without any lenity, and done much execution, resumed their former relative positions. “You had better read your paper than do nothing at all,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “What’s there to read in a paper?” returned Mr. Tetterby, with excessive discontent. “What?” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Police.” “It’s nothing to me,” said Tetterby. “What do I care what people do, or are done to?” “Suicides,” suggested Mrs. Tetterby. “No business of mine,” replied her husband. “Births, deaths, and marriages, are those nothing to you?” said Mrs. Tetterby. “If the births were all over for good, and all to-day; and the deaths were all to begin to come off to-morrow; I don’t see why it should interest me, till I thought it was a coming to my turn,” grumbled Tetterby. “As to marriages, I’ve done it myself. I know quite enough about them.” To judge from the dissatisfied expression of her face and manner, Mrs. Tetterby appeared to entertain the same opinions as her husband; but she opposed him, nevertheless, for the gratification of quarrelling with him. “Oh, you’re a consistent man,” said Mrs. Tetterby, “an’t you? You, with the screen of your own making there, made of nothing else but bits of newspapers, which you sit and read to the children by the half-hour together!” “Say used to, if you please,” returned her husband. “You won’t find me doing so any more. I’m wiser now.” “Bah! wiser, indeed!” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Are you better?” The question sounded some discordant note in Mr. Tetterby’s breast. He ruminated dejectedly, and passed his hand across and across his forehead. “Better!” murmured Mr. Tetterby. “I don’t know as any of us are better, or happier either. Better, is it?” He turned to the screen, and traced about it with his finger, until he found a certain paragraph of which he was in quest. “This used to be one of the family favourites, I recollect,” said Tetterby, in a forlorn and stupid way, “and used to draw tears from the children, and make ’em good, if there was any little bickering or discontent among ’em, next to the story of the robin redbreasts in the wood. ‘Melancholy case of destitution. Yesterday a small man, with a baby in his arms, and surrounded by half-a-dozen ragged little ones, of various ages between ten and two, the whole of whom were evidently in a famishing condition, appeared before the worthy magistrate, and made the following recital:’—Ha! I don’t understand it, I’m sure,” said Tetterby; “I don’t see what it has got to do with us.” “How old and shabby he looks,” said Mrs. Tetterby, watching him. “I never saw such a change in a man. Ah! dear me, dear me, dear me, it was a sacrifice!” “What was a sacrifice?” her husband sourly inquired. Mrs. Tetterby shook her head; and without replying in words, raised a complete sea-storm about the baby, by her violent agitation of the cradle. “If you mean your marriage was a sacrifice, my good woman—” said her husband. “I do mean it,” said his wife. “Why, then I mean to say,” pursued Mr. Tetterby, as sulkily and surlily as she, “that there are two sides to that affair; and that I was the sacrifice; and that I wish the sacrifice hadn’t been accepted.” “I wish it hadn’t, Tetterby, with all my heart and soul I do assure you,” said his wife. “You can’t wish it more than I do, Tetterby.” “I don’t know what I saw in her,” muttered the newsman, “I’m sure;—certainly, if I saw anything, it’s not there now. I was thinking so, last night, after supper, by the fire. She’s fat, she’s ageing, she won’t bear comparison with most other women.” “He’s common-looking, he has no air with him, he’s small, he’s beginning to stoop and he’s getting bald,” muttered Mrs. Tetterby. “I must have been half out of my mind when I did it,” muttered Mr. Tetterby. “My senses must have forsook me. That’s the only way in which I can explain it to myself,” said Mrs. Tetterby with elaboration. In this mood they sat down to breakfast. The little Tetterbys were not habituated to regard that meal in the light of a sedentary occupation, but discussed it as a dance or trot; rather resembling a savage ceremony, in the occasionally shrill whoops, and brandishings of bread and butter, with which it was accompanied, as well as in the intricate filings off into the street and back again, and the hoppings up and down the door-steps, which were incidental to the performance. In the present instance, the contentions between these Tetterby children for the milk-and-water jug, common to all, which stood upon the table, presented so lamentable an instance of angry passions risen very high indeed, that it was an outrage on the memory of Dr. Watts. It was not until Mr. Tetterby had driven the whole herd out at the front door, that a moment’s peace was secured; and even that was broken by the discovery that Johnny had surreptitiously come back, and was at that instant choking in the jug like a ventriloquist, in his indecent and rapacious haste. “These children will be the death of me at last!” said Mrs. Tetterby, after banishing the culprit. “And the sooner the better, I think.” “Poor people,” said Mr. Tetterby, “ought not to have children at all. They give us no pleasure.” He was at that moment taking up the cup which Mrs. Tetterby had rudely pushed towards him, and Mrs. Tetterby was lifting her own cup to her lips, when they both stopped, as if they were transfixed. “Here! Mother! Father!” cried Johnny, running into the room. “Here’s Mrs. William coming down the street!” And if ever, since the world began, a young boy took a baby from a cradle with the care of an old nurse, and hushed and soothed it tenderly, and tottered away with it cheerfully, Johnny was that boy, and Moloch was that baby, as they went out together! Mr. Tetterby put down his cup; Mrs. Tetterby put down her cup. Mr. Tetterby rubbed his forehead; Mrs. Tetterby rubbed hers. Mr. Tetterby’s face began to smooth and brighten; Mrs. Tetterby’s began to smooth and brighten. “Why, Lord forgive me,” said Mr. Tetterby to himself, “what evil tempers have I been giving way to? What has been the matter here!” “How could I ever treat him ill again, after all I said and felt last night!” sobbed Mrs. Tetterby, with her apron to her eyes. “Am I a brute,” said Mr. Tetterby, “or is there any good in me at all? Sophia! My little woman!” “’Dolphus dear,” returned his wife. “I—I’ve been in a state of mind,” said Mr. Tetterby, “that I can’t abear to think of, Sophy.” “Oh! It’s nothing to what I’ve been in, Dolf,” cried his wife in a great burst of grief. “My Sophia,” said Mr. Tetterby, “don’t take on. I never shall forgive myself. I must have nearly broke your heart, I know.” “No, Dolf, no. It was me! Me!” cried Mrs. Tetterby. “My little woman,” said her husband, “don’t. You make me reproach myself dreadful, when you show such a noble spirit. Sophia, my dear, you don’t know what I thought. I showed it bad enough, no doubt; but what I thought, my little woman!—” “Oh, dear Dolf, don’t! Don’t!” cried his wife. “Sophia,” said Mr. Tetterby, “I must reveal it. I couldn’t rest in my conscience unless I mentioned it. My little woman—” “Mrs. William’s very nearly here!” screamed Johnny at the door. “My little woman, I wondered how,” gasped Mr. Tetterby, supporting himself by his chair, “I wondered how I had ever admired you—I forgot the precious children you have brought about me, and thought you didn’t look as slim as I could wish. I—I never gave a recollection,” said Mr. Tetterby, with severe self-accusation, “to the cares you’ve had as my wife, and along of me and mine, when you might have had hardly any with another man, who got on better and was luckier than me (anybody might have found such a man easily I am sure); and I quarrelled with you for having aged a little in the rough years you have lightened for me. Can you believe it, my little woman? I hardly can myself.” Mrs. Tetterby, in a whirlwind of laughing and crying, caught his face within her hands, and held it there. “Oh, Dolf!” she cried. “I am so happy that you thought so; I am so grateful that you thought so! For I thought that you were common-looking, Dolf; and so you are, my dear, and may you be the commonest of all sights in my eyes, till you close them with your own good hands. I thought that you were small; and so you are, and I’ll make much of you because you are, and more of you because I love my husband. I thought that you began to stoop; and so you do, and you shall lean on me, and I’ll do all I can to keep you up. I thought there was no air about you; but there is, and it’s the air of home, and that’s the purest and the best there is, and God bless home once more, and all belonging to it, Dolf!” “Hurrah! Here’s Mrs. William!” cried Johnny. So she was, and all the children with her; and so she came in, they kissed her, and kissed one another, and kissed the baby, and kissed their father and mother, and then ran back and flocked and danced about her, trooping on with her in triumph. Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby were not a bit behind-hand in the warmth of their reception. They were as much attracted to her as the children were; they ran towards her, kissed her hands, pressed round her, could not receive her ardently or enthusiastically enough. She came among them like the spirit of all goodness, affection, gentle consideration, love, and domesticity. “What! are you all so glad to see me, too, this bright Christmas morning?” said Milly, clapping her hands in a pleasant wonder. “Oh dear, how delightful this is!” More shouting from the children, more kissing, more trooping round her, more happiness, more love, more joy, more honour, on all sides, than she could bear. “Oh dear!” said Milly, “what delicious tears you make me shed. How can I ever have deserved this! What have I done to be so loved?” “Who can help it!” cried Mr. Tetterby. “Who can help it!” cried Mrs. Tetterby. “Who can help it!” echoed the children, in a joyful chorus. And they danced and trooped about her again, and clung to her, and laid their rosy faces against her dress, and kissed and fondled it, and could not fondle it, or her, enough. “I never was so moved,” said Milly, drying her eyes, “as I have been this morning. I must tell you, as soon as I can speak.—Mr. Redlaw came to me at sunrise, and with a tenderness in his manner, more as if I had been his darling daughter than myself, implored me to go with him to where William’s brother George is lying ill. We went together, and all the way along he was so kind, and so subdued, and seemed to put such trust and hope in me, that I could not help crying with pleasure. When we got to the house, we met a woman at the door (somebody had bruised and hurt her, I am afraid), who caught me by the hand, and blessed me as I passed.” “She was right!” said Mr. Tetterby. Mrs. Tetterby said she was right. All the children cried out that she was right. “Ah, but there’s more than that,” said Milly. “When we got up stairs, into the room, the sick man who had lain for hours in a state from which no effort could rouse him, rose up in his bed, and, bursting into tears, stretched out his arms to me, and said that he had led a mis-spent life, but that he was truly repentant now, in his sorrow for the past, which was all as plain to him as a great prospect, from which a dense black cloud had cleared away, and that he entreated me to ask his poor old father for his pardon and his blessing, and to say a prayer beside his bed. And when I did so, Mr. Redlaw joined in it so fervently, and then so thanked and thanked me, and thanked Heaven, that my heart quite overflowed, and I could have done nothing but sob and cry, if the sick man had not begged me to sit down by him,—which made me quiet of course. As I sat there, he held my hand in his until he sank in a doze; and even then, when I withdrew my hand to leave him to come here (which Mr. Redlaw was very earnest indeed in wishing me to do), his hand felt for mine, so that some one else was obliged to take my place and make believe to give him my hand back. Oh dear, oh dear,” said Milly, sobbing. “How thankful and how happy I should feel, and do feel, for all this!” While she was speaking, Redlaw had come in, and, after pausing for a moment to observe the group of which she was the centre, had silently ascended the stairs. Upon those stairs he now appeared again; remaining there, while the young student passed him, and came running down. “Kind nurse, gentlest, best of creatures,” he said, falling on his knee to her, and catching at her hand, “forgive my cruel ingratitude!” “Oh dear, oh dear!” cried Milly innocently, “here’s another of them! Oh dear, here’s somebody else who likes me. What shall I ever do!” The guileless, simple way in which she said it, and in which she put her hands before her eyes and wept for very happiness, was as touching as it was delightful. “I was not myself,” he said. “I don’t know what it was—it was some consequence of my disorder perhaps—I was mad. But I am so no longer. Almost as I speak, I am restored. I heard the children crying out your name, and the shade passed from me at the very sound of it. Oh, don’t weep! Dear Milly, if you could read my heart, and only knew with what affection and what grateful homage it is glowing, you would not let me see you weep. It is such deep reproach.” “No, no,” said Milly, “it’s not that. It’s not indeed. It’s joy. It’s wonder that you should think it necessary to ask me to forgive so little, and yet it’s pleasure that you do.” “And will you come again? and will you finish the little curtain?” “No,” said Milly, drying her eyes, and shaking her head. “You won’t care for my needlework now.” “Is it forgiving me, to say that?” She beckoned him aside, and whispered in his ear. “There is news from your home, Mr. Edmund.” “News? How?” “Either your not writing when you were very ill, or the change in your handwriting when you began to be better, created some suspicion of the truth; however that is—but you’re sure you’ll not be the worse for any news, if it’s not bad news?” “Sure.” “Then there’s some one come!” said Milly. “My mother?” asked the student, glancing round involuntarily towards Redlaw, who had come down from the stairs. “Hush! No,” said Milly. “It can be no one else.” “Indeed?” said Milly, “are you sure?” “It is not—” Before he could say more, she put her hand upon his mouth. “Yes it is!” said Milly. “The young lady (she is very like the miniature, Mr. Edmund, but she is prettier) was too unhappy to rest without satisfying her doubts, and came up, last night, with a little servant-maid. As you always dated your letters from the college, she came there; and before I saw Mr. Redlaw this morning, I saw her. She likes me too!” said Milly. “Oh dear, that’s another!” “This morning! Where is she now?” “Why, she is now,” said Milly, advancing her lips to his ear, “in my little parlour in the Lodge, and waiting to see you.” He pressed her hand, and was darting off, but she detained him. “Mr. Redlaw is much altered, and has told me this morning that his memory is impaired. Be very considerate to him, Mr. Edmund; he needs that from us all.” The young man assured her, by a look, that her caution was not ill-bestowed; and as he passed the Chemist on his way out, bent respectfully and with an obvious interest before him. Redlaw returned the salutation courteously and even humbly, and looked after him as he passed on. He drooped his head upon his hand too, as trying to reawaken something he had lost. But it was gone. The abiding change that had come upon him since the influence of the music, and the Phantom’s reappearance, was, that now he truly felt how much he had lost, and could compassionate his own condition, and contrast it, clearly, with the natural state of those who were around him. In this, an interest in those who were around him was revived, and a meek, submissive sense of his calamity was bred, resembling that which sometimes obtains in age, when its mental powers are weakened, without insensibility or sullenness being added to the list of its infirmities. He was conscious that, as he redeemed, through Milly, more and more of the evil he had done, and as he was more and more with her, this change ripened itself within him. Therefore, and because of the attachment she inspired him with (but without other hope), he felt that he was quite dependent on her, and that she was his staff in his affliction. So, when she asked him whether they should go home now, to where the old man and her husband were, and he readily replied “yes”—being anxious in that regard—he put his arm through hers, and walked beside her; not as if he were the wise and learned man to whom the wonders of Nature were an open book, and hers were the uninstructed mind, but as if their two positions were reversed, and he knew nothing, and she all. He saw the children throng about her, and caress her, as he and she went away together thus, out of the house; he heard the ringing of their laughter, and their merry voices; he saw their bright faces, clustering around him like flowers; he witnessed the renewed contentment and affection of their parents; he breathed the simple air of their poor home, restored to its tranquillity; he thought of the unwholesome blight he had shed upon it, and might, but for her, have been diffusing then; and perhaps it is no wonder that he walked submissively beside her, and drew her gentle bosom nearer to his own. When they arrived at the Lodge, the old man was sitting in his chair in the chimney-corner, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and his son was leaning against the opposite side of the fire-place, looking at him. As she came in at the door, both started, and turned round towards her, and a radiant change came upon their faces. “Oh dear, dear, dear, they are all pleased to see me like the rest!” cried Milly, clapping her hands in an ecstasy, and stopping short. “Here are two more!” Pleased to see her! Pleasure was no word for it. She ran into her husband’s arms, thrown wide open to receive her, and he would have been glad to have her there, with her head lying on his shoulder, through the short winter’s day. But the old man couldn’t spare her. He had arms for her too, and he locked her in them. “Why, where has my quiet Mouse been all this time?” said the old man. “She has been a long while away. I find that it’s impossible for me to get on without Mouse. I—where’s my son William?—I fancy I have been dreaming, William.” “That’s what I say myself, father,” returned his son. “I have been in an ugly sort of dream, I think.—How are you, father? Are you pretty well?” “Strong and brave, my boy,” returned the old man. It was quite a sight to see Mr. William shaking hands with his father, and patting him on the back, and rubbing him gently down with his hand, as if he could not possibly do enough to show an interest in him. “What a wonderful man you are, father!—How are you, father? Are you really pretty hearty, though?” said William, shaking hands with him again, and patting him again, and rubbing him gently down again. “I never was fresher or stouter in my life, my boy.” “What a wonderful man you are, father! But that’s exactly where it is,” said Mr. William, with enthusiasm. “When I think of all that my father’s gone through, and all the chances and changes, and sorrows and troubles, that have happened to him in the course of his long life, and under which his head has grown grey, and years upon years have gathered on it, I feel as if we couldn’t do enough to honour the old gentleman, and make his old age easy.—How are you, father? Are you really pretty well, though?” Mr. William might never have left off repeating this inquiry, and shaking hands with him again, and patting him again, and rubbing him down again, if the old man had not espied the Chemist, whom until now he had not seen. “I ask your pardon, Mr. Redlaw,” said Philip, “but didn’t know you were here, sir, or should have made less free. It reminds me, Mr. Redlaw, seeing you here on a Christmas morning, of the time when you was a student yourself, and worked so hard that you were backwards and forwards in our Library even at Christmas time. Ha! ha! I’m old enough to remember that; and I remember it right well, I do, though I am eighty-seven. It was after you left here that my poor wife died. You remember my poor wife, Mr. Redlaw?” The Chemist answered yes. “Yes,” said the old man. “She was a dear creetur.—I recollect you come here one Christmas morning with a young lady—I ask your pardon, Mr. Redlaw, but I think it was a sister you was very much attached to?” The Chemist looked at him, and shook his head. “I had a sister,” he said vacantly. He knew no more. “One Christmas morning,” pursued the old man, “that you come here with her—and it began to snow, and my wife invited the lady to walk in, and sit by the fire that is always a burning on Christmas Day in what used to be, before our ten poor gentlemen commuted, our great Dinner Hall. I was there; and I recollect, as I was stirring up the blaze for the young lady to warm her pretty feet by, she read the scroll out loud, that is underneath that pictur, ‘Lord, keep my memory green!’ She and my poor wife fell a talking about it; and it’s a strange thing to think of, now, that they both said (both being so unlike to die) that it was a good prayer, and that it was one they would put up very earnestly, if they were called away young, with reference to those who were dearest to them. ‘My brother,’ says the young lady—‘My husband,’ says my poor wife.—‘Lord, keep his memory of me, green, and do not let me be forgotten!’” Tears more painful, and more bitter than he had ever shed in all his life, coursed down Redlaw’s face. Philip, fully occupied in recalling his story, had not observed him until now, nor Milly’s anxiety that he should not proceed. “Philip!” said Redlaw, laying his hand upon his arm, “I am a stricken man, on whom the hand of Providence has fallen heavily, although deservedly. You speak to me, my friend, of what I cannot follow; my memory is gone.” “Merciful power!” cried the old man. “I have lost my memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble,” said the Chemist, “and with that I have lost all man would remember!” To see old Philip’s pity for him, to see him wheel his own great chair for him to rest in, and look down upon him with a solemn sense of his bereavement, was to know, in some degree, how precious to old age such recollections are. The boy came running in, and ran to Milly. “Here’s the man,” he said, “in the other room. I don’t want him.” “What man does he mean?” asked Mr. William. “Hush!” said Milly. Obedient to a sign from her, he and his old father softly withdrew. As they went out, unnoticed, Redlaw beckoned to the boy to come to him. “I like the woman best,” he answered, holding to her skirts. “You are right,” said Redlaw, with a faint smile. “But you needn’t fear to come to me. I am gentler than I was. Of all the world, to you, poor child!” The boy still held back at first, but yielding little by little to her urging, he consented to approach, and even to sit down at his feet. As Redlaw laid his hand upon the shoulder of the child, looking on him with compassion and a fellow-feeling, he put out his other hand to Milly. She stooped down on that side of him, so that she could look into his face, and after silence, said: “Mr. Redlaw, may I speak to you?” “Yes,” he answered, fixing his eyes upon her. “Your voice and music are the same to me.” “May I ask you something?” “What you will.” “Do you remember what I said, when I knocked at your door last night? About one who was your friend once, and who stood on the verge of destruction?” “Yes. I remember,” he said, with some hesitation. “Do you understand it?” He smoothed the boy’s hair—looking at her fixedly the while, and shook his head. “This person,” said Milly, in her clear, soft voice, which her mild eyes, looking at him, made clearer and softer, “I found soon afterwards. I went back to the house, and, with Heaven’s help, traced him. I was not too soon. A very little and I should have been too late.” He took his hand from the boy, and laying it on the back of that hand of hers, whose timid and yet earnest touch addressed him no less appealingly than her voice and eyes, looked more intently on her. “He is the father of Mr. Edmund, the young gentleman we saw just now. His real name is Longford.—You recollect the name?” “I recollect the name.” “And the man?” “No, not the man. Did he ever wrong me?” “Yes!” “Ah! Then it’s hopeless—hopeless.” He shook his head, and softly beat upon the hand he held, as though mutely asking her commiseration. “I did not go to Mr. Edmund last night,” said Milly,—“You will listen to me just the same as if you did remember all?” “To every syllable you say.” “Both, because I did not know, then, that this really was his father, and because I was fearful of the effect of such intelligence upon him, after his illness, if it should be. Since I have known who this person is, I have not gone either; but that is for another reason. He has long been separated from his wife and son—has been a stranger to his home almost from this son’s infancy, I learn from him—and has abandoned and deserted what he should have held most dear. In all that time he has been falling from the state of a gentleman, more and more, until—” she rose up, hastily, and going out for a moment, returned, accompanied by the wreck that Redlaw had beheld last night. “Do you know me?” asked the Chemist. “I should be glad,” returned the other, “and that is an unwonted word for me to use, if I could answer no.” The Chemist looked at the man, standing in self-abasement and degradation before him, and would have looked longer, in an ineffectual struggle for enlightenment, but that Milly resumed her late position by his side, and attracted his attentive gaze to her own face. “See how low he is sunk, how lost he is!” she whispered, stretching out her arm towards him, without looking from the Chemist’s face. “If you could remember all that is connected with him, do you not think it would move your pity to reflect that one you ever loved (do not let us mind how long ago, or in what belief that he has forfeited), should come to this?” “I hope it would,” he answered. “I believe it would.” His eyes wandered to the figure standing near the door, but came back speedily to her, on whom he gazed intently, as if he strove to learn some lesson from every tone of her voice, and every beam of her eyes. “I have no learning, and you have much,” said Milly; “I am not used to think, and you are always thinking. May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us, to remember wrong that has been done us?” “Yes.” “That we may forgive it.” “Pardon me, great Heaven!” said Redlaw, lifting up his eyes, “for having thrown away thine own high attribute!” “And if,” said Milly, “if your memory should one day be restored, as we will hope and pray it may be, would it not be a blessing to you to recall at once a wrong and its forgiveness?” He looked at the figure by the door, and fastened his attentive eyes on her again; a ray of clearer light appeared to him to shine into his mind, from her bright face. “He cannot go to his abandoned home. He does not seek to go there. He knows that he could only carry shame and trouble to those he has so cruelly neglected; and that the best reparation he can make them now, is to avoid them. A very little money carefully bestowed, would remove him to some distant place, where he might live and do no wrong, and make such atonement as is left within his power for the wrong he has done. To the unfortunate lady who is his wife, and to his son, this would be the best and kindest boon that their best friend could give them—one too that they need never know of; and to him, shattered in reputation, mind, and body, it might be salvation.” He took her head between her hands, and kissed it, and said: “It shall be done. I trust to you to do it for me, now and secretly; and to tell him that I would forgive him, if I were so happy as to know for what.” As she rose, and turned her beaming face towards the fallen man, implying that her mediation had been successful, he advanced a step, and without raising his eyes, addressed himself to Redlaw. “You are so generous,” he said, “—you ever were—that you will try to banish your rising sense of retribution in the spectacle that is before you. I do not try to banish it from myself, Redlaw. If you can, believe me.” The Chemist entreated Milly, by a gesture, to come nearer to him; and, as he listened looked in her face, as if to find in it the clue to what he heard. “I am too decayed a wretch to make professions; I recollect my own career too well, to array any such before you. But from the day on which I made my first step downward, in dealing falsely by you, I have gone down with a certain, steady, doomed progression. That, I say.” Redlaw, keeping her close at his side, turned his face towards the speaker, and there was sorrow in it. Something like mournful recognition too. “I might have been another man, my life might have been another life, if I had avoided that first fatal step. I don’t know that it would have been. I claim nothing for the possibility. Your sister is at rest, and better than she could have been with me, if I had continued even what you thought me: even what I once supposed myself to be.” Redlaw made a hasty motion with his hand, as if he would have put that subject on one side. “I speak,” the other went on, “like a man taken from the grave. I should have made my own grave, last night, had it not been for this blessed hand.” “Oh dear, he likes me too!” sobbed Milly, under her breath. “That’s another!” “I could not have put myself in your way, last night, even for bread. But, to-day, my recollection of what has been is so strongly stirred, and is presented to me, I don’t know how, so vividly, that I have dared to come at her suggestion, and to take your bounty, and to thank you for it, and to beg you, Redlaw, in your dying hour, to be as merciful to me in your thoughts, as you are in your deeds.” He turned towards the door, and stopped a moment on his way forth. “I hope my son may interest you, for his mother’s sake. I hope he may deserve to do so. Unless my life should be preserved a long time, and I should know that I have not misused your aid, I shall never look upon him more.” Going out, he raised his eyes to Redlaw for the first time. Redlaw, whose steadfast gaze was fixed upon him, dreamily held out his hand. He returned and touched it—little more—with both his own; and bending down his head, went slowly out. In the few moments that elapsed, while Milly silently took him to the gate, the Chemist dropped into his chair, and covered his face with his hands. Seeing him thus, when she came back, accompanied by her husband and his father (who were both greatly concerned for him), she avoided disturbing him, or permitting him to be disturbed; and kneeled down near the chair to put some warm clothing on the boy. “That’s exactly where it is. That’s what I always say, father!” exclaimed her admiring husband. “There’s a motherly feeling in Mrs. William’s breast that must and will have went!” “Ay, ay,” said the old man; “you’re right. My son William’s right!” “It happens all for the best, Milly dear, no doubt,” said Mr. William, tenderly, “that we have no children of our own; and yet I sometimes wish you had one to love and cherish. Our little dead child that you built such hopes upon, and that never breathed the breath of life—it has made you quiet-like, Milly.” “I am very happy in the recollection of it, William dear,” she answered. “I think of it every day.” “I was afraid you thought of it a good deal.” “Don’t say, afraid; it is a comfort to me; it speaks to me in so many ways. The innocent thing that never lived on earth, is like an angel to me, William.” “You are like an angel to father and me,” said Mr. William, softly. “I know that.” “When I think of all those hopes I built upon it, and the many times I sat and pictured to myself the little smiling face upon my bosom that never lay there, and the sweet eyes turned up to mine that never opened to the light,” said Milly, “I can feel a greater tenderness, I think, for all the disappointed hopes in which there is no harm. When I see a beautiful child in its fond mother’s arms, I love it all the better, thinking that my child might have been like that, and might have made my heart as proud and happy.” Redlaw raised his head, and looked towards her. “All through life, it seems by me,” she continued, “to tell me something. For poor neglected children, my little child pleads as if it were alive, and had a voice I knew, with which to speak to me. When I hear of youth in suffering or shame, I think that my child might have come to that, perhaps, and that God took it from me in His mercy. Even in age and grey hair, such as father’s, it is present: saying that it too might have lived to be old, long and long after you and I were gone, and to have needed the respect and love of younger people.” Her quiet voice was quieter than ever, as she took her husband’s arm, and laid her head against it. “Children love me so, that sometimes I half fancy—it’s a silly fancy, William—they have some way I don’t know of, of feeling for my little child, and me, and understanding why their love is precious to me. If I have been quiet since, I have been more happy, William, in a hundred ways. Not least happy, dear, in this—that even when my little child was born and dead but a few days, and I was weak and sorrowful, and could not help grieving a little, the thought arose, that if I tried to lead a good life, I should meet in Heaven a bright creature, who would call me, Mother!” Redlaw fell upon his knees, with a loud cry. “O Thou,” he said, “who through the teaching of pure love, hast graciously restored me to the memory which was the memory of Christ upon the Cross, and of all the good who perished in His cause, receive my thanks, and bless her!” Then, he folded her to his heart; and Milly, sobbing more than ever, cried, as she laughed, “He is come back to himself! He likes me very much indeed, too! Oh, dear, dear, dear me, here’s another!” Then, the student entered, leading by the hand a lovely girl, who was afraid to come. And Redlaw so changed towards him, seeing in him and his youthful choice, the softened shadow of that chastening passage in his own life, to which, as to a shady tree, the dove so long imprisoned in his solitary ark might fly for rest and company, fell upon his neck, entreating them to be his children. Then, as Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than our own experiences, for all good, he laid his hand upon the boy, and, silently calling Him to witness who laid His hand on children in old time, rebuking, in the majesty of His prophetic knowledge, those who kept them from Him, vowed to protect him, teach him, and reclaim him. Then, he gave his right hand cheerily to Philip, and said that they would that day hold a Christmas dinner in what used to be, before the ten poor gentlemen commuted, their great Dinner Hall; and that they would bid to it as many of that Swidger family, who, his son had told him, were so numerous that they might join hands and make a ring round England, as could be brought together on so short a notice. And it was that day done. There were so many Swidgers there, grown up and children, that an attempt to state them in round numbers might engender doubts, in the distrustful, of the veracity of this history. Therefore the attempt shall not be made. But there they were, by dozens and scores—and there was good news and good hope there, ready for them, of George, who had been visited again by his father and brother, and by Milly, and again left in a quiet sleep. There, present at the dinner, too, were the Tetterbys, including young Adolphus, who arrived in his prismatic comforter, in good time for the beef. Johnny and the baby were too late, of course, and came in all on one side, the one exhausted, the other in a supposed state of double-tooth; but that was customary, and not alarming. It was sad to see the child who had no name or lineage, watching the other children as they played, not knowing how to talk with them, or sport with them, and more strange to the ways of childhood than a rough dog. It was sad, though in a different way, to see what an instinctive knowledge the youngest children there had of his being different from all the rest, and how they made timid approaches to him with soft words and touches, and with little presents, that he might not be unhappy. But he kept by Milly, and began to love her—that was another, as she said!—and, as they all liked her dearly, they were glad of that, and when they saw him peeping at them from behind her chair, they were pleased that he was so close to it. All this, the Chemist, sitting with the student and his bride that was to be, Philip, and the rest, saw. Some people have said since, that he only thought what has been herein set down; others, that he read it in the fire, one winter night about the twilight time; others, that the Ghost was but the representation of his gloomy thoughts, and Milly the embodiment of his better wisdom. I say nothing. —Except this. That as they were assembled in the old Hall, by no other light than that of a great fire (having dined early), the shadows once more stole out of their hiding-places, and danced about the room, showing the children marvellous shapes and faces on the walls, and gradually changing what was real and familiar there, to what was wild and magical. But that there was one thing in the Hall, to which the eyes of Redlaw, and of Milly and her husband, and of the old man, and of the student, and his bride that was to be, were often turned, which the shadows did not obscure or change. Deepened in its gravity by the fire-light, and gazing from the darkness of the panelled wall like life, the sedate face in the portrait, with the beard and ruff, looked down at them from under its verdant wreath of holly, as they looked up at it; and, clear and plain below, as if a voice had uttered them, were the words. Lord keep my Memory green. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Google Books, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Haunted_Man_and_the_Ghost_s_Bargain/riMEAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=haunted+man+ghost%27s+bargain+dickens&pg=PP11&printsec=frontcover" class="waffle-rich-text-link">https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Haunted_Man_and_the_Ghost_s_Bargain/riMEAAAAQAAJ</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1848-12 Type The nature or genre of the resource Christmas Book Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 12-1848-The_Haunted_Man_and_the_Ghosts_Bargain Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (December 1848). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-books/12-1848-The_Haunted_Man_and_the_Ghosts_Bargain">https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-books/12-1848-The_Haunted_Man_and_the_Ghosts_Bargain</a>. Description An account of the resource Published by Bradbury and Evans, December 1848 Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. CHAPTER I The Gift Bestowed Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; "but that’s no rule," as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad. The dread word, Ghost, recals me. Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He did. Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity,—but might have said he looked like a haunted man? Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a byegone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man? Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a haunted man? Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory,—for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily,—who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour;—who that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too? Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on haunted ground? His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects, smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stacks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming top, when in all other places it was silent and still. His dwelling, at its heart and core—within doors—at his fireside—was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with its worm-eaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving downward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the town, yet so remote in fashion, age, and custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door was shut,—echoes, not confined to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth. You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the dead winter time. When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going down of the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that the forms of things were indistinct and big, but not wholly lost. When sitters by the fire began to see wild faces and figures, mountains and abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals. When people in the streets bent down their heads, and ran before the weather. When those who were obliged to meet it, were stopped at angry corners, stung by wandering snow-flakes alighting on the lashes of their eyes,—which fell too sparingly, and were blown away too quickly, to leave a trace upon the frozen ground. When windows of private houses closed up tight and warm. When lighted gas began to burst forth in the busy and the quiet streets, fast blackening otherwise. When stray pedestrians, shivering along the latter, looked down at the glowing fires in kitchens, and sharpened their sharp appetites by sniffing up the fragrance of whole miles of dinners. When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. When mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung above the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on rocks and headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birds breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead. When little readers of story-books, by the firelight, trembled to think of Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the Robbers’ Cave, or had some small misgivings that the fierce little old woman, with the crutch, who used to start out of the box in the merchant Abudah’s bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon the stairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey up to bed. When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of daylight died away from the ends of avenues; and the trees, arching overhead, were sullen and black. When, in parks and woods, the high wet fern and sodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks of trees, were lost to view, in masses of impenetrable shade. When mists arose from dyke, and fen, and river. When lights in old halls and in cottage windows, were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, the wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turnpike-gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in the fields, the labourer and team went home, and the striking of the church-clock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the church-yard wicket would be swung no more that night. When twilight everywhere released the shadows, prisoned up all day, that now closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts. When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowned out from behind half-opened doors. When they had full possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze. When they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself,—the very tongs upon the hearth, a straddling giant with his arms a-kimbo, evidently smelling the blood of Englishmen, and wanting to grind people’s bones to make his bread. When these shadows brought into the minds of older people, other thoughts, and showed them different images. When they stole from their retreats, in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past, from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things that might have been, and never were, are always wandering. When he sat, as already mentioned, gazing at the fire. When, as it rose and fell, the shadows went and came. When he took no heed of them, with his bodily eyes; but, let them come or let them go, looked fixedly at the fire. You should have seen him, then. When the sounds that had arisen with the shadows, and come out of their lurking-places at the twilight summons, seemed to make a deeper stillness all about him. When the wind was rumbling in the chimney, and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the house. When the old trees outside were so shaken and beaten, that one querulous old rook, unable to sleep, protested now and then, in a feeble, dozy, high-up "Caw!" When, at intervals, the window trembled, the rusty vane upon the turret-top complained, the clock beneath it recorded that another quarter of an hour was gone, or the fire collapsed and fell in with a rattle. —When a knock came at his door, in short, as he was sitting so, and roused him. "Who’s that?" said he. "Come in!" Surely there had been no figure leaning on the back of his chair; no face looking over it. It is certain that no gliding footstep touched the floor, as he lifted up his head, with a start, and spoke. And yet there was no mirror in the room on whose surface his own form could have cast its shadow for a moment; and Something had passed darkly and gone! "I’m humbly fearful, sir," said a fresh-coloured busy man, holding the door open with his foot for the admission of himself and a wooden tray he carried, and letting it go again by very gentle and careful degrees, when he and the tray had got in, lest it should close noisily, "that it’s a good bit past the time to-night. But Mrs. William has been taken off her legs so often"— "By the wind? Ay! I have heard it rising." "—By the wind, sir—that it’s a mercy she got home at all. Oh dear, yes. Yes. It was by the wind, Mr. Redlaw. By the wind." He had, by this time, put down the tray for dinner, and was employed in lighting the lamp, and spreading a cloth on the table. From this employment he desisted in a hurry, to stir and feed the fire, and then resumed it; the lamp he had lighted, and the blaze that rose under his hand, so quickly changing the appearance of the room, that it seemed as if the mere coming in of his fresh red face and active manner had made the pleasant alteration. "Mrs. William is of course subject at any time, sir, to be taken off her balance by the elements. She is not formed superior to that." "No," returned Mr. Redlaw good-naturedly, though abruptly. "No, sir. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Earth; as for example, last Sunday week, when sloppy and greasy, and she going out to tea with her newest sister-in-law, and having a pride in herself, and wishing to appear perfectly spotless though pedestrian. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Air; as being once over-persuaded by a friend to try a swing at Peckham Fair, which acted on her constitution instantly like a steam-boat. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Fire; as on a false alarm of engines at her mother’s, when she went two mile in her nightcap. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Water; as at Battersea, when rowed into the piers by her young nephew, Charley Swidger junior, aged twelve, which had no idea of boats whatever. But these are elements. Mrs. William must be taken out of elements for the strength of her character to come into play." As he stopped for a reply, the reply was "Yes," in the same tone as before. "Yes, sir. Oh dear, yes!" said Mr. Swidger, still proceeding with his preparations, and checking them off as he made them. "That’s where it is, sir. That’s what I always say myself, sir. Such a many of us Swidgers!—Pepper. Why there’s my father, sir, superannuated keeper and custodian of this Institution, eigh-ty-seven year old. He’s a Swidger!—Spoon." "True, William," was the patient and abstracted answer, when he stopped again. "Yes, sir," said Mr. Swidger. "That’s what I always say, sir. You may call him the trunk of the tree!—Bread. Then you come to his successor, my unworthy self—Salt—and Mrs. William, Swidgers both.—Knife and fork. Then you come to all my brothers and their families, Swidgers, man and woman, boy and girl. Why, what with cousins, uncles, aunts, and relationships of this, that, and t’other degree, and what-not degree, and marriages, and lyings-in, the Swidgers—Tumbler—might take hold of hands, and make a ring round England!" Receiving no reply at all here, from the thoughtful man whom he addressed, Mr. William approached him nearer, and made a feint of accidentally knocking the table with a decanter, to rouse him. The moment he succeeded, he went on, as if in great alacrity of acquiescence. "Yes, sir! That’s just what I say myself, sir. Mrs. William and me have often said so. ‘There’s Swidgers enough,’ we say, ‘without our voluntary contributions,’—Butter. In fact, sir, my father is a family in himself—Castors—to take care of; and it happens all for the best that we have no child of our own, though it’s made Mrs. William rather quiet-like, too. Quite ready for the fowl and mashed potatoes, sir? Mrs. William said she’d dish in ten minutes when I left the Lodge." "I am quite ready," said the other, waking as from a dream, and walking slowly to and fro. "Mrs. William has been at it again, sir!" said the keeper, as he stood warming a plate at the fire, and pleasantly shading his face with it. Mr. Redlaw stopped in his walking, and an expression of interest appeared in him. 'What I always say myself, sir. She will do it! There’s a motherly feeling in Mrs. William’s breast that must and will have went." "What has she done?" “Why, sir, not satisfied with being a sort of mother to all the young gentlemen that come up from a wariety of parts, to attend your courses of lectures at this ancient foundation—it's surprising how stone-chaney catches the heat this frosty weather, to be sure!” Here he turned the plate, and cooled his fingers. "Well?" said Mr. Redlaw. "That’s just what I say myself, sir," returned Mr. William, speaking over his shoulder, as if in ready and delighted assent. "That’s exactly where it is, sir! There ain’t one of our students but appears to regard Mrs. William in that light. Every day, right through the course, they puts their heads into the Lodge, one after another, and have all got something to tell her, or something to ask her. ‘Swidge’ is the appellation by which they speak of Mrs. William in general, among themselves, I’m told; but that’s what I say, sir. Better be called ever so far out of your name, if it’s done in real liking, than have it made ever so much of, and not cared about! What’s a name for? To know a person by. If Mrs. William is known by something better than her name—I allude to Mrs. William’s qualities and disposition—never mind her name, though it is Swidger, by rights. Let ’em call her Swidge, Widge, Bridge—Lord! London Bridge, Blackfriars', Chelsea, Putney, Waterloo, or Hammersmith Suspension—if they like!" The close of this triumphant oration brought him and the plate to the table, upon which he half laid and half dropped it, with a lively sense of its being thoroughly heated, just as the subject of his praises entered the room, bearing another tray and a lantern, and followed by a venerable old man with long grey hair. Mrs. William, like Mr. William, was a simple, innocent-looking person, in whose smooth cheeks the cheerful red of her husband’s official waistcoat was very pleasantly repeated. But whereas Mr. William’s light hair stood on end all over his head, and seemed to draw his eyes up with it in an excess of bustling readiness for anything, the dark brown hair of Mrs. William was carefully smoothed down, and waved away under a trim tidy cap, in the most exact and quiet manner imaginable. Whereas Mr. William’s very trousers hitched themselves up at the ankles, as if it were not in their iron-grey nature to rest without looking about them, Mrs. William’s neatly-flowered skirts—red and white, like her own pretty face—were as composed and orderly, as if the very wind that blew so hard out of doors could not disturb one of their folds. Whereas his coat had something of a fly-away and half-off appearance about the collar and breast, her little bodice was so placid and neat, that there should have been protection for her, in it, had she needed any, with the roughest people. Who could have had the heart to make so calm a bosom swell with grief, or throb with fear, or flutter with a thought of shame! To whom would its repose and peace have not appealed against disturbance, like the innocent slumber of a child! "Punctual, of course, Milly," said her husband, relieving her of the tray, "or it wouldn’t be you. Here’s Mrs. William, sir!—He looks lonelier than ever to-night," whispering to his wife, as he was taking the tray, "and ghostlier altogether." Without any show of hurry or noise, or any show of herself even, she was so calm and quiet, Milly set the dishes she had brought upon the table,—Mr. William, after much clattering and running about, having only gained possession of a butter-boat of gravy, which he stood ready to serve. "What is that the old man has in his arms?" asked Mr. Redlaw, as he sat down to his solitary meal. "Holly, sir," replied the quiet voice of Milly. "That’s what I say myself, sir," interposed Mr. William, striking in with the butter-boat. "Berries is so seasonable to the time of year!—Brown gravy!" "Another Christmas come, another year gone!" murmured the Chemist, with a gloomy sigh. "More figures in the lengthening sum of recollection that we work and work at to our torment, till Death idly jumbles all together, and rubs all out. So, Philip!" breaking off, and raising his voice as he addressed the old man, standing apart, with his glistening burden in his arms, from which the quiet Mrs. William took small branches, which she noiselessly trimmed with her scissors, and decorated the room with, while her aged father-in-law looked on much interested in the ceremony. "My duty to you, sir," returned the old man. "Should have spoke before, sir, but know your ways, Mr. Redlaw—proud to say—and wait till spoke to! Merry Christmas, sir, and Happy New Year, and many of ’em. Have had a pretty many of ’em myself—ha, ha!—and may take the liberty of wishing ’em. I’m eighty-seven!" "Have you had so many that were merry and happy?" asked the other. "Ay, sir, ever so many," returned the old man. "Is his memory impaired with age? It is to be expected now," said Mr. Redlaw, turning to the son, and speaking lower. "Not a morsel of it, sir," replied Mr. William. "That’s exactly what I say myself, sir. There never was such a memory as my father’s. He’s the most wonderful man in the world. He don’t know what forgetting means. It’s the very observation I’m always making to Mrs. William, sir, if you’ll believe me!" Mr. Swidger, in his polite desire to seem to acquiesce at all events, delivered this as if there were no iota of contradiction in it, and it were all said in unbounded and unqualified assent. The Chemist pushed his plate away, and, rising from the table, walked across the room to where the old man stood looking at a little sprig of holly in his hand. "It recalls the time when many of those years were old and new, then?" he said, observing him attentively, and touching him on the shoulder. "Does it?" "Oh many, many!" said Philip, half awaking from his reverie. 'I’m eighty-seven!" "Merry and happy, was it?" asked the Chemist in a low voice. "Merry and happy, old man?" "Maybe as high as that, no higher," said the old man, holding out his hand a little way above the level of his knee, and looking retrospectively at his questioner, "when I first remember ’em! Cold, sunshiny day it was, out a-walking, when some one—it was my mother as sure as you stand there, though I don’t know what her blessed face was like, for she took ill and died that Christmas-time—told me they were food for birds. The pretty little fellow thought—that’s me, you understand—that birds’ eyes were so bright, perhaps, because the berries that they lived on in the winter were so bright. I recollect that. And I’m eighty-seven!" "Merry and happy!" mused the other, bending his dark eyes upon the stooping figure, with a smile of compassion. "Merry and happy—and remember well?" "Ay, ay, ay!" resumed the old man, catching the last words. “I remember 'em well in my school time, year after year, and all the merry-making that used to come along with them. I was a strong chap then, Mr. Redlaw; and, if you'll believe me, hadn't my match at football within ten mile. Where's my son William? Hadn't my match at foot-ball, William, within ten mile!' "That's what I always say, father!" returned the son promptly, and with great respect. "You ARE a Swidger, if ever there was one of the family!" "Dear!" said the old man, shaking his head as he again looked at the holly. "His mother—my son William's my youngest son—and I, have sat among 'em all, boys and girls, little children and babies, many a year, when the berries like these were not shining half so bright all round us, as their bright faces. Many of 'em are gone; she's gone; and my son George (our eldest, who was her pride more than all the rest!) is fallen very low: but I can see them, when I look here, alive and healthy, as they used to be in those days; and I can see him, thank God, in his innocence. It's a blessed thing to me, at eighty-seven." The keen look that had been fixed upon him with so much earnestness, had gradually sought the ground. "When my circumstances got to be not so good as formerly, through not being honestly dealt by, and I first come here to be custodian," said the old man, "—which was upwards of fifty years ago—where's my son William? More than half a century ago, William!" "That’s what I say, father," replied the son, as promptly and dutifully as before, "that’s exactly where it is. Two times ought’s an ought, and twice five ten, and there's a hundred of ’em." "It was quite a pleasure to know that one of our founders—or more correctly speaking," said the old man, with a great glory in his subject and his knowledge of it, "one of the learned gentlemen that helped endow us in Queen Elizabeth’s time, for we were founded afore her day—left in his will, among the other bequests he made us, so much to buy holly, for garnishing the walls and windows, come Christmas. There was something homely and friendly in it. Being but strange here, then, and coming at Christmas time, we took a liking for his very picter that hangs in what used to be, anciently, afore our ten poor gentlemen commuted for an annual stipend in money, our great Dinner Hall.—A sedate gentleman in a peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck, and a scroll below him, in old English letters, 'Lord! keep my memory green!' You know all about him, Mr. Redlaw?" "I know the portrait hangs there, Philip." "Yes, sure, it's the second on the right, above the panelling. I was going to say—he has helped to keep my memory green, I thank him; for going round the building every year, as I'm a doing now, and freshening up the bare rooms with these branches and berries, freshens up my bare old brain. One year brings back another, and that year another, and those others numbers! At last, it seems to me as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in,—and they're a pretty many, for I’m eighty-seven!" "Merry and happy," murmured Redlaw to himself. The room began to darken strangely. "So you see, sir," pursued old Philip, whose hale wintry cheek had warmed into a ruddier glow, and whose blue eyes had brightened while he spoke, "I have plenty to keep, when I keep this present season. Now, where’s my quiet Mouse? Chattering's the sin of my time of life, and there's half the building to do yet, if the cold don't freeze us first, or the wind don't blow us away, or the darkness don't swallow us up." The quiet Mouse had brought her calm face to his side, and silently taken his arm, before he finished speaking. "Come away, my dear," said the old man. "Mr. Redlaw won't settle to his dinner, otherwise, till it's cold as the winter. I hope you'll excuse me rambling on, sir, and I wish you good night, and, once again, a merry—" "Stay!" said Mr. Redlaw, resuming his place at the table, more, it would have seemed from his manner, to reassure the old keeper, than in any remembrance of his own appetite. "Spare me another moment, Philip. William, you were going to tell me something to your excellent wife’s honour. It will not be disagreeable to her to hear you praise her. What was it?" "Why, that’s where it is, you see, sir," returned Mr. William Swidger, looking towards his wife in considerable embarrassment. "Mrs. William's got her eye upon me." "But you're not afraid of Mrs. William’s eye?" "Why, no, sir," returned Mr. Swidger, "that’s what I say myself. It wasn't made to be afraid of. It wouldn’t have been made so mild, if that was the intention. But I wouldn’t like to—Milly!—him, you know. Down in the Buildings." Mr. William, standing behind the table, and rummaging disconcertedly among the objects upon it, directed persuasive glances at Mrs. William, and secret jerks of his head and thumb at Mr. Redlaw, as alluring her towards him. "Him, you know, my love," said Mr. William. "Down in the Buildings. Tell, my dear! You’re the works of Shakespeare in comparison with myself. Down in the Buildings, you know, my love.—Student." "Student?" repeated Mr. Redlaw, raising his head. "That’s what I say, sir!" cried Mr. William, in the utmost animation of assent. "If it wasn't the poor student down in the Buildings, why should you wish to hear it from Mrs. William’s lips? Mrs. William, my dear—Buildings." "I didn’t know," said Milly, with a quiet frankness, free from any haste or confusion, "that William had said anything about it, or I wouldn't have come. I asked him not to. It's a sick young gentleman, sir—and very poor, I am afraid—who is too ill to go home this holiday-time, and lives, unknown to any one, in but a common kind of lodging for a gentleman, down in Jerusalem Buildings. That's all, sir." "Why have I never heard of him?" said the Chemist, rising hurriedly. "Why has he not made his situation known to me? Sick!—give me my hat and cloak. Poor!—what house?—what number?" "Oh, you mustn’t go there, sir," said Milly, leaving her father-in-law, and calmly confronting him with her collected little face and folded hands. "Not go there?" "Oh dear, no!" said Milly, shaking her head as at a most manifest and self-evident impossibility. "It couldn’t be thought of!" "What do you mean? Why not?" "Why, you see, sir," said Mr. William Swidger, persuasively and confidentially, "that's what I say. Depend upon it, the young gentleman would never have made his situation known to one of his own sex. Mrs. Williams has got into his confidence, but that's quite different. They all confide in Mrs. William; they all trust her. A man, sir, couldn't have got a whisper out of him; but woman, sir, and Mrs. William combined—!" "There is good sense and delicacy in what you say, William," returned Mr. Redlaw, observant of the gentle and composed face at his shoulder. And laying his finger on his lip, he secretly put his purse into her hand. "Oh dear no, sir!" cried Milly, giving it back again. "Worse and worse! Couldn’t be dreamed of!" Such a staid matter-of-fact housewife she was, and so unruffled by the momentary haste of this rejection, that, an instant afterwards, she was tidily picking up a few leaves which had strayed from between her scissors and her apron, when she had arranged the holly. Finding, when she rose from her stooping posture, that Mr. Redlaw was still regarding her with doubt and astonishment, she quietly repeated—looking about, the while, for any other fragments that might have escaped her observation: "Oh dear no, sir! He said that of all the world he would not be known to you, or receive help from you—though he is a student in your class. I have made no terms of secrecy with you, but I trust to your honour completely." "Why did he say so?" "Indeed I can’t tell, sir," said Milly, after thinking a little, "because I am not at all clever, you know; and I wanted to be useful to him in making things neat and comfortable about him, and employed myself that way. But I know he is poor, and lonely, and I think he is somehow neglected too.—How dark it is!" The room had darkened more and more. There was a very heavy gloom and shadow gathering behind the Chemist’s chair. "What more about him?" he asked. "He is engaged to be married when he can afford it," said Milly, "and is studying, I think, to qualify himself to earn a living. I have seen, a long time, that he has studied hard and denied himself much.—How very dark it is!" "It's turned colder, too," said the old man, rubbing his hands. "There’s a chill and dismal feeling in the room. Where's my son William? William, my boy, turn the lamp, and rouse the fire!" Milly’s voice resumed, like quiet music very softly played: "He muttered in his broken sleep yesterday afternoon, after talking to me" (this was to herself) "about some one dead, and some great wrong done that could never be forgotten; but whether to him or to another person, I don’t know. Not by him, I am sure." "And, in short, Mrs. William, you see—which she wouldn't say herself, Mr. Redlaw, if she was to stop here till the new year after this next one—" said Mr. William, coming up to him to speak in his ear, "has done him worlds of good! Bless you, worlds of good! All at home just the same as ever—my father made as snug and comfortable—not a crumb of litter to be found in the house, if you were to offer fifty pound ready money for it—Mrs. William apparently never out of the way—yet Mrs. William backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, up and down, up and down, a mother to him!" The room turned darker and colder, and the gloom and shadow gathering behind the chair was heavier. "Not content with this, sir, Mrs. William goes and finds, this very night, when she was coming home (why it's not above a couple of hours ago), a creature more like a young wild beast than a young child, shivering upon a door-step. What does Mrs. William do, but brings it home to dry it, and feed it, and keep it till our old Bounty of food and flannel is given away, on Christmas morning! If it ever felt a fire before, it's as much as ever it did; for it's sitting in the old Lodge chimney, staring at ours as if its ravenous eyes would never shut again. It's sitting there, at least," said Mr. William, correcting himself, on reflection, "unless it’s bolted!" "Heaven keep her happy!" said the Chemist aloud, "and you too, Philip! and you, William! I must consider what to do in this. I may desire to see this student, I’ll not detain you any longer now. Good-night!" "I thank’ee, sir, I thank’ee!" said the old man, "for Mouse, and for my son William, and for myself. Where's my son William? William, you take the lantern and go on first, through them long dark passages, as you did last year and the year afore. Ha ha! I remember—though I'm eighty-seven! 'Lord, keep my memory green!' It’s a very good prayer, Mr. Redlaw, that of the learned gentleman in the peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck—hangs up, second on the right above the panelling, in what used to be, afore our ten poor gentlemen commuted, our great Dinner Hall. 'Lord, keep my memory green!' It's very good and pious, sir. Amen! Amen!" As they passed out and shut the heavy door, which, however carefully withheld, fired a long train of thundering reverberations when it shut at last, the room turned darker. As he fell a-musing in his chair alone, the healthy holly withered on the wall, and dropped—dead branches. As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees,—or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process—not to be traced by any human sense,—an awful likeness of himself! Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound. As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with its appalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore. This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. This was the dread companion of the haunted man! It took, for some moments, no more apparent heed of him, than he of it. The Christmas Waits were playing somewhere in the distance, and, through his thoughtfulness, he seemed to listen to the music. It seemed to listen too. At length he spoke; without moving or lifting up his face. "Here again!" he said. "Here again," replied the Phantom. "I see you in the fire," said the haunted man; "I hear you in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night." The Phantom moved its head, assenting. "Why do you come, to haunt me thus?" "I come as I am called," replied the Ghost. "No. Unbidden," exclaimed the Chemist. "Unbidden be it," said the Spectre. "It is enough. I am here." Hitherto the light of the fire had shone on the two faces—if the dread lineaments behind the chair might be called a face—both addressed towards it, as at first, and neither looking at the other. But, now, the haunted man turned, suddenly, and stared upon the Ghost. The Ghost, as sudden in its motion, passed to before the chair, and stared on him. The living man, and the animated image of himself dead, might so have looked, the one upon the other. An awful survey, in a lonely and remote part of an empty old pile of building, on a winter night, with the loud wind going by upon its journey of mystery—whence or whither, no man knowing since the world began—and the stars, in unimaginable millions, glittering through it, from eternal space, where the world’s bulk is as a grain, and its hoary age is infancy. "Look upon me!" said the Spectre. "I am he, neglected in my youth, and miserably poor, who strove and suffered, and still strove and suffered, until I hewed out knowledge from the mine where it was buried, and made rugged steps thereof, for my worn feet to rest and rise on." "I am that man," returned the Chemist. "No mother’s self-denying love," pursued the Phantom, "no father’s counsel, aided me. A stranger came into my father’s place when I was but a child, and I was easily an alien from my mother’s heart. My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done; who cast their offspring loose, early, as birds do theirs; and, if they do well, claim the merit; and, if ill, the pity." It paused, and seemed to tempt and goad him with its look, and with the manner of its speech, and with its smile. "I am he," pursued the Phantom, "who, in this struggle upward, found a friend. I made him—won him—bound him to me! We worked together, side by side. All the love and confidence that in my earlier youth had had no outlet, and found no expression, I bestowed on him." "Not all," said Redlaw, hoarsely. 'No, not all," returned the Phantom. "I had a sister." The haunted man, with his head resting on his hands, replied "I had!" The Phantom, with an evil smile, drew closer to the chair, and resting its chin upon its folded hands, its folded hands upon the back, and looking down into his face with searching eyes, that seemed instinct with fire, went on: "Such glimpses of the light of home as I had ever known, had streamed from her. How young she was, how fair, how loving! I took her to the first poor roof that I was master of, and made it rich. She came into the darkness of my life, and made it bright.—She is before me!" "I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night," returned the haunted man. "Did he love her?" said the Phantom, echoing his contemplative tone. "I think he did, once. I am sure he did. Better had she loved him less—less secretly, less dearly, from the shallower depths of a more divided heart!" "Let me forget it!" said the Chemist, with an angry motion of his hand. "Let me blot it from my memory!" The Spectre, without stirring, and with its unwinking, cruel eyes still fixed upon his face, went on: "A dream, like hers, stole upon my own life." "It did," said Redlaw. "A love, as like hers," pursued the Phantom, "as my inferior nature might cherish, arose in my own heart. I was too poor to bind its object to my fortune then, by any thread of promise or entreaty. I loved her far too well, to seek to do it. But, more than ever I had striven in my life, I strove to climb! Only an inch gained, brought me something nearer to the height. I toiled up! In the late pauses of my labour at that time,—my sister (sweet companion!) still sharing with me the expiring embers and the cooling hearth,—when day was breaking, what pictures of the future did I see!" "I saw them, in the fire, but now," he murmured. "They come back to me in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years." "—Pictures of my own domestic life, in aftertime, with her who was the inspiration of my toil. Pictures of my sister, made the wife of my dear friend, on equal terms—for he had some inheritance, we none—pictures of our sobered age and mellowed happiness, and of the golden links, extending back so far, that should bind us, and our children, in a radiant garland," said the Phantom. "Pictures," said the haunted man, "that were delusions. Why is it my doom to remember them too well!" "Delusions," echoed the Phantom in its changeless voice, and glaring on him with its changeless eyes. "For my friend (in whose breast my confidence was locked as in my own), passing between me and the centre of the system of my hopes and struggles, won her to himself, and shattered my frail universe. My sister, doubly dear, doubly devoted, doubly cheerful in my home, lived on to see me famous, and my old ambition so rewarded when its spring was broken, and then—" "Then died," he interposed. "Died, gentle as ever; happy; and with no concern but for her brother. Peace!" The Phantom watched him silently. "Remembered!" said the haunted man, after a pause. "Yes. So well remembered, that even now, when years have passed, and nothing is more idle or more visionary to me than the boyish love so long outlived, I think of it with sympathy, as if it were a younger brother’s or a son’s. Sometimes I even wonder when her heart first inclined to him, and how it had been affected towards me.—Not lightly, once, I think.—But that is nothing. Early unhappiness, a wound from a hand I loved and trusted, and a loss that nothing can replace, outlive such fancies." "Thus," said the Phantom, "I bear within me a Sorrow and a Wrong. Thus I prey upon myself. Thus, memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!" "Mocker!" said the Chemist, leaping up, and making, with a wrathful hand, at the throat of his other self. "Why have I always that taunt in my ears?" "Forbear!" exclaimed the Spectre in an awful voice. "Lay a hand on Me, and die!" He stopped midway, as if its words had paralysed him, and stood looking on it. It had glided from him; it had its arm raised high in warning; and a smile passed over its unearthly features, as it reared its dark figure in triumph. "If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would," the Ghost repeated. "If I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!" "Evil spirit of myself," returned the haunted man, in a low, trembling tone, "my life is darkened by that incessant whisper." "It is an echo," said the Phantom. "If it be an echo of my thoughts—as now, indeed, I know it is," rejoined the haunted man, "why should I, therefore, be tormented? It is not a selfish thought. I suffer it to range beyond myself. All men and women have their sorrows,—most of them their wrongs; ingratitude, and sordid jealousy, and interest, besetting all degrees of life. Who would not forget their sorrows and their wrongs?" "Who would not, truly, and be happier and better for it?" said the Phantom. "These revolutions of years, which we commemorate," proceeded Redlaw, "what do they recall! Are there any minds in which they do not re-awaken some sorrow, or some trouble? What is the remembrance of the old man who was here to-night? A tissue of sorrow and trouble." "But common natures," said the Phantom, with its evil smile upon its glassy face, "unenlightened minds and ordinary spirits, do not feel or reason on these things like men of higher cultivation and profounder thought." "Tempter," answered Redlaw, "whose hollow look and voice I dread more than words can express, and from whom some dim foreshadowing of greater fear is stealing over me while I speak, I hear again an echo of my own mind." "Receive it as a proof that I am powerful," returned the Ghost. "Hear what I offer! Forget the sorrow, wrong, and trouble you have known!" "Forget them!" he repeated. "I have the power to cancel their remembrance—to leave but very faint, confused traces of them, that will die out soon," returned the Spectre. "Say! Is it done?" "Stay!" cried the haunted man, arresting by a terrified gesture the uplifted hand. "I tremble with distrust and doubt of you; and the dim fear you cast upon me deepens into a nameless horror I can hardly bear.—I would not deprive myself of any kindly recollection, or any sympathy that is good for me, or others. What shall I lose, if I assent to this? What else will pass from my remembrance?" "No knowledge; no result of study; nothing but the intertwisted chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn dependent on, and nourished by, the banished recollections. Those will go." "Are they so many?" said the haunted man, reflecting in alarm. "They have been wont to show themselves in the fire, in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years," returned the Phantom scornfully. "In nothing else?" The Phantom held its peace. But having stood before him, silent, for a little while, it moved towards the fire; then stopped. "Decide!" it said, "before the opportunity is lost!" "A moment! I call Heaven to witness," said the agitated man, "that I have never been a hater of any kind,—never morose, indifferent, or hard, to anything around me. If, living here alone, I have made too much of all that was and might have been, and too little of what is, the evil, I believe, has fallen on me, and not on others. But, if there were poison in my body, should I not, possessed of antidotes and knowledge how to use them, use them? If there be poison in my mind, and through this fearful shadow I can cast it out, shall I not cast it out?" "Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?" "A moment longer!" he answered hurriedly. "I would forget it if I could! Have I thought that, alone, or has it been the thought of thousands upon thousands, generation after generation? All human memory is fraught with sorrow and trouble. My memory is as the memory of other men, but other men have not this choice. Yes, I close the bargain. Yes! I WILL forget my sorrow, wrong, and trouble!" "Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?" "It is!" "It is. And take this with you, man whom I here renounce! The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will. Without recovering yourself the power that you have yielded up, you shall henceforth destroy its like in all whom you approach. Your wisdom has discovered that the memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble is the lot of all mankind, and that mankind would be the happier, in its other memories, without it. Go! Be its benefactor! Freed from such remembrance, from this hour, carry involuntarily the blessing of such freedom with you. Its diffusion is inseparable and inalienable from you. Go! Be happy in the good you have won, and in the good you do!" The Phantom, which had held its bloodless hand above him while it spoke, as if in some unholy invocation, or some ban; and which had gradually advanced its eyes so close to his, that he could see how they did not participate in the terrible smile upon its face, but were a fixed, unalterable, steady horror; melted before him and was gone. As he stood rooted to the spot, possessed by fear and wonder, and imagining he heard repeated in melancholy echoes, dying away fainter and fainter, the words, "Destroy its like in all whom you approach!" a shrill cry reached his ears. It came, not from the passages beyond the door, but from another part of the old building, and sounded like the cry of some one in the dark who had lost the way. He looked confusedly upon his hands and limbs, as if to be assured of his identity, and then shouted in reply, loudly and wildly; for there was a strangeness and terror upon him, as if he too were lost. The cry responding, and being nearer, he caught up the lamp, and raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to pass into and out of the theatre where he lectured,—which adjoined his room. Associated with youth and animation, and a high amphitheatre of faces which his entrance charmed to interest in a moment, it was a ghostly place when all this life was faded out of it, and stared upon him like an emblem of Death. "Halloa!" he cried. "Halloa! This way! Come to the light!" When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and crouched down in a corner. "What is it?" he said, hastily. He might have asked "What is it?" even had he seen it well, as presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered up in its corner. A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant’s, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man’s. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy,—ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast. Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow. "I’ll bite," he said, "if you hit me!" The time had been, and not many minutes since, when such a sight as this would have wrung the Chemist’s heart. He looked upon it now, coldly; but with a heavy effort to remember something—he did not know what—he asked the boy what he did there, and whence he came. "Where’s the woman?" he replied. "I want to find the woman." "Who?" "The woman. Her that brought me here, and set me by the large fire. She was so long gone, that I went to look for her, and lost myself. I don’t want you. I want the woman." He made a spring, so suddenly, to get away, that the dull sound of his naked feet upon the floor was near the curtain, when Redlaw caught him by his rags. "Come! you let me go!" muttered the boy, struggling, and clenching his teeth. "I’ve done nothing to you. Let me go, will you, to the woman!" "That is not the way. There is a nearer one," said Redlaw, detaining him, in the same blank effort to remember some association that ought, of right, to bear upon this monstrous object. "What is your name?" "Got none." "Where do you live?" "Live! What’s that?" The boy shook his hair from his eyes to look at him for a moment, and then, twisting round his legs and wrestling with him, broke again into his repetition of "You let me go, will you? I want to find the woman." The Chemist led him to the door. "This way," he said, looking at him still confusedly, but with repugnance and avoidance, growing out of his coldness. "I’ll take you to her." The sharp eyes in the child’s head, wandering round the room, lighted on the table where the remnants of the dinner were. "Give me some of that!" he said, covetously. "Has she not fed you?" "I shall be hungry again to-morrow, sha’n’t I? Ain’t I hungry every day?" Finding himself released, he bounded at the table like some small animal of prey, and hugging to his breast bread and meat, and his own rags, all together, said: "There! Now take me to the woman!" As the Chemist, with a new-born dislike to touch him, sternly motioned him to follow, and was going out of the door, he trembled and stopped. "The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!" The Phantom’s words were blowing in the wind, and the wind blew chill upon him. "I’ll not go there, to-night," he murmured faintly. "I’ll go nowhere to-night. Boy! straight down this long-arched passage, and past the great dark door into the yard,—you will see the fire shining on the window there." "The woman’s fire?" inquired the boy. He nodded, and the naked feet had sprung away. He came back with his lamp, locked his door hastily, and sat down in his chair, covering his face like one who was frightened at himself. For now he was, indeed, alone. Alone, alone. CHAPTER II The Gift Diffused A small man sat in a small parlour, partitioned off from a small shop by a small screen, pasted all over with small scraps of newspapers. In company with the small man, was almost any amount of small children you may please to name—at least it seemed so; they made, in that very limited sphere of action, such an imposing effect, in point of numbers. Of these small fry, two had, by some strong machinery, been got into bed in a corner, where they might have reposed snugly enough in the sleep of innocence, but for a constitutional propensity to keep awake, and also to scuffle in and out of bed. The immediate occasion of these predatory dashes at the waking world, was the construction of an oyster-shell wall in a corner, by two other youths of tender age; on which fortification the two in bed made harassing descents (like those accursed Picts and Scots who beleaguer the early historical studies of most young Britons), and then withdrew to their own territory. In addition to the stir attendant on these inroads, and the retorts of the invaded, who pursued hotly, and made lunges at the bed-clothes under which the marauders took refuge, another little boy, in another little bed, contributed his mite of confusion to the family stock, by casting his boots upon the waters; in other words, by launching these and several small objects, inoffensive in themselves, though of a hard substance considered as missiles, at the disturbers of his repose,—who were not slow to return these compliments. Besides which, another little boy—the biggest there, but still little—was tottering to and fro, bent on one side, and considerably affected in his knees by the weight of a large baby, which he was supposed by a fiction that obtains sometimes in sanguine families, to be hushing to sleep. But oh! the inexhaustible regions of contemplation and watchfulness into which this baby’s eyes were then only beginning to compose themselves to stare, over his unconscious shoulder! It was a very Moloch of a baby, on whose insatiate altar the whole existence of this particular young brother was offered up a daily sacrifice. Its personality may be said to have consisted in its never being quiet, in any one place, for five consecutive minutes, and never going to sleep when required. "Tetterby’s baby" was as well known in the neighbourhood as the postman or the pot-boy. It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the Tumblers or the Monkey, and came up, all on one side, a little too late for everything that was attractive, from Monday morning until Saturday night. Wherever childhood congregated to play, there was little Moloch making Johnny fag and toil. Wherever Johnny desired to stay, little Moloch became fractious, and would not remain. Whenever Johnny wanted to go out, Moloch was asleep, and must be watched. Whenever Johnny wanted to stay at home, Moloch was awake, and must be taken out. Yet Johnny was verily persuaded that it was a faultless baby, without its peer in the realm of England, and was quite content to catch meek glimpses of things in general from behind its skirts, or over its limp flapping bonnet, and to go staggering about with it like a very little porter with a very large parcel, which was not directed to anybody, and could never be delivered anywhere. The small man who sat in the small parlour, making fruitless attempts to read his newspaper peaceably in the midst of this disturbance, was the father of the family, and the chief of the firm described in the inscription over the little shop front, by the name and title of A. Tetterby and Co., Newsmen. Indeed, strictly speaking, he was the only personage answering to that designation, as Co. was a mere poetical abstraction, altogether baseless and impersonal. Tetterby’s was the corner shop in Jerusalem Buildings. There was a good show of literature in the window, chiefly consisting of picture-newspapers out of date, and serial pirates, and footpads. Walking-sticks, likewise, and marbles, were included in the stock in trade. It had once extended into the light confectionery line; but it would seem that those elegancies of life were not in demand about Jerusalem Buildings, for nothing connected with that branch of commerce remained in the window, except a sort of small glass lantern containing a languishing mass of bull’s-eyes, which had melted in the summer and congealed in the winter until all hope of ever getting them out, or of eating them without eating the lantern too, was gone for ever. Tetterby’s had tried its hand at several things. It had once made a feeble little dart at the toy business; for, in another lantern, there was a heap of minute wax dolls, all sticking together upside down, in the direst confusion, with their feet on one another’s heads, and a precipitate of broken arms and legs at the bottom. It had made a move in the millinery direction, which a few dry, wiry bonnet-shapes remained in a corner of the window to attest. It had fancied that a living might lie hidden in the tobacco trade, and had stuck up a representation of a native of each of the three integral portions of the British Empire, in the act of consuming that fragrant weed; with a poetic legend attached, importing that united in one cause they sat and joked, one chewed tobacco, one took snuff, one smoked: but nothing seemed to have come of it—except flies. Time had been when it had put a forlorn trust in imitative jewellery, for in one pane of glass there was a card of cheap seals, and another of pencil-cases, and a mysterious black amulet of inscrutable intention, labelled ninepence. But, to that hour, Jerusalem Buildings had bought none of them. In short, Tetterby’s had tried so hard to get a livelihood out of Jerusalem Buildings in one way or other, and appeared to have done so indifferently in all, that the best position in the firm was too evidently Co.’s; Co., as a bodiless creation, being untroubled with the vulgar inconveniences of hunger and thirst, being chargeable neither to the poor’s-rates nor the assessed taxes, and having no young family to provide for. Tetterby himself, however, in his little parlour, as already mentioned, having the presence of a young family impressed upon his mind in a manner too clamorous to be disregarded, or to comport with the quiet perusal of a newspaper, laid down his paper, wheeled, in his distraction, a few times round the parlour, like an undecided carrier-pigeon, made an ineffectual rush at one or two flying little figures in bed-gowns that skimmed past him, and then, bearing suddenly down upon the only unoffending member of the family, boxed the ears of little Moloch’s nurse. "You bad boy!" said Mr. Tetterby, "haven’t you any feeling for your poor father after the fatigues and anxieties of a hard winter’s day, since five o’clock in the morning, but must you wither his rest, and corrode his latest intelligence, with your wicious tricks? Isn’t it enough, sir, that your brother 'Dolphus is toiling and moiling in the fog and cold, and you rolling in the lap of luxury with a—with a baby, and everything you can wish for," said Mr. Tetterby, heaping this up as a great climax of blessings, "but must you make a wilderness of home, and maniacs of your parents? Must you, Johnny? Hey?" At each interrogation, Mr. Tetterby made a feint of boxing his ears again, but thought better of it, and held his hand. "Oh, father!" whimpered Johnny, "when I wasn’t doing anything, I'm sure, but taking such care of Sally, and getting her to sleep. Oh, father!" "I wish my little woman would come home!" said Mr. Tetterby, relenting and repenting, "I only wish my little woman would come home! I ain’t fit to deal with ’em. They make my head go round, and get the better of me. Oh, Johnny! Isn’t it enough that your dear mother has provided you with that sweet sister?" indicating Moloch; "isn’t it enough that you were seven boys before without a ray of gal, and that your dear mother went through what she did go through, on purpose that you might all of you have a little sister, but must you so behave yourself as to make my head swim?" Softening more and more, as his own tender feelings and those of his injured son were worked on, Mr. Tetterby concluded by embracing him, and immediately breaking away to catch one of the real delinquents. A reasonably good start occurring, he succeeded, after a short but smart run, and some rather severe cross-country work under and over the bedsteads, and in and out among the intricacies of the chairs, in capturing this infant, whom he condignly punished, and bore to bed. This example had a powerful, and apparently, mesmeric influence on him of the boots, who instantly fell into a deep sleep, though he had been, but a moment before, broad awake, and in the highest possible feather. Nor was it lost upon the two young architects, who retired to bed, in an adjoining closet, with great privacy and speed. The comrade of the Intercepted One also shrinking into his nest with similar discretion, Mr. Tetterby, when he paused for breath, found himself unexpectedly in a scene of peace. "My little woman herself," said Mr. Tetterby, wiping his flushed face, "could hardly have done it better! I only wish my little woman had had it to do, I do indeed!" Mr. Tetterby sought upon his screen for a passage appropriate to be impressed upon his children’s minds on the occasion, and read the following. "'It is an undoubted fact that all remarkable men have had remarkable mothers, and have respected them in after life as their best friends.' Think of your own remarkable mother, my boys," said Mr. Tetterby, "and know her value while she is still among you!" He sat down again in his chair by the fire, and composed himself, cross-legged, over his newspaper. "Let anybody, I don’t care who it is, get out of bed again," said Tetterby, as a general proclamation, delivered in a very soft-hearted manner, "and astonishment will be the portion of that respected contemporary!"—which expression Mr. Tetterby selected from his screen. "Johnny, my child, take care of your only sister, Sally; for she’s the brightest gem that ever sparkled on your early brow." Johnny sat down on a little stool, and devotedly crushed himself beneath the weight of Moloch. "Ah, what a gift that baby is to you, Johnny!" said his father, "and how thankful you ought to be! 'It is not generally known, Johnny,'" he was now referring to the screen again, "'but it is a fact ascertained, by accurate calculations, that the following immense percentage of babies never attain to two years old; that is to say—'" "Oh, don’t, father, please!" cried Johnny. "I can’t bear it, when I think of Sally." Mr. Tetterby desisting, Johnny, with a profound sense of his trust, wiped his eyes, and hushed his sister. "Your brother 'Dolphus," said his father, poking the fire, "is late to-night, Johnny, and will come home like a lump of ice. What's got your precious mother?" "Here's mother, and 'Dolphus too, father!" exclaimed Johnny, "I think." "You’re right!" returned his father, listening. "Yes, that’s the footstep of my little woman." The process of induction, by which Mr. Tetterby had come to the conclusion that his wife was a little woman, was his own secret. She would have made two editions of himself, very easily. Considered as an individual, she was rather remarkable for being robust and portly; but considered with reference to her husband, her dimensions became magnificent. Nor did they assume a less imposing proportion, when studied with reference to the size of her seven sons, who were but diminutive. In the case of Sally, however, Mrs. Tetterby had asserted herself, at last; as nobody knew better than the victim Johnny, who weighed and measured that exacting idol every hour in the day. Mrs. Tetterby, who had been marketing, and carried a basket, threw back her bonnet and shawl, and sitting down, fatigued, commanded Johnny to bring his sweet charge to her straightway, for a kiss. Johnny having complied, and gone back to his stool, and again crushed himself, Master Adolphus Tetterby, who had by this time unwound his torso out of a prismatic comforter, apparently interminable, requested the same favour. Johnny having again complied, and again gone back to his stool, and again crushed himself, Mr. Tetterby, struck by a sudden thought, preferred the same claim on his own parental part. The satisfaction of this third desire completely exhausted the sacrifice, who had hardly breath enough left to get back to his stool, crush himself again, and pant at his relations. "Whatever you do, Johnny," said Mrs. Tetterby, shaking her head, "take care of her, or never look your mother in the face again." "Nor your brother," said Adolphus. "Nor your father, Johnny," added Mr. Tetterby. Johnny, much affected by this conditional renunciation of him, looked down at Moloch's eyes to see that they were all right, so far, and skilfully patted her back (which was uppermost), and rocked her with his foot. "Are you wet, 'Dolphus, my boy?" said his father. "Come and take my chair, and dry yourself." "No, father, thank'ee," said Adolphus, smoothing himself down with his hands. "I an’t very wet, I don't think. Does my face shine much, father?" "Well, it does look waxy, my boy," returned Mr. Tetterby. "It's the weather, father," said Adolphus, polishing his cheeks on the worn sleeve of his jacket. "What with rain, and sleet, and wind, and snow, and fog, my face gets quite brought out into a rash sometimes. And shines, it does—oh, don't it, though!" Master Adolphus was also in the newspaper line of life, being employed, by a more thriving firm than his father and Co., to vend newspapers at a railway station, where his chubby little person, like a shabbily-disguised Cupid, and his shrill little voice (he was not much more than ten years old), were as well known as the hoarse panting of the locomotives, running in and out. His juvenility might have been at some loss for a harmless outlet, in this early application to traffic, but for a fortunate discovery he made of a means of entertaining himself, and of dividing the long day into stages of interest, without neglecting business. This ingenious invention, remarkable, like many great discoveries, for its simplicity, consisted in varying the first vowel in the word “paper,” and substituting, in its stead, at different periods of the day, all the other vowels in grammatical succession. Thus, before daylight in the winter-time, he went to and fro, in his little oilskin cap and cape, and his big comforter, piercing the heavy air with his cry of "Morn-ing Pa-per!" which, about an hour before noon, changed to "Morn-ing Pepper!" which, at about two, changed to "Morn-ing Pip-per!" which in a couple of hours changed to "Morn-ing Pop-per!" and so declined with the sun into "Eve-ning Pup-per!" to the great relief and comfort of this young gentleman’s spirits. Mrs. Tetterby, his lady-mother, who had been sitting with her bonnet and shawl thrown back, as aforesaid, thoughtfully turning her wedding-ring round and round upon her finger, now rose, and divesting herself of her out-of-door attire, began to lay the cloth for supper. "Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "That’s the way the world goes!" "Which is the way the world goes, my dear?" asked Mr. Tetterby, looking round. "Oh, nothing," said Mrs. Tetterby. Mr. Tetterby elevated his eyebrows, folded his newspaper afresh, and carried his eyes up it, and down it, and across it, but was wandering in his attention, and not reading it. Mrs. Tetterby, at the same time, laid the cloth, but rather as if she were punishing the table than preparing the family supper; hitting it unnecessarily hard with the knives and forks, slapping it with the plates, dinting it with the salt-cellar, and coming heavily down upon it with the loaf. "Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "That’s the way the world goes!" "My duck," returned her husband, looking round again, "you said that before. Which is the way the world goes?" "Oh, nothing!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "Sophia!" remonstrated her husband, "you said that before, too." "Well, I’ll say it again if you like," returned Mrs. Tetterby. "Oh nothing—there! And again if you like, oh nothing—there! And again if you like, oh nothing—now then!" Mr. Tetterby brought his eye to bear upon the partner of his bosom, and said, in mild astonishment: "My little woman, what has put you out?" "I’m sure I don’t know," she retorted. "Don’t ask me. Who said I was put out at all? I never did." Mr. Tetterby gave up the perusal of his newspaper as a bad job, and, taking a slow walk across the room, with his hands behind him, and his shoulders raised—his gait according perfectly with the resignation of his manner—addressed himself to his two eldest offspring. "Your supper will be ready in a minute, 'Dolphus," said Mr. Tetterby. "Your mother has been out in the wet, to the cook’s shop, to buy it. It was very good of your mother so to do. You shall get some supper too, very soon, Johnny. Your mother's pleased with you, my man, for being so attentive to your precious sister." Mrs. Tetterby, without any remark, but with a decided subsidence of her animosity towards the table, finished her preparations, and took, from her ample basket, a substantial slab of hot pease pudding wrapped in paper, and a basin covered with a saucer, which, on being uncovered, sent forth an odour so agreeable, that the three pair of eyes in the two beds opened wide and fixed themselves upon the banquet. Mr. Tetterby, without regarding this tacit invitation to be seated, stood repeating slowly, "Yes, yes, your supper will be ready in a minute, 'Dolphus—your mother went out in the wet, to the cook’s shop, to buy it. It was very good of your mother so to do"—until Mrs. Tetterby, who had been exhibiting sundry tokens of contrition behind him, caught him round the neck, and wept. "Oh, Dolphus!" said Mrs. Tetterby, "how could I go and behave so?" This reconciliation affected Adolphus the younger and Johnny to that degree, that they both, as with one accord, raised a dismal cry, which had the effect of immediately shutting up the round eyes in the beds, and utterly routing the two remaining little Tetterbys, just then stealing in from the adjoining closet to see what was going on in the eating way. "I am sure, 'Dolphus," sobbed Mrs. Tetterby, "coming home, I had no more idea than a child unborn—" Mr. Tetterby seemed to dislike this figure of speech, and observed, "Say than the baby, my dear." "—Had no more idea than the baby," said Mrs. Tetterby.—"Johnny, don’t look at me, but look at her, or she’ll fall out of your lap and be killed, and then you’ll die in agonies of a broken heart, and serve you right.—No more idea I hadn’t than that darling, of being cross when I came home; but somehow, 'Dolphus—" Mrs. Tetterby paused, and again turned her wedding-ring round and round upon her finger. "I see!" said Mr. Tetterby. "I understand! My little woman was put out. Hard times, and hard weather, and hard work, make it trying now and then. I see, bless your soul! No wonder! Dolf, my man," continued Mr. Tetterby, exploring the basin with a fork, "here’s your mother been and bought, at the cook’s shop, besides pease pudding, a whole knuckle of a lovely roast leg of pork, with lots of crackling left upon it, and with seasoning gravy and mustard quite unlimited. Hand in your plate, my boy, and begin while it's simmering." Master Adolphus, needing no second summons, received his portion with eyes rendered moist by appetite, and withdrawing to his particular stool, fell upon his supper tooth and nail. Johnny was not forgotten, but received his rations on bread, lest he should, in a flush of gravy, trickle any on the baby. He was required, for similar reasons, to keep his pudding, when not on active service, in his pocket. There might have been more pork on the knucklebone,—which knucklebone the carver at the cook's shop had assuredly not forgotten in carving for previous customers—but there was no stint of seasoning, and that is an accessory dreamily suggesting pork, and pleasantly cheating the sense of taste. The pease pudding, too, the gravy and mustard, like the Eastern rose in respect of the nightingale, if they were not absolutely pork, had lived near it; so, upon the whole, there was the flavour of a middle-sized pig. It was irresistible to the Tetterbys in bed, who, though professing to slumber peacefully, crawled out when unseen by their parents, and silently appealed to their brothers for any gastronomic token of fraternal affection. They, not hard of heart, presenting scraps in return, it resulted that a party of light skirmishers in nightgowns were careering about the parlour all through supper, which harassed Mr. Tetterby exceedingly, and once or twice imposed upon him the necessity of a charge, before which these guerilla troops retired in all directions and in great confusion. Mrs. Tetterby did not enjoy her supper. There seemed to be something on Mrs. Tetterby’s mind. At one time she laughed without reason, and at another time she cried without reason, and at last she laughed and cried together in a manner so very unreasonable that her husband was confounded. "My little woman," said Mr. Tetterby, "if the world goes that way, it appears to go the wrong way, and to choke you." "Give me a drop of water," said Mrs. Tetterby, struggling with herself, "and don’t speak to me for the present, or take any notice of me. Don’t do it!" Mr. Tetterby having administered the water, turned suddenly on the unlucky Johnny (who was full of sympathy), and demanded why he was wallowing there, in gluttony and idleness, instead of coming forward with the baby, that the sight of her might revive his mother. Johnny immediately approached, borne down by its weight; but Mrs. Tetterby holding out her hand to signify that she was not in a condition to bear that trying appeal to her feelings, he was interdicted from advancing another inch, on pain of perpetual hatred from all his dearest connections; and accordingly retired to his stool again, and crushed himself as before. After a pause, Mrs. Tetterby said she was better now, and began to laugh. "My little woman," said her husband, dubiously, "are you quite sure you're better? Or are you, Sophia, about to break out in a fresh direction?" "No, 'Dolphus, no," replied his wife. "I’m quite myself." With that, settling her hair, and pressing the palms of her hands upon her eyes, she laughed again. "What a wicked fool I was, to think so for a moment!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "Come nearer, 'Dolphus, and let me ease my mind, and tell you what I mean. Let me tell you all about it." Mr. Tetterby bringing his chair closer, Mrs. Tetterby laughed again, gave him a hug, and wiped her eyes. "You know, Dolphus, my dear," said Mrs. Tetterby, "that when I was single, I might have given myself away in several directions. At one time, four after me at once; two of them were sons of Mars." "We’re all sons of Ma's, my dear," said Mr. Tetterby, "jointly with Pa’s." "I don’t mean that," replied his wife, "I mean soldiers—serjeants." "Oh!" said Mr. Tetterby. "Well, 'Dolphus, I'm sure I never think of such things now, to regret them; and I'm sure I've got as good a husband, and would do as much to prove that I was fond of him, as—" "As any little woman in the world," said Mr. Tetterby. "Very good. Very good." If Mr. Tetterby had been ten feet high, he could not have expressed a gentler consideration for Mrs. Tetterby’s fairy-like stature; and if Mrs. Tetterby had been two feet high, she could not have felt it more appropriately her due. "But you see, 'Dolphus," said Mrs. Tetterby, "this being Christmas-time, when all people who can, make holiday, and when all people who have got money, like to spend some, I did, somehow, get a little out of sorts when I was in the streets just now. There were so many things to be sold—such delicious things to eat, such fine things to look at, such delightful things to have—and there was so much calculating and calculating necessary, before I durst lay out a sixpence for the commonest thing; and the basket was so large, and wanted so much in it; and my stock of money was so small, and would go such a little way;—you hate me, don’t you, 'Dolphus?" "Not quite," said Mr. Tetterby, "as yet." "Well! I'll tell you the whole truth," pursued his wife, penitently, "and then perhaps you will. I felt all this, so much, when I was trudging about in the cold, and when I saw a lot of other calculating faces and large baskets trudging about, too, that I began to think whether I mightn’t have done better, and been happier, if—I—hadn't—" the wedding-ring went round again, and Mrs. Tetterby shook her downcast head as she turned it. "I see," said her husband quietly; "if you hadn't married at all, or if you had married somebody else?" "Yes," sobbed Mrs. Tetterby. "That’s really what I thought. Do you hate me now, 'Dolphus?" "Why no," said Mr. Tetterby. "I don’t find that I do, as yet." Mrs. Tetterby gave him a thankful kiss, and went on. "I begin to hope you won't, now, 'Dolphus, though I’m afraid I haven't told you the worst. I can't think what came over me. I don't know whether I was ill, or mad, or what I was, but I couldn't call up anything that seemed to bind us to each other, or to reconcile me to my fortune. All the pleasures and enjoyments we had ever had—they seemed so poor and insignificant, I hated them. I could have trodden on them. And I could think of nothing else, except our being poor, and the number of mouths there were at home." "Well, well, my dear," said Mr. Tetterby, shaking her hand encouragingly, "that’s truth, after all. We are poor, and there are a number of mouths at home here." "Ah! but, Dolf, Dolf!" cried his wife, laying her hands upon his neck, "my good, kind, patient fellow, when I had been at home a very little while—how different! Oh, Dolf, dear, how different it was! I felt as if there was a rush of recollection on me, all at once, that softened my hard heart, and filled it up till it was bursting. All our struggles for a livelihood, all our cares and wants since we have been married, all the times of sickness, all the hours of watching, we have ever had, by one another, or by the children, seemed to speak to me, and say that they had made us one, and that I never might have been, or could have been, or would have been, any other than the wife and mother I am. Then, the cheap enjoyments that I could have trodden on so cruelly, got to be so precious to me—Oh so priceless, and dear!—that I couldn’t bear to think how much I had wronged them; and I said, and say again a hundred times, how could I ever behave so, 'Dolphus, how could I ever have the heart to do it!" The good woman, quite carried away by her honest tenderness and remorse, was weeping with all her heart, when she started up with a scream, and ran behind her husband. Her cry was so terrified, that the children started from their sleep and from their beds, and clung about her. Nor did her gaze belie her voice, as she pointed to a pale man in a black cloak who had come into the room. "Look at that man! Look there! What does he want?" "My dear," returned her husband, "I’ll ask him if you’ll let me go. What’s the matter! How you shake!" "I saw him in the street, when I was out just now. He looked at me, and stood near me. I am afraid of him." "Afraid of him! Why?" "I don’t know why—I—stop! husband!" for he was going towards the stranger. She had one hand pressed upon her forehead, and one upon her breast; and there was a peculiar fluttering all over her, and a hurried unsteady motion of her eyes, as if she had lost something. "Are you ill, my dear?" "What is it that is going from me again?" she muttered, in a low voice. "What is this that is going away?" Then she abruptly answered: 'Ill? No, I am quite well," and stood looking vacantly at the floor. Her husband, who had not been altogether free from the infection of her fear at first, and whom the present strangeness of her manner did not tend to reassure, addressed himself to the pale visitor in the black cloak, who stood still, and whose eyes were bent upon the ground. "What may be your pleasure, sir," he asked, "with us?" "I fear that my coming in unperceived," returned the visitor, "has alarmed you; but you were talking and did not hear me." "My little woman says—perhaps you heard her say it," returned Mr. Tetterby, "that it’s not the first time you have alarmed her to-night." "I am sorry for it. I remember to have observed her, for a few moments only, in the street. I had no intention of frightening her." As he raised his eyes in speaking, she raised hers. It was extraordinary to see what dread she had of him, and with what dread he observed it—and yet how narrowly and closely. "My name," he said, "is Redlaw. I come from the old college hard by. A young gentleman who is a student there, lodges in your house, does he not?" "Mr. Denham?" said Tetterby. "Yes." It was a natural action, and so slight as to be hardly noticeable; but the little man, before speaking again, passed his hand across his forehead, and looked quickly round the room, as though he were sensible of some change in its atmosphere. The Chemist, instantly transferring to him the look of dread he had directed towards the wife, stepped back, and his face turned paler. "The gentleman’s room," said Tetterby, "is upstairs, sir. There’s a more convenient private entrance; but as you have come in here, it will save your going out into the cold, if you’ll take this little staircase," showing one communicating directly with the parlour, "and go up to him that way, if you wish to see him." "Yes, I wish to see him," said the Chemist. "Can you spare a light?" The watchfulness of his haggard look, and the inexplicable distrust that darkened it, seemed to trouble Mr. Tetterby. He paused; and looking fixedly at him in return, stood for a minute or so, like a man stupefied, or fascinated. At length he said, "I’ll light you, sir, if you’ll follow me." "No," replied the Chemist, "I don’t wish to be attended, or announced to him. He does not expect me. I would rather go alone. Please to give me the light, if you can spare it, and I’ll find the way." In the quickness of his expression of this desire, and in taking the candle from the newsman, he touched him on the breast. Withdrawing his hand hastily, almost as though he had wounded him by accident (for he did not know in what part of himself his new power resided, or how it was communicated, or how the manner of its reception varied in different persons), he turned and ascended the stair. But when he reached the top, he stopped and looked down. The wife was standing in the same place, twisting her ring round and round upon her finger. The husband, with his head bent forward on his breast, was musing heavily and sullenly. The children, still clustering about the mother, gazed timidly after the visitor, and nestled together when they saw him looking down. "Come!" said the father, roughly. "There’s enough of this. Get to bed here!" "The place is inconvenient and small enough," the mother added, "without you. Get to bed!" The whole brood, scared and sad, crept away; little Johnny and the baby lagging last. The mother, glancing contemptuously round the sordid room, and tossing from her the fragments of their meal, stopped on the threshold of her task of clearing the table, and sat down, pondering idly and dejectedly. The father betook himself to the chimney-corner, and impatiently raking the small fire together, bent over it as if he would monopolise it all. They did not interchange a word. The Chemist, paler than before, stole upward like a thief; looking back upon the change below, and dreading equally to go on or return. "What have I done!" he said confusedly. "What am I going to do!" "To be the benefactor of mankind," he thought he heard a voice reply. He looked round, but there was nothing there; and a passage now shutting out the little parlour from his view, he went on, directing his eyes before him at the way he went. "It is only since last night," he muttered gloomily, "that I have remained shut up, and yet all things are strange to me. I am strange to myself. I am here, as in a dream. What interest have I in this place, or in any place that I can bring to my remembrance? My mind is going blind!" There was a door before him, and he knocked at it. Being invited, by a voice within, to enter, he complied. "Is that my kind nurse?" said the voice. "But I need not ask her. There is no one else to come here." It spoke cheerfully, though in a languid tone, and attracted his attention to a young man lying on a couch, drawn before the chimney-piece, with the back towards the door. A meagre scanty stove, pinched and hollowed like a sick man’s cheeks, and bricked into the centre of a hearth that it could scarcely warm, contained the fire, to which his face was turned. Being so near the windy house-top, it wasted quickly, and with a busy sound, and the burning ashes dropped down fast. "They chink when they shoot out here," said the student, smiling, "so, according to the gossips, they are not coffins, but purses. I shall be well and rich yet, some day, if it please God, and shall live perhaps to love a daughter Milly, in remembrance of the kindest nature and the gentlest heart in the world." He put up his hand as if expecting her to take it, but, being weakened, he lay still, with his face resting on his other hand, and did not turn round. The Chemist glanced about the room;—at the student’s books and papers, piled upon a table in a corner, where they, and his extinguished reading-lamp, now prohibited and put away, told of the attentive hours that had gone before this illness, and perhaps caused it;—at such signs of his old health and freedom, as the out-of-door attire that hung idle on the wall;—at those remembrances of other and less solitary scenes, the little miniatures upon the chimney-piece, and the drawing of home;—at that token of his emulation, perhaps, in some sort, of his personal attachment too, the framed engraving of himself, the looker-on. The time had been, only yesterday, when not one of these objects, in its remotest association of interest with the living figure before him, would have been lost on Redlaw. Now, they were but objects; or, if any gleam of such connexion shot upon him, it perplexed, and not enlightened him, as he stood looking round with a dull wonder. The student, recalling the thin hand which had remained so long untouched, raised himself on the couch, and turned his head. "Mr. Redlaw!" he exclaimed, and started up. Redlaw put out his arm. "Don’t come nearer to me. I will sit here. Remain you, where you are!" He sat down on a chair near the door, and having glanced at the young man standing leaning with his hand upon the couch, spoke with his eyes averted towards the ground. "I heard, by an accident, by what accident is no matter, that one of my class was ill and solitary. I received no other description of him, than that he lived in this street. Beginning my inquiries at the first house in it, I have found him." "I have been ill, sir," returned the student, not merely with a modest hesitation, but with a kind of awe of him, "but am greatly better. An attack of fever—of the brain, I believe—has weakened me, but I am much better. I cannot say I have been solitary, in my illness, or I should forget the ministering hand that has been near me." "You are speaking of the keeper’s wife," said Redlaw. "Yes." The student bent his head, as if he rendered her some silent homage. The Chemist, in whom there was a cold, monotonous apathy, which rendered him more like a marble image on the tomb of the man who had started from his dinner yesterday at the first mention of this student’s case, than the breathing man himself, glanced again at the student leaning with his hand upon the couch, and looked upon the ground, and in the air, as if for light for his blinded mind. "I remembered your name," he said, "when it was mentioned to me down stairs, just now; and I recollect your face. We have held but very little personal communication together?" "Very little." "You have retired and withdrawn from me, more than any of the rest, I think?" The student signified assent. "And why?" said the Chemist; not with the least expression of interest, but with a moody, wayward kind of curiosity. "Why? How comes it that you have sought to keep especially from me, the knowledge of your remaining here, at this season, when all the rest have dispersed, and of your being ill? I want to know why this is?" The young man, who had heard him with increasing agitation, raised his downcast eyes to his face, and clasping his hands together, cried with sudden earnestness and with trembling lips: "Mr. Redlaw! You have discovered me. You know my secret!" "Secret?" said the Chemist, harshly. “I know?” "Yes! Your manner, so different from the interest and sympathy which endear you to so many hearts, your altered voice, the constraint there is in everything you say, and in your looks," replied the student, "warn me that you know me. That you would conceal it, even now, is but a proof to me (God knows I need none!) of your natural kindness and of the bar there is between us." A vacant and contemptuous laugh, was all his answer. "But, Mr. Redlaw," said the student, "as a just man, and a good man, think how innocent I am, except in name and descent, of participation in any wrong inflicted on you or in any sorrow you have borne." "Sorrow!" said Redlaw, laughing. "Wrong! What are those to me?" "For Heaven’s sake," entreated the shrinking student, "do not let the mere interchange of a few words with me change you like this, sir! Let me pass again from your knowledge and notice. Let me occupy my old reserved and distant place among those whom you instruct. Know me only by the name I have assumed, and not by that of Longford—" "Longford!" exclaimed the other. He clasped his head with both his hands, and for a moment turned upon the young man his own intelligent and thoughtful face. But the light passed from it, like the sun-beam of an instant, and it clouded as before. "The name my mother bears, sir," faltered the young man, "the name she took, when she might, perhaps, have taken one more honoured. Mr. Redlaw," hesitating, "I believe I know that history. Where my information halts, my guesses at what is wanting may supply something not remote from the truth. I am the child of a marriage that has not proved itself a well-assorted or a happy one. From infancy, I have heard you spoken of with honour and respect—with something that was almost reverence. I have heard of such devotion, of such fortitude and tenderness, of such rising up against the obstacles which press men down, that my fancy, since I learnt my little lesson from my mother, has shed a lustre on your name. At last, a poor student myself, from whom could I learn but you?" Redlaw, unmoved, unchanged, and looking at him with a staring frown, answered by no word or sign. "I cannot say," pursued the other, "I should try in vain to say, how much it has impressed me, and affected me, to find the gracious traces of the past, in that certain power of winning gratitude and confidence which is associated among us students (among the humblest of us, most) with Mr. Redlaw’s generous name. Our ages and positions are so different, sir, and I am so accustomed to regard you from a distance, that I wonder at my own presumption when I touch, however lightly, on that theme. But to one who—I may say, who felt no common interest in my mother once—it may be something to hear, now that all is past, with what indescribable feelings of affection I have, in my obscurity, regarded him; with what pain and reluctance I have kept aloof from his encouragement, when a word of it would have made me rich; yet how I have felt it fit that I should hold my course, content to know him, and to be unknown. Mr. Redlaw," said the student, faintly, "what I would have said, I have said ill, for my strength is strange to me as yet; but for anything unworthy in this fraud of mine, forgive me, and for all the rest forget me!" The staring frown remained on Redlaw’s face, and yielded to no other expression until the student, with these words, advanced towards him, as if to touch his hand, when he drew back and cried to him: "Don’t come nearer to me!" The young man stopped, shocked by the eagerness of his recoil, and by the sternness of his repulsion; and he passed his hand, thoughtfully, across his forehead. "The past is past," said the Chemist. "It dies like the brutes. Who talks to me of its traces in my life? He raves or lies! What have I to do with your distempered dreams? If you want money, here it is. I came to offer it; and that is all I came for. There can be nothing else that brings me here," he muttered, holding his head again, with both his hands. "There can be nothing else, and yet—" He had tossed his purse upon the table. As he fell into this dim cogitation with himself, the student took it up, and held it out to him. "Take it back, sir," he said proudly, though not angrily. "I wish you could take from me, with it, the remembrance of your words and offer." "You do?" he retorted, with a wild light in his eyes. "You do?" "I do!" The Chemist went close to him, for the first time, and took the purse, and turned him by the arm, and looked him in the face. "There is sorrow and trouble in sickness, is there not?" he demanded, with a laugh. The wondering student answered, "Yes." "In its unrest, in its anxiety, in its suspense, in all its train of physical and mental miseries?" said the Chemist, with a wild unearthly exultation. "All best forgotten, are they not?" The student did not answer, but again passed his hand, confusedly, across his forehead. Redlaw still held him by the sleeve, when Milly’s voice was heard outside. "I can see very well now," she said, "thank you, Dolf. Don’t cry, dear. Father and mother will be comfortable again, to-morrow, and home will be comfortable too. A gentleman with him, is there!" Redlaw released his hold, as he listened. "I have feared, from the first moment," he murmured to himself, "to meet her. There is a steady quality of goodness in her, that I dread to influence. I may be the murderer of what is tenderest and best within her bosom." She was knocking at the door. "Shall I dismiss it as an idle foreboding, or still avoid her?" he muttered, looking uneasily around. She was knocking at the door again. "Of all the visitors who could come here," he said, in a hoarse alarmed voice, turning to his companion, "this is the one I should desire most to avoid. Hide me!" The student opened a frail door in the wall, communicating where the garret-roof began to slope towards the floor, with a small inner room. Redlaw passed in hastily, and shut it after him. The student then resumed his place upon the couch, and called to her to enter. "Dear Mr. Edmund," said Milly, looking round, "they told me there was a gentleman here." "There is no one here but I." "There has been some one?" "Yes, yes, there has been some one." She put her little basket on the table, and went up to the back of the couch, as if to take the extended hand—but it was not there. A little surprised, in her quiet way, she leaned over to look at his face, and gently touched him on the brow. "Are you quite as well to-night? Your head is not so cool as in the afternoon." "Tut!" said the student, petulantly, "very little ails me." A little more surprise, but no reproach, was expressed in her face, as she withdrew to the other side of the table, and took a small packet of needlework from her basket. But she laid it down again, on second thoughts, and going noiselessly about the room, set everything exactly in its place, and in the neatest order; even to the cushions on the couch, which she touched with so light a hand, that he hardly seemed to know it, as he lay looking at the fire. When all this was done, and she had swept the hearth, she sat down, in her modest little bonnet, to her work, and was quietly busy on it directly. "It’s the new muslin curtain for the window, Mr. Edmund," said Milly, stitching away as she talked. "It will look very clean and nice, though it costs very little, and will save your eyes, too, from the light. My William says the room should not be too light just now, when you are recovering so well, or the glare might make you giddy." He said nothing; but there was something so fretful and impatient in his change of position, that her quick fingers stopped, and she looked at him anxiously. "The pillows are not comfortable," she said, laying down her work and rising. "I will soon put them right." "They are very well," he answered. "Leave them alone, pray. You make so much of everything." He raised his head to say this, and looked at her so thanklessly, that, after he had thrown himself down again, she stood timidly pausing. However, she resumed her seat, and her needle, without having directed even a murmuring look towards him, and was soon as busy as before. "I have been thinking, Mr. Edmund, that you have been often thinking of late, when I have been sitting by, how true the saying is, that adversity is a good teacher. Health will be more precious to you, after this illness, than it has ever been. And years hence, when this time of year comes round, and you remember the days when you lay here sick, alone, that the knowledge of your illness might not afflict those who are dearest to you, your home will be doubly dear and doubly blest. Now, isn’t that a good, true thing?" She was too intent upon her work, and too earnest in what she said, and too composed and quiet altogether, to be on the watch for any look he might direct towards her in reply; so the shaft of his ungrateful glance fell harmless, and did not wound her. "Ah!" said Milly, with her pretty head inclining thoughtfully on one side, as she looked down, following her busy fingers with her eyes. "Even on me—and I am very different from you, Mr. Edmund, for I have no learning, and don’t know how to think properly—this view of such things has made a great impression, since you have been lying ill. When I have seen you so touched by the kindness and attention of the poor people down stairs, I have felt that you thought even that experience some repayment for the loss of health, and I have read in your face, as plain as if it was a book, that but for some trouble and sorrow we should never know half the good there is about us." His getting up from the couch, interrupted her, or she was going on to say more. "We needn’t magnify the merit, Mrs. William," he rejoined slightingly. "The people down stairs will be paid in good time I dare say, for any little extra service they may have rendered me; and perhaps they anticipate no less. I am much obliged to you, too." Her fingers stopped, and she looked at him. "I can’t be made to feel the more obliged by your exaggerating the case," he said. "I am sensible that you have been interested in me, and I say I am much obliged to you. What more would you have?" Her work fell on her lap, as she still looked at him walking to and fro with an intolerant air, and stopping now and then. "I say again, I am much obliged to you. Why weaken my sense of what is your due in obligation, by preferring enormous claims upon me? Trouble, sorrow, affliction, adversity! One might suppose I had been dying a score of deaths here!" "Do you believe, Mr. Edmund," she asked, rising and going nearer to him, "that I spoke of the poor people of the house, with any reference to myself? To me?" laying her hand upon her bosom with a simple and innocent smile of astonishment. "Oh! I think nothing about it, my good creature," he returned. "I have had an indisposition, which your solicitude—observe! I say solicitude—makes a great deal more of, than it merits; and it's over, and we can't perpetuate it." He coldly took a book, and sat down at the table. She watched him for a little while, until her smile was quite gone, and then, returning to where her basket was, said gently: "Mr. Edmund, would you rather be alone?" "There is no reason why I should detain you here," he replied. "Except—" said Milly, hesitating, and showing her work. "Oh! the curtain," he answered, with a supercilious laugh. "That’s not worth staying for." She made up the little packet again, and put it in her basket. Then, standing before him with such an air of patient entreaty that he could not choose but look at her, she said: "If you should want me, I will come back willingly. When you did want me, I was quite happy to come; there was no merit in it. I think you must be afraid, that, now you are getting well, I may be troublesome to you; but I should not have been, indeed. I should have come no longer than your weakness and confinement lasted. You owe me nothing; but it is right that you should deal as justly by me as if I was a lady—even the very lady that you love; and if you suspect me of meanly making much of the little I have tried to do to comfort your sick room, you do yourself more wrong than ever you can do me. That is why I am sorry. That is why I am very sorry." If she had been as passionate as she was quiet, as indignant as she was calm, as angry in her look as she was gentle, as loud of tone as she was low and clear, she might have left no sense of her departure in the room, compared with that which fell upon the lonely student when she went away. He was gazing drearily upon the place where she had been, when Redlaw came out of his concealment, and came to the door. "When sickness lays its hand on you again," he said, looking fiercely back at him, "—may it be soon!—Die here! Rot here!" "What have you done?" returned the other, catching at his cloak. "What change have you wrought in me? What curse have you brought upon me? Give me back myself!" "Give me back myself!" exclaimed Redlaw like a madman. "I am infected! I am infectious! I am charged with poison for my own mind, and the minds of all mankind. Where I felt interest, compassion, sympathy, I am turning into stone. Selfishness and ingratitude spring up in my blighting footsteps. I am only so much less base than the wretches whom I make so, that in the moment of their transformation I can hate them." As he spoke—the young man still holding to his cloak—he cast him off, and struck him: then, wildly hurried out into the night air where the wind was blowing, the snow falling, the cloud-drift sweeping on, the moon dimly shining; and where, blowing in the wind, falling with the snow, drifting with the clouds, shining in the moonlight, and heavily looming in the darkness, were the Phantom’s words, "The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!" Whither he went, he neither knew nor cared, so that he avoided company. The change he felt within him made the busy streets a desert, and himself a desert, and the multitude around him, in their manifold endurances and ways of life, a mighty waste of sand, which the winds tossed into unintelligible heaps and made a ruinous confusion of. Those traces in his breast which the Phantom had told him would "die out soon," were not, as yet, so far upon their way to death, but that he understood enough of what he was, and what he made of others, to desire to be alone. This put it in his mind—he suddenly bethought himself, as he was going along, of the boy who had rushed into his room. And then he recollected, that of those with whom he had communicated since the Phantom’s disappearance, that boy alone had shown no sign of being changed. Monstrous and odious as the wild thing was to him, he determined to seek it out, and prove if this were really so; and also to seek it with another intention, which came into his thoughts at the same time. So, resolving with some difficulty where he was, he directed his steps back to the old college, and to that part of it where the general porch was, and where, alone, the pavement was worn by the tread of the students’ feet. The keeper’s house stood just within the iron gates, forming a part of the chief quadrangle. There was a little cloister outside, and from that sheltered place he knew he could look in at the window of their ordinary room, and see who was within. The iron gates were shut, but his hand was familiar with the fastening, and drawing it back by thrusting in his wrist between the bars, he passed through softly, shut it again, and crept up to the window, crumbling the thin crust of snow with his feet. The fire, to which he had directed the boy last night, shining brightly through the glass, made an illuminated place upon the ground. Instinctively avoiding this, and going round it, he looked in at the window. At first, he thought that there was no one there, and that the blaze was reddening only the old beams in the ceiling and the dark walls; but peering in more narrowly, he saw the object of his search coiled asleep before it on the floor. He passed quickly to the door, opened it, and went in. The creature lay in such a fiery heat, that, as the Chemist stooped to rouse him, it scorched his head. So soon as he was touched, the boy, not half awake, clutching his rags together with the instinct of flight upon him, half rolled and half ran into a distant corner of the room, where, heaped upon the ground, he struck his foot out to defend himself. "Get up!" said the Chemist. "You have not forgotten me?" "You let me alone!" returned the boy. "This is the woman’s house—not yours." The Chemist’s steady eye controlled him somewhat, or inspired him with enough submission to be raised upon his feet, and looked at. "Who washed them, and put those bandages where they were bruised and cracked?" asked the Chemist, pointing to their altered state. "The woman did." "And is it she who has made you cleaner in the face, too?" "Yes, the woman." Redlaw asked these questions to attract his eyes towards himself, and with the same intent now held him by the chin, and threw his wild hair back, though he loathed to touch him. The boy watched his eyes keenly, as if he thought it needful to his own defence, not knowing what he might do next; and Redlaw could see well that no change came over him. "Where are they?" he inquired. "The woman’s out." "I know she is. Where is the old man with the white hair, and his son?" "The woman’s husband, d’ye mean?" inquired the boy. "Ay. Where are those two?" "Out. Something’s the matter, somewhere. They were fetched out in a hurry, and told me to stop here." "Come with me," said the Chemist, "and I’ll give you money." "Come where? and how much will you give?" "I’ll give you more shillings than you ever saw, and bring you back soon. Do you know your way to where you came from?" "You let me go," returned the boy, suddenly twisting out of his grasp. "I’m not a going to take you there. Let me be, or I’ll heave some fire at you!" He was down before it, and ready, with his savage little hand, to pluck the burning coals out. What the Chemist had felt, in observing the effect of his charmed influence stealing over those with whom he came in contact, was not nearly equal to the cold vague terror with which he saw this baby-monster put it at defiance. It chilled his blood to look on the immovable impenetrable thing, in the likeness of a child, with its sharp malignant face turned up to his, and its almost infant hand, ready at the bars. "Listen, boy!" he said. "You shall take me where you please, so that you take me where the people are very miserable or very wicked. I want to do them good, and not to harm them. You shall have money, as I have told you, and I will bring you back. Get up! Come quickly!" He made a hasty step towards the door, afraid of her returning. "Will you let me walk by myself, and never hold me, nor yet touch me?" said the boy, slowly withdrawing the hand with which he threatened, and beginning to get up. "I will!" "And let me go, before, behind, or anyways I like?" "I will!" "Give me some money first, then, and go." The Chemist laid a few shillings, one by one, in his extended hand. To count them was beyond the boy’s knowledge, but he said "one," every time, and avariciously looked at each as it was given, and at the donor. He had nowhere to put them, out of his hand, but in his mouth; and he put them there. Redlaw then wrote with his pencil on a leaf of his pocket-book, that the boy was with him; and laying it on the table, signed to him to follow. Keeping his rags together, as usual, the boy complied, and went out with his bare head and naked feet into the winter night. Preferring not to depart by the iron gate by which he had entered, where they were in danger of meeting her whom he so anxiously avoided, the Chemist led the way, through some of those passages among which the boy had lost himself, and by that portion of the building where he lived, to a small door of which he had the key. When they got into the street, he stopped to ask his guide—who instantly retreated from him—if he knew where they were. The savage thing looked here and there, and at length, nodding his head, pointed in the direction he designed to take. Redlaw going on at once, he followed, something less suspiciously; shifting his money from his mouth into his hand, and back again into his mouth, and stealthily rubbing it bright upon his shreds of dress, as he went along. Three times, in their progress, they were side by side. Three times they stopped, being side by side. Three times the Chemist glanced down at his face, and shuddered as it forced upon him one reflection. The first occasion was when they were crossing an old churchyard, and Redlaw stopped among the graves, utterly at a loss how to connect them with any tender, softening, or consolatory thought. The second was, when the breaking forth of the moon induced him to look up at the Heavens, where he saw her in her glory, surrounded by a host of stars he still knew by the names and histories which human science has appended to them; but where he saw nothing else he had been wont to see, felt nothing he had been wont to feel, in looking up there, on a bright night. The third was when he stopped to listen to a plaintive strain of music, but could only hear a tune, made manifest to him by the dry mechanism of the instruments and his own ears, with no address to any mystery within him, without a whisper in it of the past, or of the future, powerless upon him as the sound of last year’s running water, or the rushing of last year’s wind. At each of these three times, he saw with horror that, in spite of the vast intellectual distance between them, and their being unlike each other in all physical respects, the expression on the boy’s face was the expression on his own. They journeyed on for some time—now through such crowded places, that he often looked over his shoulder thinking he had lost his guide, but generally finding him within his shadow on his other side; now by ways so quiet, that he could have counted his short, quick, naked footsteps coming on behind—until they arrived at a ruinous collection of houses, and the boy touched him and stopped. "In there!" he said, pointing out one house where there were scattered lights in the windows, and a dim lantern in the doorway, with "Lodgings for Travellers" painted on it. Redlaw looked about him; from the houses to the waste piece of ground on which the houses stood, or rather did not altogether tumble down, unfenced, undrained, unlighted, and bordered by a sluggish ditch; from that, to the sloping line of arches, part of some neighbouring viaduct or bridge with which it was surrounded, and which lessened gradually towards them, until the last but one was a mere kennel for a dog, the last a plundered little heap of bricks; from that, to the child, close to him, cowering and trembling with the cold, and limping on one little foot, while he coiled the other round his leg to warm it, yet staring at all these things with that frightful likeness of expression so apparent in his face, that Redlaw started from him. "In there!" said the boy, pointing out the house again. "I’ll wait." "Will they let me in?" asked Redlaw. "Say you’re a doctor," he answered with a nod. "There’s plenty ill here." Looking back on his way to the house-door, Redlaw saw him trail himself upon the dust and crawl within the shelter of the smallest arch, as if he were a rat. He had no pity for the thing, but he was afraid of it; and when it looked out of its den at him, he hurried to the house as a retreat. "Sorrow, wrong, and trouble," said the Chemist, with a painful effort at some more distinct remembrance, "at least haunt this place darkly. He can do no harm, who brings forgetfulness of such things here!" With these words, he pushed the yielding door, and went in. There was a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or forlorn, whose head was bent down on her hands and knees. As it was not easy to pass without treading on her, and as she was perfectly regardless of his near approach, he stopped, and touched her on the shoulder. Looking up, she showed him quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the spring. With little or no show of concern on his account, she moved nearer to the wall to leave him a wider passage. "What are you?" said Redlaw, pausing, with his hand upon the broken stair-rail. "What do you think I am?" she answered, showing him her face again. He looked upon the ruined Temple of God, so lately made, so soon disfigured; and something, which was not compassion—for the springs in which a true compassion for such miseries has its rise, were dried up in his breast—but which was nearer to it, for the moment, than any feeling that had lately struggled into the darkening, but not yet wholly darkened, night of his mind—mingled a touch of softness with his next words. "I am come here to give relief, if I can," he said. "Are you thinking of any wrong?" She frowned at him, and then laughed; and then her laugh prolonged itself into a shivering sigh, as she dropped her head again, and hid her fingers in her hair. "Are you thinking of a wrong?" he asked once more. “I am thinking of my life,” she said, with a momentary look at him. He had a perception that she was one of many, and that he saw the type of thousands, when he saw her, drooping at his feet. “What are your parents?” he demanded. "I had a good home once. My father was a gardener, far away, in the country." "Is he dead?" "He’s dead to me. All such things are dead to me. You a gentleman, and not know that!" She raised her eyes again, and laughed at him. “Girl!” said Redlaw, sternly, “before this death, of all such things, was brought about, was there no wrong done to you? In spite of all that you can do, does no remembrance of wrong cleave to you? Are there not times upon times when it is misery to you?” So little of what was womanly was left in her appearance, that now, when she burst into tears, he stood amazed. But he was more amazed, and much disquieted, to note that in her awakened recollection of this wrong, the first trace of her old humanity and frozen tenderness appeared to show itself. He drew a little off, and in doing so, observed that her arms were black, her face cut, and her bosom bruised. “What brutal hand has hurt you so?” he asked. “My own. I did it myself!” she answered quickly. “It is impossible.” “I’ll swear I did! He didn’t touch me. I did it to myself in a passion, and threw myself down here. He wasn’t near me. He never laid a hand upon me!” In the white determination of her face, confronting him with this untruth, he saw enough of the last perversion and distortion of good surviving in that miserable breast, to be stricken with remorse that he had ever come near her. “Sorrow, wrong, and trouble!” he muttered, turning his fearful gaze away. “All that connects her with the state from which she has fallen, has those roots! In the name of God, let me go by!” Afraid to look at her again, afraid to touch her, afraid to think of having sundered the last thread by which she held upon the mercy of Heaven, he gathered his cloak about him, and glided swiftly up the stairs. Opposite to him, on the landing, was a door, which stood partly open, and which, as he ascended, a man with a candle in his hand, came forward from within to shut. But this man, on seeing him, drew back, with much emotion in his manner, and, as if by a sudden impulse, mentioned his name aloud. In the surprise of such a recognition there, he stopped, endeavouring to recollect the wan and startled face. He had no time to consider it, for, to his yet greater amazement, old Philip came out of the room, and took him by the hand. “Mr. Redlaw,” said the old man, “this is like you, this is like you, sir! you have heard of it, and have come after us to render any help you can. Ah, too late, too late!” Redlaw, with a bewildered look, submitted to be led into the room. A man lay there, on a truckle-bed, and William Swidger stood at the bedside. “Too late!” murmured the old man, looking wistfully into the Chemist’s face; and the tears stole down his cheeks. “That’s what I say, father,” interposed his son in a low voice. “That’s where it is, exactly. To keep as quiet as ever we can while he’s a dozing, is the only thing to do. You’re right, father!” Redlaw paused at the bedside, and looked down on the figure that was stretched upon the mattress. It was that of a man, who should have been in the vigour of his life, but on whom it was not likely the sun would ever shine again. The vices of his forty or fifty years’ career had so branded him, that, in comparison with their effects upon his face, the heavy hand of Time upon the old man’s face who watched him had been merciful and beautifying. “Who is this?” asked the Chemist, looking round. “My son George, Mr. Redlaw,” said the old man, wringing his hands. “My eldest son, George, who was more his mother’s pride than all the rest!” Redlaw’s eyes wandered from the old man’s grey head, as he laid it down upon the bed, to the person who had recognised him, and who had kept aloof, in the remotest corner of the room. He seemed to be about his own age; and although he knew no such hopeless decay and broken man as he appeared to be, there was something in the turn of his figure, as he stood with his back towards him, and now went out at the door, that made him pass his hand uneasily across his brow. “William,” he said in a gloomy whisper, “who is that man?” “Why you see, sir,” returned Mr. William, “that’s what I say, myself. Why should a man ever go and gamble, and the like of that, and let himself down inch by inch till he can’t let himself down any lower!” “Has he done so?” asked Redlaw, glancing after him with the same uneasy action as before. “Just exactly that, sir,” returned William Swidger, “as I’m told. He knows a little about medicine, sir, it seems; and having been wayfaring towards London with my unhappy brother that you see here,” Mr. William passed his coat-sleeve across his eyes, “and being lodging up stairs for the night—what I say, you see, is that strange companions come together here sometimes—he looked in to attend upon him, and came for us at his request. What a mournful spectacle, sir! But that’s where it is. It’s enough to kill my father!” Redlaw looked up, at these words, and, recalling where he was and with whom, and the spell he carried with him—which his surprise had obscured—retired a little, hurriedly, debating with himself whether to shun the house that moment, or remain. Yielding to a certain sullen doggedness, which it seemed to be a part of his condition to struggle with, he argued for remaining. “Was it only yesterday,” he said, “when I observed the memory of this old man to be a tissue of sorrow and trouble, and shall I be afraid, to-night, to shake it? Are such remembrances as I can drive away, so precious to this dying man that I need fear for him? No! I’ll stay here.” But he stayed in fear and trembling none the less for these words; and, shrouded in his black cloak with his face turned from them, stood away from the bedside, listening to what they said, as if he felt himself a demon in the place. “Father!” murmured the sick man, rallying a little from stupor. “My boy! My son George!” said old Philip. “You spoke, just now, of my being mother’s favourite, long ago. It’s a dreadful thing to think now, of long ago!” “No, no, no;” returned the old man. “Think of it. Don’t say it’s dreadful. It’s not dreadful to me, my son.” “It cuts you to the heart, father.” For the old man’s tears were falling on him. “Yes, yes,” said Philip, “so it does; but it does me good. It’s a heavy sorrow to think of that time, but it does me good, George. Oh, think of it too, think of it too, and your heart will be softened more and more! Where’s my son William? William, my boy, your mother loved him dearly to the last, and with her latest breath said, ‘Tell him I forgave him, blessed him, and prayed for him.’ Those were her words to me. I have never forgotten them, and I’m eighty-seven!” “Father!” said the man upon the bed, “I am dying, I know. I am so far gone, that I can hardly speak, even of what my mind most runs on. Is there any hope for me beyond this bed?” “There is hope,” returned the old man, “for all who are softened and penitent. There is hope for all such. Oh!” he exclaimed, clasping his hands and looking up, “I was thankful, only yesterday, that I could remember this unhappy son when he was an innocent child. But what a comfort it is, now, to think that even God himself has that remembrance of him!” Redlaw spread his hands upon his face, and shrank, like a murderer. “Ah!” feebly moaned the man upon the bed. “The waste since then, the waste of life since then!” “But he was a child once,” said the old man. “He played with children. Before he lay down on his bed at night, and fell into his guiltless rest, he said his prayers at his poor mother’s knee. I have seen him do it, many a time; and seen her lay his head upon her breast, and kiss him. Sorrowful as it was to her and me, to think of this, when he went so wrong, and when our hopes and plans for him were all broken, this gave him still a hold upon us, that nothing else could have given. Oh, Father, so much better than the fathers upon earth! Oh, Father, so much more afflicted by the errors of Thy children! take this wanderer back! Not as he is, but as he was then, let him cry to Thee, as he has so often seemed to cry to us!” As the old man lifted up his trembling hands, the son, for whom he made the supplication, laid his sinking head against him for support and comfort, as if he were indeed the child of whom he spoke. When did man ever tremble, as Redlaw trembled, in the silence that ensued! He knew it must come upon them, knew that it was coming fast. “My time is very short, my breath is shorter,” said the sick man, supporting himself on one arm, and with the other groping in the air, “and I remember there is something on my mind concerning the man who was here just now, Father and William—wait!—is there really anything in black, out there?” “Yes, yes, it is real,” said his aged father. “Is it a man?” “What I say myself, George,” interposed his brother, bending kindly over him. “It’s Mr. Redlaw.” “I thought I had dreamed of him. Ask him to come here.” The Chemist, whiter than the dying man, appeared before him. Obedient to the motion of his hand, he sat upon the bed. “It has been so ripped up, to-night, sir,” said the sick man, laying his hand upon his heart, with a look in which the mute, imploring agony of his condition was concentrated, “by the sight of my poor old father, and the thought of all the trouble I have been the cause of, and all the wrong and sorrow lying at my door, that—” Was it the extremity to which he had come, or was it the dawning of another change, that made him stop? “—that what I can do right, with my mind running on so much, so fast, I’ll try to do. There was another man here. Did you see him?” Redlaw could not reply by any word; for when he saw that fatal sign he knew so well now, of the wandering hand upon the forehead, his voice died at his lips. But he made some indication of assent. “He is penniless, hungry, and destitute. He is completely beaten down, and has no resource at all. Look after him! Lose no time! I know he has it in his mind to kill himself.” It was working. It was on his face. His face was changing, hardening, deepening in all its shades, and losing all its sorrow. “Don’t you remember? Don’t you know him?” he pursued. He shut his face out for a moment, with the hand that again wandered over his forehead, and then it lowered on Redlaw, reckless, ruffianly, and callous. “Why, d-n you!” he said, scowling round, “what have you been doing to me here! I have lived bold, and I mean to die bold. To the Devil with you!” And so lay down upon his bed, and put his arms up, over his head and ears, as resolute from that time to keep out all access, and to die in his indifference. If Redlaw had been struck by lightning, it could not have struck him from the bedside with a more tremendous shock. But the old man, who had left the bed while his son was speaking to him, now returning, avoided it quickly likewise, and with abhorrence. “Where’s my boy William?” said the old man hurriedly. “William, come away from here. We’ll go home.” “Home, father!” returned William. “Are you going to leave your own son?” “Where’s my own son?” replied the old man. “Where? why, there!” “That’s no son of mine,” said Philip, trembling with resentment. “No such wretch as that, has any claim on me. My children are pleasant to look at, and they wait upon me, and get my meat and drink ready, and are useful to me. I’ve a right to it! I’m eighty-seven!” “You’re old enough to be no older,” muttered William, looking at him grudgingly, with his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know what good you are, myself. We could have a deal more pleasure without you.” “My son, Mr. Redlaw!” said the old man. “My son, too! The boy talking to me of my son! Why, what has he ever done to give me any pleasure, I should like to know?” “I don’t know what you have ever done to give me any pleasure,” said William, sulkily. “Let me think,” said the old man. “For how many Christmas times running, have I sat in my warm place, and never had to come out in the cold night air; and have made good cheer, without being disturbed by any such uncomfortable, wretched sight as him there? Is it twenty, William?” “Nigher forty, it seems,” he muttered. “Why, when I look at my father, sir, and come to think of it,” addressing Redlaw, with an impatience and irritation that were quite new, “I’m whipped if I can see anything in him but a calendar of ever so many years of eating and drinking, and making himself comfortable, over and over again.” “I—I’m eighty-seven,” said the old man, rambling on, childishly and weakly, “and I don’t know as I ever was much put out by anything. I’m not going to begin now, because of what he calls my son. He’s not my son. I’ve had a power of pleasant times. I recollect once—no I don’t—no, it’s broken off. It was something about a game of cricket and a friend of mine, but it’s somehow broken off. I wonder who he was—I suppose I liked him? And I wonder what became of him—I suppose he died? But I don’t know. And I don’t care, neither; I don’t care a bit.” In his drowsy chuckling, and the shaking of his head, he put his hands into his waistcoat pockets. In one of them he found a bit of holly (left there, probably last night), which he now took out, and looked at. “Berries, eh?” said the old man. “Ah! It’s a pity they’re not good to eat. I recollect, when I was a little chap about as high as that, and out a walking with—let me see—who was I out a walking with?—no, I don’t remember how that was. I don’t remember as I ever walked with any one particular, or cared for any one, or any one for me. Berries, eh? There’s good cheer when there’s berries. Well; I ought to have my share of it, and to be waited on, and kept warm and comfortable; for I’m eighty-seven, and a poor old man. I’m eigh-ty-seven. Eigh-ty-seven!” The drivelling, pitiable manner in which, as he repeated this, he nibbled at the leaves, and spat the morsels out; the cold, uninterested eye with which his youngest son (so changed) regarded him; the determined apathy with which his eldest son lay hardened in his sin; impressed themselves no more on Redlaw’s observation,—for he broke his way from the spot to which his feet seemed to have been fixed, and ran out of the house. His guide came crawling forth from his place of refuge, and was ready for him before he reached the arches. “Back to the woman’s?” he inquired. “Back, quickly!” answered Redlaw. “Stop nowhere on the way!” For a short distance the boy went on before; but their return was more like a flight than a walk, and it was as much as his bare feet could do, to keep pace with the Chemist’s rapid strides. Shrinking from all who passed, shrouded in his cloak, and keeping it drawn closely about him, as though there were mortal contagion in any fluttering touch of his garments, he made no pause until they reached the door by which they had come out. He unlocked it with his key, went in, accompanied by the boy, and hastened through the dark passages to his own chamber. The boy watched him as he made the door fast, and withdrew behind the table, when he looked round. “Come!” he said. “Don’t you touch me! You’ve not brought me here to take my money away.” Redlaw threw some more upon the ground. He flung his body on it immediately, as if to hide it from him, lest the sight of it should tempt him to reclaim it; and not until he saw him seated by his lamp, with his face hidden in his hands, began furtively to pick it up. When he had done so, he crept near the fire, and, sitting down in a great chair before it, took from his breast some broken scraps of food, and fell to munching, and to staring at the blaze, and now and then to glancing at his shillings, which he kept clenched up in a bunch, in one hand. “And this,” said Redlaw, gazing on him with increased repugnance and fear, “is the only one companion I have left on earth!” How long it was before he was aroused from his contemplation of this creature, whom he dreaded so—whether half-an-hour, or half the night—he knew not. But the stillness of the room was broken by the boy (whom he had seen listening) starting up, and running towards the door. “Here’s the woman coming!” he exclaimed. The Chemist stopped him on his way, at the moment when she knocked. “Let me go to her, will you?” said the boy. “Not now,” returned the Chemist. “Stay here. Nobody must pass in or out of the room now. Who’s that?” “It’s I, sir,” cried Milly. “Pray, sir, let me in!” “No! not for the world!” he said. “Mr. Redlaw, Mr. Redlaw, pray, sir, let me in.” “What is the matter?” he said, holding the boy. “The miserable man you saw, is worse, and nothing I can say will wake him from his terrible infatuation. William’s father has turned childish in a moment, William himself is changed. The shock has been too sudden for him; I cannot understand him; he is not like himself. Oh, Mr. Redlaw, pray advise me, help me!” “No! No! No!” he answered. “Mr. Redlaw! Dear sir! George has been muttering, in his doze, about the man you saw there, who, he fears, will kill himself.” “Better he should do it, than come near me!” “He says, in his wandering, that you know him; that he was your friend once, long ago; that he is the ruined father of a student here—my mind misgives me, of the young gentleman who has been ill. What is to be done? How is he to be followed? How is he to be saved? Mr. Redlaw, pray, oh, pray, advise me! Help me!” All this time he held the boy, who was half-mad to pass him, and let her in. “Phantoms! Punishers of impious thoughts!” cried Redlaw, gazing round in anguish, “look upon me! From the darkness of my mind, let the glimmering of contrition that I know is there, shine up and show my misery! In the material world as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made in the great universe. I know, now, that it is the same with good and evil, happiness and sorrow, in the memories of men. Pity me! Relieve me!” There was no response, but her “Help me, help me, let me in!” and the boy’s struggling to get to her. “Shadow of myself! Spirit of my darker hours!” cried Redlaw, in distraction, “come back, and haunt me day and night, but take this gift away! Or, if it must still rest with me, deprive me of the dreadful power of giving it to others. Undo what I have done. Leave me benighted, but restore the day to those whom I have cursed. As I have spared this woman from the first, and as I never will go forth again, but will die here, with no hand to tend me, save this creature’s who is proof against me,—hear me!” The only reply still was, the boy struggling to get to her, while he held him back; and the cry, increasing in its energy, “Help! let me in. He was your friend once, how shall he be followed, how shall he be saved? They are all changed, there is no one else to help me, pray, pray, let me in!” CHAPTER III The Gift Reversed Night was still heavy in the sky. On open plains, from hill-tops, and from the decks of solitary ships at sea, a distant low-lying line, that promised by-and-by to change to light, was visible in the dim horizon; but its promise was remote and doubtful, and the moon was striving with the night-clouds busily. The shadows upon Redlaw’s mind succeeded thick and fast to one another, and obscured its light as the night-clouds hovered between the moon and earth, and kept the latter veiled in darkness. Fitful and uncertain as the shadows which the night-clouds cast, were their concealments from him, and imperfect revelations to him; and, like the night-clouds still, if the clear light broke forth for a moment, it was only that they might sweep over it, and make the darkness deeper than before. Without, there was a profound and solemn hush upon the ancient pile of building, and its buttresses and angles made dark shapes of mystery upon the ground, which now seemed to retire into the smooth white snow and now seemed to come out of it, as the moon’s path was more or less beset. Within, the Chemist’s room was indistinct and murky, by the light of the expiring lamp; a ghostly silence had succeeded to the knocking and the voice outside; nothing was audible but, now and then, a low sound among the whitened ashes of the fire, as of its yielding up its last breath. Before it on the ground the boy lay fast asleep. In his chair, the Chemist sat, as he had sat there since the calling at his door had ceased—like a man turned to stone. At such a time, the Christmas music he had heard before, began to play. He listened to it at first, as he had listened in the church-yard; but presently—it playing still, and being borne towards him on the night air, in a low, sweet, melancholy strain—he rose, and stood stretching his hands about him, as if there were some friend approaching within his reach, on whom his desolate touch might rest, yet do no harm. As he did this, his face became less fixed and wondering; a gentle trembling came upon him; and at last his eyes filled with tears, and he put his hands before them, and bowed down his head. His memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble, had not come back to him; he knew that it was not restored; he had no passing belief or hope that it was. But some dumb stir within him made him capable, again, of being moved by what was hidden, afar off, in the music. If it were only that it told him sorrowfully the value of what he had lost, he thanked Heaven for it with a fervent gratitude. As the last chord died upon his ear, he raised his head to listen to its lingering vibration. Beyond the boy, so that his sleeping figure lay at its feet, the Phantom stood, immovable and silent, with its eyes upon him. Ghastly it was, as it had ever been, but not so cruel and relentless in its aspect—or he thought or hoped so, as he looked upon it trembling. It was not alone, but in its shadowy hand it held another hand. And whose was that? Was the form that stood beside it indeed Milly’s, or but her shade and picture? The quiet head was bent a little, as her manner was, and her eyes were looking down, as if in pity, on the sleeping child. A radiant light fell on her face, but did not touch the Phantom; for, though close beside her, it was dark and colourless as ever. “Spectre!” said the Chemist, newly troubled as he looked, “I have not been stubborn or presumptuous in respect of her. Oh, do not bring her here. Spare me that!” “This is but a shadow,” said the Phantom; “when the morning shines seek out the reality whose image I present before you.” “Is it my inexorable doom to do so?” cried the Chemist. “It is,” replied the Phantom. “To destroy her peace, her goodness; to make her what I am myself, and what I have made of others!” “I have said seek her out,” returned the Phantom. “I have said no more.” “Oh, tell me,” exclaimed Redlaw, catching at the hope which he fancied might lie hidden in the words. “Can I undo what I have done?” “No,” returned the Phantom. “I do not ask for restoration to myself,” said Redlaw. “What I abandoned, I abandoned of my own free will, and have justly lost. But for those to whom I have transferred the fatal gift; who never sought it; who unknowingly received a curse of which they had no warning, and which they had no power to shun; can I do nothing?” “Nothing,” said the Phantom. “If I cannot, can any one?” The Phantom, standing like a statue, kept its gaze upon him for a while; then turned its head suddenly, and looked upon the shadow at its side. “Ah! Can she?” cried Redlaw, still looking upon the shade. The Phantom released the hand it had retained till now, and softly raised its own with a gesture of dismissal. Upon that, her shadow, still preserving the same attitude, began to move or melt away. “Stay,” cried Redlaw with an earnestness to which he could not give enough expression. “For a moment! As an act of mercy! I know that some change fell upon me, when those sounds were in the air just now. Tell me, have I lost the power of harming her? May I go near her without dread? Oh, let her give me any sign of hope!” The Phantom looked upon the shade as he did—not at him—and gave no answer. “At least, say this—has she, henceforth, the consciousness of any power to set right what I have done?” “She has not,” the Phantom answered. “Has she the power bestowed on her without the consciousness?” The phantom answered: “Seek her out.” And her shadow slowly vanished. They were face to face again, and looking on each other, as intently and awfully as at the time of the bestowal of the gift, across the boy who still lay on the ground between them, at the Phantom’s feet. “Terrible instructor,” said the Chemist, sinking on his knee before it, in an attitude of supplication, “by whom I was renounced, but by whom I am revisited (in which, and in whose milder aspect, I would fain believe I have a gleam of hope), I will obey without inquiry, praying that the cry I have sent up in the anguish of my soul has been, or will be, heard, in behalf of those whom I have injured beyond human reparation. But there is one thing—” “You speak to me of what is lying here,” the phantom interposed, and pointed with its finger to the boy. “I do,” returned the Chemist. “You know what I would ask. Why has this child alone been proof against my influence, and why, why, have I detected in its thoughts a terrible companionship with mine?” “This,” said the Phantom, pointing to the boy, “is the last, completest illustration of a human creature, utterly bereft of such remembrances as you have yielded up. No softening memory of sorrow, wrong, or trouble enters here, because this wretched mortal from his birth has been abandoned to a worse condition than the beasts, and has, within his knowledge, no one contrast, no humanising touch, to make a grain of such a memory spring up in his hardened breast. All within this desolate creature is barren wilderness. All within the man bereft of what you have resigned, is the same barren wilderness. Woe to such a man! Woe, tenfold, to the nation that shall count its monsters such as this, lying here, by hundreds and by thousands!” Redlaw shrank, appalled, from what he heard. “There is not,” said the Phantom, “one of these—not one—but sows a harvest that mankind MUST reap. From every seed of evil in this boy, a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world, until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another Deluge. Open and unpunished murder in a city’s streets would be less guilty in its daily toleration, than one such spectacle as this.” It seemed to look down upon the boy in his sleep. Redlaw, too, looked down upon him with a new emotion. “There is not a father,” said the Phantom, “by whose side in his daily or his nightly walk, these creatures pass; there is not a mother among all the ranks of loving mothers in this land; there is no one risen from the state of childhood, but shall be responsible in his or her degree for this enormity. There is not a country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse. There is no religion upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people upon earth it would not put to shame.” The Chemist clasped his hands, and looked, with trembling fear and pity, from the sleeping boy to the Phantom, standing above him with his finger pointing down. “Behold, I say,” pursued the Spectre, “the perfect type of what it was your choice to be. Your influence is powerless here, because from this child’s bosom you can banish nothing. His thoughts have been in ‘terrible companionship’ with yours, because you have gone down to his unnatural level. He is the growth of man’s indifference; you are the growth of man’s presumption. The beneficent design of Heaven is, in each case, overthrown, and from the two poles of the immaterial world you come together.” The Chemist stooped upon the ground beside the boy, and, with the same kind of compassion for him that he now felt for himself, covered him as he slept, and no longer shrank from him with abhorrence or indifference. Soon, now, the distant line on the horizon brightened, the darkness faded, the sun rose red and glorious, and the chimney stacks and gables of the ancient building gleamed in the clear air, which turned the smoke and vapour of the city into a cloud of gold. The very sun-dial in his shady corner, where the wind was used to spin with such unwindy constancy, shook off the finer particles of snow that had accumulated on his dull old face in the night, and looked out at the little white wreaths eddying round and round him. Doubtless some blind groping of the morning made its way down into the forgotten crypt so cold and earthy, where the Norman arches were half buried in the ground, and stirred the dull sap in the lazy vegetation hanging to the walls, and quickened the slow principle of life within the little world of wonderful and delicate creation which existed there, with some faint knowledge that the sun was up. The Tetterbys were up, and doing. Mr. Tetterby took down the shutters of the shop, and, strip by strip, revealed the treasures of the window to the eyes, so proof against their seductions, of Jerusalem Buildings. Adolphus had been out so long already, that he was halfway on to “Morning Pepper.” Five small Tetterbys, whose ten round eyes were much inflamed by soap and friction, were in the tortures of a cool wash in the back kitchen; Mrs. Tetterby presiding. Johnny, who was pushed and hustled through his toilet with great rapidity when Moloch chanced to be in an exacting frame of mind (which was always the case), staggered up and down with his charge before the shop door, under greater difficulties than usual; the weight of Moloch being much increased by a complication of defences against the cold, composed of knitted worsted-work, and forming a complete suit of chain-armour, with a head-piece and blue gaiters. It was a peculiarity of this baby to be always cutting teeth. Whether they never came, or whether they came and went away again, is not in evidence; but it had certainly cut enough, on the showing of Mrs. Tetterby, to make a handsome dental provision for the sign of the Bull and Mouth. All sorts of objects were impressed for the rubbing of its gums, notwithstanding that it always carried, dangling at its waist (which was immediately under its chin), a bone ring, large enough to have represented the rosary of a young nun. Knife-handles, umbrella-tops, the heads of walking-sticks selected from the stock, the fingers of the family in general, but especially of Johnny, nutmeg-graters, crusts, the handles of doors, and the cool knobs on the tops of pokers, were among the commonest instruments indiscriminately applied for this baby’s relief. The amount of electricity that must have been rubbed out of it in a week, is not to be calculated. Still Mrs. Tetterby always said “it was coming through, and then the child would be herself;” and still it never did come through, and the child continued to be somebody else. The tempers of the little Tetterbys had sadly changed with a few hours. Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby themselves were not more altered than their offspring. Usually they were an unselfish, good-natured, yielding little race, sharing short commons when it happened (which was pretty often) contentedly and even generously, and taking a great deal of enjoyment out of a very little meat. But they were fighting now, not only for the soap and water, but even for the breakfast which was yet in perspective. The hand of every little Tetterby was against the other little Tetterbys; and even Johnny’s hand—the patient, much-enduring, and devoted Johnny—rose against the baby! Yes, Mrs. Tetterby, going to the door by mere accident, saw him viciously pick out a weak place in the suit of armour where a slap would tell, and slap that blessed child. Mrs. Tetterby had him into the parlour by the collar, in that same flash of time, and repaid him the assault with usury thereto. “You brute, you murdering little boy,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Had you the heart to do it?” “Why don’t her teeth come through, then,” retorted Johnny, in a loud rebellious voice, “instead of bothering me? How would you like it yourself?” “Like it, sir!” said Mrs. Tetterby, relieving him of his dishonoured load. “Yes, like it,” said Johnny. “How would you? Not at all. If you was me, you’d go for a soldier. I will, too. There an’t no babies in the Army.” Mr. Tetterby, who had arrived upon the scene of action, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, instead of correcting the rebel, and seemed rather struck by this view of a military life. “I wish I was in the Army myself, if the child’s in the right,” said Mrs. Tetterby, looking at her husband, “for I have no peace of my life here. I’m a slave—a Virginia slave:” some indistinct association with their weak descent on the tobacco trade perhaps suggested this aggravated expression to Mrs. Tetterby. “I never have a holiday, or any pleasure at all, from year’s end to year’s end! Why, Lord bless and save the child,” said Mrs. Tetterby, shaking the baby with an irritability hardly suited to so pious an aspiration, “what’s the matter with her now?” Not being able to discover, and not rendering the subject much clearer by shaking it, Mrs. Tetterby put the baby away in a cradle, and, folding her arms, sat rocking it angrily with her foot. “How you stand there, ’Dolphus,” said Mrs. Tetterby to her husband. “Why don’t you do something?” “Because I don’t care about doing anything,” Mr. Tetterby replied. “I am sure I don’t,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “I’ll take my oath I don’t,” said Mr. Tetterby. A diversion arose here among Johnny and his five younger brothers, who, in preparing the family breakfast table, had fallen to skirmishing for the temporary possession of the loaf, and were buffeting one another with great heartiness; the smallest boy of all, with precocious discretion, hovering outside the knot of combatants, and harassing their legs. Into the midst of this fray, Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby both precipitated themselves with great ardour, as if such ground were the only ground on which they could now agree; and having, with no visible remains of their late soft-heartedness, laid about them without any lenity, and done much execution, resumed their former relative positions. “You had better read your paper than do nothing at all,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “What’s there to read in a paper?” returned Mr. Tetterby, with excessive discontent. “What?” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Police.” “It’s nothing to me,” said Tetterby. “What do I care what people do, or are done to?” “Suicides,” suggested Mrs. Tetterby. “No business of mine,” replied her husband. “Births, deaths, and marriages, are those nothing to you?” said Mrs. Tetterby. “If the births were all over for good, and all to-day; and the deaths were all to begin to come off to-morrow; I don’t see why it should interest me, till I thought it was a coming to my turn,” grumbled Tetterby. “As to marriages, I’ve done it myself. I know quite enough about them.” To judge from the dissatisfied expression of her face and manner, Mrs. Tetterby appeared to entertain the same opinions as her husband; but she opposed him, nevertheless, for the gratification of quarrelling with him. “Oh, you’re a consistent man,” said Mrs. Tetterby, “an’t you? You, with the screen of your own making there, made of nothing else but bits of newspapers, which you sit and read to the children by the half-hour together!” “Say used to, if you please,” returned her husband. “You won’t find me doing so any more. I’m wiser now.” “Bah! wiser, indeed!” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Are you better?” The question sounded some discordant note in Mr. Tetterby’s breast. He ruminated dejectedly, and passed his hand across and across his forehead. “Better!” murmured Mr. Tetterby. “I don’t know as any of us are better, or happier either. Better, is it?” He turned to the screen, and traced about it with his finger, until he found a certain paragraph of which he was in quest. “This used to be one of the family favourites, I recollect,” said Tetterby, in a forlorn and stupid way, “and used to draw tears from the children, and make ’em good, if there was any little bickering or discontent among ’em, next to the story of the robin redbreasts in the wood. ‘Melancholy case of destitution. Yesterday a small man, with a baby in his arms, and surrounded by half-a-dozen ragged little ones, of various ages between ten and two, the whole of whom were evidently in a famishing condition, appeared before the worthy magistrate, and made the following recital:’—Ha! I don’t understand it, I’m sure,” said Tetterby; “I don’t see what it has got to do with us.” “How old and shabby he looks,” said Mrs. Tetterby, watching him. “I never saw such a change in a man. Ah! dear me, dear me, dear me, it was a sacrifice!” “What was a sacrifice?” her husband sourly inquired. Mrs. Tetterby shook her head; and without replying in words, raised a complete sea-storm about the baby, by her violent agitation of the cradle. “If you mean your marriage was a sacrifice, my good woman—” said her husband. “I do mean it,” said his wife. “Why, then I mean to say,” pursued Mr. Tetterby, as sulkily and surlily as she, “that there are two sides to that affair; and that I was the sacrifice; and that I wish the sacrifice hadn’t been accepted.” “I wish it hadn’t, Tetterby, with all my heart and soul I do assure you,” said his wife. “You can’t wish it more than I do, Tetterby.” “I don’t know what I saw in her,” muttered the newsman, “I’m sure;—certainly, if I saw anything, it’s not there now. I was thinking so, last night, after supper, by the fire. She’s fat, she’s ageing, she won’t bear comparison with most other women.” “He’s common-looking, he has no air with him, he’s small, he’s beginning to stoop and he’s getting bald,” muttered Mrs. Tetterby. “I must have been half out of my mind when I did it,” muttered Mr. Tetterby. “My senses must have forsook me. That’s the only way in which I can explain it to myself,” said Mrs. Tetterby with elaboration. In this mood they sat down to breakfast. The little Tetterbys were not habituated to regard that meal in the light of a sedentary occupation, but discussed it as a dance or trot; rather resembling a savage ceremony, in the occasionally shrill whoops, and brandishings of bread and butter, with which it was accompanied, as well as in the intricate filings off into the street and back again, and the hoppings up and down the door-steps, which were incidental to the performance. In the present instance, the contentions between these Tetterby children for the milk-and-water jug, common to all, which stood upon the table, presented so lamentable an instance of angry passions risen very high indeed, that it was an outrage on the memory of Dr. Watts. It was not until Mr. Tetterby had driven the whole herd out at the front door, that a moment’s peace was secured; and even that was broken by the discovery that Johnny had surreptitiously come back, and was at that instant choking in the jug like a ventriloquist, in his indecent and rapacious haste. “These children will be the death of me at last!” said Mrs. Tetterby, after banishing the culprit. “And the sooner the better, I think.” “Poor people,” said Mr. Tetterby, “ought not to have children at all. They give us no pleasure.” He was at that moment taking up the cup which Mrs. Tetterby had rudely pushed towards him, and Mrs. Tetterby was lifting her own cup to her lips, when they both stopped, as if they were transfixed. “Here! Mother! Father!” cried Johnny, running into the room. “Here’s Mrs. William coming down the street!” And if ever, since the world began, a young boy took a baby from a cradle with the care of an old nurse, and hushed and soothed it tenderly, and tottered away with it cheerfully, Johnny was that boy, and Moloch was that baby, as they went out together! Mr. Tetterby put down his cup; Mrs. Tetterby put down her cup. Mr. Tetterby rubbed his forehead; Mrs. Tetterby rubbed hers. Mr. Tetterby’s face began to smooth and brighten; Mrs. Tetterby’s began to smooth and brighten. “Why, Lord forgive me,” said Mr. Tetterby to himself, “what evil tempers have I been giving way to? What has been the matter here!” “How could I ever treat him ill again, after all I said and felt last night!” sobbed Mrs. Tetterby, with her apron to her eyes. “Am I a brute,” said Mr. Tetterby, “or is there any good in me at all? Sophia! My little woman!” “’Dolphus dear,” returned his wife. “I—I’ve been in a state of mind,” said Mr. Tetterby, “that I can’t abear to think of, Sophy.” “Oh! It’s nothing to what I’ve been in, Dolf,” cried his wife in a great burst of grief. “My Sophia,” said Mr. Tetterby, “don’t take on. I never shall forgive myself. I must have nearly broke your heart, I know.” “No, Dolf, no. It was me! Me!” cried Mrs. Tetterby. “My little woman,” said her husband, “don’t. You make me reproach myself dreadful, when you show such a noble spirit. Sophia, my dear, you don’t know what I thought. I showed it bad enough, no doubt; but what I thought, my little woman!—” “Oh, dear Dolf, don’t! Don’t!” cried his wife. “Sophia,” said Mr. Tetterby, “I must reveal it. I couldn’t rest in my conscience unless I mentioned it. My little woman—” “Mrs. William’s very nearly here!” screamed Johnny at the door. “My little woman, I wondered how,” gasped Mr. Tetterby, supporting himself by his chair, “I wondered how I had ever admired you—I forgot the precious children you have brought about me, and thought you didn’t look as slim as I could wish. I—I never gave a recollection,” said Mr. Tetterby, with severe self-accusation, “to the cares you’ve had as my wife, and along of me and mine, when you might have had hardly any with another man, who got on better and was luckier than me (anybody might have found such a man easily I am sure); and I quarrelled with you for having aged a little in the rough years you have lightened for me. Can you believe it, my little woman? I hardly can myself.” Mrs. Tetterby, in a whirlwind of laughing and crying, caught his face within her hands, and held it there. “Oh, Dolf!” she cried. “I am so happy that you thought so; I am so grateful that you thought so! For I thought that you were common-looking, Dolf; and so you are, my dear, and may you be the commonest of all sights in my eyes, till you close them with your own good hands. I thought that you were small; and so you are, and I’ll make much of you because you are, and more of you because I love my husband. I thought that you began to stoop; and so you do, and you shall lean on me, and I’ll do all I can to keep you up. I thought there was no air about you; but there is, and it’s the air of home, and that’s the purest and the best there is, and God bless home once more, and all belonging to it, Dolf!” “Hurrah! Here’s Mrs. William!” cried Johnny. So she was, and all the children with her; and so she came in, they kissed her, and kissed one another, and kissed the baby, and kissed their father and mother, and then ran back and flocked and danced about her, trooping on with her in triumph. Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby were not a bit behind-hand in the warmth of their reception. They were as much attracted to her as the children were; they ran towards her, kissed her hands, pressed round her, could not receive her ardently or enthusiastically enough. She came among them like the spirit of all goodness, affection, gentle consideration, love, and domesticity. “What! are you all so glad to see me, too, this bright Christmas morning?” said Milly, clapping her hands in a pleasant wonder. “Oh dear, how delightful this is!” More shouting from the children, more kissing, more trooping round her, more happiness, more love, more joy, more honour, on all sides, than she could bear. “Oh dear!” said Milly, “what delicious tears you make me shed. How can I ever have deserved this! What have I done to be so loved?” “Who can help it!” cried Mr. Tetterby. “Who can help it!” cried Mrs. Tetterby. “Who can help it!” echoed the children, in a joyful chorus. And they danced and trooped about her again, and clung to her, and laid their rosy faces against her dress, and kissed and fondled it, and could not fondle it, or her, enough. “I never was so moved,” said Milly, drying her eyes, “as I have been this morning. I must tell you, as soon as I can speak.—Mr. Redlaw came to me at sunrise, and with a tenderness in his manner, more as if I had been his darling daughter than myself, implored me to go with him to where William’s brother George is lying ill. We went together, and all the way along he was so kind, and so subdued, and seemed to put such trust and hope in me, that I could not help crying with pleasure. When we got to the house, we met a woman at the door (somebody had bruised and hurt her, I am afraid), who caught me by the hand, and blessed me as I passed.” “She was right!” said Mr. Tetterby. Mrs. Tetterby said she was right. All the children cried out that she was right. “Ah, but there’s more than that,” said Milly. “When we got up stairs, into the room, the sick man who had lain for hours in a state from which no effort could rouse him, rose up in his bed, and, bursting into tears, stretched out his arms to me, and said that he had led a mis-spent life, but that he was truly repentant now, in his sorrow for the past, which was all as plain to him as a great prospect, from which a dense black cloud had cleared away, and that he entreated me to ask his poor old father for his pardon and his blessing, and to say a prayer beside his bed. And when I did so, Mr. Redlaw joined in it so fervently, and then so thanked and thanked me, and thanked Heaven, that my heart quite overflowed, and I could have done nothing but sob and cry, if the sick man had not begged me to sit down by him,—which made me quiet of course. As I sat there, he held my hand in his until he sank in a doze; and even then, when I withdrew my hand to leave him to come here (which Mr. Redlaw was very earnest indeed in wishing me to do), his hand felt for mine, so that some one else was obliged to take my place and make believe to give him my hand back. Oh dear, oh dear,” said Milly, sobbing. “How thankful and how happy I should feel, and do feel, for all this!” While she was speaking, Redlaw had come in, and, after pausing for a moment to observe the group of which she was the centre, had silently ascended the stairs. Upon those stairs he now appeared again; remaining there, while the young student passed him, and came running down. “Kind nurse, gentlest, best of creatures,” he said, falling on his knee to her, and catching at her hand, “forgive my cruel ingratitude!” “Oh dear, oh dear!” cried Milly innocently, “here’s another of them! Oh dear, here’s somebody else who likes me. What shall I ever do!” The guileless, simple way in which she said it, and in which she put her hands before her eyes and wept for very happiness, was as touching as it was delightful. “I was not myself,” he said. “I don’t know what it was—it was some consequence of my disorder perhaps—I was mad. But I am so no longer. Almost as I speak, I am restored. I heard the children crying out your name, and the shade passed from me at the very sound of it. Oh, don’t weep! Dear Milly, if you could read my heart, and only knew with what affection and what grateful homage it is glowing, you would not let me see you weep. It is such deep reproach.” “No, no,” said Milly, “it’s not that. It’s not indeed. It’s joy. It’s wonder that you should think it necessary to ask me to forgive so little, and yet it’s pleasure that you do.” “And will you come again? and will you finish the little curtain?” “No,” said Milly, drying her eyes, and shaking her head. “You won’t care for my needlework now.” “Is it forgiving me, to say that?” She beckoned him aside, and whispered in his ear. “There is news from your home, Mr. Edmund.” “News? How?” “Either your not writing when you were very ill, or the change in your handwriting when you began to be better, created some suspicion of the truth; however that is—but you’re sure you’ll not be the worse for any news, if it’s not bad news?” “Sure.” “Then there’s some one come!” said Milly. “My mother?” asked the student, glancing round involuntarily towards Redlaw, who had come down from the stairs. “Hush! No,” said Milly. “It can be no one else.” “Indeed?” said Milly, “are you sure?” “It is not—” Before he could say more, she put her hand upon his mouth. “Yes it is!” said Milly. “The young lady (she is very like the miniature, Mr. Edmund, but she is prettier) was too unhappy to rest without satisfying her doubts, and came up, last night, with a little servant-maid. As you always dated your letters from the college, she came there; and before I saw Mr. Redlaw this morning, I saw her. She likes me too!” said Milly. “Oh dear, that’s another!” “This morning! Where is she now?” “Why, she is now,” said Milly, advancing her lips to his ear, “in my little parlour in the Lodge, and waiting to see you.” He pressed her hand, and was darting off, but she detained him. “Mr. Redlaw is much altered, and has told me this morning that his memory is impaired. Be very considerate to him, Mr. Edmund; he needs that from us all.” The young man assured her, by a look, that her caution was not ill-bestowed; and as he passed the Chemist on his way out, bent respectfully and with an obvious interest before him. Redlaw returned the salutation courteously and even humbly, and looked after him as he passed on. He drooped his head upon his hand too, as trying to reawaken something he had lost. But it was gone. The abiding change that had come upon him since the influence of the music, and the Phantom’s reappearance, was, that now he truly felt how much he had lost, and could compassionate his own condition, and contrast it, clearly, with the natural state of those who were around him. In this, an interest in those who were around him was revived, and a meek, submissive sense of his calamity was bred, resembling that which sometimes obtains in age, when its mental powers are weakened, without insensibility or sullenness being added to the list of its infirmities. He was conscious that, as he redeemed, through Milly, more and more of the evil he had done, and as he was more and more with her, this change ripened itself within him. Therefore, and because of the attachment she inspired him with (but without other hope), he felt that he was quite dependent on her, and that she was his staff in his affliction. So, when she asked him whether they should go home now, to where the old man and her husband were, and he readily replied “yes”—being anxious in that regard—he put his arm through hers, and walked beside her; not as if he were the wise and learned man to whom the wonders of Nature were an open book, and hers were the uninstructed mind, but as if their two positions were reversed, and he knew nothing, and she all. He saw the children throng about her, and caress her, as he and she went away together thus, out of the house; he heard the ringing of their laughter, and their merry voices; he saw their bright faces, clustering around him like flowers; he witnessed the renewed contentment and affection of their parents; he breathed the simple air of their poor home, restored to its tranquillity; he thought of the unwholesome blight he had shed upon it, and might, but for her, have been diffusing then; and perhaps it is no wonder that he walked submissively beside her, and drew her gentle bosom nearer to his own. When they arrived at the Lodge, the old man was sitting in his chair in the chimney-corner, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and his son was leaning against the opposite side of the fire-place, looking at him. As she came in at the door, both started, and turned round towards her, and a radiant change came upon their faces. “Oh dear, dear, dear, they are all pleased to see me like the rest!” cried Milly, clapping her hands in an ecstasy, and stopping short. “Here are two more!” Pleased to see her! Pleasure was no word for it. She ran into her husband’s arms, thrown wide open to receive her, and he would have been glad to have her there, with her head lying on his shoulder, through the short winter’s day. But the old man couldn’t spare her. He had arms for her too, and he locked her in them. “Why, where has my quiet Mouse been all this time?” said the old man. “She has been a long while away. I find that it’s impossible for me to get on without Mouse. I—where’s my son William?—I fancy I have been dreaming, William.” “That’s what I say myself, father,” returned his son. “I have been in an ugly sort of dream, I think.—How are you, father? Are you pretty well?” “Strong and brave, my boy,” returned the old man. It was quite a sight to see Mr. William shaking hands with his father, and patting him on the back, and rubbing him gently down with his hand, as if he could not possibly do enough to show an interest in him. “What a wonderful man you are, father!—How are you, father? Are you really pretty hearty, though?” said William, shaking hands with him again, and patting him again, and rubbing him gently down again. “I never was fresher or stouter in my life, my boy.” “What a wonderful man you are, father! But that’s exactly where it is,” said Mr. William, with enthusiasm. “When I think of all that my father’s gone through, and all the chances and changes, and sorrows and troubles, that have happened to him in the course of his long life, and under which his head has grown grey, and years upon years have gathered on it, I feel as if we couldn’t do enough to honour the old gentleman, and make his old age easy.—How are you, father? Are you really pretty well, though?” Mr. William might never have left off repeating this inquiry, and shaking hands with him again, and patting him again, and rubbing him down again, if the old man had not espied the Chemist, whom until now he had not seen. “I ask your pardon, Mr. Redlaw,” said Philip, “but didn’t know you were here, sir, or should have made less free. It reminds me, Mr. Redlaw, seeing you here on a Christmas morning, of the time when you was a student yourself, and worked so hard that you were backwards and forwards in our Library even at Christmas time. Ha! ha! I’m old enough to remember that; and I remember it right well, I do, though I am eighty-seven. It was after you left here that my poor wife died. You remember my poor wife, Mr. Redlaw?” The Chemist answered yes. “Yes,” said the old man. “She was a dear creetur.—I recollect you come here one Christmas morning with a young lady—I ask your pardon, Mr. Redlaw, but I think it was a sister you was very much attached to?” The Chemist looked at him, and shook his head. “I had a sister,” he said vacantly. He knew no more. “One Christmas morning,” pursued the old man, “that you come here with her—and it began to snow, and my wife invited the lady to walk in, and sit by the fire that is always a burning on Christmas Day in what used to be, before our ten poor gentlemen commuted, our great Dinner Hall. I was there; and I recollect, as I was stirring up the blaze for the young lady to warm her pretty feet by, she read the scroll out loud, that is underneath that pictur, ‘Lord, keep my memory green!’ She and my poor wife fell a talking about it; and it’s a strange thing to think of, now, that they both said (both being so unlike to die) that it was a good prayer, and that it was one they would put up very earnestly, if they were called away young, with reference to those who were dearest to them. ‘My brother,’ says the young lady—‘My husband,’ says my poor wife.—‘Lord, keep his memory of me, green, and do not let me be forgotten!’” Tears more painful, and more bitter than he had ever shed in all his life, coursed down Redlaw’s face. Philip, fully occupied in recalling his story, had not observed him until now, nor Milly’s anxiety that he should not proceed. “Philip!” said Redlaw, laying his hand upon his arm, “I am a stricken man, on whom the hand of Providence has fallen heavily, although deservedly. You speak to me, my friend, of what I cannot follow; my memory is gone.” “Merciful power!” cried the old man. “I have lost my memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble,” said the Chemist, “and with that I have lost all man would remember!” To see old Philip’s pity for him, to see him wheel his own great chair for him to rest in, and look down upon him with a solemn sense of his bereavement, was to know, in some degree, how precious to old age such recollections are. The boy came running in, and ran to Milly. “Here’s the man,” he said, “in the other room. I don’t want him.” “What man does he mean?” asked Mr. William. “Hush!” said Milly. Obedient to a sign from her, he and his old father softly withdrew. As they went out, unnoticed, Redlaw beckoned to the boy to come to him. “I like the woman best,” he answered, holding to her skirts. “You are right,” said Redlaw, with a faint smile. “But you needn’t fear to come to me. I am gentler than I was. Of all the world, to you, poor child!” The boy still held back at first, but yielding little by little to her urging, he consented to approach, and even to sit down at his feet. As Redlaw laid his hand upon the shoulder of the child, looking on him with compassion and a fellow-feeling, he put out his other hand to Milly. She stooped down on that side of him, so that she could look into his face, and after silence, said: “Mr. Redlaw, may I speak to you?” “Yes,” he answered, fixing his eyes upon her. “Your voice and music are the same to me.” “May I ask you something?” “What you will.” “Do you remember what I said, when I knocked at your door last night? About one who was your friend once, and who stood on the verge of destruction?” “Yes. I remember,” he said, with some hesitation. “Do you understand it?” He smoothed the boy’s hair—looking at her fixedly the while, and shook his head. “This person,” said Milly, in her clear, soft voice, which her mild eyes, looking at him, made clearer and softer, “I found soon afterwards. I went back to the house, and, with Heaven’s help, traced him. I was not too soon. A very little and I should have been too late.” He took his hand from the boy, and laying it on the back of that hand of hers, whose timid and yet earnest touch addressed him no less appealingly than her voice and eyes, looked more intently on her. “He is the father of Mr. Edmund, the young gentleman we saw just now. His real name is Longford.—You recollect the name?” “I recollect the name.” “And the man?” “No, not the man. Did he ever wrong me?” “Yes!” “Ah! Then it’s hopeless—hopeless.” He shook his head, and softly beat upon the hand he held, as though mutely asking her commiseration. “I did not go to Mr. Edmund last night,” said Milly,—“You will listen to me just the same as if you did remember all?” “To every syllable you say.” “Both, because I did not know, then, that this really was his father, and because I was fearful of the effect of such intelligence upon him, after his illness, if it should be. Since I have known who this person is, I have not gone either; but that is for another reason. He has long been separated from his wife and son—has been a stranger to his home almost from this son’s infancy, I learn from him—and has abandoned and deserted what he should have held most dear. In all that time he has been falling from the state of a gentleman, more and more, until—” she rose up, hastily, and going out for a moment, returned, accompanied by the wreck that Redlaw had beheld last night. “Do you know me?” asked the Chemist. “I should be glad,” returned the other, “and that is an unwonted word for me to use, if I could answer no.” The Chemist looked at the man, standing in self-abasement and degradation before him, and would have looked longer, in an ineffectual struggle for enlightenment, but that Milly resumed her late position by his side, and attracted his attentive gaze to her own face. “See how low he is sunk, how lost he is!” she whispered, stretching out her arm towards him, without looking from the Chemist’s face. “If you could remember all that is connected with him, do you not think it would move your pity to reflect that one you ever loved (do not let us mind how long ago, or in what belief that he has forfeited), should come to this?” “I hope it would,” he answered. “I believe it would.” His eyes wandered to the figure standing near the door, but came back speedily to her, on whom he gazed intently, as if he strove to learn some lesson from every tone of her voice, and every beam of her eyes. “I have no learning, and you have much,” said Milly; “I am not used to think, and you are always thinking. May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us, to remember wrong that has been done us?” “Yes.” “That we may forgive it.” “Pardon me, great Heaven!” said Redlaw, lifting up his eyes, “for having thrown away thine own high attribute!” “And if,” said Milly, “if your memory should one day be restored, as we will hope and pray it may be, would it not be a blessing to you to recall at once a wrong and its forgiveness?” He looked at the figure by the door, and fastened his attentive eyes on her again; a ray of clearer light appeared to him to shine into his mind, from her bright face. “He cannot go to his abandoned home. He does not seek to go there. He knows that he could only carry shame and trouble to those he has so cruelly neglected; and that the best reparation he can make them now, is to avoid them. A very little money carefully bestowed, would remove him to some distant place, where he might live and do no wrong, and make such atonement as is left within his power for the wrong he has done. To the unfortunate lady who is his wife, and to his son, this would be the best and kindest boon that their best friend could give them—one too that they need never know of; and to him, shattered in reputation, mind, and body, it might be salvation.” He took her head between her hands, and kissed it, and said: “It shall be done. I trust to you to do it for me, now and secretly; and to tell him that I would forgive him, if I were so happy as to know for what.” As she rose, and turned her beaming face towards the fallen man, implying that her mediation had been successful, he advanced a step, and without raising his eyes, addressed himself to Redlaw. “You are so generous,” he said, “—you ever were—that you will try to banish your rising sense of retribution in the spectacle that is before you. I do not try to banish it from myself, Redlaw. If you can, believe me.” The Chemist entreated Milly, by a gesture, to come nearer to him; and, as he listened looked in her face, as if to find in it the clue to what he heard. “I am too decayed a wretch to make professions; I recollect my own career too well, to array any such before you. But from the day on which I made my first step downward, in dealing falsely by you, I have gone down with a certain, steady, doomed progression. That, I say.” Redlaw, keeping her close at his side, turned his face towards the speaker, and there was sorrow in it. Something like mournful recognition too. “I might have been another man, my life might have been another life, if I had avoided that first fatal step. I don’t know that it would have been. I claim nothing for the possibility. Your sister is at rest, and better than she could have been with me, if I had continued even what you thought me: even what I once supposed myself to be.” Redlaw made a hasty motion with his hand, as if he would have put that subject on one side. “I speak,” the other went on, “like a man taken from the grave. I should have made my own grave, last night, had it not been for this blessed hand.” “Oh dear, he likes me too!” sobbed Milly, under her breath. “That’s another!” “I could not have put myself in your way, last night, even for bread. But, to-day, my recollection of what has been is so strongly stirred, and is presented to me, I don’t know how, so vividly, that I have dared to come at her suggestion, and to take your bounty, and to thank you for it, and to beg you, Redlaw, in your dying hour, to be as merciful to me in your thoughts, as you are in your deeds.” He turned towards the door, and stopped a moment on his way forth. “I hope my son may interest you, for his mother’s sake. I hope he may deserve to do so. Unless my life should be preserved a long time, and I should know that I have not misused your aid, I shall never look upon him more.” Going out, he raised his eyes to Redlaw for the first time. Redlaw, whose steadfast gaze was fixed upon him, dreamily held out his hand. He returned and touched it—little more—with both his own; and bending down his head, went slowly out. In the few moments that elapsed, while Milly silently took him to the gate, the Chemist dropped into his chair, and covered his face with his hands. Seeing him thus, when she came back, accompanied by her husband and his father (who were both greatly concerned for him), she avoided disturbing him, or permitting him to be disturbed; and kneeled down near the chair to put some warm clothing on the boy. “That’s exactly where it is. That’s what I always say, father!” exclaimed her admiring husband. “There’s a motherly feeling in Mrs. William’s breast that must and will have went!” “Ay, ay,” said the old man; “you’re right. My son William’s right!” “It happens all for the best, Milly dear, no doubt,” said Mr. William, tenderly, “that we have no children of our own; and yet I sometimes wish you had one to love and cherish. Our little dead child that you built such hopes upon, and that never breathed the breath of life—it has made you quiet-like, Milly.” “I am very happy in the recollection of it, William dear,” she answered. “I think of it every day.” “I was afraid you thought of it a good deal.” “Don’t say, afraid; it is a comfort to me; it speaks to me in so many ways. The innocent thing that never lived on earth, is like an angel to me, William.” “You are like an angel to father and me,” said Mr. William, softly. “I know that.” “When I think of all those hopes I built upon it, and the many times I sat and pictured to myself the little smiling face upon my bosom that never lay there, and the sweet eyes turned up to mine that never opened to the light,” said Milly, “I can feel a greater tenderness, I think, for all the disappointed hopes in which there is no harm. When I see a beautiful child in its fond mother’s arms, I love it all the better, thinking that my child might have been like that, and might have made my heart as proud and happy.” Redlaw raised his head, and looked towards her. “All through life, it seems by me,” she continued, “to tell me something. For poor neglected children, my little child pleads as if it were alive, and had a voice I knew, with which to speak to me. When I hear of youth in suffering or shame, I think that my child might have come to that, perhaps, and that God took it from me in His mercy. Even in age and grey hair, such as father’s, it is present: saying that it too might have lived to be old, long and long after you and I were gone, and to have needed the respect and love of younger people.” Her quiet voice was quieter than ever, as she took her husband’s arm, and laid her head against it. “Children love me so, that sometimes I half fancy—it’s a silly fancy, William—they have some way I don’t know of, of feeling for my little child, and me, and understanding why their love is precious to me. If I have been quiet since, I have been more happy, William, in a hundred ways. Not least happy, dear, in this—that even when my little child was born and dead but a few days, and I was weak and sorrowful, and could not help grieving a little, the thought arose, that if I tried to lead a good life, I should meet in Heaven a bright creature, who would call me, Mother!” Redlaw fell upon his knees, with a loud cry. “O Thou,” he said, “who through the teaching of pure love, hast graciously restored me to the memory which was the memory of Christ upon the Cross, and of all the good who perished in His cause, receive my thanks, and bless her!” Then, he folded her to his heart; and Milly, sobbing more than ever, cried, as she laughed, “He is come back to himself! He likes me very much indeed, too! Oh, dear, dear, dear me, here’s another!” Then, the student entered, leading by the hand a lovely girl, who was afraid to come. And Redlaw so changed towards him, seeing in him and his youthful choice, the softened shadow of that chastening passage in his own life, to which, as to a shady tree, the dove so long imprisoned in his solitary ark might fly for rest and company, fell upon his neck, entreating them to be his children. Then, as Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than our own experiences, for all good, he laid his hand upon the boy, and, silently calling Him to witness who laid His hand on children in old time, rebuking, in the majesty of His prophetic knowledge, those who kept them from Him, vowed to protect him, teach him, and reclaim him. Then, he gave his right hand cheerily to Philip, and said that they would that day hold a Christmas dinner in what used to be, before the ten poor gentlemen commuted, their great Dinner Hall; and that they would bid to it as many of that Swidger family, who, his son had told him, were so numerous that they might join hands and make a ring round England, as could be brought together on so short a notice. And it was that day done. There were so many Swidgers there, grown up and children, that an attempt to state them in round numbers might engender doubts, in the distrustful, of the veracity of this history. Therefore the attempt shall not be made. But there they were, by dozens and scores—and there was good news and good hope there, ready for them, of George, who had been visited again by his father and brother, and by Milly, and again left in a quiet sleep. There, present at the dinner, too, were the Tetterbys, including young Adolphus, who arrived in his prismatic comforter, in good time for the beef. Johnny and the baby were too late, of course, and came in all on one side, the one exhausted, the other in a supposed state of double-tooth; but that was customary, and not alarming. It was sad to see the child who had no name or lineage, watching the other children as they played, not knowing how to talk with them, or sport with them, and more strange to the ways of childhood than a rough dog. It was sad, though in a different way, to see what an instinctive knowledge the youngest children there had of his being different from all the rest, and how they made timid approaches to him with soft words and touches, and with little presents, that he might not be unhappy. But he kept by Milly, and began to love her—that was another, as she said!—and, as they all liked her dearly, they were glad of that, and when they saw him peeping at them from behind her chair, they were pleased that he was so close to it. All this, the Chemist, sitting with the student and his bride that was to be, Philip, and the rest, saw. Some people have said since, that he only thought what has been herein set down; others, that he read it in the fire, one winter night about the twilight time; others, that the Ghost was but the representation of his gloomy thoughts, and Milly the embodiment of his better wisdom. I say nothing. —Except this. That as they were assembled in the old Hall, by no other light than that of a great fire (having dined early), the shadows once more stole out of their hiding-places, and danced about the room, showing the children marvellous shapes and faces on the walls, and gradually changing what was real and familiar there, to what was wild and magical. But that there was one thing in the Hall, to which the eyes of Redlaw, and of Milly and her husband, and of the old man, and of the student, and his bride that was to be, were often turned, which the shadows did not obscure or change. Deepened in its gravity by the fire-light, and gazing from the darkness of the panelled wall like life, the sedate face in the portrait, with the beard and ruff, looked down at them from under its verdant wreath of holly, as they looked up at it; and, clear and plain below, as if a voice had uttered them, were the words. Lord keep my Memory green. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/7/The_Battle_of_Life._A_Love_Story/1846-12-The_Battle_of_Life.pdf 80bc6d16dd9bc5c39c40454e709a4e58 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christmas Books Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context christmas-books Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites the five Christmas books that Dickens wrote between 1843 and 1848 and published firstly with Chapman and Hall and secondly with Bradbury and Evans. Charles Dickens wrote the first of five Christmas books in 1843. A Christmas Carol, the story of a miser's slow repentance and decision to make amends, under the influence of the Ghosts of his old law partner Jacob Marley, Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future, would prove to be a timeless classic. In Scrooge's realization of his own selfishness, mortality, and responsibility towards both his impoverished employee and the faceless London poor, readers are compelled to reassess their own social actions evidenced over the course of a lifetime. Consequently, this Christmas book's cultural and academic legacy has overshadowed the other four subsequently penned by Dickens in response to public interest. Due to Dickens's use of various passages for public readings, it instantly commenced a theatrical life as well, and continues to be the most adapted of his works for film and stage. Though the financial success of A Christmas Carol did not benefit Dickens to the degree he had hoped, its immediate attraction to Victorians and enduring legacy opened up a seasonal niche that author and publishers were eager to exploit annually, for multiple reasons. The Christmas books provided Dickens with a way to morally encourage and exhort his readers to better themselves and society under the influence of holiday sentiment. They also offered the chance to acquire some much-needed revenue.  Next, he wrote The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (Chapman and Hall, 1844). Continuing to point out socioeconomic discrepancies between Victorian strata, Dickens induces sympathy for the straitened porter Toby Veck, and the endangered future life of his beloved daughter, Meg, who is headed for catastrophe unless she can marry her sweetheart despite the ill-intentioned advice of politicians and the barrier of her own poverty.  The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home (Bradbury and Evans, 1845) dealt with the spectre of adultery in an age-gap marriage, later to be explored with a similar resolution in Dickens's novel David Copperfield (1850). Due to the evil Mr. Tackleton, a sinister toy-merchant, John Peerybingle comes to doubt the fidelity of his beloved young wife, Dot. The cricket, a chirping guardian spirit of the home, plays a significant part in the action that ensues. In this story, Dickens also features a blind girl, Bertha Plummer, one of his most extensive explorations of disability.  In 1846, The Battle of Life. A Love Story was published by Bradbury and Evans, a romantic tale set in the eighteenth century on the site of an ancient battle-field. Interestingly, it centres around the relationship between two sisters, Grace and Marion Jeddler, and the latter's engagement to a childhood friend, Alfred Heathfield. Several characters in this tale elicit interest, such as the intimate partners-in-law Mr. Snitchey and Mr. Craggs and the semi-literate maid Clemency. What might be the reader's philosophy of life is brought into question under the influence of the dramatic events that so greatly unsettle the rural village.  The last of these Christmas books, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (Bradbury and Evans, 1848) represents a more sinister view of Christmas, with the full powers of a menacing double of the brooding Chemist Mr. Redlaw spiritually contending with the cheerful good-will of Milly Swidger. Like another of Dickens's domestic paragons, Esther Summerson, Milly endeavours to brighten the lives of those around her while the double seeks to provoke their regrets.  Ultimately, Dickens would never pen another Christmas book, though he wrote the short reflective pieces "A Christmas Tree" (1850) and "What Christmas is, as we Grow Older" (1851) for Household Words. However, between 1852 and 1867, he annually orchestrated and significantly contributed to a Christmas number, either published in his periodicals Household Words or All the Year Round. In most cases, a scan of each full number - and Dickens's specific contributions, transcribed - can be accessed in the Dickens Search collection <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/collections/show/8">Christmas Stories</a>. Before citing the five texts in this collection of the Christmas books, please consult the metadata and pdf scan. In most cases, the edition is not the first, but the earliest that can be found freely digitised on the internet. Eventually, these will hopefully be replaced by scans of first editions, with the transcriptions updated, when necessary. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans found on databases such as Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and Google Books; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions. 1. See Christine Schintgen. 'Dickens and the Specter of Materialism: The Spiritual Significance of Ghosts in the Christmas Books and Ghost Stories'. In The Theological Dickens. Routledge, 2021; Emily Moody. '"Implausible and inappropriate"?: A Defense of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Dickens Quarterly 37.4 (2020): pp. 393-408; Aubrey Plourde. '"Another Man from What I Was": Enchanted Reading and Ethical Selfhood in A Christmas Carol'. Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies 43.2 (Fall 2017): 271-286; Brandon Chitwood. 'Eternal Returns: A Christmas Carol's Ghosts of Repetition'. Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): pp. 675-687; Phillip V. Allingham. 'Charles "Carlo" Dickens In and Out of Italy in 1844: The Chimes'. Dickens Studies Annual 41 (2010): pp. 127-149; Michael Slater. 'Carlyle and Jerrold Into Dickens: A Study of The Chimes'. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24.4 (Mar 1970): pp. 506-52; David Raybin. 'Chaucer on the Hearth'. Dickens Studies Annual 49.1 (2018): pp. 1-25; Heather Anne Tilley. 'Sentiment and Vision in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth'. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 4 (2007): 1-22; Elisabeth G. Gitter. 'The Blind Daughter in Charles Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth'. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39.4 (Autumn 1999): pp. 675-689; Goldie Morgentaler. 'The Doppelganger Effect: Dickens, Heredity, and the Double in The Battle of Life'. Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 42 (2011): 159-175; Phillip V. Allingham. 'The Illustrations in Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain: Public and Private Spheres and Spaces'. Dickens Studies Annual 36 (2005): pp. 75-123. Short Story Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Periodical Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) All the Year Round Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18461201 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Part the First. Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England, it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought. It was fought upon a long summer day when the waving grass was green. Many a wild flower formed by the Almighty Hand to be a perfumed goblet for the dew, felt its enamelled cup filled high with blood that day, and shrinking dropped. Many an insect deriving its delicate colour from harmless leaves and herbs, was stained anew that day by dying men, and marked its frightened way with an unnatural track. The painted butterfly took blood into the air upon the edges of its wings. The stream ran red. The trodden ground became a quagmire, whence, from sullen pools collected in the prints of human feet and horses’ hoofs, the one prevailing hue still lowered and glimmered at the sun. Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the sights the moon beheld upon that field, when, coming up above the black line of distant rising-ground, softened and blurred at the edge by trees, she rose into the sky and looked upon the plain, strewn with upturned faces that had once at mothers’ breasts sought mothers’ eyes, or slumbered happily. Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the secrets whispered afterwards upon the tainted wind that blew across the scene of that day’s work and that night’s death and suffering! Many a lonely moon was bright upon the battle-ground, and many a star kept mournful watch upon it, and many a wind from every quarter of the earth blew over it, before the traces of the fight were worn away. They lurked and lingered for a long time, but survived in little things; for, Nature, far above the evil passions of men, soon recovered Her serenity, and smiled upon the guilty battle-ground as she had done before, when it was innocent. The larks sang high above it; the swallows skimmed and dipped and flitted to and fro; the shadows of the flying clouds pursued each other swiftly, over grass and corn and turnip-field and wood, and over roof and church-spire in the nestling town among the trees, away into the bright distance on the borders of the sky and earth, where the red sunsets faded. Crops were sown, and grew up, and were gathered in; the stream that had been crimsoned, turned a watermill; men whistled at the plough; gleaners and haymakers were seen in quiet groups at work; sheep and oxen pastured; boys whooped and called, in fields, to scare away the birds; smoke rose from cottage chimneys; sabbath bells rang peacefully; old people lived and died; the timid creatures of the field, the simple flowers of the bush and garden, grew and withered in their destined terms: and all upon the fierce and bloody battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight. But, there were deep green patches in the growing corn at first, that people looked at awfully. Year after year they re-appeared; and it was known that underneath those fertile spots, heaps of men and horses lay buried, indiscriminately, enriching the ground. The husbandmen who ploughed those places, shrunk from the great worms abounding there; and the sheaves they yielded, were, for many a long year, called the Battle Sheaves, and set apart; and no one ever knew a Battle Sheaf to be among the last load at a Harvest Home. For a long time, every furrow that was turned, revealed some fragments of the fight. For a long time, there were wounded trees upon the battle-ground; and scraps of hacked and broken fence and wall, where deadly struggles had been made; and trampled parts where not a leaf or blade would grow. For a long time, no village girl would dress her hair or bosom with the sweetest flower from that field of death: and after many a year had come and gone, the berries growing there, were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon the hand that plucked them. The Seasons in their course, however, though they passed as lightly as the summer clouds themselves, obliterated, in the lapse of time, even these remains of the old conflict; and wore away such legendary traces of it as the neighbouring people carried in their minds, until they dwindled into old wives’ tales, dimly remembered round the winter fire, and waning every year. Where the wild flowers and berries had so long remained upon the stem untouched, gardens arose, and houses were built, and children played at battles on the turf. The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas logs, and blazed and roared away. The deep green patches were no greener now than the memory of those who lay in dust below. The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and those who found them wondered and disputed. An old dinted corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long, that the same weak half-blind old man who tried in vain to make them out above the whitewashed arch, had marvelled at them as a baby. If the host slain upon the field, could have been for a moment reanimated in the forms in which they fell, each upon the spot that was the bed of his untimely death, gashed and ghastly soldiers would have stared in, hundreds deep, at household door and window; and would have risen on the hearths of quiet homes; and would have been the garnered store of barns and granaries; and would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and would have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill, and crowded the orchard, and burdened the meadow, and piled the rickyard high with dying men. So altered was the battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight. Nowhere more altered, perhaps, about a hundred years ago, than in one little orchard attached to an old stone house with a honeysuckle porch; where, on a bright autumn morning, there were sounds of music and laughter, and where two girls danced merrily together on the grass, while some half-dozen peasant women standing on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work to look down, and share their enjoyment. It was a pleasant, lively, natural scene; a beautiful day, a retired spot; and the two girls, quite unconstrained and careless, danced in the freedom and gaiety of their hearts. If there were no such thing as display in the world, my private opinion is, and I hope you agree with me, that we might get on a great deal better than we do, and might be infinitely more agreeable company than we are. It was charming to see how these girls danced. They had no spectators but the apple-pickers on the ladders. They were very glad to please them, but they danced to please themselves (or at least you would have supposed so); and you could no more help admiring, than they could help dancing. How they did dance! Not like opera dancers. Not at all. And not like Madame Anybody’s finished pupils. Not the least. It was not quadrille dancing, nor minuet dancing, nor even country-dance dancing. It was neither in the old style, nor the new style, nor the French style, nor the English style: though it may have been, by accident, a trifle in the Spanish style, which is a free and joyous one, I am told, deriving a delightful air of off-hand inspiration, from the chirping little castanets. As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and spread, in the sun-lighted scene, like an expanding circle in the water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning air—the flashing leaves, the speckled shadows on the soft green ground—the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn the distant windmill, cheerily—everything between the two girls, and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the world—seemed dancing too. At last, the younger of the dancing sisters, out of breath, and laughing gaily, threw herself upon a bench to rest. The other leaned against a tree hard by. The music, a wandering harp and fiddle, left off with a flourish, as if it boasted of its freshness; though the truth is, it had gone at such a pace, and worked itself to such a pitch of competition with the dancing, that it never could have held on, half a minute longer. The apple-pickers on the ladders raised a hum and murmur of applause, and then, in keeping with the sound, bestirred themselves to work again like bees. The more actively, perhaps, because an elderly gentleman, who was no other than Doctor Jeddler himself—it was Doctor Jeddler’s house and orchard, you should know, and these were Doctor Jeddler’s daughters—came bustling out to see what was the matter, and who the deuce played music on his property, before breakfast. For he was a great philosopher, Doctor Jeddler, and not very musical. "Music and dancing to-day!" said the Doctor, stopping short, and speaking to himself. "I thought they dreaded to-day. But it’s a world of contradictions. Why, Grace; why, Marion!" he added, aloud, "is the world more mad than usual this morning?" "Make some allowance for it, father, if it be," replied his younger daughter, Marion, going close to him, and looking into his face, "for it’s somebody’s birth-day." "Somebody’s birth-day, Puss," replied the Doctor. "Don’t you know it’s always somebody’s birth-day? Did you never hear how many new performers enter on this—ha! ha! ha!—it’s impossible to speak gravely of it—on this preposterous and ridiculous business called Life, every minute?" "No, father!" "No, not you, of course; you’re a woman—almost," said the Doctor. "By-the-by," and he looked into the pretty face, still close to his, "I suppose it’s your birth-day." "No! Do you really, father?" cried his pet daughter, pursing up her red lips to be kissed. "There! Take my love with it," said the Doctor, imprinting his upon them; "and many happy returns of the—the idea!—of the day. The notion of wishing happy returns in such a farce as this," said the Doctor to himself, "is good! Ha! ha! ha!" Doctor Jeddler was, as I have said, a great philosopher, and the heart and mystery of his philosophy was, to look upon the world as a gigantic practical joke; as something too absurd to be considered seriously, by any rational man. His system of belief had been, in the beginning, part and parcel of the battle-ground on which he lived, as you shall presently understand. "Well! But how did you get the music?" asked the Doctor. "Poultry-stealers, of course. Where did the minstrels come from?" "Alfred sent the music," said his daughter Grace, adjusting a few simple flowers in her sister’s hair, with which, in her admiration of that youthful beauty, she had herself adorned it half-an-hour before, and which the dancing had disarranged. "Oh! Alfred sent the music, did he?" returned the Doctor. "Yes. He met it coming out of the town as he was entering early. The men are travelling on foot, and rested there last night; and as it was Marion’s birth-day, and he thought it would please her, he sent them on, with a pencilled note to me, saying that if I thought so too, they had come to serenade her." "Ay, ay," said the Doctor, carelessly, "he always takes your opinion." "And my opinion being favourable," said Grace, good-humouredly; and pausing for a moment to admire the pretty head she decorated, with her own thrown back; "and Marion being in high spirits, and beginning to dance, I joined her: and so we danced to Alfred’s music till we were out of breath. And we thought the music all the gayer for being sent by Alfred. Didn’t we, dear Marion?" "Oh, I don’t know, Grace. How you teaze me about Alfred." "Teaze you by mentioning your lover!" said her sister. "I am sure I don’t much care to have him mentioned," said the wilful beauty, stripping the petals from some flowers she held, and scattering them on the ground. "I am almost tired of hearing of him; and as to his being my lover"— "Hush! Don’t speak lightly of a true heart, which is all your own, Marion," cried her sister, "even in jest. There is not a truer heart than Alfred’s in the world!" "No-no," said Marion, raising her eyebrows with a pleasant air of careless consideration, "perhaps not. But I don’t know that there’s any great merit in that. I—I don’t want him to be so very true. I never asked him. If he expects that I— But, dear Grace, why need we talk of him at all, just now!" It was agreeable to see the graceful figures of the blooming sisters, twined together, lingering among the trees, conversing thus, with earnestness opposed to lightness, yet, with love responding tenderly to love. And it was very curious indeed to see the younger sister’s eyes suffused with tears; and something fervently and deeply felt, breaking through the wilfulness of what she said, and striving with it painfully. The difference between them, in respect of age, could not exceed four years at most: but Grace, as often happens in such cases, when no mother watches over both (the Doctor’s wife was dead), seemed, in her gentle care of her young sister, and in the steadiness of her devotion to her, older than she was; and more removed, in course of nature, from all competition with her, or participation, otherwise than through her sympathy and true affection, in her wayward fancies, than their ages seemed to warrant. Great character of mother, that, even in this shadow and faint reflection of it, purifies the heart, and raises the exalted nature nearer to the angels! The Doctor’s reflections, as he looked after them, and heard the purport of their discourse, were limited, at first, to certain merry meditations on the folly of all loves and likings, and the idle imposition practised on themselves by young people, who believed, for a moment, that there could be anything serious in such bubbles, and were always undeceived—always! But, the home-adorning, self-denying qualities of Grace, and her sweet temper, so gentle and retiring, yet including so much constancy and bravery of spirit, seemed all expressed to him in the contrast between her quiet household figure and that of his younger and more beautiful child; and he was sorry for her sake—sorry for them both—that life should be such a very ridiculous business as it was. The Doctor never dreamed of inquiring whether his children, or either of them, helped in any way to make the scheme a serious one. But then he was a Philosopher. A kind and generous man by nature, he had stumbled, by chance, over that common Philosopher’s stone (much more easily discovered than the object of the alchemist’s researches), which sometimes trips up kind and generous men, and has the fatal property of turning gold to dross and every precious thing to poor account. "Britain!" cried the Doctor. "Britain! Holloa!" A small man, with an uncommonly sour and discontented face, emerged from the house, and returned to this call the unceremonious acknowledgment of "Now then!" "Where’s the breakfast table?" said the Doctor. "In the house," returned Britain. "Are you going to spread it out here, as you were told last night?" said the Doctor. "Don’t you know that there are gentlemen coming? That there’s business to be done this morning, before the coach comes by? That this is a very particular occasion?" "I couldn’t do anything, Dr. Jeddler, till the women had done getting in the apples, could I?" said Britain, his voice rising with his reasoning, so that it was very loud at last. "Well, have they done now?" replied the Doctor, looking at his watch, and clapping his hands. "Come! make haste! where’s Clemency?" "Here am I, Mister," said a voice from one of the ladders, which a pair of clumsy feet descended briskly. "It’s all done now. Clear away, gals. Everything shall be ready for you in half a minute, Mister." With that she began to bustle about most vigorously; presenting, as she did so, an appearance sufficiently peculiar to justify a word of introduction. She was about thirty years old; and had a sufficiently plump and cheerful face, though it was twisted up into an odd expression of tightness that made it comical. But the extraordinary homeliness of her gait and manner, would have superseded any face in the world. To say that she had two left legs, and somebody else’s arms; and that all four limbs seemed to be out of joint, and to start from perfectly wrong places when they were set in motion; is to offer the mildest outline of the reality. To say that she was perfectly content and satisfied with these arrangements, and regarded them as being no business of hers, and that she took her arms and legs as they came, and allowed them to dispose of themselves just as it happened, is to render faint justice to her equanimity. Her dress was a prodigious pair of self-willed shoes, that never wanted to go where her feet went; blue stockings; a printed gown of many colours, and the most hideous pattern procurable for money; and a white apron. She always wore short sleeves, and always had, by some accident, grazed elbows, in which she took so lively an interest that she was continually trying to turn them round and get impossible views of them. In general, a little cap placed somewhere on her head; though it was rarely to be met with in the place usually occupied in other subjects, by that article of dress; but from head to foot she was scrupulously clean, and maintained a kind of dislocated tidiness. Indeed her laudable anxiety to be tidy and compact in her own conscience as well as in the public eye, gave rise to one of her most startling evolutions, which was to grasp herself sometimes by a sort of wooden handle (part of her clothing, and familiarly called a busk), and wrestle as it were with her garments, until they fell into a symmetrical arrangement. Such, in outward form and garb, was Clemency Newcome; who was supposed to have unconsciously originated a corruption of her own christian name, from Clementina (but nobody knew, for the deaf old mother, a very phenomenon of age, whom she had supported almost from a child, was dead, and she had no other relation); who now busied herself in preparing the table; and who stood, at intervals, with her bare red arms crossed, rubbing her grazed elbows with opposite hands, and staring at it very composedly, until she suddenly remembered something else it wanted, and jogged off to fetch it. "Here are them two lawyers a-coming, Mister!" said Clemency, in a tone of no very great good-will. "Aha!" cried the Doctor, advancing to the gate to meet them. "Good morning, good morning! Grace, my dear! Marion! Here are Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs. Where’s Alfred?" "He’ll be back directly, father, no doubt," said Grace. "He had so much to do this morning in his preparations for departure, that he was up and out by daybreak. Good morning, gentlemen." "Ladies!" said Mr. Snitchey, "For Self and Craggs," who bowed, "good morning. Miss," to Marion, "I kiss your hand." Which he did. "And I wish you"—which he might or might not, for he didn’t look, at first sight, like a gentleman troubled with many warm outpourings of soul, in behalf of other people, "a hundred happy returns of this auspicious day." "Ha ha ha!" laughed the Doctor thoughtfully, with his hands in his pockets. "The great farce in a hundred acts!" "You wouldn’t, I am sure," said Mr. Snitchey, standing a small professional blue bag against one leg of the table, "cut the great farce short for this actress, at all events, Doctor Jeddler." "No," returned the Doctor. "God forbid! May she live to laugh at it, as long as she can laugh, and then say, with the French wit, 'The farce is ended; draw the curtain.'" "The French wit," said Mr. Snitchey, peeping sharply into his blue bag, "was wrong, Doctor Jeddler, and your philosophy is altogether wrong, depend upon it, as I have often told you. Nothing serious in life! What do you call law?" "A joke," replied the Doctor. "Did you ever go to law?" asked Mr. Snitchey, looking out of the blue bag. "Never," returned the Doctor. "If you ever do," said Mr. Snitchey, "perhaps you’ll alter that opinion." Craggs, who seemed to be represented by Snitchey, and to be conscious of little or no separate existence or personal individuality, offered a remark of his own in this place. It involved the only idea of which he did not stand seized and possessed in equal moieties with Snitchey; but, he had some partners in it among the wise men of the world. "It’s made a great deal too easy," said Mr. Craggs. "Law is?" asked the Doctor. "Yes," said Mr. Craggs, "everything is. Everything appears to me to be made too easy, now-a-days. It’s the vice of these times. If the world is a joke (I am not prepared to say it isn’t), it ought to be made a very difficult joke to crack. It ought to be as hard a struggle, Sir, as possible. That’s the intention. But, it’s being made far too easy. We are oiling the gates of life. They ought to be rusty. We shall have them beginning to turn, soon, with a smooth sound. Whereas they ought to grate upon their hinges, Sir." Mr. Craggs seemed positively to grate upon his own hinges, as he delivered this opinion; to which he communicated immense effect—being a cold, hard, dry, man, dressed in grey and white, like a flint; with small twinkles in his eyes, as if something struck sparks out of them. The three natural kingdoms, indeed, had each a fanciful representative among this brotherhood of disputants; for Snitchey was like a magpie or raven (only not so sleek), and the Doctor had a streaked face like a winter-pippin, with here and there a dimple to express the peckings of the birds, and a very little bit of pigtail behind, that stood for the stalk. As the active figure of a handsome young man, dressed for a journey, and followed by a porter bearing several packages and baskets, entered the orchard at a brisk pace, and with an air of gaiety and hope that accorded well with the morning,— these three drew together, like the brothers of the sister Fates, or like the Graces most effectually disguised, or like the three weird prophets on the heath, and greeted him. "Happy returns, Alf," said the Doctor, lightly. "A hundred happy returns of this auspicious day, Mr. Heathfield," said Snitchey, bowing low. "Returns!" Craggs murmured in a deep voice, all alone. "Why, what a battery!" exclaimed Alfred, stopping short, "and one—two—three—all foreboders of no good, in the great sea before me. I am glad you are not the first I have met this morning: I should have taken it for a bad omen. But, Grace was the first—sweet, pleasant Grace—so I defy you all!" "If you please, Mister, I was the first you know," said Clemency Newcome. "She was walking out here, before sunrise, you remember. I was in the house." "That’s true! Clemency was the first," said Alfred. "So I defy you with Clemency." "Ha, ha, ha!—for Self and Craggs," said Snitchey. "What a defiance!" "Not so bad a one as it appears, may be," said Alfred, shaking hands heartily with the Doctor, and also with Snitchey and Craggs, and then looking round. "Where are the—Good Heavens!" With a start, productive for the moment of a closer partnership between Jonathan Snitchey and Thomas Craggs than the subsisting articles of agreement in that wise contemplated, he hastily betook himself to where the sisters stood together, and—however, I needn’t more particularly explain his manner of saluting Marion first, and Grace afterwards, than by hinting that Mr. Craggs may possibly have considered it "too easy." Perhaps to change the subject, Dr. Jeddler made a hasty move towards the breakfast, and they all sat down at table. Grace presided; but so discreetly stationed herself, as to cut off her sister and Alfred from the rest of the company. Snitchey and Craggs sat at opposite corners, with the blue bag between them for safety; the Doctor took his usual position, opposite to Grace. Clemency hovered galvanically about the table, as waitress; and the melancholy Britain, at another and a smaller board, acted as Grand Carver of a round of beef, and a ham. "Meat?" said Britain, approaching Mr. Snitchey, with the carving knife and fork in his hands, and throwing the question at him like a missile. "Certainly," returned the lawyer. "Do you want any?" to Craggs. "Lean and well done," replied that gentleman. Having executed these orders, and moderately supplied the Doctor (he seemed to know that nobody else wanted anything to eat), he lingered as near the Firm as he decently could, watching with an austere eye their disposition of the viands, and but once relaxing the severe expression of his face. This was on the occasion of Mr. Craggs, whose teeth were not of the best, partially choking, when he cried out with great animation, "I thought he was gone!" "Now, Alfred," said the Doctor, "for a word or two of business, while we are yet at breakfast." "While we are yet at breakfast," said Snitchey and Craggs, who seemed to have no present idea of leaving off. Although Alfred had not been breakfasting, and seemed to have quite enough business on his hands as it was, he respectfully answered: "If you please, Sir." "If anything could be serious," the Doctor began, "in such a—" "Farce as this, Sir," hinted Alfred. "In such a farce as this," observed the Doctor, "it might be this recurrence, on the eve of separation, of a double birth-day, which is connected with many associations pleasant to us four, and with the recollection of a long and amicable intercourse. That’s not to the purpose." "Ah! yes, yes, Dr. Jeddler," said the young man. "It is to the purpose. Much to the purpose, as my heart bears witness this morning; and as yours does too, I know, if you would let it speak. I leave your house to-day; I cease to be your ward to-day; we part with tender relations stretching far behind us, that never can be exactly renewed, and with others dawning—yet before us," he looked down at Marion beside him, "fraught with such considerations as I must not trust myself to speak of now. Come, come!" he added, rallying his spirits and the Doctor at once, "there’s a serious grain in this large foolish dust-heap, Doctor. Let us allow to-day, that there is One." "To-day!" cried the Doctor. "Hear him! Ha, ha, ha! Of all days in the foolish year. Why, on this day, the great battle was fought on this ground. On this ground where we now sit, where I saw my two girls dance this morning, where the fruit has just been gathered for our eating from these trees, the roots of which are struck in Men, not earth,—so many lives were lost, that within my recollection, generations afterwards, a churchyard full of bones, and dust of bones, and chips of cloven skulls, has been dug up from underneath our feet here. Yet not a hundred people in that battle knew for what they fought, or why; not a hundred of the inconsiderate rejoicers in the victory, why they rejoiced. Not half a hundred people were the better for the gain or loss. Not half-a-dozen men agree to this hour on the cause or merits; and nobody, in short, ever knew anything distinct about it, but the mourners of the slain. Serious, too!" said the Doctor, laughing. "Such a system!" "But, all this seems to me," said Alfred, "to be very serious." "Serious!" cried the Doctor. "If you allowed such things to be serious, you must go mad, or die, or climb up to the top of a mountain, and turn hermit." "Besides—so long ago," said Alfred. "Long ago!" returned the Doctor. "Do you know what the world has been doing, ever since? Do you know what else it has been doing? I don’t!" "It has gone to law a little," observed Mr. Snitchey, stirring his tea. "Although the way out has been always made too easy," said his partner. "And you’ll excuse my saying, Doctor," pursued Mr. Snitchey, "having been already put a thousand times in possession of my opinion, in the course of our discussions, that, in its having gone to law, and in its legal system altogether, I do observe a serious side—now, really, a something tangible, and with a purpose and intention in it—" Clemency Newcome made an angular tumble against the table, occasioning a sounding clatter among the cups and saucers. "Heyday! what’s the matter there?" exclaimed the Doctor. "It’s this evil-inclined blue bag," said Clemency, "always tripping up somebody!" "With a purpose and intention in it, I was saying," resumed Snitchey, "that commands respect. Life a farce, Dr. Jeddler? With law in it?" The Doctor laughed, and looked at Alfred. "Granted, if you please, that war is foolish," said Snitchey. "There we agree. For example. Here’s a smiling country," pointing it out with his fork, "once overrun by soldiers—trespassers every man of ’em—and laid waste by fire and sword. He, he, he! The idea of any man exposing himself, voluntarily, to fire and sword! Stupid, wasteful, positively ridiculous; you laugh at your fellow-creatures, you know, when you think of it! But take this smiling country as it stands. Think of the laws appertaining to real property; to the bequest and devise of real property; to the mortgage and redemption of real property; to leasehold, freehold, and copyhold estate; think," said Mr. Snitchey, with such great emotion that he actually smacked his lips, "of the complicated laws relating to title and proof of title, with all the contradictory precedents and numerous acts of parliament connected with them; think of the infinite number of ingenious and interminable chancery suits, to which this pleasant prospect may give rise; —and acknowledge, Doctor Jeddler, that there is a green spot in the scheme about us! I believe," said Mr. Snitchey, looking at his partner, "that I speak for Self and Craggs?" Mr. Craggs having signified assent, Mr. Snitchey, somewhat freshened by his recent eloquence, observed that he would take a little more beef, and another cup of tea. "I don’t stand up for life in general," he added, rubbing his hands and chuckling, "it’s full of folly; full of something worse. Professions of trust, and confidence, and unselfishness, and all that! Bah, bah, bah! We see what they’re worth. But, you mustn’t laugh at life; you’ve got a game to play; a very serious game indeed! Everybody’s playing against you, you know, and you’re playing against them. Oh! it’s a very interesting thing. There are deep moves upon the board. You must only laugh, Doctor Jeddler, when you win; and then not much. He, he, he! And then not much," repeated Snitchey, rolling his head and winking his eye, as if he would have added, 'you may do this instead!’ "Well, Alfred!" cried the Doctor, "what do you say now?" "I say, Sir," replied Alfred, "that the greatest favour you could do me, and yourself too, I am inclined to think, would be to try sometimes to forget this battle-field, and others like it, in that broader battle-field of Life, on which the sun looks every day." "Really, I’m afraid that wouldn’t soften his opinions, Mr. Alfred," said Snitchey. "The combatants are very eager and very bitter in that same battle of Life. There’s a great deal of cutting and slashing, and firing into people’s heads from behind; terrible treading down, and trampling on; it's rather a bad business." "I believe, Mr. Snitchey," said Alfred, "there are quiet victories and struggles, great sacrifices of self, and noble acts of heroism, in it—even in many of its apparent lightnesses and contradictions—not the less difficult to achieve, because they have no earthly chronicle or audience; done every day in nooks and corners, and in little households, and in men’s and women’s hearts—any one of which might reconcile the sternest man to such a world, and fill him with belief and hope in it, though two-fourths of its people were at war, and another fourth at law; and that’s a bold word." Both the sisters listened keenly. "Well, well!" said the Doctor, "I am too old to be converted, even by my friend Snitchey here, or my good spinster sister, Martha Jeddler; who had what she calls her domestic trials ages ago, and has led a sympathising life with all sorts of people ever since; and who is so much of your opinion (only she’s less reasonable and more obstinate, being a woman), that we can’t agree, and seldom meet. I was born upon this battle-field. I began, as a boy, to have my thoughts directed to the real history of a battle-field. Sixty years have gone over my head; and I have never seen the Christian world, including Heaven knows how many loving mothers and good enough girls, like mine here, anything but mad for a battle-field. The same contradictions prevail in everything. One must either laugh or cry at such stupendous inconsistencies; and I prefer to laugh." Britain, who had been paying the profoundest and most melancholy attention to each speaker in his turn, seemed suddenly to decide in favour of the same preference, if a deep sepulchral sound that escaped him might be construed into a demonstration of risibility. His face, however, was so perfectly unaffected by it, both before and afterwards, that although one or two of the breakfast party looked round as being startled by a mysterious noise, nobody connected the offender with it. Except his partner in attendance, Clemency Newcome; who rousing him with one of those favourite joints, her elbows, inquired, in a reproachful whisper, what he laughed at. "Not you!" said Britain. "Who then?" "Humanity," said Britain. "That’s the joke." "What between master and them lawyers, he’s getting more and more addle-headed every day!" cried Clemency, giving him a lunge with the other elbow, as a mental stimulant. "Do you know where you are? Do you want to get warning?" "I don’t know anything," said Britain, with a leaden eye and an immovable visage. "I don’t care for anything. I don’t make out anything. I don’t believe anything. And I don’t want anything." Although this forlorn summary of his general condition may have been overcharged in an access of despondency, Benjamin Britain—sometimes called Little Britain, to distinguish him from Great; as we might say Young England, to express Old England with a decided difference—had defined his real state more accurately than might be supposed. For, serving as a sort of man Miles, to the Doctor’s Friar Bacon, and listening day after day to innumerable orations addressed by the Doctor to various people, all tending to show that his very existence was at best a mistake and an absurdity; this unfortunate servitor had fallen, by degrees, into such an abyss of confused and contradictory suggestions from within and without, that Truth at the bottom of her well, was on the level surface as compared with Britain in the depths of his mystification. The only point he clearly comprehended, was, that the new element usually brought into these discussions by Snitchey and Craggs, never served to make them clearer, and always seemed to give the Doctor a species of advantage and confirmation. Therefore, he looked upon the Firm as one of the proximate causes of his state of mind, and held them in abhorrence accordingly. "But, this is not our business, Alfred," said the Doctor. "Ceasing to be my ward (as you have said) to-day; and leaving us full to the brim of such learning as the Grammar School down here was able to give you, and your studies in London could add to that, and such practical knowledge as a dull old country Doctor like myself could graft upon both; you are away, now, into the world. The first term of probation appointed by your poor father, being over, away you go now, your own master, to fulfil his second desire: and long before your three years’ tour among the foreign schools of medicine is finished, you’ll have forgotten us. Lord, you’ll forget us easily in six months!" "If I do—But you know better; why should I speak to you!" said Alfred, laughing. "I don’t know anything of the sort," returned the Doctor. "What do you say, Marion?" Marion, trifling with her teacup, seemed to say—but she didn’t say it—that he was welcome to forget them, if he could. Grace pressed the blooming face against her cheek, and smiled. "I haven’t been, I hope, a very unjust steward in the execution of my trust," pursued the Doctor; "but I am to be, at any rate, formally discharged, and released, and what not this morning; and here are our good friends Snitchey and Craggs, with a bagful of papers, and accounts, and documents, for the transfer of the balance of the trust fund to you (I wish it was a more difficult one to dispose of, Alfred, but you must get to be a great man and make it so), and other drolleries of that sort, which are to be signed, sealed, and delivered." "And duly witnessed, as by law required," said Snitchey, pushing away his plate, and taking out the papers, which his partner proceeded to spread upon the table; "and Self and Craggs having been co-trustees with you, Doctor, in so far as the fund was concerned, we shall want your two servants to attest the signatures—can you read, Mrs. Newcome?" "I an’t married, Mister," said Clemency. "Oh! I beg your pardon. I should think not," chuckled Snitchey, casting his eyes over her extraordinary figure. "You can read?" "A little," answered Clemency. "The marriage service, night and morning, eh?" observed the lawyer, jocosely. "No," said Clemency. "Too hard. I only reads a thimble." "Read a thimble!" echoed Snitchey. "What are you talking about, young woman?" Clemency nodded. "And a nutmeg-grater." "Why, this is a lunatic! a subject for the Lord High Chancellor!" said Snitchey, staring at her. —"If possessed of any property," stipulated Craggs. Grace, however, interposing, explained that each of the articles in question bore an engraved motto, and so formed the pocket library of Clemency Newcome, who was not much given to the study of books. "Oh, that’s it, is it, Miss Grace!" said Snitchey. "Yes, yes. Ha, ha, ha! I thought our friend was an idiot. She looks uncommonly like it," he muttered, with a supercilious glance. "And what does the thimble say, Mrs. Newcome?" "I an’t married, Mister," observed Clemency. "Well, Newcome. Will that do?" said the lawyer. "What does the thimble say, Newcome?" How Clemency, before replying to this question, held one pocket open, and looked down into its yawning depths for the thimble which wasn’t there,—and how she then held an opposite pocket open, and seeming to descry it, like a pearl of great price, at the bottom, cleared away such intervening obstacles as a handkerchief, an end of wax candle, a flushed apple, an orange, a lucky penny, a cramp bone, a padlock, a pair of scissors in a sheath, more expressively describable as promising young shears, a handful or so of loose beads, several balls of cotton, a needle-case, a cabinet collection of curl-papers, and a biscuit, all of which articles she entrusted individually and separately to Britain to hold,—is of no consequence. Nor how, in her determination to grasp this pocket by the throat and keep it prisoner (for it had a tendency to swing, and twist itself round the nearest corner), she assumed, and calmly maintained, an attitude apparently inconsistent with the human anatomy and the laws of gravity. It is enough that at last she triumphantly produced the thimble on her finger, and rattled the nutmeg-grater; the literature of both those trinkets being obviously in course of wearing out and wasting away, through excessive friction. "That’s the thimble, is it, young woman?" said Mr. Snitchey, diverting himself at her expense. "And what does the thimble say?" "It says," replied Clemency, reading slowly round as if it were a tower, "For-get and For-give." Snitchey and Craggs laughed heartily. "So new!" said Snitchey. "So easy!" said Craggs. "Such a knowledge of human nature in it," said Snitchey. "So applicable to the affairs of life," said Craggs. "And the nutmeg-grater?" inquired the head of the Firm. "The grater says," returned Clemency, "Do as you—wold—be—done by." "'Do, or you’ll be done brown,' you mean," said Mr. Snitchey. "I don’t understand," retorted Clemency, shaking her head vaguely. "I a'n’t no lawyer." "I am afraid that if she was, Doctor," said Mr. Snitchey, turning to him suddenly, as if to anticipate any effect that might otherwise be consequent on this retort, "she’d find it to be the golden rule of half her clients. They are serious enough in that—whimsical as your world is—and lay the blame on us afterwards. We, in our profession, are little else than mirrors after all, Mr. Alfred; but, we are generally consulted by angry and quarrelsome people, who are not in their best looks; and it’s rather hard to quarrel with us if we reflect unpleasant aspects. I think," said Mr. Snitchey, "that I speak for Self and Craggs?" "Decidedly," said Craggs. "And so, if Mr. Britain will oblige us with a mouthful of ink," said Mr. Snitchey, returning to the papers, "we’ll sign, seal, and deliver as soon as possible, or the coach will be coming past before we know where we are." If one might judge from his appearance, there was every probability of the coach coming past before Mr. Britain knew where he was; for he stood in a state of abstraction, mentally balancing the Doctor against the lawyers, and the lawyers against the Doctor, and their clients against both; and engaged in feeble attempts to make the thimble and nutmeg-grater (a new idea to him) square with anybody’s system of philosophy; and, in short, bewildering himself as much as ever his great namesake has done with theories and schools. But Clemency, who was his good Genius—though he had the meanest possible opinion of her understanding, by reason of her seldom troubling herself with abstract speculations, and being always at hand to do the right thing at the right time—having produced the ink in a twinkling, tendered him the further service of recalling him to himself by the application of her elbows; with which gentle flappers she so jogged his memory, in a more literal construction of that phrase than usual, that he soon became quite fresh and brisk. How he laboured under an apprehension not uncommon to persons in his degree, to whom the use of pen and ink is an event, that he couldn’t append his name to a document, not of his own writing, without committing himself in some shadowy manner, or somehow signing away vague and enormous sums of money; and how he approached the deeds under protest, and by dint of the Doctor’s coercion, and insisted on pausing to look at them before writing (the cramped hand, to say nothing of the phraseology, being so much Chinese to him), and also on turning them round to see whether there was anything fraudulent, underneath; and how, having signed his name, he became desolate as one who had parted with his property and rights; I want the time to tell. Also, how the blue bag containing his signature, afterwards had a mysterious interest for him, and he couldn’t leave it; also, how Clemency Newcome, in an ecstasy of laughter at the idea of her own importance and dignity, brooded over the whole table with her two elbows, like a spread eagle, and reposed her head upon her left arm as a preliminary to the formation of certain cabalistic characters, which required a deal of ink, and imaginary counterparts whereof she executed at the same time with her tongue. Also how, having once tasted ink, she became thirsty in that regard, as tame tigers are said to be after tasting another sort of fluid, and wanted to sign everything, and put her name in all kinds of places. In brief, the Doctor was discharged of his trust and all its responsibilities; and Alfred, taking it on himself, was fairly started on the journey of life. "Britain!" said the Doctor. "Run to the gate, and watch for the coach. Time flies, Alfred!" "Yes, Sir, yes," returned the young man, hurriedly. "Dear Grace! a moment! Marion—so young and beautiful, so winning and so much admired, dear to my heart as nothing else in life is—remember! I leave Marion to you!" "She has always been a sacred charge to me, Alfred. She is doubly so, now. I will be faithful to my trust, believe me." "I do believe it, Grace. I know it well. Who could look upon your face, and hear your voice, and not know it! Ah, Grace! If I had your well-governed heart, and tranquil mind, how bravely I would leave this place to-day!" "Would you?" she answered with a quiet smile. "And yet, Grace—Sister, seems the natural word." "Use it!" she said quickly. "I am glad to hear it, call me nothing else." "And yet, Sister, then," said Alfred, "Marion and I had better have your true and stedfast qualities serving us here, and making us both happier and better. I wouldn’t carry them away, to sustain myself, if I could!" "Coach upon the hill-top!" exclaimed Britain. "Time flies, Alfred," said the Doctor. Marion had stood apart, with her eyes fixed upon the ground; but, this warning being given, her young lover brought her tenderly to where her sister stood, and gave her into her embrace. "I have been telling Grace, dear Marion," he said, "that you are her charge; my precious trust at parting. And when I come back and reclaim you, dearest, and the bright prospect of our married life lies stretched before us, it shall be one of our chief pleasures to consult how we can make Grace happy; how we can anticipate her wishes; how we can show our gratitude and love to her; how we can return her something of the debt she will have heaped upon us." The younger sister had one hand in his; the other rested on her sister’s neck. She looked into that sister’s eyes, so calm, serene, and cheerful, with a gaze in which affection, admiration, sorrow, wonder, almost veneration, were blended. She looked into that sister’s face, as if it were the face of some bright angel. Calm, serene, and cheerful, the face looked back on her and on her lover. "And when the time comes, as it must one day," said Alfred,—"I wonder it has never come yet: but Grace knows best, for Grace is always right—when she will want a friend to open her whole heart to, and to be to her something of what she has been to us,—then, Marion, how faithful we will prove, and what delight to us to know that she, our dear good sister, loves and is loved again, as we would have her!" Still the younger sister looked into her eyes, and turned not—even towards him. And still those honest eyes looked back, so calm, serene, and cheerful, on herself and on her lover. "And when all that is past, and we are old, and living (as we must!) together—close together; talking often of old times,’ said Alfred—"these shall be our favourite times among them—this day most of all; and, telling each other what we thought and felt, and hoped and feared, at parting; and how we couldn’t bear to say good bye"— "Coach coming through the wood," cried Britain. "Yes! I am ready—and how we met again, so happily in spite of all; we’ll make this day the happiest in all the year, and keep it as a treble birth-day. Shall we, dear?" "Yes!" interposed the elder sister, eagerly, and with a radiant smile. "Yes! Alfred, don’t linger. There’s no time. Say good bye to Marion. And Heaven be with you!" He pressed the younger sister to his heart. Released from his embrace, she again clung to her sister; and her eyes, with the same blended look, again sought those so calm, serene, and cheerful. "Farewell, my boy!" said the Doctor. "To talk about any serious correspondence or serious affections, and engagements and so forth, in such a—ha ha ha!—you know what I mean—why that, of course, would be sheer nonsense. All I can say is, that if you and Marion should continue in the same foolish minds, I shall not object to have you for a son-in-law one of these days." "Over the bridge!" cried Britain. "Let it come!" said Alfred, wringing the Doctor’s hand stoutly. "Think of me sometimes, my old friend and guardian, as seriously as you can! Adieu, Mr. Snitchey! Farewell, Mr. Craggs!" "Coming down the road!" cried Britain. "A kiss of Clemency Newcome for long acquaintance’ sake—shake hands, Britain—Marion, dearest heart, good bye! Sister Grace! remember!" The quiet household figure, and the face so beautiful in its serenity, were turned towards him in reply; but Marion’s look and attitude remained unchanged. The coach was at the gate. There was a bustle with the luggage. The coach drove away. Marion never moved. "He waves his hat to you, my love," said Grace."Your chosen husband, darling. Look!" The younger sister raised her head, and, for a moment, turned it. Then, turning back again, and fully meeting, for the first time, those calm eyes, fell sobbing on her neck. "Oh, Grace. God bless you! But I cannot bear to see it, Grace! It breaks my heart." Part the Second. Snitchey and Craggs had a snug little office on the old Battle Ground, where they drove a snug little business, and fought a great many small pitched battles for a great many contending parties. Though it could hardly be said of these conflicts that they were running fights—for in truth they generally proceeded at a snail’s pace—the part the Firm had in them came so far within the general denomination, that now they took a shot at this Plaintiff, and now aimed a chop at that Defendant, now made a heavy charge at an estate in Chancery, and now had some light skirmishing among an irregular body of small debtors, just as the occasion served, and the enemy happened to present himself. The Gazette was an important and profitable feature in some of their fields, as in fields of greater renown; and in most of the Actions wherein they showed their generalship, it was afterwards observed by the combatants that they had had great difficulty in making each other out, or in knowing with any degree of distinctness what they were about, in consequence of the vast amount of smoke by which they were surrounded. The offices of Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs stood convenient with an open door, down two smooth steps in the market-place: so that any angry farmer inclining towards hot water, might tumble into it at once. Their special council-chamber and hall of conference was an old back room up stairs, with a low dark ceiling, which seemed to be knitting its brows gloomily in the consideration of tangled points of law. It was furnished with some high-backed leathern chairs, garnished with great goggle-eyed brass nails, of which, every here and there, two or three had fallen out; or had been picked out, perhaps, by the wandering thumbs and forefingers of bewildered clients. There was a framed print of a great judge in it, every curl in whose dreadful wig had made a man’s hair stand on end. Bales of papers filled the dusty closets, shelves, and tables; and round the wainscot there were tiers of boxes, padlocked and fireproof, with people’s names painted outside, which anxious visitors felt themselves, by a cruel enchantment, obliged to spell backwards and forwards, and to make anagrams of, while they sat, seeming to listen to Snitchey and Craggs, without comprehending one word of what they said. Snitchey and Craggs had each, in private life as in professional existence, a partner of his own. Snitchey and Craggs were the best friends in the world, and had a real confidence in one another; but Mrs. Snitchey, by a dispensation not uncommon in the affairs of life, was, on principle, suspicious of Mr. Craggs; and Mrs. Craggs was, on principle, suspicious of Mr. Snitchey. "Your Snitcheys indeed," the latter lady would observe, sometimes, to Mr. Craggs; using that imaginative plural as if in disparagement of an objectionable pair of pantaloons, or other articles not possessed of a singular number; "I don’t see what you want with your Snitcheys, for my part. You trust a great deal too much to your Snitcheys, I think, and I hope you may never find my words come true." While Mrs. Snitchey would observe to Mr. Snitchey, of Craggs, "that if ever he was led away by man he was led away by that man; and that if ever she read a double purpose in a mortal eye, she read that purpose in Craggs’s eye." Notwithstanding this, however, they were all very good friends in general: and Mrs. Snitchey and Mrs. Craggs maintained a close bond of alliance against "the office," which they both considered a Blue chamber, and common enemy, full of dangerous (because unknown) machinations. In this office, nevertheless, Snitchey and Craggs made honey for their several hives. Here sometimes they would linger, of a fine evening, at the window of their council-chamber, overlooking the old battle-ground, and wonder (but that was generally at assize time, when much business had made them sentimental) at the folly of mankind, who couldn’t always be at peace with one another, and go to law comfortably. Here days, and weeks, and months, and years, passed over them; their calendar, the gradually diminishing number of brass nails in the leathern chairs, and the increasing bulk of papers on the tables. Here, nearly three years’ flight had thinned the one and swelled the other, since the breakfast in the orchard; when they sat together in consultation, at night. Not alone; but with a man of thirty, or about that time of life, negligently dressed, and somewhat haggard in the face, but well-made, well-attired, and well-looking, who sat in the arm-chair of state, with one hand in his breast, and the other in his dishevelled hair, pondering moodily. Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs sat opposite each other at a neighbouring desk. One of the fire-proof boxes, unpadlocked and opened, was upon it; a part of its contents lay strewn upon the table, and the rest was then in course of passing through the hands of Mr. Snitchey, who brought it to the candle, document by document; looked at every paper singly, as he produced it, shook his head, and handed it to Mr. Craggs, who looked it over also, shook his head, and laid it down. Sometimes they would stop, and shaking their heads in concert, look towards the abstracted client; and the name on the box being Michael Warden, Esquire, we may conclude from these premises that the name and the box were both his, and that the affairs of Michael Warden, Esquire, were in a bad way. "That’s all," said Mr. Snitchey, turning up the last paper. "Really there’s no other resource. No other resource." "All lost, spent, wasted, pawned, borrowed, and sold, eh?" said the client, looking up. "All," returned Mr. Snitchey. "Nothing else to be done, you say?" "Nothing at all." The client bit his nails, and pondered again. "And I am not even personally safe in England? You hold to that, do you?" "In no part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland," replied Mr. Snitchey. "A mere prodigal son with no father to go back to, no swine to keep, and no husks to share with them? Eh?" pursued the client, rocking one leg over the other, and searching the ground with his eyes. Mr. Snitchey coughed, as if to deprecate the being supposed to participate in any figurative illustration of a legal position. Mr. Craggs, as if to express that it was a partnership view of the subject, also coughed. "Ruined at thirty!" said the client. "Humph!" "Not ruined, Mr. Warden," returned Snitchey. "Not so bad as that. You have done a good deal towards it, I must say, but you are not ruined. A little nursing—" "A little Devil," said the client. "Mr. Craggs," said Snitchey, "will you oblige me with a pinch of snuff? Thank you, Sir." As the imperturbable lawyer applied it to his nose, with great apparent relish and a perfect absorption of his attention in the proceeding, the client gradually broke into a smile, and, looking up, said: "You talk of nursing. How long nursing?" "How long nursing?" repeated Snitchey, dusting the snuff from his fingers, and making a slow calculation in his mind. "For your involved estate, Sir? In good hands? S. and C.’s, say? Six or seven years." "To starve for six or seven years!" said the client with a fretful laugh, and an impatient change of his position. "To starve for six or seven years, Mr. Warden," said Snitchey, "would be very uncommon indeed. You might get another estate by shewing yourself, the while. But, we don’t think you could do it—speaking for Self and Craggs—and consequently don’t advise it." "What do you advise?" "Nursing, I say," repeated Snitchey. "Some few years of nursing by Self and Craggs would bring it round. But to enable us to make terms, and hold terms, and you to keep terms, you must go away; you must live abroad. As to starvation, we could ensure you some hundreds a-year to starve upon, even in the beginning—I dare say, Mr. Warden." "Hundreds," said the client. "And I have spent thousands!" "That," retorted Mr. Snitchey, putting the papers slowly back into the cast-iron box, "there is no doubt about. No doubt a—bout," he repeated to himself, as he thoughtfully pursued his occupation. The lawyer very likely knew his man; at any rate his dry, shrewd, whimsical manner, had a favourable influence on the client’s moody state, and disposed him to be more free and unreserved. Or, perhaps the client knew his man, and had elicited such encouragement as he had received, to render some purpose he was about to disclose the more defensible in appearance. Gradually raising his head, he sat looking at his immovable adviser with a smile, which presently broke into a laugh. "After all," he said, "my iron-headed friend—" Mr. Snitchey pointed out his partner. "Self and—excuse me—Craggs." "I beg Mr. Craggs’s pardon," said the client. "After all, my iron-headed friends," he leaned forward in his chair, and dropped his voice a little, "you don’t know half my ruin yet." Mr. Snitchey stopped and stared at him. Mr. Craggs also stared. "I am not only deep in debt," said the client, "but I am deep in—" "Not in love!" cried Snitchey. "Yes!" said the client, falling back in his chair, and surveying the Firm with his hands in his pockets. "Deep in love." "And not with an heiress, Sir?" said Snitchey. "Not with an heiress." "Nor a rich lady?" "Nor a rich lady that I know of—except in beauty and merit." "A single lady, I trust?" said Mr. Snitchey, with great expression. "Certainly." ‘It’s not one of Doctor Jeddler’s daughters?’ said Snitchey, suddenly squaring his elbows on his knees, and advancing his face at least a yard. ‘Yes!’ returned the client. "Not his younger daughter?" said Snitchey. "Yes!" returned the client. "Mr. Craggs," said Snitchey, much relieved, "will you oblige me with another pinch of snuff? Thank you. I am happy to say it don’t signify, Mr. Warden; she’s engaged, sir, she’s bespoke. My partner can corroborate me. We know the fact." "We know the fact," repeated Craggs. "Why, so do I perhaps," returned the client quietly. "What of that? Are you men of the world, and did you never hear of a woman changing her mind?" "There certainly have been actions for breach," said Mr. Snitchey, "brought against both spinsters and widows, but in the majority of cases—" "Cases!" interposed the client, impatiently. "Don’t talk to me of cases. The general precedent is in a much larger volume than any of your law books. Besides, do you think I have lived six weeks in the Doctor’s house for nothing?" "I think, sir," observed Mr. Snitchey, gravely addressing himself to his partner, "that of all the scrapes Mr. Warden’s horses have brought him into at one time and another—and they have been pretty numerous, and pretty expensive, as none know better than himself and you and I—the worst scrape may turn out to be, if he talks in this way, this having ever been left by one of them at the Doctor’s garden wall, with three broken ribs, a snapped collar-bone, and the Lord knows how many bruises. We didn’t think so much of it, at the time when we knew he was going on well under the Doctor’s hands and roof; but it looks bad now, Sir. Bad! It looks very bad. Doctor Jeddler too—our client, Mr. Craggs." "Mr. Alfred Heathfield too—a sort of client, Mr. Snitchey," said Craggs. "Mr. Michael Warden too, a kind of client," said the careless visitor, "and no bad one either: having played the fool for ten or twelve years. However Mr. Michael Warden has sown his wild oats now—there’s their crop, in that box; and he means to repent and be wise. And in proof of it, Mr. Michael Warden means, if he can, to marry Marion, the Doctor’s lovely daughter, and to carry her away with him." "Really, Mr. Craggs," Snitchey began. "Really, Mr. Snitchey, and Mr. Craggs, partners both," said the client, interrupting him; "you know your duty to your clients, and you know well enough, I am sure, that it is no part of it to interfere in a mere love affair, which I am obliged to confide to you. I am not going to carry the young lady off, without her own consent. There’s nothing illegal in it. I never was Mr. Heathfield’s bosom friend. I violate no confidence of his. I love where he loves, and I mean to win where he would win, if I can." "He can’t, Mr. Craggs," said Snitchey, evidently anxious and discomfited. "He can’t do it, Sir. She dotes on Mr. Alfred." "Does she?" returned the client. "Mr. Craggs, she dotes on him, Sir," persisted Snitchey. "I didn’t live six weeks, some few months ago, in the Doctor’s house for nothing; and I doubted that soon," observed the client. "She would have doted on him, if her sister could have brought it about; but I watched them. Marion avoided his name, avoided the subject: shrunk from the least allusion to it, with evident distress." "Why should she, Mr. Craggs, you know? Why should she, Sir?" inquired Snitchey. "I don’t know why she should, though there are many likely reasons," said the client, smiling at the attention and perplexity expressed in Mr. Snitchey’s shining eye, and at his cautious way of carrying on the conversation, and making himself informed upon the subject; "but I know she does. She was very young when she made the engagement—if it may be called one, I am not even sure of that—and has repented of it, perhaps. Perhaps—it seems a foppish thing to say, but upon my soul I don’t mean it in that light—she may have fallen in love with me, as I have fallen in love with her." "He, he! Mr. Alfred, her old playfellow too, you remember, Mr. Craggs," said Snitchey, with a disconcerted laugh; "knew her almost from a baby!" "Which makes it the more probable that she may be tired of his idea," calmly pursued the client, "and not indisposed to exchange it for the newer one of another lover, who presents himself (or is presented by his horse) under romantic circumstances; has the not unfavourable reputation—with a country girl—of having lived thoughtlessly and gaily, without doing much harm to anybody; and who, for his youth and figure, and so forth—this may seem foppish again, but upon my soul I don’t mean it in that light—might perhaps pass muster in a crowd with Mr. Alfred himself." There was no gainsaying the last clause, certainly; and Mr. Snitchey, glancing at him, thought so. There was something naturally graceful and pleasant in the very carelessness of his air. It seemed to suggest, of his comely face and well-knit figure, that they might be greatly better if he chose: and that, once roused and made earnest (but he never had been earnest yet), he could be full of fire and purpose. "A dangerous sort of libertine," thought the shrewd lawyer, "to seem to catch the spark he wants from a young lady’s eyes." "Now, observe, Snitchey," he continued, rising and taking him by the button, "and Craggs," taking him by the button also, and placing one partner on either side of him, so that neither might evade him. "I don’t ask you for any advice. You are right to keep quite aloof from all parties in such a matter, which is not one in which grave men like you could interfere, on any side. I am briefly going to review in half-a-dozen words, my position and intention, and then I shall leave it to you to do the best for me, in money matters, that you can: seeing, that, if I run away with the Doctor’s beautiful daughter (as I hope to do, and to become another man under her bright influence), it will be, for the moment, more chargeable than running away alone. But I shall soon make all that up in an altered life." "I think it will be better not to hear this, Mr. Craggs?" said Snitchey, looking at him across the client. "I think not," said Craggs.—Both listening attentively. "Well! You needn’t hear it," replied their client. "I’ll mention it, however. I don’t mean to ask the Doctor’s consent, because he wouldn’t give it me. But I mean to do the Doctor no wrong or harm, because (besides there being nothing serious in such trifles, as he says) I hope to rescue his child, my Marion, from what I see—I know—she dreads, and contemplates with misery: that is, the return of this old lover. If anything in the world is true, it is true that she dreads his return. Nobody is injured so far. I am so harried and worried here just now, that I lead the life of a flying-fish; skulk about in the dark, I am shut out of my own house, and warned off my own grounds: but that house, and those grounds, and many an acre besides, will come back to me one day, as you know and say; and Marion will probably be richer—on your showing, who are never sanguine—ten years hence as my wife, than as the wife of Alfred Heathfield, whose return she dreads (remember that), and in whom or in any man, my passion is not surpassed. Who is injured yet? It is a fair case throughout. My right is as good as his, if she decide in my favor; and I will try my right by her alone. You will like to know no more after this, and I will tell you no more. Now you know my purpose, and wants. When must I leave here?" "In a week," said Snitchey. "Mr. Craggs?"— "In something less, I should say," responded Craggs. "In a month," said the client, after attentively watching the two faces. "This day month. To-day is Thursday. Succeed or fail, on this day month I go." "It’s too long a delay," said Snitchey; "much too long. But let it be so. I thought he’d have stipulated for three," he murmured to himself. "Are you going? Good night, Sir!" "Good night!" returned the client, shaking hands with the Firm. "You’ll live to see me making a good use of riches yet. Henceforth the star of my destiny is, Marion!" "Take care of the stairs, Sir," replied Snitchey; "for she don’t shine there. Good night!" "Good night!" So they both stood at the stair-head with a pair of office-candles, watching him down; and when he had gone away, stood looking at each other. "What do you think of all this, Mr. Craggs?" said Snitchey. Mr. Craggs shook his head. "It was our opinion, on the day when that release was executed, that there was something curious in the parting of that pair, I recollect," said Snitchey. "It was," said Mr. Craggs. "Perhaps he deceives himself altogether," pursued Mr. Snitchey, locking up the fireproof box, and putting it away; "or, if he don’t, a little bit of fickleness and perfidy is not a miracle, Mr. Craggs. And yet I thought that pretty face was very true. I thought," said Mr. Snitchey, putting on his great-coat (for the weather was very cold), drawing on his gloves, and snuffing out one candle, "that I had even seen her character becoming stronger and more resolved of late. More like her sister’s." "Mrs. Craggs was of the same opinion," returned Craggs. "I’d really give a trifle to-night," observed Mr. Snitchey, who was a good-natured man, "if I could believe that Mr. Warden was reckoning without his host; but light-headed, capricious, and unballasted as he is, he knows something of the world and its people (he ought to, for he has bought what he does know, dear enough); and I can’t quite think that. We had better not interfere: we can do nothing, Mr. Craggs, but keep quiet." "Nothing," returned Craggs. "Our friend the Doctor makes light of such things," said Mr. Snitchey, shaking his head. "I hope he mayn’t stand in need of his philosophy. Our friend Alfred talks of the battle of life," he shook his head again, "I hope he mayn’t be cut down early in the day. Have you got your hat, Mr. Craggs? I am going to put the other candle out." Mr. Craggs replying in the affirmative, Mr. Snitchey suited the action to the word, and they groped their way out of the council-chamber: now dark as the subject, or the law in general. My story passes to a quiet little study, where, on that same night, the sisters and the hale old Doctor sat by a cheerful fire-side. Grace was working at her needle. Marion read aloud from a book before her. The Doctor, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his feet spread out upon the warm rug, leaned back in his easy chair, and listened to the book, and looked upon his daughters. They were very beautiful to look upon. Two better faces for a fireside, never made a fireside bright and sacred. Something of the difference between them had been softened down in three years’ time; and enthroned upon the clear brow of the younger sister, looking through her eyes, and thrilling in her voice, was the same earnest nature that her own motherless youth had ripened in the elder sister long ago. But she still appeared at once the lovelier and weaker of the two; still seemed to rest her head upon her sister’s breast, and put her trust in her, and look into her eyes for counsel and reliance. Those loving eyes, so calm, serene, and cheerful, as of old. " 'And being in her own home,'" read Marion, from the book; " 'her home made exquisitely dear by these remembrances, she now began to know that the great trial of her heart must soon come on, and could not be delayed. O Home, our comforter and friend when others fall away, to part with whom, at any step between the cradle and the grave—'" "Marion, my love!" said Grace. "Why, Puss!" exclaimed her father, "what’s the matter?" She put her hand upon the hand her sister stretched towards her, and read on; her voice still faltering and trembling, though she made an effort to command it when thus interrupted. " 'To part with whom, at any step between the cradle and the grave, is always sorrowful. Oh Home, so true to us, so often slighted in return, be lenient to them that turn away from thee, and do not haunt their erring footsteps too reproachfully! Let no kind looks, no well-remembered smiles, be seen upon thy phantom face. Let no ray of affection, welcome, gentleness, forbearance, cordiality, shine from thy white head. Let no old loving word, or tone, rise up in judgment against thy deserter; but if thou canst look harshly and severely, do, in mercy to the Penitent!'" "Dear Marion, read no more to-night," said Grace —for she was weeping. "I cannot," she replied, and closed the book. "The words seem all on fire!" The Doctor was amused at this; and laughed as he patted her on the head. "What! overcome by a story-book!" said Doctor Jeddler. "Print and paper! Well, well, it’s all one. It’s as rational to make a serious matter of print and paper as of anything else. But dry your eyes, love, dry your eyes. I dare say the heroine has got home again long ago, and made it up all round—and if she hasn’t, a real home is only four walls; and a fictitious one, mere rags and ink. What’s the matter now?" "It’s only me, Mister," said Clemency, putting in her head at the door. "And what’s the matter with you?" said the Doctor. "Oh, bless you, nothing an’t the matter with me," returned Clemency—and truly too, to judge from her well-soaped face, in which there gleamed as usual the very soul of good humour, which, ungainly as she was, made her quite engaging. Abrasions on the elbows are not generally understood, it is true, to range within that class of personal charms called beauty-spots. But, it is better, going through the world, to have the arms chafed in that narrow passage, than the temper: and Clemency’s was sound and whole as any beauty’s in the land. "Nothing an’t the matter with me," said Clemency, entering, "but—come a little closer, Mister." The Doctor, in some astonishment, complied with this invitation. "You said I wasn’t to give you one before them, you know," said Clemency. A novice in the family might have supposed, from her extraordinary ogling as she said it, as well as from a singular rapture or ecstasy which pervaded her elbows, as if she were embracing herself, that ‘one,’ in its most favorable interpretation, meant a chaste salute. Indeed the Doctor himself seemed alarmed, for the moment; but quickly regained his composure, as Clemency, having had recourse to both her pockets—beginning with the right one, going away to the wrong one, and afterwards coming back to the right one again—produced a letter from the Post-office. "Britain was riding by on a errand," she chuckled, handing it to the Doctor, "and see the mail come in, and waited for it. There’s A. H. in the corner. Mr. Alfred’s on his journey home, I bet. We shall have a wedding in the house—there was two spoons in my saucer this morning. Oh Luck, how slow he opens it!" All this she delivered, by way of soliloquy, gradually rising higher and higher on tiptoe, in her impatience to hear the news, and making a corkscrew of her apron, and a bottle of her mouth. At last, arriving at a climax of suspense, and seeing the Doctor still engaged in the perusal of the letter, she came down flat upon the soles of her feet again, and cast her apron, as a veil, over her head, in a mute despair, and inability to bear it any longer. "Here! Girls!" cried the Doctor. "I can’t help it: I never could keep a secret in my life. There are not many secrets, indeed, worth being kept in such a—well! never mind that. Alfred’s coming home, my dears, directly." "Directly!" exclaimed Marion. "What! The story-book is soon forgotten!" said the Doctor, pinching her cheek. "I thought the news would dry those tears. Yes. 'Let it be a surprise,' he says, here. But I can’t let it be a surprise. He must have a welcome." "Directly!" repeated Marion. "Why, perhaps not what your impatience calls 'directly,’" returned the Doctor; "but pretty soon too. Let us see. Let us see. To-day is Thursday, is it not? Then he promises to be here, this day month." "This day month!" repeated Marion, softly. "A gay day and a holiday for us," said the cheerful voice of her sister Grace, kissing her in congratulation. "Long looked forward to, dearest, and come at last." She answered with a smile; a mournful smile, but full of sisterly affection. As she looked in her sister’s face, and listened to the quiet music of her voice, picturing the happiness of this return, her own face glowed with hope and joy. And with a something else: a something shining more and more through all the rest of its expression: for which I have no name. It was not exultation, triumph, proud enthusiasm. They are not so calmly shown. It was not love and gratitude alone, though love and gratitude were part of it. It emanated from no sordid thought, for sordid thoughts do not light up the brow, and hover on the lips, and move the spirit like a fluttered light, until the sympathetic figure trembles. Dr. Jeddler, in spite of his system of philosophy—which he was continually contradicting and denying in practice, but more famous philosophers have done that—could not help having as much interest in the return of his old ward and pupil, as if it had been a serious event. So he sat himself down in his easy chair again, stretched out his slippered feet once more upon the rug, read the letter over and over a great many times, and talked it over more times still. "Ah! The day was," said the Doctor, looking at the fire, "when you and he, Grace, used to trot about arm-in-arm, in his holiday time, like a couple of walking dolls. You remember?" "I remember," she answered, with her pleasant laugh, and plying her needle busily. "This day month, indeed!" mused the Doctor. "That hardly seems a twelve-month ago. And where was my little Marion then!" "Never far from her sister," said Marion, cheerily, "however little. Grace was everything to me, even when she was a young child herself." "True, Puss, true," returned the Doctor. "She was a staid little woman, was Grace, and a wise housekeeper, and a busy, quiet, pleasant body; bearing with our humours and anticipating our wishes, and always ready to forget her own, even in those times. I never knew you positive or obstinate, Grace, my darling, even then, on any subject but one." "I am afraid I have changed sadly for the worse, since," laughed Grace, still busy at her work. "What was that one, father?" "Alfred, of course," said the Doctor. "Nothing would serve you but you must be called Alfred’s wife; so we called you Alfred’s wife; and you liked it better, I believe (odd as it seems now), than being called a Duchess, if we could have made you one." "Indeed?" said Grace, placidly. "Why, don’t you remember?" inquired the Doctor. "I think I remember something of it," she returned, "but not much. It’s so long ago." And as she sat at work, she hummed the burden of an old song, which the Doctor liked. "Alfred will find a real wife soon," she said, breaking off; "and that will be a happy time indeed for all of us. My three years’ trust is nearly at an end, Marion. It has been a very easy one. I shall tell Alfred, when I give you back to him, that you have loved him dearly all the time, and that he has never once needed my good services. May I tell him so, love?" "Tell him, dear Grace," replied Marion, "that there never was a trust so generously, nobly, steadfastly discharged; and that I have loved you, all the time, dearer and dearer every day; and oh! how dearly now!" "Nay," said her cheerful sister, returning her embrace, "I can scarcely tell him that; we will leave my deserts to Alfred’s imagination. It will be liberal enough, dear Marion; like your own." With that, she resumed the work she had for a moment laid down, when her sister spoke so fervently: and with it the old song the Doctor liked to hear. And the Doctor, still reposing in his easy chair, with his slippered feet stretched out before him on the rug, listened to the tune, and beat time on his knee with Alfred’s letter, and looked at his two daughters, and thought that among the many trifles of the trifling world, these trifles were agreeable enough. Clemency Newcome, in the mean time, having accomplished her mission and lingered in the room until she had made herself a party to the news, descended to the kitchen, where her coadjutor, Mr. Britain, was regaling after supper, surrounded by such a plentiful collection of bright pot-lids, well-scoured saucepans, burnished dinner-covers, gleaming kettles, and other tokens of her industrious habits, arranged upon the walls and shelves, that he sat as in the centre of a hall of mirrors. The majority did not give forth very flattering portraits of him, certainly; nor were they by any means unanimous in their reflections; as some made him very long-faced, others very broad-faced, some tolerably well-looking, others vastly ill-looking, according to their several manners of reflecting: which were as various, in respect of one fact, as those of so many kinds of men. But they all agreed that in the midst of them sat, quite at his ease, an individual with a pipe in his mouth, and a jug of beer at his elbow, who nodded condescendingly to Clemency, when she stationed herself at the same table. "Well, Clemmy," said Britain, "how are you by this time, and what’s the news?" Clemency told him the news, which he received very graciously. A gracious change had come over Benjamin from head to foot. He was much broader, much redder, much more cheerful, and much jollier in all respects. It seemed as if his face had been tied up in a knot before, and was now untwisted and smoothed out. "There’ll be another job for Snitchey and Craggs, I suppose," he observed, puffing slowly at his pipe. "More witnessing for you and me, perhaps, Clemmy!" "Lor!" replied his fair companion, with her favorite twist of her favorite joints. "I wish it was me, Britain!" "Wish what was you?" "A going to be married," said Clemency. Benjamin took his pipe out of his mouth and laughed heartily. "Yes! you’re a likely subject for that!" he said. "Poor Clem!" Clemency for her part laughed as heartily as he, and seemed as much amused by the idea. "Yes," she assented, "I’m a likely subject for that; an’t I?" "You’ll never be married, you know," said Mr. Britain, resuming his pipe. "Don’t you think I ever shall though?" said Clemency, in perfect good faith. Mr. Britain shook his head. "Not a chance of it!" "Only think!" said Clemency. "Well!—I suppose you mean to, Britain, one of these days; don’t you?" A question so abrupt, upon a subject so momentous, required consideration. After blowing out a great cloud of smoke, and looking at it with his head now on this side and now on that, as if it were actually the question, and he were surveying it in various aspects, Mr. Britain replied that he wasn’t altogether clear about it, but—ye-es—he thought he might come to that at last. "I wish her joy, whoever she may be!" cried Clemency. "Oh she’ll have that," said Benjamin, "safe enough." "But she wouldn’t have led quite such a joyful life as she will lead, and wouldn’t have had quite such a sociable sort of husband as she will have," said Clemency, spreading herself half over the table, and staring retrospectively at the candle, "if it hadn’t been for—not that I went to do it, for it was accidental, I am sure—if it hadn’t been for me; now would she, Britain?" "Certainly not," returned Mr. Britain, by this time in that high state of appreciation of his pipe, when a man can open his mouth but a very little way for speaking purposes; and sitting luxuriously immovable in his chair, can afford to turn only his eyes towards a companion, and that very passively and gravely. "Oh! I’m greatly beholden to you, you know, Clem." "Lor, how nice that is to think of!" said Clemency. At the same time, bringing her thoughts as well as her sight to bear upon the candle-grease, and becoming abruptly reminiscent of its healing qualities as a balsam, she anointed her left elbow with a plentiful application of that remedy. "You see I’ve made a good many investigations of one sort and another in my time," pursued Mr. Britain, with the profundity of a sage, "having been always of an inquiring turn of mind; and I’ve read a good many books about the general Rights of things and Wrongs of things, for I went into the literary line myself, when I began life." "Did you though!" cried the admiring Clemency. "Yes," said Mr. Britain: "I was hid for the best part of two years behind a bookstall, ready to fly out if anybody pocketed a volume; and after that, I was light porter to a stay and mantua maker, in which capacity I was employed to carry about, in oilskin baskets, nothing but deceptions—which soured my spirits and disturbed my confidence in human nature; and after that, I heard a world of discussions in this house, which soured my spirits fresh; and my opinion after all is, that, as a safe and comfortable sweetener of the same, and as a pleasant guide through life, there’s nothing like a nutmeg-grater." Clemency was about to offer a suggestion, but he stopped her by anticipating it. "Com-bined," he added gravely, "with a thimble." "Do as you wold, you know, and cetrer, eh!" observed Clemency, folding her arms comfortably in her delight at this avowal, and patting her elbows. "Such a short cut, an’t it?" "I’m not sure," said Mr. Britain, "that it’s what would be considered good philosophy. I’ve my doubts about that: but it wears well, and saves a quantity of snarling, which the genuine article don’t always." "See how you used to go on once, yourself, you know!" said Clemency. "Ah!" said Mr. Britain. "But the most extraordinary thing, Clemmy, is that I should live to be brought round, through you. That’s the strange part of it. Through you! Why, I suppose you haven’t so much as half an idea in your head." Clemency, without taking the least offence, shook it, and laughed and hugged herself, and said, "No, she didn’t suppose she had." "I’m pretty sure of it," said Mr. Britain. "Oh! I dare say you’re right," said Clemency. "I don’t pretend to none. I don’t want any." Benjamin took his pipe from his lips, and laughed till the tears ran down his face. "What a natural you are, Clemmy!" he said, shaking his head, with an infinite relish of the joke, and wiping his eyes. Clemency, without the smallest inclination to dispute it, did the like, and laughed as heartily as he. "I can’t help liking you," said Mr. Britain; "you’re a regular good creature in your way, so shake hands, Clem. Whatever happens, I’ll always take notice of you, and be a friend to you." "Will you?" returned Clemency. "Well! that’s very good of you." "Yes, yes," said Mr. Britain, giving her his pipe to knock the ashes out of it; "I’ll stand by you. Hark! That’s a curious noise!" "Noise!" repeated Clemency. "A footstep outside. Somebody dropping from the wall, it sounded like," said Britain. "Are they all abed up-stairs?" "Yes, all abed by this time," she replied. "Didn’t you hear anything?" "No." They both listened, but heard nothing. "I tell you what," said Benjamin, taking down a lantern. "I’ll have a look round, before I go to bed myself, for satisfaction’s sake. Undo the door while I light this, Clemmy." Clemency complied briskly; but observed as she did so, that he would only have his walk for his pains, that it was all his fancy, and so forth. Mr. Britain said 'very likely;' but sallied out, nevertheless, armed with the poker, and casting the light of the lantern far and near in all directions. "It’s as quiet as a churchyard," said Clemency, looking after him; "and almost as ghostly too!" Glancing back into the kitchen, she cried fearfully, as a light figure stole into her view, "What’s that!" "Hush!" said Marion in an agitated whisper. "You have always loved me, have you not!" "Loved you, child! You may be sure I have." "I am sure. And I may trust you, may I not? There is no one else just now, in whom I can trust." "Yes," said Clemency, with all her heart. "There is some one out there," pointing to the door, "whom I must see, and speak with, to-night. Michael Warden, for God’s sake retire! Not now!" Clemency started with surprise and trouble as, following the direction of the speaker’s eyes, she saw a dark figure standing in the doorway. "In another moment you may be discovered," said Marion. "Not now! Wait, if you can, in some concealment. I will come presently." He waved his hand to her, and was gone. "Don’t go to bed. Wait here for me!" said Marion, hurriedly. "I have been seeking to speak to you for an hour past. Oh, be true to me!" Eagerly seizing her bewildered hand, and pressing it with both her own to her breast—an action more expressive, in its passion of entreaty, than the most eloquent appeal in words,—Marion withdrew; as the light of the returning lantern flashed into the room. "All still and peaceable. Nobody there. Fancy, I suppose," said Mr. Britain, as he locked and barred the door. "One of the effects of having a lively imagination. Halloa! Why, what’s the matter?" Clemency, who could not conceal the effects of her surprise and concern, was sitting in a chair: pale, and trembling from head to foot. "Matter!" she repeated, chafing her hands and elbows, nervously, and looking anywhere but at him. "That’s good in you, Britain, that is! After going and frightening one out of one’s life with noises and lanterns, and I don’t know what all. Matter! Oh, yes!" "If you’re frightened out of your life by a lantern, Clemmy," said Mr. Britain, composedly blowing it out and hanging it up again, "that apparition’s very soon got rid of. But you’re as bold as brass in general," he said, stopping to observe her; "and were, after the noise and the lantern too. What have you taken into your head? Not an idea, eh?" But as Clemency bade him good night very much after her usual fashion, and began to bustle about with a show of going to bed herself immediately, Little Britain, after giving utterance to the original remark that it was impossible to account for a woman’s whims, bade her good night in return, and taking up his candle strolled drowsily away to bed. When all was quiet, Marion returned. "Open the door," she said; "and stand there close beside me, while I speak to him, outside." Timid as her manner was, it still evinced a resolute and settled purpose, such as Clemency could not resist. She softly unbarred the door: but before turning the key, looked round on the young creature waiting to issue forth when she should open it. The face was not averted or cast down, but looking full upon her, in its pride of youth and beauty. Some simple sense of the slightness of the barrier that interposed itself between the happy home and honoured love of the fair girl, and what might be the desolation of that home, and shipwreck of its dearest treasure, smote so keenly on the tender heart of Clemency, and so filled it to overflowing with sorrow and compassion, that, bursting into tears, she threw her arms round Marion’s neck. "It’s little that I know, my dear," cried Clemency, "very little; but I know that this should not be. Think of what you do!" "I have thought of it many times," said Marion, gently. "Once more," urged Clemency. "Till to-morrow." Marion shook her head. "For Mr. Alfred’s sake," said Clemency, with homely earnestness. "Him that you used to love so dearly, once!" She hid her face, upon the instant, in her hands, repeating "Once!" as if it rent her heart. "Let me go out," said Clemency, soothing her. "I’ll tell him what you like. Don’t cross the door-step to-night. I’m sure no good will come of it. Oh, it was an unhappy day when Mr. Warden was ever brought here! Think of your good father, darling: of your sister." "I have," said Marion, hastily raising her head. "You don’t know what I do. You don't know what I do. I must speak to him. You are the best and truest friend in all the world for what you have said to me, but I must take this step. Will you go with me, Clemency," she kissed her on her friendly face, "or shall I go alone?" Sorrowing and wondering, Clemency turned the key, and opened the door. Into the dark and doubtful night that lay beyond the threshold, Marion passed quickly, holding by her hand. In the dark night he joined her, and they spoke together earnestly and long: and the hand that held so fast by Clemency’s, now trembled, now turned deadly cold, now clasped and closed on hers, in the strong feeling of the speech it emphasized unconsciously. When they returned, he followed to the door; and pausing there a moment, seized the other hand, and pressed it to his lips. Then stealthily withdrew. The door was barred and locked again, and once again she stood beneath her father’s roof. Not bowed down by the secret that she brought there, though so young; but with that same expression on her face for which I had no name before, and shining through her tears. Again she thanked and thanked her humble friend, and trusted to her, as she said, with confidence, implicitly. Her chamber safely reached, she fell upon her knees; and with her secret weighing on her heart, could pray! Could rise up from her prayers, so tranquil and serene, and bending over her fond sister in her slumber, look upon her face and smile: though sadly: murmuring as she kissed her forehead, how that Grace had been a mother to her, ever, and she loved her as a child! Could draw the passive arm about her neck when lying down to rest—it seemed to cling there, of its own will, protectingly and tenderly even in sleep—and breathe upon the parted lips, God bless her! Could sink into a peaceful sleep, herself; but for one dream, in which she cried out, in her innocent and touching voice, that she was quite alone, and they had all forgotten her. A month soon passes, even at its tardiest pace. The month appointed to elapse between that night and the return, was quick of foot, and went by, like a vapour. The day arrived. A raging winter day, that shook the old house, sometimes, as if it shivered in the blast. A day to make home doubly home. To give the chimney corner new delights. To shed a ruddier glow upon the faces gathered round the hearth; and draw each fireside group into a closer and more social league, against the roaring elements without. Such a wild winter day as best prepares the way for shut-out night; for curtained rooms, and cheerful looks; for music, laughter, dancing, light, and jovial entertainment! All these the Doctor had in store to welcome Alfred back. They knew that he could not arrive till night; and they would make the night air ring, he said, as he approached. All his old friends should congregate about him. He should not miss a face that he had known and liked. No! They should every one be there! So, guests were bidden, and musicians were engaged, and tables spread, and floors prepared for active feet, and bountiful provision made, of every hospitable kind. Because it was the Christmas season, and his eyes were all unused to English holly, and its sturdy green, the dancing room was garlanded and hung with it; and the red berries gleamed an English welcome to him, peeping from among the leaves. It was a busy day for all of them: a busier day for none of them than Grace, who noiselessly presided everywhere, and was the cheerful mind of all the preparations. Many a time that day (as well as many a time within the fleeting month preceding it), did Clemency glance anxiously, and almost fearfully, at Marion. She saw her paler, perhaps, than usual; but there was a sweet composure on her face that made it lovelier than ever. At night when she was dressed, and wore upon her head a wreath that Grace had proudly twined about it—its mimic flowers were Alfred’s favourites, as Grace remembered when she chose them—that old expression, pensive, almost sorrowful, and yet so spiritual, high, and stirring, sat again upon her brow, enhanced a hundred fold. "The next wreath I adjust on this fair head, will be a marriage wreath," said Grace; "or I am no true prophet, dear." Her sister smiled, and held her in her arms. "A moment, Grace. Don’t leave me yet. Are you sure that I want nothing more?" Her care was not for that. It was her sister’s face she thought of, and her eyes were fixed upon it, tenderly. "My art," said Grace, "can go no farther, dear girl; nor your beauty. I never saw you look so beautiful as now." "I never was so happy," she returned. "Ay, but there is a greater happiness in store. In such another home, as cheerful and as bright as this looks now," said Grace, "Alfred and his young wife will soon be living." She smiled again. "It is a happy home, Grace, in your fancy. I can see it in your eyes. I know it will be happy, dear. How glad I am to know it." "Well," cried the Doctor, bustling in. "Here we are, all ready for Alfred, eh? He can’t be here until pretty late—an hour or so before midnight—so there’ll be plenty of time for making merry before he comes. He’ll not find us with the ice unbroken. Pile up the fire here, Britain! Let it shine upon the holly till it winks again. It’s a world of nonsense, Puss; true lovers and all the rest of it—all nonsense; but we’ll be nonsensical with the rest of ’em, and give our true lover a mad welcome. Upon my word!" said the old Doctor, looking at his daughters proudly, "I’m not clear to-night, among other absurdities, but that I’m the father of two handsome girls." "All that one of them has ever done, or may do—may do, dearest father—to cause you pain or grief, forgive her," said Marion, "forgive her now, when her heart is full. Say that you forgive her. That you will forgive her. That she shall always share your love, and—," and the rest was not said, for her face was hidden on the old man’s shoulder. "Tut, tut, tut," said the Doctor gently. "Forgive! What have I to forgive? Heyday, if our true lovers come back to flurry us like this, we must hold ’em at a distance; we must send expresses out to stop ’em short upon the road, and bring ’em on a mile or two a day, until we’re properly prepared to meet ’em. Kiss me, Puss. Forgive! Why, what a silly child you are! If you had vexed and crossed me fifty times a day, instead of not at all, I’d forgive you everything, but such a supplication. Kiss me again, Puss. There! Prospective and retrospective—a clear score between us. Pile up the fire here! Would you freeze the people on this bleak December night! Let us be light, and warm, and merry, or I’ll not forgive some of you!" So gaily the old Doctor carried it! And the fire was piled up, and the lights were bright, and company arrived, and a murmuring of lively tongues began, and already there was a pleasant air of cheerful excitement stirring through all the house. More and more company came flocking in. Bright eyes sparkled upon Marion; smiling lips gave her joy of his return; sage mothers fanned themselves, and hoped she mightn’t be too youthful and inconstant for the quiet round of home; impetuous fathers fell into disgrace for too much exaltation of her beauty; daughters envied her; sons envied him; innumerable pairs of lovers profited by the occasion; all were interested, animated, and expectant. Mr. and Mrs. Craggs came arm in arm, but Mrs. Snitchey came alone. "Why, what’s become of him?" inquired the Doctor. The feather of a Bird of Paradise in Mrs. Snitchey’s turban, trembled as if the Bird of Paradise were alive again, when she said that doubtless Mr. Craggs knew. She was never told. "That nasty office," said Mrs. Craggs. "I wish it was burnt down," said Mrs. Snitchey. "He’s—he’s—there’s a little matter of business that keeps my partner rather late," said Mr. Craggs, looking uneasily about him. "Oh-h! Business. Don’t tell me!" said Mrs. Snitchey. "We know what business means," said Mrs. Craggs. But their not knowing what it meant, was perhaps the reason why Mrs. Snitchey’s Bird of Paradise feather quivered so portentously, and why all the pendant bits on Mrs. Craggs’s ear-rings shook like little bells. "I wonder you could come away, Mr. Craggs," said his wife. "Mr. Craggs is fortunate, I’m sure!" said Mrs. Snitchey. "That office so engrosses ’em," said Mrs. Craggs. "A person with an office has no business to be married at all," said Mrs. Snitchey. Then, Mrs. Snitchey said, within herself, that that look of hers had pierced to Craggs’s soul, and he knew it; and Mrs. Craggs observed to Craggs, that 'is Snitcheys’ were deceiving him behind his back, and he would find it out when it was too late. Still, Mr. Craggs, without much heeding these remarks, looked uneasily about until his eye rested on Grace, to whom he immediately presented himself. "Good evening, ma’am," said Craggs. "You look charmingly. Your—Miss—your sister, Miss Marion, is she—" "Oh, she’s quite well, Mr. Craggs." "Yes—I—is she here?" asked Craggs. "Here! Don’t you see her yonder? Going to dance?" said Grace. Mr. Craggs put on his spectacles to see the better; looked at her through them, for some time; coughed; and put them, with an air of satisfaction, in their sheath again, and in his pocket. Now the music struck up, and the dance commenced. The bright fire crackled and sparkled, rose and fell, as though it joined the dance itself, in right good fellowship. Sometimes it roared as if it would make music too. Sometimes it flashed and beamed as if it were the eye of the old room: it winked too, sometimes, like a knowing patriarch, upon the youthful whisperers in corners. Sometimes, it sported with the holly-boughs; and, shining on the leaves by fits and starts, made them look as if they were in the cold winter night again, and fluttering in the wind. Sometimes its genial humour grew obstreperous, and passed all bounds; and then it cast into the room, among the twinkling feet, with a loud burst, a shower of harmless little sparks, and in its exultation leaped and bounded, like a mad thing, up the broad old chimney. Another dance was near its close, when Mr. Snitchey touched his partner, who was looking on, upon the arm. Mr. Craggs started, as if his familiar had been a spectre. "Is he gone?" he asked. "Hush! He has been with me," said Snitchey, "for three hours and more. He went over everything. He looked into all our arrangements for him, and was very particular indeed. He—Humph!" The dance was finished. Marion passed close before him, as he spoke. She did not observe him, or his partner; but looked over her shoulder towards her sister in the distance, as she slowly made her way into the crowd, and passed out of their view. "You see! All safe and well," said Mr. Craggs. "He didn’t recur to that subject, I suppose?" "Not a word." "And is he really gone? Is he safe away?" "He keeps to his word. He drops down the river with the tide in that shell of a boat of his, and so goes out to sea on this dark night—a dare-devil he is—before the wind. There’s no such lonely road anywhere else. That’s one thing. The tide flows, he says, an hour before midnight about this time. I’m glad it’s over." Mr. Snitchey wiped his forehead, which looked hot and anxious. "What do you think," said Mr. Craggs, "about—" "Hush!" replied his cautious partner, looking straight before him. "I understand you. Don’t mention names, and don’t let us seem to be talking secrets. I don’t know what to think; and to tell you the truth, I don’t care now. It’s a great relief. His self-love deceived him, I suppose. Perhaps the young lady coquetted a little. The evidence would seem to point that way. Alfred not arrived?" "Not yet," said Mr. Craggs. "Expected every minute." "Good." Mr. Snitchey wiped his forehead again. "It’s a great relief. I haven’t been so nervous since we’ve been in partnership. I intend to spend the evening now, Mr. Craggs." Mrs. Craggs and Mrs. Snitchey joined them as he announced this intention. The Bird of Paradise was in a state of extreme vibration, and the little bells were ringing quite audibly. "It has been the theme of general comment, Mr. Snitchey," said Mrs. Snitchey. "I hope the office is satisfied." "Satisfied with what, my dear?" asked Mr. Snitchey. "With the exposure of a defenceless woman to ridicule and remark," returned his wife. "That is quite in the way of the office, that is." "I really, myself," said Mrs. Craggs, "have been so long accustomed to connect the office with everything opposed to domesticity, that I am glad to know it as the avowed enemy of my peace. There is something honest in that, at all events." "My dear," urged Mr. Craggs, "your good opinion is invaluable, but I never avowed that the office was the enemy of your peace." "No," said Mrs. Craggs, ringing a perfect peal upon the little bells. "Not you, indeed. You wouldn’t be worthy of the office, if you had the candor to." "As to my having been away to-night, my dear," said Mr. Snitchey, giving her his arm, "the deprivation has been mine, I’m sure; but, as Mr. Craggs knows—" Mrs. Snitchey cut this reference very short by hitching her husband to a distance, and asking him to look at that man. To do her the favour to look at him! "At which man, my dear?" said Mr. Snitchey. "Your chosen companion; I’m no companion to you, Mr. Snitchey." "Yes, yes, you are, my dear," he interposed. "No, no, I’m not," said Mrs. Snitchey with a majestic smile. "I know my station. Will you look at your chosen companion, Mr. Snitchey; at your referee, at the keeper of your secrets, at the man you trust; at your other self, in short?" The habitual association of Self with Craggs, occasioned Mr. Snitchey to look in that direction. "If you can look that man in the eye this night," said Mrs. Snitchey, "and not know that you are deluded, practised upon: made the victim of his arts, and bent down prostrate to his will by some unaccountable fascination which it is impossible to explain, and against which no warning of mine is of the least avail: all I can say is—I pity you!" At the very same moment Mrs. Craggs was oracular on the cross subject. Was it possible she said, that Craggs could so blind himself to his Snitcheys, as not to feel his true position? Did he mean to say that he had seen his Snitcheys come into that room, and didn’t plainly see that there was reservation, cunning, treachery, in the man? Would he tell her that his very action, when he wiped his forehead and looked so stealthily about him, didn’t show that there was something weighing on the conscience of his precious Snitcheys (if he had a conscience), that wouldn’t bear the light? Did anybody but his Snitcheys come to festive entertainments like a burglar?—which, by the way, was hardly a clear illustration of the case, as he had walked in very mildly at the door. And would he still assert to her at noon-day (it being nearly midnight), that his Snitcheys were to be justified through thick and thin, against all facts, and reason, and experience? Neither Snitchey nor Craggs openly attempted to stem the current which had thus set in, but, both were content to be carried gently along it, until its force abated; which happened at about the same time as a general movement for a country dance; when Mr. Snitchey proposed himself as a partner to Mrs. Craggs, and Mr. Craggs gallantly offered himself to Mrs. Snitchey; and after some such slight evasions as "why don’t you ask somebody else?" and "you’ll be glad, I know, if I decline," and "I wonder you can dance out of the office" (but this jocosely now), each lady graciously accepted, and took her place. It was an old custom among them, indeed, to do so, and to pair off, in like manner, at dinners and suppers; for they were excellent friends, and on a footing of easy familiarity. Perhaps the false Craggs and the wicked Snitchey were a recognised fiction with the two wives, as Doe and Roe, incessantly running up and down bailiwicks, were with the two husbands: or, perhaps the ladies had instituted, and taken upon themselves, these two shares in the business, rather than be left out of it altogether. But, certain it is, that each wife went as gravely and steadily to work in her vocation as her husband did in his: and would have considered it almost impossible for the Firm to maintain a successful and respectable existence, without her laudable exertions. But now the Bird of Paradise was seen to flutter down the middle; and the little bells began to bounce and jingle in poussette; and the Doctor’s rosy face spun round and round, like an expressive pegtop highly varnished; and breathless Mr. Craggs began to doubt already, whether country dancing had been made "too easy," like the rest of life; and Mr. Snitchey, with his nimble cuts and capers, footed it for Self and Craggs, and half a dozen more. Now, too, the fire took fresh courage, favored by the lively wind the dance awakened, and burnt clear and high. It was the Genius of the room, and present everywhere. It shone in people’s eyes, it sparkled in the jewels on the snowy necks of girls, it twinkled at their ears as if it whispered to them slyly, it flashed about their waists, it flickered on the ground and made it rosy for their feet, it bloomed upon the ceiling that its glow might set off their bright faces, and it kindled up a general illumination in Mrs. Craggs’s little belfry. Now, too, the lively air that fanned it, grew less gentle as the music quickened and the dance proceeded with new spirit; and a breeze arose that made the leaves and berries dance upon the wall, as they had often done upon the trees; and rustled in the room as if an invisible company of fairies, treading in the foot-steps of the good substantial revellers, were whirling after them. Now, too, no feature of the Doctor’s face could be distinguished as he spun and spun; and now there seemed a dozen Birds of Paradise in fitful flight; and now there were a thousand little bells at work; and now a fleet of flying skirts was ruffled by a little tempest; when the music gave in, and the dance was over. Hot and breathless as the Doctor was, it only made him the more impatient for Alfred’s coming. "Anything been seen, Britain? Anything been heard?" "Too dark to see far, Sir. Too much noise inside the house to hear." "That’s right! The gayer welcome for him. How goes the time?" "Just twelve, sir. He can’t be long, Sir." "Stir up the fire, and throw another log upon it," said the Doctor. "Let him see his welcome blazing out upon the night—good boy!—as he comes along!" He saw it—Yes! From the chaise he caught the light, as he turned the corner by the old church. He knew the room from which it shone. He saw the wintry branches of the old trees between the light and him. He knew that one of those trees rustled musically in the summer time at the window of Marion’s chamber. The tears were in his eyes. His heart throbbed so violently that he could hardly bear his happiness. How often he had thought of this time—pictured it under all circumstances—feared that it might never come—yearned, and wearied for it—far away! Again the light! Distinct and ruddy; kindled, he knew, to give him welcome, and to speed him home. He beckoned with his hand, and waved his hat, and cheered out, loud, as if the light were they, and they could see and hear him, as he dashed towards them through the mud and mire, triumphantly. Stop! He knew the Doctor, and understood what he had done. He would not let it be a surprise to them. But he could make it one, yet, by going forward on foot. If the orchard-gate were open, he could enter there; if not, the wall was easily climbed, as he knew of old; and he would be among them in an instant. He dismounted from the chaise, and telling the driver—even that was not easy in his agitation—to remain behind for a few minutes, and then to follow slowly, ran on with exceeding swiftness, tried the gate, scaled the wall, jumped down on the other side, and stood panting in the old orchard. There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands. Withered leaves crackled and snapped beneath his feet, as he crept softly on towards the house. The desolation of a winter night sat brooding on the earth, and in the sky. But the red light came cheerily towards him from the windows; figures passed and repassed there; and the hum and murmur of voices greeted his ear sweetly. Listening for hers: attempting, as he crept on, to detach it from the rest, and half believing that he heard it: he had nearly reached the door, when it was abruptly opened, and a figure coming out encountered his. It instantly recoiled with a half-suppressed cry. "Clemency," he said, "don’t you know me?" "Don’t come in!" she answered, pushing him back. "Go away. Don’t ask me why. Don’t come in." "What is the matter?" he exclaimed. "I don’t know. I—I am afraid to think. Go back. Hark!" There was a sudden tumult in the house. She put her hands upon her ears. A wild scream, such as no hands could shut out, was heard; and Grace—distraction in her looks and manner—rushed out at the door. "Grace!" He caught her in his arms. "What is it! Is she dead!" She disengaged herself, as if to recognise his face, and fell down at his feet. A crowd of figures came about them from the house. Among them was her father, with a paper in his hand. "What is it!" cried Alfred, grasping his hair with his hands, and looking in an agony from face to face, as he bent upon his knee beside the insensible girl. "Will no one look at me? Will no one speak to me? Does no one know me? Is there no voice among you all, to tell me what it is!" There was a murmur among them. "She is gone." "Gone!" he echoed. "Fled, my dear Alfred!" said the Doctor, in a broken voice, and with his hands before his face. "Gone from her home and us. To-night! She writes that she has made her innocent and blameless choice—entreats that we will forgive her—prays that we will not forget her—and is gone." "With whom? Where?" He started up, as if to follow in pursuit; but, when they gave way to let him pass, looked wildly round upon them, staggered back, and sunk down in his former attitude, clasping one of Grace’s cold hands in his own. There was a hurried running to and fro, confusion, noise, disorder, and no purpose. Some proceeded to disperse themselves about the roads, and some took horse, and some got lights, and some conversed together, urging that there was no trace or track to follow. Some approached him kindly, with the view of offering consolation; some admonished him that Grace must be removed into the house, and that he prevented it. He never heard them, and he never moved. The snow fell fast and thick. He looked up for a moment in the air, and thought that those white ashes strewn upon his hopes and misery, were suited to them well. He looked round on the whitening ground, and thought how Marion’s foot-prints would be hushed and covered up, as soon as made, and even that remembrance of her blotted out. But he never felt the weather and he never stirred. Part the Third. The world had grown six years older since that night of the return. It was a warm autumn afternoon, and there had been heavy rain. The sun burst suddenly from among the clouds; and the old battle-ground, sparkling brilliantly and cheerfully at sight of it in one green place, flashed a responsive welcome there, which spread along the country side as if a joyful beacon had been lighted up, and answered from a thousand stations. How beautiful the landscape kindling in the light, and that luxuriant influence passing on like a celestial presence, brightening everything! The wood, a sombre mass before, revealed its varied tints of yellow, green, brown, red; its different forms of trees, with raindrops glittering on their leaves and twinkling as they fell. The verdant meadow-land, bright and glowing, seemed as if it had been blind a minute since, and now had found a sense of sight wherewith to look up at the shining sky. Corn-fields, hedge-rows, fences, homesteads, the clustered roofs, the steeple of the church, the stream, the watermill, all sprang out of the gloomy darkness, smiling. Birds sang sweetly, flowers raised their drooping heads, fresh scents arose from the invigorated ground; the blue expanse above, extended and diffused itself; already the sun’s slanting rays pierced mortally the sullen bank of cloud that lingered in its flight; and a rainbow, spirit of all the colors that adorned the earth and sky, spanned the whole arch with its triumphant glory. At such a time, one little roadside Inn, snugly sheltered behind a great elm-tree with a rare seat for idlers encircling its capacious bole, addressed a cheerful front towards the traveller, as a house of entertainment ought, and tempted him with many mute but significant assurances of a comfortable welcome. The ruddy sign-board perched up in the tree, with its golden letters winking in the sun, ogled the passer-by, from among the green leaves, like a jolly face, and promised good cheer. The horse-trough, full of clear fresh water, and the ground below it, sprinkled with droppings of fragrant hay, made every horse that passed prick up his ears. The crimson curtains in the lower rooms, and the pure white hangings in the little bed-chambers above, beckoned, Come in! with every breath of air. Upon the bright green shutters, there were golden legends about beer and ale, and neat wines, and good beds; and an affecting picture of a brown jug frothing over at the top. Upon the window-sills were flowering plants in bright red pots, which made a lively show against the white front of the house; and in the darkness of the doorway there were streaks of light, which glanced off from the surfaces of bottles and tankards. On the door-step, appeared a proper figure of a landlord, too; for though he was a short man, he was round and broad; and stood with his hands in his pockets, and his legs just wide enough apart to express a mind at rest upon the subject of the cellar, and an easy confidence—too calm and virtuous to become a swagger—in the general resources of the Inn. The superabundant moisture, trickling from everything after the late rain, set him off well. Nothing near him was thirsty. Certain top-heavy dahlias, looking over the palings of his neat well-ordered garden, had swilled as much as they could carry—perhaps a trifle more—and may have been the worse for liquor; but the sweetbriar, roses, wall-flowers, the plants at the windows, and the leaves on the old tree, were in the beaming state of moderate company that had taken no more than was wholesome for them, and had served to develope their best qualities. Sprinkling dewy drops about them on the ground, they seemed profuse of innocent and sparkling mirth, that did good where it lighted, softening neglected corners which the steady rain could seldom reach, and hurting nothing. This village Inn had assumed, on being established, an uncommon sign. It was called The Nutmeg-Grater. And underneath that household word, was inscribed, up in the tree, on the same flaming board, and in the like golden characters, By Benjamin Britain. At a second glance, and on a more minute examination of his face, you might have known that it was no other than Benjamin Britain himself who stood in the doorway—reasonably changed by time, but for the better; a very comfortable host indeed. "Mrs. B.," said Mr. Britain, looking down the road, "is rather late. It’s tea time." As there was no Mrs. Britain coming, he strolled leisurely out into the road and looked up at the house, very much to his satisfaction. "It’s just the sort of house," said Benjamin, "I should wish to stop at, if I didn’t keep it." Then he strolled towards the garden paling, and took a look at the dahlias. They looked over at him, with a helpless, drowsy hanging of their heads: which bobbed again, as the heavy drops of wet dripped off them. "You must be looked after," said Benjamin. "Memorandum, not to forget to tell her so. She’s a long time coming!" Mr. Britain’s better half seemed to be by so very much his better half, that his own moiety of himself was utterly cast away and helpless without her. "She hadn’t much to do, I think," said Ben. "There were a few little matters of business after market, but not many. Oh! here we are at last!" A chaise-cart, driven by a boy, came clattering along the road: and seated in it, in a chair, with a large well-saturated umbrella spread out to dry behind her, was the plump figure of a matronly woman, with her bare arms folded across a basket which she carried on her knee, several other baskets and parcels lying crowded around her, and a certain bright good-nature in her face and contented awkwardness in her manner, as she jogged to and fro with the motion of her carriage, which smacked of old times, even in the distance. Upon her nearer approach, this relish of bygone days was not diminished; and when the cart stopped at the Nutmeg Grater door, a pair of shoes, alighting from it, slipped nimbly through Mr. Britain’s open arms, and came down with a substantial weight upon the pathway, which shoes could hardly have belonged to any one but Clemency Newcome. In fact they did belong to her, and she stood in them, and a rosy comfortable-looking soul she was: with as much soap on her glossy face as in times of yore, but with whole elbows now, that had grown quite dimpled in her improved condition. "You’re late, Clemmy!" said Mr. Britain. "Why, you see, Ben, I’ve had a deal to do!" she replied, looking busily after the safe removal into the house of all the packages and baskets: "eight, nine, ten—where’s eleven? Oh! my basket’s eleven! It’s all right. Put the horse up, Harry, and if he coughs again give him a warm mash to-night. Eight, nine, ten. Why, where’s eleven? Oh I forgot, it’s all right. How’s the children, Ben?" "Hearty, Clemmy, hearty." "Bless their precious faces!" said Mrs. Britain, unbonneting her own round countenance (for she and her husband were by this time in the bar), and smoothing her hair with her open hands. "Give us a kiss, old man." Mr. Britain promptly complied. "I think," said Mrs. Britain, applying herself to her pockets and drawing forth an immense bulk of thin books and crumpled papers, a very kennel of dogs’ ears: "I’ve done everything. Bills all settled—turnips sold—brewer’s account looked into and paid—’bacco pipes ordered—seventeen pound four paid into the Bank—Doctor Heathfield’s charge for little Clem—you’ll guess what that is—Doctor Heathfield won’t take nothing again, Ben." "I thought he wouldn’t," returned Ben. "No. He says whatever family you was to have, Ben, he’d never put you to the cost of a halfpenny. Not if you was to have twenty." Mr. Britain’s face assumed a serious expression, and he looked hard at the wall. "An’t it kind of him?" said Clemency. "Very," returned Mr. Britain. "It’s the sort of kindness that I wouldn’t presume upon, on any account." "No," retorted Clemency. "Of course not. Then there’s the pony—he fetched eight pound two; and that an’t bad, is it?" "It’s very good," said Ben. "I’m glad you’re pleased!" exclaimed his wife. "I thought you would be; and I think that’s all, and so no more at present from yours and cetrer, C. Britain. Ha ha ha! There! Take all the papers, and lock ’em. Oh! Wait a minute. Here’s a printed bill to stick on the wall. Wet from the printer’s. How nice it smells!" "What’s this?" said Ben, looking over the document. "I don’t know," replied his wife. "I haven’t read a word of it." "'To be sold by Auction,'" read the host of the Nutmeg-Grater, "'unless previously disposed of by private contract.'" "They always put that," said Clemency. "Yes, but they don’t always put this," he returned. "Look here, 'Mansion,' &c.—'offices,' &c., 'shrubberies,' &c., 'ring fence,' &c. 'Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs,' &c. 'ornamental portion of the unencumbered freehold property of Michael Warden, Esquire, intending to continue to reside abroad'!" "Intending to continue to reside abroad!" repeated Clemency. "Here it is," said Britain. "Look!" "And it was only this very day that I heard it whispered at the old house, that better and plainer news had been half promised of her, soon!" said Clemency, shaking her head sorrowfully, and patting her elbows as if the recollection of old times unconsciously awakened her old habits. "Dear, dear, dear! There’ll be heavy hearts, Ben, yonder." Mr. Britain heaved a sigh, and shook his head, and said he couldn’t make it out: he had left off trying long ago. With that remark, he applied himself to putting up the bill just inside the bar window: and Clemency, after meditating in silence for a few moments, roused herself, cleared her thoughtful brow, and bustled off to look after the children. Though the host of the Nutmeg Grater had a lively regard for his good-wife, it was of the old patronising kind; and she amused him mightily. Nothing would have astonished him so much, as to have known for certain from any third party, that it was she who managed the whole house, and made him, by her plain straightforward thrift, good-humour, honesty, and industry, a thriving man. So easy it is, in any degree of life (as the world very often finds it,) to take those cheerful natures that never assert their merit, at their own modest valuation; and to conceive a flippant liking of people for their outward oddities and eccentricities, whose innate worth, if we would look so far, might make us blush in the comparison! It was comfortable to Mr. Britain, to think of his own condescension in having married Clemency. She was a perpetual testimony to him of the goodness of his heart, and the kindness of his disposition; and he felt that her being an excellent wife was an illustration of the old precept that virtue is its own reward. He had finished wafering up the bill, and had locked the vouchers for her day’s proceedings in the cupboard—chuckling all the time, over her capacity for business—when, returning with the news that the two Master Britains were playing in the coach-house under the superintendence of one Betsey, and that little Clem was sleeping "like a picture," she sat down to tea, which had awaited her arrival, on a little table. It was a very neat little bar, with the usual display of bottles and glasses; a sedate clock, right to the minute (it was half-past five); everything in its place, and everything furbished and polished up to the very utmost. "It’s the first time I’ve sat down quietly to-day, I declare," said Mrs. Britain, taking a long breath, as if she had sat down for the night; but getting up again immediately to hand her husband his tea, and cut him his bread-and-butter; "how that bill does set me thinking of old times!" "Ah!" said Mr. Britain, handling his saucer like an oyster, and disposing of its contents on the same principle. "That same Mr. Michael Warden," said Clemency, shaking her head at the notice of sale, "lost me my old place." "And got you your husband," said Mr. Britain. "Well! So he did," retorted Clemency, "and many thanks to him." "Man’s the creature of habit," said Mr. Britain, surveying her, over his saucer. "I had somehow got used to you, Clem; and I found I shouldn’t be able to get on without you. So we went and got made man and wife. Ha! ha! We! Who’d have thought it!" "Who indeed!" cried Clemency. "It was very good of you, Ben." "No, no, no," replied Mr. Britain, with an air of self-denial. "Nothing worth mentioning." "Oh yes it was, Ben," said his wife, with great simplicity; "I’m sure I think so, and am very much obliged to you. Ah!" looking again at the bill; "when she was known to be gone, and out of reach, dear girl, I couldn’t help telling—for her sake quite as much as theirs—what I knew, could I?" "You told it, anyhow," observed her husband. "And Doctor Jeddler," pursued Clemency, putting down her tea-cup, and looking thoughtfully at the bill, "in his grief and passion, turned me out of house and home! I never have been so glad of anything in all my life, as that I didn’t say an angry word to him, and hadn’t any angry feeling towards him, even then; for he repented that truly, afterwards. How often he has sat in this room, and told me over and over again he was sorry for it!—the last time, only yesterday, when you were out. How often he has sat in this room, and talked to me, hour after hour, about one thing and another, in which he made believe to be interested!—but only for the sake of the days that are gone by, and because he knows she used to like me, Ben!" "Why, how did you ever come to catch a glimpse of that, Clem?" asked her husband: astonished that she should have a distinct perception of a truth which had only dimly suggested itself to his inquiring mind. "I don’t know, I’m sure," said Clemency, blowing her tea, to cool it. "Bless you, I couldn’t tell you, if you was to offer me a reward of a hundred pound." He might have pursued this metaphysical subject but for her catching a glimpse of a substantial fact behind him, in the shape of a gentleman attired in mourning, and cloaked and booted like a rider on horseback, who stood at the bar-door. He seemed attentive to their conversation, and not at all impatient to interrupt it. Clemency hastily rose at this sight. Mr. Britain also rose and saluted the guest. "Will you please to walk up-stairs, Sir? There’s a very nice room up-stairs, sir." "Thank you," said the stranger, looking earnestly at Mr. Britain’s wife. "May I come in here?" "Oh, surely, if you like, Sir," returned Clemency, admitting him. "What would you please to want, Sir?" The bill had caught his eye, and he was reading it. "Excellent property that, Sir," observed Mr. Britain. He made no answer; but turning round, when he had finished reading, looked at Clemency with the same observant curiosity as before. "You were asking me," he said, still looking at her,— "What you would please to take, Sir," answered Clemency, stealing a glance at him in return. "If you will let me have a draught of ale," he said, moving to a table by the window, "and will let me have it here, without being any interruption to your meal, I shall be much obliged to you." He sat down as he spoke, without any further parley, and looked out at the prospect. He was an easy, well-knit figure of a man in the prime of life. His face, much browned by the sun, was shaded by a quantity of dark hair; and he wore a moustache. His beer being set before him, he filled out a glass, and drank, good-humouredly, to the house; adding, as he put the tumbler down again: "It’s a new house, is it not?" "Not particularly new, Sir," replied Mr. Britain. "Between five and six years old," said Clemency; speaking very distinctly. "I think I heard you mention Doctor Jeddler’s name, as I came in," inquired the stranger. "That bill reminds me of him; for I happen to know something of that story, by hearsay, and through certain connexions of mine.—Is the old man living?" "Yes, he’s living, Sir," said Clemency. "Much changed?" "Since when, Sir?" returned Clemency, with remarkable emphasis and expression. "Since his daughter—went away." "Yes! he’s greatly changed since then," said Clemency. "He’s grey and old, and hasn’t the same way with him at all; but I think he’s happy now. He has taken on with his sister since then, and goes to see her very often. That did him good, directly. At first, he was sadly broken down; and it was enough to make one’s heart bleed, to see him wandering about, railing at the world; but a great change for the better came over him after a year or two, and then he began to like to talk about his lost daughter, and to praise her, ay and the world too! and was never tired of saying, with the tears in his poor eyes, how beautiful and good she was. He had forgiven her then. That was about the same time as Miss Grace’s marriage. Britain, you remember?" Mr. Britain remembered very well. "The sister is married then," returned the stranger. He paused for some time before he asked, "To whom?" Clemency narrowly escaped oversetting the tea-board, in her emotion at this question. "Did you never hear?" she said. "I should like to hear," he replied, as he filled his glass again, and raised it to his lips. "Ah! It would be a long story, if it was properly told," said Clemency, resting her chin on the palm of her left hand, and supporting that elbow on her right hand, as she shook her head, and looked back through the intervening years, as if she were looking at a fire. "It would be a long story, I am sure." "But told as a short one," suggested the stranger. "Told as a short one," repeated Clemency in the same thoughtful tone, and without any apparent reference to him, or consciousness of having auditors, "what would there be to tell? That they grieved together, and remembered her together, like a person dead; that they were so tender of her, never would reproach her, called her back to one another as she used to be, and found excuses for her? Every one knows that. I’m sure I do. No one better," added Clemency, wiping her eyes with her hand. "And so," suggested the stranger. "And so," said Clemency, taking him up mechanically, and without any change in her attitude or manner, "they at last were married. They were married on her birth-day—it comes round again to-morrow—very quiet, very humble like, but very happy. Mr. Alfred said, one night when they were walking in the orchard, 'Grace, shall our wedding-day be Marion’s birth-day?' And it was." "And they have lived happily together?" said the stranger. "Ay," said Clemency. "No two people ever more so. They have had no sorrow but this." She raised her head as with a sudden attention to the circumstances under which she was recalling these events, and looked quickly at the stranger. Seeing that his face was turned toward the window, and that he seemed intent upon the prospect, she made some eager signs to her husband, and pointed to the bill, and moved her mouth as if she were repeating with great energy, one word or phrase to him over and over again. As she uttered no sound, and as her dumb motions like most of her gestures were of a very extraordinary kind, this unintelligible conduct reduced Mr. Britain to the confines of despair. He stared at the table, at the stranger, at the spoons, at his wife—followed her pantomime with looks of deep amazement and perplexity—asked in the same language, was it property in danger, was it he in danger, was it she—answered her signals with other signals expressive of the deepest distress and confusion—followed the motions of her lips—guessed half aloud "milk and water," "monthly warning," "mice and walnuts"—and couldn’t approach her meaning. Clemency gave it up at last, as a hopeless attempt; and moving her chair by very slow degrees a little nearer to the stranger, sat with her eyes apparently cast down but glancing sharply at him now and then, waiting until he should ask some other question. She had not to wait long; for he said, presently: "And what is the after history of the young lady who went away? They know it, I suppose?" Clemency shook her head. "I’ve heard," she said, "that Doctor Jeddler is thought to know more of it than he tells. Miss Grace has had letters from her sister, saying that she was well and happy, and made much happier by her being married to Mr. Alfred: and has written letters back. But there’s a mystery about her life and fortunes, altogether, which nothing has cleared up to this hour, and which—" She faultered here, and stopped. "And which"—repeated the stranger. "Which only one other person, I believe, could explain," said Clemency, drawing her breath quickly. "Who may that be?" asked the stranger. "Mr. Michael Warden!" answered Clemency, almost in a shriek: at once conveying to her husband what she would have had him understand before, and letting Michael Warden know that he was recognised. "You remember me, sir?" said Clemency, trembling with emotion; "I saw just now you did! You remember me, that night in the garden. I was with her!" "Yes. You were," he said. "Yes, sir," returned Clemency. "Yes, to be sure. This is my husband, if you please. Ben, my dear Ben, run to Miss Grace—run to Mr. Alfred—run somewhere, Ben! Bring somebody here, directly!" "Stay!" said Michael Warden, quietly interposing himself between the door and Britain. "What would you do?" "Let them know that you are here, Sir," answered Clemency, clapping her hands in sheer agitation. "Let them know that they may hear of her, from your own lips; let them know that she is not quite lost to them, but that she will come home again yet, to bless her father and her loving sister—even her old servant, even me," she struck herself upon the breast with both hands, "with a sight of her sweet face. Run, Ben, run!" And still she pressed him on towards the door, and still Mr. Warden stood before it, with his hand stretched out, not angrily, but sorrowfully. "Or perhaps," said Clemency, running past her husband, and catching in her emotion at Mr. Warden’s cloak, "perhaps she’s here now; perhaps she’s close by. I think from your manner she is. Let me see her, Sir, if you please. I waited on her when she was a little child. I saw her grow to be the pride of all this place. I knew her when she was Mr. Alfred’s promised wife. I tried to warn her when you tempted her away. I know what her old home was when she was like the soul of it, and how it changed when she was gone and lost. Let me speak to her, if you please!" He gazed at her with compassion, not unmixed with wonder: but he made no gesture of assent. "I don’t think she can know," pursued Clemency, "how truly they forgive her; how they love her; what joy it would be to them, to see her once more. She may be timorous of going home. Perhaps if she sees me, it may give her new heart. Only tell me truly, Mr. Warden, is she with you?" "She is not," he answered, shaking his head. This answer, and his manner, and his black dress, and his coming back so quietly, and his announced intention of continuing to live abroad, explained it all. Marion was dead. He didn’t contradict her; yes, she was dead! Clemency sat down, hid her face upon the table, and cried. At that moment, a grey-headed old gentleman came running in: quite out of breath, and panting so much that his voice was scarcely to be recognised as the voice of Mr. Snitchey. "Good Heaven, Mr. Warden!" said the lawyer, taking him aside, "what wind has blown—" He was so blown himself, that he couldn’t get on any further until after a pause, when he added, feebly, "you here?" "An ill-wind, I am afraid," he answered. "If you could have heard what has just passed—how I have been besought and entreated to perform impossibilities—what confusion and affliction I carry with me!" "I can guess it all. But why did you ever come here, my good Sir?" retorted Snitchey. "Come! How should I know who kept the house? When I sent my servant on to you, I strolled in here because the place was new to me; and I had a natural curiosity in everything new and old, in these old scenes; and it was outside the town. I wanted to communicate with you first, before appearing there. I wanted to know what people would say to me. I see by your manner that you can tell me. If it were not for your confounded caution, I should have been possessed of everything long ago." "Our caution!" returned the lawyer, "speaking for Self and Craggs—deceased," here Mr. Snitchey, glancing at his hat-band, shook his head, "how can you reasonably blame us, Mr. Warden? It was understood between us that the subject was never to be renewed, and that it wasn’t a subject on which grave and sober men like us (I made a note of your observations at the time) could interfere. Our caution too! When Mr. Craggs, Sir, went down to his respected grave in the full belief—" "I had given a solemn promise of silence until I should return, whenever that might be," interrupted Mr. Warden; "and I have kept it." "Well, Sir, and I repeat it," returned Mr. Snitchey, "we were bound to silence too. We were bound to silence in our duty towards ourselves, and in our duty towards a variety of clients, you among them, who were as close as wax. It was not our place to make inquiries of you on such a delicate subject. I had my suspicions, Sir; but, it is not six months since I have known the truth, and been assured that you lost her." "By whom?" inquired his client. "By Doctor Jeddler himself, sir, who at last reposed that confidence in me voluntarily. He, and only he, has known the whole truth, years and years." "And you know it?" said his client. "I do, Sir!" replied Snitchey; "and I have also reason to know that it will be broken to her sister to-morrow evening. They have given her that promise. In the meantime, perhaps you’ll give me the honor of your company at my house; being unexpected at your own. But, not to run the chance of any more such difficulties as you have had here, in case you should be recognised—though you’re a good deal changed—I think I might have passed you myself, Mr. Warden—we had better dine here, and walk on in the evening. It’s a very good place to dine at, Mr. Warden: your own property, by the bye. Self and Craggs (deceased) took a chop here sometimes, and had it very comfortably served. Mr. Craggs, Sir," said Snitchey, shutting his eyes tight for an instant, and opening them again, "was struck off the roll of life too soon." "Heaven forgive me for not condoling with you," returned Michael Warden, passing his hand across his forehead, "but I’m like a man in a dream at present. I seem to want my wits. Mr. Craggs—yes—I am very sorry we have lost Mr. Craggs." But he looked at Clemency as he said it, and seemed to sympathise with Ben, consoling her. "Mr. Craggs, Sir," observed Snitchey, "didn’t find life, I regret to say, as easy to have and to hold as his theory made it out, or he would have been among us now. It’s a great loss to me. He was my right arm, my right leg, my right ear, my right eye, was Mr. Craggs. I am paralytic without him. He bequeathed his share of the business to Mrs. Craggs, her executors, administrators, and assigns. His name remains in the Firm to this hour. I try, in a childish sort of a way, to make believe, sometimes, that he’s alive. You may observe that I speak for Self and Craggs—deceased Sir—deceased," said the tender-hearted attorney, waving his pocket-handkerchief. Michael Warden, who had still been observant of Clemency, turned to Mr. Snitchey when he ceased to speak, and whispered in his ear. "Ah, poor thing!" said Snitchey, shaking his head. "Yes. She was always very faithful to Marion. She was always very fond of her. Pretty Marion! Poor Marion! Cheer up, Mistress—you are married now, you know, Clemency." Clemency only sighed, and shook her head. "Well, well! Wait till to-morrow," said the lawyer, kindly. "To-morrow can’t bring back the dead to life, Mister," said Clemency, sobbing. "No. It can’t do that, or it would bring back Mr. Craggs, deceased," returned the lawyer. "But it may bring some soothing circumstances; it may bring some comfort. Wait till to-morrow!" So Clemency, shaking his proffered hand, said she would; and Britain, who had been terribly cast down at sight of his despondent wife (which was like the business hanging its head), said that was right; and Mr. Snitchey and Michael Warden went up stairs; and there they were soon engaged in a conversation so cautiously conducted, that no murmur of it was audible above the clatter of plates and dishes, the hissing of the frying-pan, the bubbling of saucepans, the low monotonous waltzing of the Jack—with a dreadful click every now and then as if it had met with some mortal accident to its head, in a fit of giddiness—and all the other preparations in the kitchen, for their dinner. To-morrow was a bright and peaceful day; and nowhere were the autumn tints more beautifully seen, than from the quiet orchard of the Doctor’s house. The snows of many winter nights had melted from that ground, the withered leaves of many summer times had rustled there, since she had fled. The honey-suckle porch was green again, the trees cast bountiful and changing shadows on the grass, the landscape was as tranquil and serene as it had ever been; but where was she! Not there. Not there. She would have been a stranger sight in her old home now, even than that home had been at first, without her. But a lady sat in the familiar place, from whose heart she had never passed away; in whose true memory she lived, unchanging, youthful, radiant with all promise and all hope; in whose affection—and it was a mother’s now: there was a cherished little daughter playing by her side—she had no rival, no successor; upon whose gentle lips her name was trembling then. The spirit of the lost girl looked out of those eyes. Those eyes of Grace, her sister, sitting with her husband in the orchard, on their wedding-day, and his and Marion’s birth-day. He had not become a great man; he had not grown rich; he had not forgotten the scenes and friends of his youth; he had not fulfilled any one of the Doctor’s old predictions. But in his useful, patient, unknown visiting of poor men’s homes; and in his watching of sick beds; and in his daily knowledge of the gentleness and goodness flowering the bye-paths of the world, not to be trodden down beneath the heavy foot of poverty, but springing up, elastic, in its track, and making its way beautiful; he had better learned and proved, in each succeeding year, the truth of his old faith. The manner of his life, though quiet and remote, had shown him how often men still entertained angels, unawares, as in the olden time; and how the most unlikely forms—even some that were mean and ugly to the view, and poorly clad—became irradiated by the couch of sorrow, want, and pain, and changed to ministering spirits with a glory round their heads. He lived to better purpose on the altered battle-ground perhaps, than if he had contended restlessly in more ambitious lists; and he was happy with his wife, dear Grace. And Marion. Had he forgotten her? "The time has flown, dear Grace," he said, "since then;" they had been talking of that night; "and yet it seems a long long while ago. We count by changes and events within us. Not by years." "Yet we have years to count by, too, since Marion was with us," returned Grace. "Six times, dear husband, counting to-night as one, we have sat here on her birth-day, and spoken together of that happy return, so eagerly expected and so long deferred. Ah when will it be! When will it be!" Her husband attentively observed her, as the tears collected in her eyes; and drawing nearer, said: "But, Marion told you, in that farewell letter which she left for you upon your table, love, and which you read so often, that years must pass away before it could be. Did she not?" She took a letter from her breast, and kissed it, and said "Yes." "That through these intervening years, however happy she might be, she would look forward to the time when you would meet again, and all would be made clear: and prayed you, trustfully and hopefully to do the same. The letter runs so, does it not, my dear?" "Yes, Alfred." "And every other letter she has written since?" "Except the last—some months ago—in which she spoke of you, and what you then knew, and what I was to learn to-night." He looked towards the sun, then fast declining, and said that the appointed time was sunset. "Alfred!" said Grace, laying her hand upon his shoulder earnestly, "there is something in this letter—this old letter, which you say I read so often—that I have never told you. But to-night, dear husband, with that sunset drawing near, and all our life seeming to soften and become hushed with the departing day, I cannot keep it secret." "What is it, love?" "When Marion went away, she wrote me, here, that you had once left her a sacred trust to me, and that now she left you, Alfred, such a trust in my hands: praying and beseeching me, as I loved her, and as I loved you, not to reject the affection she believed (she knew, she said) you would transfer to me when the new wound was healed, but to encourage and return it.’ "—And make me a proud, and happy man again, Grace. Did she say so?" "She meant, to make myself so blest and honored in your love," was his wife’s answer, as he held her in his arms. "Hear me, my dear!" he said.—"No. Hear me so!"—and as he spoke, he gently laid the head she had raised, again upon his shoulder. "I know why I have never heard this passage in the letter, until now. I know why no trace of it ever showed itself in any word or look of yours at that time. I know why Grace, although so true a friend to me, was hard to win to be my wife. And knowing it, my own! I know the priceless value of the heart I gird within my arms, and thank GOD for the rich possession!" She wept, but not for sorrow, as he pressed her to his heart. After a brief space, he looked down at the child, who was sitting at their feet, playing with a little basket of flowers, and bade her look how golden and how red the sun was. "Alfred," said Grace, raising her head quickly at these words. "The sun is going down. You have not forgotten what I am to know before it sets." "You are to know the truth of Marion’s history, my love," he answered. "All the truth," she said, imploringly. "Nothing veiled from me, any more. That was the promise. Was it not?" "It was," he answered. "Before the sun went down on Marion’s birth-day. And you see it, Alfred? It is sinking fast." He put his arm about her waist; and, looking steadily into her eyes, rejoined: "That truth is not reserved so long for me to tell, dear Grace. It is to come from other lips." "From other lips!" she faintly echoed. "Yes. I know your constant heart, I know how brave you are, I know that to you a word of preparation is enough. You have said, truly, that the time is come. It is. Tell me that you have present fortitude to bear a trial—a surprise—a shock: and the messenger is waiting at the gate." "What messenger?" she said. "And what intelligence does he bring?" "I am pledged," he answered her, preserving his steady look, "to say no more. Do you think you understand me?" "I am afraid to think," she said. There was that emotion in his face, despite its steady gaze, which frightened her. Again she hid her own face on his shoulder, trembling, and entreated him to pause—a moment. "Courage, my wife! When you have firmness to receive the messenger, the messenger is waiting at the gate. The sun is setting on Marion’s birth-day. Courage, courage, Grace!" She raised her head, and, looking at him, told him she was ready. As she stood, and looked upon him going away, her face was so like Marion’s as it had been in her later days at home, that it was wonderful to see. He took the child with him. She called her back—she bore the lost girl’s name—and pressed her to her bosom. The little creature, being released again, sped after him, and Grace was left alone. She knew not what she dreaded, or what hoped; but remained there, motionless, looking at the porch by which they had disappeared. Ah! what was that, emerging from its shadow; standing on its threshold! That figure, with its white garments rustling in the evening air; its head laid down upon her father’s breast, and pressed against it to his loving heart! O God! was it a vision that came bursting from the old man’s arms, and with a cry, and with a waving of its hands, and with a wild precipitation of itself upon her in its boundless love, sank down in her embrace! "Oh, Marion, Marion! Oh, my sister! Oh, my heart’s dear love! Oh, joy and happiness unutterable, so to meet again!" It was no dream, no phantom conjured up by hope and fear, but Marion, sweet Marion! So beautiful, so happy, so unalloyed by care and trial, so elevated and exalted in her loveliness, that as the setting sun shone brightly on her upturned face, she might have been a spirit visiting the earth upon some healing mission. Clinging to her sister, who had dropped upon a seat and bent down over her: and smiling through her tears, and kneeling close before her, with both arms twining round her, and never turning for an instant from her face: and with the glory of the setting sun upon her brow, and with the soft tranquillity of evening gathering around them: Marion at length broke silence; her voice, so calm, low, clear, and pleasant, well-tuned to the time. "When this was my dear home, Grace, as it will be now again—" "Stay, my sweet love! A moment! O Marion, to hear you speak again." She could not bear the voice she loved so well, at first. "When this was my dear home, Grace, as it will be now again, I loved him from my soul. I loved him most devotedly. I would have died for him, though I was so young. I never slighted his affection in my secret breast for one brief instant. It was far beyond all price to me. Although it is so long ago, and past, and gone, and everything is wholly changed, I could not bear to think that you, who love so well, should think I did not truly love him once. I never loved him better, Grace, than when he left this very scene upon this very day. I never loved him better, dear one, than I did that night when I left here." Her sister, bending over her, could look into her face, and hold her fast. "But he had gained, unconsciously," said Marion, with a gentle smile, "another heart, before I knew that I had one to give him. That heart—yours, my sister—was so yielded up, in all its other tenderness, to me; was so devoted, and so noble; that it plucked its love away, and kept its secret from all eyes but mine—Ah! what other eyes were quickened by such tenderness and gratitude!—and was content to sacrifice itself to me. But I knew something of its depths. I knew the struggle it had made. I knew its high, inestimable worth to him, and his appreciation of it, let him love me as he would. I knew the debt I owed it. I had its great example every day before me. What you had done for me, I knew that I could do, Grace, if I would, for you. I never laid my head down on my pillow, but I prayed with tears to do it. I never laid my head down on my pillow, but I thought of Alfred’s own words on the day of his departure, and how truly he had said (for I knew that, by you) that there were victories gained every day, in struggling hearts, to which these fields of battle were nothing. Thinking more and more upon the great endurance cheerfully sustained, and never known or cared for, that there must be, every day and hour, in that great strife of which he spoke, my trial seemed to grow light and easy: and He who knows our hearts, my dearest, at this moment, and who knows there is no drop of bitterness or grief—of anything but unmixed happiness—in mine, enabled me to make the resolution that I never would be Alfred’s wife. That he should be my brother, and your husband, if the course I took could bring that happy end to pass; but that I never would (Grace, I then loved him dearly, dearly!) be his wife!" "Oh, Marion! oh, Marion!" "I had tried to seem indifferent to him;" and she pressed her sister’s face against her own; "but that was hard, and you were always his true advocate. I had tried to tell you of my resolution, but you would never hear me; you would never understand me. The time was drawing near for his return. I felt that I must act, before the daily intercourse between us was renewed. I knew that one great pang, undergone at that time, would save a lengthened agony to all of us. I knew that if I went away then, that end must follow which has followed, and which has made us both so happy, Grace! I wrote to good Aunt Martha, for a refuge in her house: I did not then tell her all, but something of my story, and she freely promised it. While I was contesting that step with myself, and with my love of you, and home, Mr. Warden, brought here by an accident, became, for some time, our companion." "I have sometimes feared of late years, that this might have been," exclaimed her sister; and her countenance was ashy-pale. "You never loved him—and you married him in your self-sacrifice to me!" "He was then," said Marion, drawing her sister closer to her, "on the eve of going secretly away for a long time. He wrote to me, after leaving here; told me what his condition and prospects really were; and offered me his hand. He told me he had seen I was not happy in the prospect of Alfred’s return. I believe he thought my heart had no part in that contract; perhaps thought I might have loved him once, and did not then; perhaps thought that when I tried to seem indifferent, I tried to hide indifference—I cannot tell. But I wished that you should feel me wholly lost to Alfred—hopeless to him—dead. Do you understand me, love?" Her sister looked into her face, attentively. She seemed in doubt. "I saw Mr. Warden, and confided in his honour; charged him with my secret, on the eve of his and my departure. He kept it. Do you understand me, dear?" Grace looked confusedly upon her. She scarcely seemed to hear. "My love, my sister!" said Marion, "recall your thoughts a moment; listen to me. Do not look so strangely on me. There are countries, dearest, where those who would abjure a misplaced passion, or would strive, against some cherished feeling of their hearts and conquer it, retire into a hopeless solitude, and close the world against themselves and worldly loves and hopes for ever. When women do so, they assume that name which is so dear to you and me, and call each other Sisters. But, there may be sisters, Grace, who, in the broad world out of doors, and underneath its free sky, and in its crowded places and among its busy life, and trying to assist and cheer it and to do some good,—learn the same lesson; and, with hearts still fresh and young, and open to all happiness and means of happiness, can say the battle is long past, the victory long won. And such a one am I! You understand me now?" Still she looked fixedly upon her, and made no reply. "Oh Grace, dear Grace," said Marion, clinging yet more tenderly and fondly to that breast from which she had been so long exiled, "if you were not a happy wife and mother—if I had no little namesake here—if Alfred, my kind brother, were not your own fond husband—from whence could I derive the ecstasy I feel to-night! But, as I left here, so I have returned. My heart has known no other love, my hand has never been bestowed apart from it. I am still your maiden sister: unmarried, unbetrothed: your own loving old Marion, in whose affection you exist alone, and have no partner, Grace!" She understood her now. Her face relaxed: sobs came to her relief; and falling on her neck, she wept and wept, and fondled her as if she were a child again. When they were more composed, they found that the Doctor, and his sister good Aunt Martha, were standing near at hand, with Alfred. "This is a weary day for me," said good Aunt Martha, smiling through her tears, as she embraced her nieces; "for I lose my dear companion in making you all happy; and what can you give me, in return for my Marion?" "A converted brother," said the Doctor. "That’s something, to be sure," retorted Aunt Martha, "in such a farce as—" "No, pray don’t," said the doctor penitently. "Well, I won’t," replied Aunt Martha. "But, I consider myself ill used. I don’t know what’s to become of me without my Marion, after we have lived together half-a-dozen years." "You must come and live here, I suppose," replied the Doctor. "We shan’t quarrel now, Martha." "Or you must get married, Aunt," said Alfred. "Indeed," returned the old lady, "I think it might be a good speculation if I were to set my cap at Michael Warden, who, I hear, is come home much the better for his absence in all respects. But as I knew him when he was a boy, and I was not a very young woman then, perhaps he mightn’t respond. So I’ll make up my mind to go and live with Marion, when she marries, and until then (it will not be very long, I dare say) to live alone. What do you say, Brother?" "I’ve a great mind to say it’s a ridiculous world altogether, and there’s nothing serious in it," observed the poor old Doctor. "You might take twenty affidavits of it if you chose, Anthony," said his sister; "but nobody would believe you with such eyes as those." "It’s a world full of hearts," said the Doctor, hugging his youngest daughter, and bending across her to hug Grace—for he couldn’t separate the sisters; "and a serious world, with all its folly—even with mine, which was enough to have swamped the whole globe; and it is a world on which the sun never rises, but it looks upon a thousand bloodless battles that are some set-off against the miseries and wickedness of Battle-Fields; and it is a world we need be careful how we libel, Heaven forgive us, for it is a world of sacred mysteries, and its Creator only knows what lies beneath the surface of His lightest image!" You would not be the better pleased with my rude pen, if it dissected and laid open to your view the transports of this family, long severed and now reunited. Therefore, I will not follow the poor Doctor through his humbled recollection of the sorrow he had had, when Marion was lost to him; nor will I tell how serious he had found that world to be, in which some love, deep-anchored, is the portion of all human creatures; nor, how such a trifle as the absence of one little unit in the great absurd account, had stricken him to the ground. Nor, how, in compassion for his distress, his sister had, long ago, revealed the truth to him by slow degrees, and brought him to the knowledge of the heart of his self-banished daughter, and to that daughter’s side. Nor, how Alfred Heathfield had been told the truth, too, in the course of that then current year; and Marion had seen him, and had promised him, as her brother, that on her birth-day, in the evening, Grace should know it from her lips at last. "I beg your pardon, Doctor," said Mr. Snitchey, looking into the orchard, "but have I liberty to come in?" Without waiting for permission, he came straight to Marion, and kissed her hand, quite joyfully. "If Mr. Craggs had been alive, my dear Miss Marion," said Mr. Snitchey, "he would have had great interest in this occasion. It might have suggested to him, Mr. Alfred, that our life is not too easy perhaps; that, taken altogether, it will bear any little smoothing we can give it; but Mr. Craggs was a man who could endure to be convinced, Sir. He was always open to conviction. If he were open to conviction, now, I—this is weakness. Mrs. Snitchey, my dear,"—at his summons that lady appeared from behind the door, "you are among old friends." Mrs. Snitchey having delivered her congratulations, took her husband aside. "One moment, Mr. Snitchey," said that lady. "It is not in my nature to rake up the ashes of the departed." "No, my dear," returned her husband. "Mr. Craggs is—" "Yes, my dear, he is deceased," said Snitchey. "But I ask you if you recollect," pursued his wife, "that evening of the ball? I only ask you that. If you do; and if your memory has not entirely failed you, Mr. Snitchey; and if you are not absolutely in your dotage; I ask you to connect this time with that—to remember how I begged and prayed you, on my knees—" "Upon your knees, my dear?" said Mr. Snitchey. "Yes," said Mrs. Snitchey, confidently, "and you know it—to beware of that man—to observe his eye—and now to tell me whether I was right, and whether at that moment he knew secrets which he didn’t choose to tell." "Mrs. Snitchey," returned her husband, in her ear, "Madam. Did you ever observe anything in my eye?" "No," said Mrs. Snitchey, sharply. "Don’t flatter yourself." "Because, Madam, that night," he continued, twitching her by the sleeve, "it happens that we both knew secrets which we didn’t choose to tell, and both knew just the same, professionally. And so the less you say about such things the better, Mrs. Snitchey; and take this as a warning to have wiser and more charitable eyes another time. Miss Marion, I brought a friend of yours along with me. Here! Mistress!" Poor Clemency, with her apron to her eyes, came slowly in, escorted by her husband; the latter doleful with the presentiment, that if she abandoned herself to grief, the Nutmeg Grater was done for. "Now, Mistress," said the lawyer, checking Marion as she ran towards her, and interposing himself between them, "what’s the matter with you?" "The matter!" cried poor Clemency. When, looking up in wonder, and in indignant remonstrance, and in the added emotion of a great roar from Mr. Britain, and seeing that sweet face so well-remembered close before her, she stared, sobbed, laughed, cried, screamed, embraced her, held her fast, released her, fell on Mr. Snitchey and embraced him (much to Mrs. Snitchey’s indignation), fell on the Doctor and embraced him, fell on Mr. Britain and embraced him, and concluded by embracing herself, throwing her apron over her head, and going into hysterics behind it. A stranger had come into the orchard, after Mr. Snitchey, and had remained apart, near the gate, without being observed by any of the group; for they had little spare attention to bestow, and that had been monopolised by the ecstasies of Clemency. He did not appear to wish to be observed, but stood alone, with downcast eyes; and there was an air of dejection about him (though he was a gentleman of a gallant appearance) which the general happiness rendered more remarkable. None but the quick eyes of Aunt Martha, however, remarked him at all; but almost as soon as she espied him, she was in conversation with him. Presently, going to where Marion stood with Grace and her little namesake, she whispered something in Marion’s ear, at which she started, and appeared surprised; but soon recovering from her confusion, she timidly approached the stranger, in Aunt Martha’s company, and engaged in conversation with him too. "Mr. Britain," said the lawyer, putting his hand in his pocket, and bringing out a legal-looking document, while this was going on, "I congratulate you. You are now the whole and sole proprietor of that freehold tenement, at present occupied and held by yourself as a licensed tavern, or house of public entertainment, and commonly called or known by the sign of the Nutmeg Grater. Your wife lost one house, through my client Mr. Michael Warden; and now gains another. I shall have the pleasure of canvassing you for the county, one of these fine mornings." "Would it make any difference in the vote if the sign was altered, Sir?" asked Britain. "Not in the least," replied the lawyer. "Then," said Mr. Britain, handing him back the conveyance, "just clap in the words, 'and Thimble,' will you be so good; and I’ll have the two mottoes painted up in the parlour instead of my wife’s portrait." "And let me," said a voice behind them; it was the stranger’s—Michael Warden’s; "let me claim the benefit of those inscriptions. Mr. Heathfield and Dr. Jeddler, I might have deeply wronged you both. That I did not, is no virtue of my own. I will not say that I am six years wiser than I was, or better. But I have known, at any rate, that term of selfreproach. I can urge no reason why you should deal gently with me. I abused the hospitality of this house; and learnt by my own demerits, with a shame I never have forgotten, yet with some profit too, I would fain hope, from one," he glanced at Marion, "to whom I made my humble supplication for forgiveness, when I knew her merit and my deep unworthiness. In a few days I shall quit this place for ever. I entreat your pardon. Do as you would be done by! Forget, and forgive!" TIME—from whom I had the latter portion of this story, and with whom I have the pleasure of a personal acquaintance of some five-and-thirty years’ duration—informed me, leaning easily upon his scythe, that Michael Warden never went away again, and never sold his house, but opened it afresh, maintained a golden means of hospitality, and had a wife, the pride and honor of that countryside, whose name was Marion. But as I have observed that Time confuses facts occasionally, I hardly know what weight to give to his authority. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Battle of Life. A Love Story Description An account of the resource Published by Bradbury and Evans, 1846 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Google Books, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Battle_of_Life/mSkEAAAAQAAJ">https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Battle_of_Life/mSkEAAAAQAAJ</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1846-12 Type The nature or genre of the resource Christmas Book Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1846-12-The_Battle_of_Life Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. The Battle of Life. A Love Story (December 1846). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date].  <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-books/1846-12-The_Battle_of_Life">https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-books/1846-12-The_Battle_of_Life</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Part the First. Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England, it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought. It was fought upon a long summer day when the waving grass was green. Many a wild flower formed by the Almighty Hand to be a perfumed goblet for the dew, felt its enamelled cup filled high with blood that day, and shrinking dropped. Many an insect deriving its delicate colour from harmless leaves and herbs, was stained anew that day by dying men, and marked its frightened way with an unnatural track. The painted butterfly took blood into the air upon the edges of its wings. The stream ran red. The trodden ground became a quagmire, whence, from sullen pools collected in the prints of human feet and horses’ hoofs, the one prevailing hue still lowered and glimmered at the sun. Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the sights the moon beheld upon that field, when, coming up above the black line of distant rising-ground, softened and blurred at the edge by trees, she rose into the sky and looked upon the plain, strewn with upturned faces that had once at mothers’ breasts sought mothers’ eyes, or slumbered happily. Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the secrets whispered afterwards upon the tainted wind that blew across the scene of that day’s work and that night’s death and suffering! Many a lonely moon was bright upon the battle-ground, and many a star kept mournful watch upon it, and many a wind from every quarter of the earth blew over it, before the traces of the fight were worn away. They lurked and lingered for a long time, but survived in little things; for, Nature, far above the evil passions of men, soon recovered Her serenity, and smiled upon the guilty battle-ground as she had done before, when it was innocent. The larks sang high above it; the swallows skimmed and dipped and flitted to and fro; the shadows of the flying clouds pursued each other swiftly, over grass and corn and turnip-field and wood, and over roof and church-spire in the nestling town among the trees, away into the bright distance on the borders of the sky and earth, where the red sunsets faded. Crops were sown, and grew up, and were gathered in; the stream that had been crimsoned, turned a watermill; men whistled at the plough; gleaners and haymakers were seen in quiet groups at work; sheep and oxen pastured; boys whooped and called, in fields, to scare away the birds; smoke rose from cottage chimneys; sabbath bells rang peacefully; old people lived and died; the timid creatures of the field, the simple flowers of the bush and garden, grew and withered in their destined terms: and all upon the fierce and bloody battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight. But, there were deep green patches in the growing corn at first, that people looked at awfully. Year after year they re-appeared; and it was known that underneath those fertile spots, heaps of men and horses lay buried, indiscriminately, enriching the ground. The husbandmen who ploughed those places, shrunk from the great worms abounding there; and the sheaves they yielded, were, for many a long year, called the Battle Sheaves, and set apart; and no one ever knew a Battle Sheaf to be among the last load at a Harvest Home. For a long time, every furrow that was turned, revealed some fragments of the fight. For a long time, there were wounded trees upon the battle-ground; and scraps of hacked and broken fence and wall, where deadly struggles had been made; and trampled parts where not a leaf or blade would grow. For a long time, no village girl would dress her hair or bosom with the sweetest flower from that field of death: and after many a year had come and gone, the berries growing there, were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon the hand that plucked them. The Seasons in their course, however, though they passed as lightly as the summer clouds themselves, obliterated, in the lapse of time, even these remains of the old conflict; and wore away such legendary traces of it as the neighbouring people carried in their minds, until they dwindled into old wives’ tales, dimly remembered round the winter fire, and waning every year. Where the wild flowers and berries had so long remained upon the stem untouched, gardens arose, and houses were built, and children played at battles on the turf. The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas logs, and blazed and roared away. The deep green patches were no greener now than the memory of those who lay in dust below. The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and those who found them wondered and disputed. An old dinted corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long, that the same weak half-blind old man who tried in vain to make them out above the whitewashed arch, had marvelled at them as a baby. If the host slain upon the field, could have been for a moment reanimated in the forms in which they fell, each upon the spot that was the bed of his untimely death, gashed and ghastly soldiers would have stared in, hundreds deep, at household door and window; and would have risen on the hearths of quiet homes; and would have been the garnered store of barns and granaries; and would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and would have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill, and crowded the orchard, and burdened the meadow, and piled the rickyard high with dying men. So altered was the battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight. Nowhere more altered, perhaps, about a hundred years ago, than in one little orchard attached to an old stone house with a honeysuckle porch; where, on a bright autumn morning, there were sounds of music and laughter, and where two girls danced merrily together on the grass, while some half-dozen peasant women standing on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work to look down, and share their enjoyment. It was a pleasant, lively, natural scene; a beautiful day, a retired spot; and the two girls, quite unconstrained and careless, danced in the freedom and gaiety of their hearts. If there were no such thing as display in the world, my private opinion is, and I hope you agree with me, that we might get on a great deal better than we do, and might be infinitely more agreeable company than we are. It was charming to see how these girls danced. They had no spectators but the apple-pickers on the ladders. They were very glad to please them, but they danced to please themselves (or at least you would have supposed so); and you could no more help admiring, than they could help dancing. How they did dance! Not like opera dancers. Not at all. And not like Madame Anybody’s finished pupils. Not the least. It was not quadrille dancing, nor minuet dancing, nor even country-dance dancing. It was neither in the old style, nor the new style, nor the French style, nor the English style: though it may have been, by accident, a trifle in the Spanish style, which is a free and joyous one, I am told, deriving a delightful air of off-hand inspiration, from the chirping little castanets. As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and spread, in the sun-lighted scene, like an expanding circle in the water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning air—the flashing leaves, the speckled shadows on the soft green ground—the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn the distant windmill, cheerily—everything between the two girls, and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the world—seemed dancing too. At last, the younger of the dancing sisters, out of breath, and laughing gaily, threw herself upon a bench to rest. The other leaned against a tree hard by. The music, a wandering harp and fiddle, left off with a flourish, as if it boasted of its freshness; though the truth is, it had gone at such a pace, and worked itself to such a pitch of competition with the dancing, that it never could have held on, half a minute longer. The apple-pickers on the ladders raised a hum and murmur of applause, and then, in keeping with the sound, bestirred themselves to work again like bees. The more actively, perhaps, because an elderly gentleman, who was no other than Doctor Jeddler himself—it was Doctor Jeddler’s house and orchard, you should know, and these were Doctor Jeddler’s daughters—came bustling out to see what was the matter, and who the deuce played music on his property, before breakfast. For he was a great philosopher, Doctor Jeddler, and not very musical. "Music and dancing to-day!" said the Doctor, stopping short, and speaking to himself. "I thought they dreaded to-day. But it’s a world of contradictions. Why, Grace; why, Marion!" he added, aloud, "is the world more mad than usual this morning?" "Make some allowance for it, father, if it be," replied his younger daughter, Marion, going close to him, and looking into his face, "for it’s somebody’s birth-day." "Somebody’s birth-day, Puss," replied the Doctor. "Don’t you know it’s always somebody’s birth-day? Did you never hear how many new performers enter on this—ha! ha! ha!—it’s impossible to speak gravely of it—on this preposterous and ridiculous business called Life, every minute?" "No, father!" "No, not you, of course; you’re a woman—almost," said the Doctor. "By-the-by," and he looked into the pretty face, still close to his, "I suppose it’s your birth-day." "No! Do you really, father?" cried his pet daughter, pursing up her red lips to be kissed. "There! Take my love with it," said the Doctor, imprinting his upon them; "and many happy returns of the—the idea!—of the day. The notion of wishing happy returns in such a farce as this," said the Doctor to himself, "is good! Ha! ha! ha!" Doctor Jeddler was, as I have said, a great philosopher, and the heart and mystery of his philosophy was, to look upon the world as a gigantic practical joke; as something too absurd to be considered seriously, by any rational man. His system of belief had been, in the beginning, part and parcel of the battle-ground on which he lived, as you shall presently understand. "Well! But how did you get the music?" asked the Doctor. "Poultry-stealers, of course. Where did the minstrels come from?" "Alfred sent the music," said his daughter Grace, adjusting a few simple flowers in her sister’s hair, with which, in her admiration of that youthful beauty, she had herself adorned it half-an-hour before, and which the dancing had disarranged. "Oh! Alfred sent the music, did he?" returned the Doctor. "Yes. He met it coming out of the town as he was entering early. The men are travelling on foot, and rested there last night; and as it was Marion’s birth-day, and he thought it would please her, he sent them on, with a pencilled note to me, saying that if I thought so too, they had come to serenade her." "Ay, ay," said the Doctor, carelessly, "he always takes your opinion." "And my opinion being favourable," said Grace, good-humouredly; and pausing for a moment to admire the pretty head she decorated, with her own thrown back; "and Marion being in high spirits, and beginning to dance, I joined her: and so we danced to Alfred’s music till we were out of breath. And we thought the music all the gayer for being sent by Alfred. Didn’t we, dear Marion?" "Oh, I don’t know, Grace. How you teaze me about Alfred." "Teaze you by mentioning your lover!" said her sister. "I am sure I don’t much care to have him mentioned," said the wilful beauty, stripping the petals from some flowers she held, and scattering them on the ground. "I am almost tired of hearing of him; and as to his being my lover"— "Hush! Don’t speak lightly of a true heart, which is all your own, Marion," cried her sister, "even in jest. There is not a truer heart than Alfred’s in the world!" "No-no," said Marion, raising her eyebrows with a pleasant air of careless consideration, "perhaps not. But I don’t know that there’s any great merit in that. I—I don’t want him to be so very true. I never asked him. If he expects that I— But, dear Grace, why need we talk of him at all, just now!" It was agreeable to see the graceful figures of the blooming sisters, twined together, lingering among the trees, conversing thus, with earnestness opposed to lightness, yet, with love responding tenderly to love. And it was very curious indeed to see the younger sister’s eyes suffused with tears; and something fervently and deeply felt, breaking through the wilfulness of what she said, and striving with it painfully. The difference between them, in respect of age, could not exceed four years at most: but Grace, as often happens in such cases, when no mother watches over both (the Doctor’s wife was dead), seemed, in her gentle care of her young sister, and in the steadiness of her devotion to her, older than she was; and more removed, in course of nature, from all competition with her, or participation, otherwise than through her sympathy and true affection, in her wayward fancies, than their ages seemed to warrant. Great character of mother, that, even in this shadow and faint reflection of it, purifies the heart, and raises the exalted nature nearer to the angels! The Doctor’s reflections, as he looked after them, and heard the purport of their discourse, were limited, at first, to certain merry meditations on the folly of all loves and likings, and the idle imposition practised on themselves by young people, who believed, for a moment, that there could be anything serious in such bubbles, and were always undeceived—always! But, the home-adorning, self-denying qualities of Grace, and her sweet temper, so gentle and retiring, yet including so much constancy and bravery of spirit, seemed all expressed to him in the contrast between her quiet household figure and that of his younger and more beautiful child; and he was sorry for her sake—sorry for them both—that life should be such a very ridiculous business as it was. The Doctor never dreamed of inquiring whether his children, or either of them, helped in any way to make the scheme a serious one. But then he was a Philosopher. A kind and generous man by nature, he had stumbled, by chance, over that common Philosopher’s stone (much more easily discovered than the object of the alchemist’s researches), which sometimes trips up kind and generous men, and has the fatal property of turning gold to dross and every precious thing to poor account. "Britain!" cried the Doctor. "Britain! Holloa!" A small man, with an uncommonly sour and discontented face, emerged from the house, and returned to this call the unceremonious acknowledgment of "Now then!" "Where’s the breakfast table?" said the Doctor. "In the house," returned Britain. "Are you going to spread it out here, as you were told last night?" said the Doctor. "Don’t you know that there are gentlemen coming? That there’s business to be done this morning, before the coach comes by? That this is a very particular occasion?" "I couldn’t do anything, Dr. Jeddler, till the women had done getting in the apples, could I?" said Britain, his voice rising with his reasoning, so that it was very loud at last. "Well, have they done now?" replied the Doctor, looking at his watch, and clapping his hands. "Come! make haste! where’s Clemency?" "Here am I, Mister," said a voice from one of the ladders, which a pair of clumsy feet descended briskly. "It’s all done now. Clear away, gals. Everything shall be ready for you in half a minute, Mister." With that she began to bustle about most vigorously; presenting, as she did so, an appearance sufficiently peculiar to justify a word of introduction. She was about thirty years old; and had a sufficiently plump and cheerful face, though it was twisted up into an odd expression of tightness that made it comical. But the extraordinary homeliness of her gait and manner, would have superseded any face in the world. To say that she had two left legs, and somebody else’s arms; and that all four limbs seemed to be out of joint, and to start from perfectly wrong places when they were set in motion; is to offer the mildest outline of the reality. To say that she was perfectly content and satisfied with these arrangements, and regarded them as being no business of hers, and that she took her arms and legs as they came, and allowed them to dispose of themselves just as it happened, is to render faint justice to her equanimity. Her dress was a prodigious pair of self-willed shoes, that never wanted to go where her feet went; blue stockings; a printed gown of many colours, and the most hideous pattern procurable for money; and a white apron. She always wore short sleeves, and always had, by some accident, grazed elbows, in which she took so lively an interest that she was continually trying to turn them round and get impossible views of them. In general, a little cap placed somewhere on her head; though it was rarely to be met with in the place usually occupied in other subjects, by that article of dress; but from head to foot she was scrupulously clean, and maintained a kind of dislocated tidiness. Indeed her laudable anxiety to be tidy and compact in her own conscience as well as in the public eye, gave rise to one of her most startling evolutions, which was to grasp herself sometimes by a sort of wooden handle (part of her clothing, and familiarly called a busk), and wrestle as it were with her garments, until they fell into a symmetrical arrangement. Such, in outward form and garb, was Clemency Newcome; who was supposed to have unconsciously originated a corruption of her own christian name, from Clementina (but nobody knew, for the deaf old mother, a very phenomenon of age, whom she had supported almost from a child, was dead, and she had no other relation); who now busied herself in preparing the table; and who stood, at intervals, with her bare red arms crossed, rubbing her grazed elbows with opposite hands, and staring at it very composedly, until she suddenly remembered something else it wanted, and jogged off to fetch it. "Here are them two lawyers a-coming, Mister!" said Clemency, in a tone of no very great good-will. "Aha!" cried the Doctor, advancing to the gate to meet them. "Good morning, good morning! Grace, my dear! Marion! Here are Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs. Where’s Alfred?" "He’ll be back directly, father, no doubt," said Grace. "He had so much to do this morning in his preparations for departure, that he was up and out by daybreak. Good morning, gentlemen." "Ladies!" said Mr. Snitchey, "For Self and Craggs," who bowed, "good morning. Miss," to Marion, "I kiss your hand." Which he did. "And I wish you"—which he might or might not, for he didn’t look, at first sight, like a gentleman troubled with many warm outpourings of soul, in behalf of other people, "a hundred happy returns of this auspicious day." "Ha ha ha!" laughed the Doctor thoughtfully, with his hands in his pockets. "The great farce in a hundred acts!" "You wouldn’t, I am sure," said Mr. Snitchey, standing a small professional blue bag against one leg of the table, "cut the great farce short for this actress, at all events, Doctor Jeddler." "No," returned the Doctor. "God forbid! May she live to laugh at it, as long as she can laugh, and then say, with the French wit, 'The farce is ended; draw the curtain.'" "The French wit," said Mr. Snitchey, peeping sharply into his blue bag, "was wrong, Doctor Jeddler, and your philosophy is altogether wrong, depend upon it, as I have often told you. Nothing serious in life! What do you call law?" "A joke," replied the Doctor. "Did you ever go to law?" asked Mr. Snitchey, looking out of the blue bag. "Never," returned the Doctor. "If you ever do," said Mr. Snitchey, "perhaps you’ll alter that opinion." Craggs, who seemed to be represented by Snitchey, and to be conscious of little or no separate existence or personal individuality, offered a remark of his own in this place. It involved the only idea of which he did not stand seized and possessed in equal moieties with Snitchey; but, he had some partners in it among the wise men of the world. "It’s made a great deal too easy," said Mr. Craggs. "Law is?" asked the Doctor. "Yes," said Mr. Craggs, "everything is. Everything appears to me to be made too easy, now-a-days. It’s the vice of these times. If the world is a joke (I am not prepared to say it isn’t), it ought to be made a very difficult joke to crack. It ought to be as hard a struggle, Sir, as possible. That’s the intention. But, it’s being made far too easy. We are oiling the gates of life. They ought to be rusty. We shall have them beginning to turn, soon, with a smooth sound. Whereas they ought to grate upon their hinges, Sir." Mr. Craggs seemed positively to grate upon his own hinges, as he delivered this opinion; to which he communicated immense effect—being a cold, hard, dry, man, dressed in grey and white, like a flint; with small twinkles in his eyes, as if something struck sparks out of them. The three natural kingdoms, indeed, had each a fanciful representative among this brotherhood of disputants; for Snitchey was like a magpie or raven (only not so sleek), and the Doctor had a streaked face like a winter-pippin, with here and there a dimple to express the peckings of the birds, and a very little bit of pigtail behind, that stood for the stalk. As the active figure of a handsome young man, dressed for a journey, and followed by a porter bearing several packages and baskets, entered the orchard at a brisk pace, and with an air of gaiety and hope that accorded well with the morning,— these three drew together, like the brothers of the sister Fates, or like the Graces most effectually disguised, or like the three weird prophets on the heath, and greeted him. "Happy returns, Alf," said the Doctor, lightly. "A hundred happy returns of this auspicious day, Mr. Heathfield," said Snitchey, bowing low. "Returns!" Craggs murmured in a deep voice, all alone. "Why, what a battery!" exclaimed Alfred, stopping short, "and one—two—three—all foreboders of no good, in the great sea before me. I am glad you are not the first I have met this morning: I should have taken it for a bad omen. But, Grace was the first—sweet, pleasant Grace—so I defy you all!" "If you please, Mister, I was the first you know," said Clemency Newcome. "She was walking out here, before sunrise, you remember. I was in the house." "That’s true! Clemency was the first," said Alfred. "So I defy you with Clemency." "Ha, ha, ha!—for Self and Craggs," said Snitchey. "What a defiance!" "Not so bad a one as it appears, may be," said Alfred, shaking hands heartily with the Doctor, and also with Snitchey and Craggs, and then looking round. "Where are the—Good Heavens!" With a start, productive for the moment of a closer partnership between Jonathan Snitchey and Thomas Craggs than the subsisting articles of agreement in that wise contemplated, he hastily betook himself to where the sisters stood together, and—however, I needn’t more particularly explain his manner of saluting Marion first, and Grace afterwards, than by hinting that Mr. Craggs may possibly have considered it "too easy." Perhaps to change the subject, Dr. Jeddler made a hasty move towards the breakfast, and they all sat down at table. Grace presided; but so discreetly stationed herself, as to cut off her sister and Alfred from the rest of the company. Snitchey and Craggs sat at opposite corners, with the blue bag between them for safety; the Doctor took his usual position, opposite to Grace. Clemency hovered galvanically about the table, as waitress; and the melancholy Britain, at another and a smaller board, acted as Grand Carver of a round of beef, and a ham. "Meat?" said Britain, approaching Mr. Snitchey, with the carving knife and fork in his hands, and throwing the question at him like a missile. "Certainly," returned the lawyer. "Do you want any?" to Craggs. "Lean and well done," replied that gentleman. Having executed these orders, and moderately supplied the Doctor (he seemed to know that nobody else wanted anything to eat), he lingered as near the Firm as he decently could, watching with an austere eye their disposition of the viands, and but once relaxing the severe expression of his face. This was on the occasion of Mr. Craggs, whose teeth were not of the best, partially choking, when he cried out with great animation, "I thought he was gone!" "Now, Alfred," said the Doctor, "for a word or two of business, while we are yet at breakfast." "While we are yet at breakfast," said Snitchey and Craggs, who seemed to have no present idea of leaving off. Although Alfred had not been breakfasting, and seemed to have quite enough business on his hands as it was, he respectfully answered: "If you please, Sir." "If anything could be serious," the Doctor began, "in such a—" "Farce as this, Sir," hinted Alfred. "In such a farce as this," observed the Doctor, "it might be this recurrence, on the eve of separation, of a double birth-day, which is connected with many associations pleasant to us four, and with the recollection of a long and amicable intercourse. That’s not to the purpose." "Ah! yes, yes, Dr. Jeddler," said the young man. "It is to the purpose. Much to the purpose, as my heart bears witness this morning; and as yours does too, I know, if you would let it speak. I leave your house to-day; I cease to be your ward to-day; we part with tender relations stretching far behind us, that never can be exactly renewed, and with others dawning—yet before us," he looked down at Marion beside him, "fraught with such considerations as I must not trust myself to speak of now. Come, come!" he added, rallying his spirits and the Doctor at once, "there’s a serious grain in this large foolish dust-heap, Doctor. Let us allow to-day, that there is One." "To-day!" cried the Doctor. "Hear him! Ha, ha, ha! Of all days in the foolish year. Why, on this day, the great battle was fought on this ground. On this ground where we now sit, where I saw my two girls dance this morning, where the fruit has just been gathered for our eating from these trees, the roots of which are struck in Men, not earth,—so many lives were lost, that within my recollection, generations afterwards, a churchyard full of bones, and dust of bones, and chips of cloven skulls, has been dug up from underneath our feet here. Yet not a hundred people in that battle knew for what they fought, or why; not a hundred of the inconsiderate rejoicers in the victory, why they rejoiced. Not half a hundred people were the better for the gain or loss. Not half-a-dozen men agree to this hour on the cause or merits; and nobody, in short, ever knew anything distinct about it, but the mourners of the slain. Serious, too!" said the Doctor, laughing. "Such a system!" "But, all this seems to me," said Alfred, "to be very serious." "Serious!" cried the Doctor. "If you allowed such things to be serious, you must go mad, or die, or climb up to the top of a mountain, and turn hermit." "Besides—so long ago," said Alfred. "Long ago!" returned the Doctor. "Do you know what the world has been doing, ever since? Do you know what else it has been doing? I don’t!" "It has gone to law a little," observed Mr. Snitchey, stirring his tea. "Although the way out has been always made too easy," said his partner. "And you’ll excuse my saying, Doctor," pursued Mr. Snitchey, "having been already put a thousand times in possession of my opinion, in the course of our discussions, that, in its having gone to law, and in its legal system altogether, I do observe a serious side—now, really, a something tangible, and with a purpose and intention in it—" Clemency Newcome made an angular tumble against the table, occasioning a sounding clatter among the cups and saucers. "Heyday! what’s the matter there?" exclaimed the Doctor. "It’s this evil-inclined blue bag," said Clemency, "always tripping up somebody!" "With a purpose and intention in it, I was saying," resumed Snitchey, "that commands respect. Life a farce, Dr. Jeddler? With law in it?" The Doctor laughed, and looked at Alfred. "Granted, if you please, that war is foolish," said Snitchey. "There we agree. For example. Here’s a smiling country," pointing it out with his fork, "once overrun by soldiers—trespassers every man of ’em—and laid waste by fire and sword. He, he, he! The idea of any man exposing himself, voluntarily, to fire and sword! Stupid, wasteful, positively ridiculous; you laugh at your fellow-creatures, you know, when you think of it! But take this smiling country as it stands. Think of the laws appertaining to real property; to the bequest and devise of real property; to the mortgage and redemption of real property; to leasehold, freehold, and copyhold estate; think," said Mr. Snitchey, with such great emotion that he actually smacked his lips, "of the complicated laws relating to title and proof of title, with all the contradictory precedents and numerous acts of parliament connected with them; think of the infinite number of ingenious and interminable chancery suits, to which this pleasant prospect may give rise; —and acknowledge, Doctor Jeddler, that there is a green spot in the scheme about us! I believe," said Mr. Snitchey, looking at his partner, "that I speak for Self and Craggs?" Mr. Craggs having signified assent, Mr. Snitchey, somewhat freshened by his recent eloquence, observed that he would take a little more beef, and another cup of tea. "I don’t stand up for life in general," he added, rubbing his hands and chuckling, "it’s full of folly; full of something worse. Professions of trust, and confidence, and unselfishness, and all that! Bah, bah, bah! We see what they’re worth. But, you mustn’t laugh at life; you’ve got a game to play; a very serious game indeed! Everybody’s playing against you, you know, and you’re playing against them. Oh! it’s a very interesting thing. There are deep moves upon the board. You must only laugh, Doctor Jeddler, when you win; and then not much. He, he, he! And then not much," repeated Snitchey, rolling his head and winking his eye, as if he would have added, 'you may do this instead!’ "Well, Alfred!" cried the Doctor, "what do you say now?" "I say, Sir," replied Alfred, "that the greatest favour you could do me, and yourself too, I am inclined to think, would be to try sometimes to forget this battle-field, and others like it, in that broader battle-field of Life, on which the sun looks every day." "Really, I’m afraid that wouldn’t soften his opinions, Mr. Alfred," said Snitchey. "The combatants are very eager and very bitter in that same battle of Life. There’s a great deal of cutting and slashing, and firing into people’s heads from behind; terrible treading down, and trampling on; it's rather a bad business." "I believe, Mr. Snitchey," said Alfred, "there are quiet victories and struggles, great sacrifices of self, and noble acts of heroism, in it—even in many of its apparent lightnesses and contradictions—not the less difficult to achieve, because they have no earthly chronicle or audience; done every day in nooks and corners, and in little households, and in men’s and women’s hearts—any one of which might reconcile the sternest man to such a world, and fill him with belief and hope in it, though two-fourths of its people were at war, and another fourth at law; and that’s a bold word." Both the sisters listened keenly. "Well, well!" said the Doctor, "I am too old to be converted, even by my friend Snitchey here, or my good spinster sister, Martha Jeddler; who had what she calls her domestic trials ages ago, and has led a sympathising life with all sorts of people ever since; and who is so much of your opinion (only she’s less reasonable and more obstinate, being a woman), that we can’t agree, and seldom meet. I was born upon this battle-field. I began, as a boy, to have my thoughts directed to the real history of a battle-field. Sixty years have gone over my head; and I have never seen the Christian world, including Heaven knows how many loving mothers and good enough girls, like mine here, anything but mad for a battle-field. The same contradictions prevail in everything. One must either laugh or cry at such stupendous inconsistencies; and I prefer to laugh." Britain, who had been paying the profoundest and most melancholy attention to each speaker in his turn, seemed suddenly to decide in favour of the same preference, if a deep sepulchral sound that escaped him might be construed into a demonstration of risibility. His face, however, was so perfectly unaffected by it, both before and afterwards, that although one or two of the breakfast party looked round as being startled by a mysterious noise, nobody connected the offender with it. Except his partner in attendance, Clemency Newcome; who rousing him with one of those favourite joints, her elbows, inquired, in a reproachful whisper, what he laughed at. "Not you!" said Britain. "Who then?" "Humanity," said Britain. "That’s the joke." "What between master and them lawyers, he’s getting more and more addle-headed every day!" cried Clemency, giving him a lunge with the other elbow, as a mental stimulant. "Do you know where you are? Do you want to get warning?" "I don’t know anything," said Britain, with a leaden eye and an immovable visage. "I don’t care for anything. I don’t make out anything. I don’t believe anything. And I don’t want anything." Although this forlorn summary of his general condition may have been overcharged in an access of despondency, Benjamin Britain—sometimes called Little Britain, to distinguish him from Great; as we might say Young England, to express Old England with a decided difference—had defined his real state more accurately than might be supposed. For, serving as a sort of man Miles, to the Doctor’s Friar Bacon, and listening day after day to innumerable orations addressed by the Doctor to various people, all tending to show that his very existence was at best a mistake and an absurdity; this unfortunate servitor had fallen, by degrees, into such an abyss of confused and contradictory suggestions from within and without, that Truth at the bottom of her well, was on the level surface as compared with Britain in the depths of his mystification. The only point he clearly comprehended, was, that the new element usually brought into these discussions by Snitchey and Craggs, never served to make them clearer, and always seemed to give the Doctor a species of advantage and confirmation. Therefore, he looked upon the Firm as one of the proximate causes of his state of mind, and held them in abhorrence accordingly. "But, this is not our business, Alfred," said the Doctor. "Ceasing to be my ward (as you have said) to-day; and leaving us full to the brim of such learning as the Grammar School down here was able to give you, and your studies in London could add to that, and such practical knowledge as a dull old country Doctor like myself could graft upon both; you are away, now, into the world. The first term of probation appointed by your poor father, being over, away you go now, your own master, to fulfil his second desire: and long before your three years’ tour among the foreign schools of medicine is finished, you’ll have forgotten us. Lord, you’ll forget us easily in six months!" "If I do—But you know better; why should I speak to you!" said Alfred, laughing. "I don’t know anything of the sort," returned the Doctor. "What do you say, Marion?" Marion, trifling with her teacup, seemed to say—but she didn’t say it—that he was welcome to forget them, if he could. Grace pressed the blooming face against her cheek, and smiled. "I haven’t been, I hope, a very unjust steward in the execution of my trust," pursued the Doctor; "but I am to be, at any rate, formally discharged, and released, and what not this morning; and here are our good friends Snitchey and Craggs, with a bagful of papers, and accounts, and documents, for the transfer of the balance of the trust fund to you (I wish it was a more difficult one to dispose of, Alfred, but you must get to be a great man and make it so), and other drolleries of that sort, which are to be signed, sealed, and delivered." "And duly witnessed, as by law required," said Snitchey, pushing away his plate, and taking out the papers, which his partner proceeded to spread upon the table; "and Self and Craggs having been co-trustees with you, Doctor, in so far as the fund was concerned, we shall want your two servants to attest the signatures—can you read, Mrs. Newcome?" "I an’t married, Mister," said Clemency. "Oh! I beg your pardon. I should think not," chuckled Snitchey, casting his eyes over her extraordinary figure. "You can read?" "A little," answered Clemency. "The marriage service, night and morning, eh?" observed the lawyer, jocosely. "No," said Clemency. "Too hard. I only reads a thimble." "Read a thimble!" echoed Snitchey. "What are you talking about, young woman?" Clemency nodded. "And a nutmeg-grater." "Why, this is a lunatic! a subject for the Lord High Chancellor!" said Snitchey, staring at her. —"If possessed of any property," stipulated Craggs. Grace, however, interposing, explained that each of the articles in question bore an engraved motto, and so formed the pocket library of Clemency Newcome, who was not much given to the study of books. "Oh, that’s it, is it, Miss Grace!" said Snitchey. "Yes, yes. Ha, ha, ha! I thought our friend was an idiot. She looks uncommonly like it," he muttered, with a supercilious glance. "And what does the thimble say, Mrs. Newcome?" "I an’t married, Mister," observed Clemency. "Well, Newcome. Will that do?" said the lawyer. "What does the thimble say, Newcome?" How Clemency, before replying to this question, held one pocket open, and looked down into its yawning depths for the thimble which wasn’t there,—and how she then held an opposite pocket open, and seeming to descry it, like a pearl of great price, at the bottom, cleared away such intervening obstacles as a handkerchief, an end of wax candle, a flushed apple, an orange, a lucky penny, a cramp bone, a padlock, a pair of scissors in a sheath, more expressively describable as promising young shears, a handful or so of loose beads, several balls of cotton, a needle-case, a cabinet collection of curl-papers, and a biscuit, all of which articles she entrusted individually and separately to Britain to hold,—is of no consequence. Nor how, in her determination to grasp this pocket by the throat and keep it prisoner (for it had a tendency to swing, and twist itself round the nearest corner), she assumed, and calmly maintained, an attitude apparently inconsistent with the human anatomy and the laws of gravity. It is enough that at last she triumphantly produced the thimble on her finger, and rattled the nutmeg-grater; the literature of both those trinkets being obviously in course of wearing out and wasting away, through excessive friction. "That’s the thimble, is it, young woman?" said Mr. Snitchey, diverting himself at her expense. "And what does the thimble say?" "It says," replied Clemency, reading slowly round as if it were a tower, "For-get and For-give." Snitchey and Craggs laughed heartily. "So new!" said Snitchey. "So easy!" said Craggs. "Such a knowledge of human nature in it," said Snitchey. "So applicable to the affairs of life," said Craggs. "And the nutmeg-grater?" inquired the head of the Firm. "The grater says," returned Clemency, "Do as you—wold—be—done by." "'Do, or you’ll be done brown,' you mean," said Mr. Snitchey. "I don’t understand," retorted Clemency, shaking her head vaguely. "I a'n’t no lawyer." "I am afraid that if she was, Doctor," said Mr. Snitchey, turning to him suddenly, as if to anticipate any effect that might otherwise be consequent on this retort, "she’d find it to be the golden rule of half her clients. They are serious enough in that—whimsical as your world is—and lay the blame on us afterwards. We, in our profession, are little else than mirrors after all, Mr. Alfred; but, we are generally consulted by angry and quarrelsome people, who are not in their best looks; and it’s rather hard to quarrel with us if we reflect unpleasant aspects. I think," said Mr. Snitchey, "that I speak for Self and Craggs?" "Decidedly," said Craggs. "And so, if Mr. Britain will oblige us with a mouthful of ink," said Mr. Snitchey, returning to the papers, "we’ll sign, seal, and deliver as soon as possible, or the coach will be coming past before we know where we are." If one might judge from his appearance, there was every probability of the coach coming past before Mr. Britain knew where he was; for he stood in a state of abstraction, mentally balancing the Doctor against the lawyers, and the lawyers against the Doctor, and their clients against both; and engaged in feeble attempts to make the thimble and nutmeg-grater (a new idea to him) square with anybody’s system of philosophy; and, in short, bewildering himself as much as ever his great namesake has done with theories and schools. But Clemency, who was his good Genius—though he had the meanest possible opinion of her understanding, by reason of her seldom troubling herself with abstract speculations, and being always at hand to do the right thing at the right time—having produced the ink in a twinkling, tendered him the further service of recalling him to himself by the application of her elbows; with which gentle flappers she so jogged his memory, in a more literal construction of that phrase than usual, that he soon became quite fresh and brisk. How he laboured under an apprehension not uncommon to persons in his degree, to whom the use of pen and ink is an event, that he couldn’t append his name to a document, not of his own writing, without committing himself in some shadowy manner, or somehow signing away vague and enormous sums of money; and how he approached the deeds under protest, and by dint of the Doctor’s coercion, and insisted on pausing to look at them before writing (the cramped hand, to say nothing of the phraseology, being so much Chinese to him), and also on turning them round to see whether there was anything fraudulent, underneath; and how, having signed his name, he became desolate as one who had parted with his property and rights; I want the time to tell. Also, how the blue bag containing his signature, afterwards had a mysterious interest for him, and he couldn’t leave it; also, how Clemency Newcome, in an ecstasy of laughter at the idea of her own importance and dignity, brooded over the whole table with her two elbows, like a spread eagle, and reposed her head upon her left arm as a preliminary to the formation of certain cabalistic characters, which required a deal of ink, and imaginary counterparts whereof she executed at the same time with her tongue. Also how, having once tasted ink, she became thirsty in that regard, as tame tigers are said to be after tasting another sort of fluid, and wanted to sign everything, and put her name in all kinds of places. In brief, the Doctor was discharged of his trust and all its responsibilities; and Alfred, taking it on himself, was fairly started on the journey of life. "Britain!" said the Doctor. "Run to the gate, and watch for the coach. Time flies, Alfred!" "Yes, Sir, yes," returned the young man, hurriedly. "Dear Grace! a moment! Marion—so young and beautiful, so winning and so much admired, dear to my heart as nothing else in life is—remember! I leave Marion to you!" "She has always been a sacred charge to me, Alfred. She is doubly so, now. I will be faithful to my trust, believe me." "I do believe it, Grace. I know it well. Who could look upon your face, and hear your voice, and not know it! Ah, Grace! If I had your well-governed heart, and tranquil mind, how bravely I would leave this place to-day!" "Would you?" she answered with a quiet smile. "And yet, Grace—Sister, seems the natural word." "Use it!" she said quickly. "I am glad to hear it, call me nothing else." "And yet, Sister, then," said Alfred, "Marion and I had better have your true and stedfast qualities serving us here, and making us both happier and better. I wouldn’t carry them away, to sustain myself, if I could!" "Coach upon the hill-top!" exclaimed Britain. "Time flies, Alfred," said the Doctor. Marion had stood apart, with her eyes fixed upon the ground; but, this warning being given, her young lover brought her tenderly to where her sister stood, and gave her into her embrace. "I have been telling Grace, dear Marion," he said, "that you are her charge; my precious trust at parting. And when I come back and reclaim you, dearest, and the bright prospect of our married life lies stretched before us, it shall be one of our chief pleasures to consult how we can make Grace happy; how we can anticipate her wishes; how we can show our gratitude and love to her; how we can return her something of the debt she will have heaped upon us." The younger sister had one hand in his; the other rested on her sister’s neck. She looked into that sister’s eyes, so calm, serene, and cheerful, with a gaze in which affection, admiration, sorrow, wonder, almost veneration, were blended. She looked into that sister’s face, as if it were the face of some bright angel. Calm, serene, and cheerful, the face looked back on her and on her lover. "And when the time comes, as it must one day," said Alfred,—"I wonder it has never come yet: but Grace knows best, for Grace is always right—when she will want a friend to open her whole heart to, and to be to her something of what she has been to us,—then, Marion, how faithful we will prove, and what delight to us to know that she, our dear good sister, loves and is loved again, as we would have her!" Still the younger sister looked into her eyes, and turned not—even towards him. And still those honest eyes looked back, so calm, serene, and cheerful, on herself and on her lover. "And when all that is past, and we are old, and living (as we must!) together—close together; talking often of old times,’ said Alfred—"these shall be our favourite times among them—this day most of all; and, telling each other what we thought and felt, and hoped and feared, at parting; and how we couldn’t bear to say good bye"— "Coach coming through the wood," cried Britain. "Yes! I am ready—and how we met again, so happily in spite of all; we’ll make this day the happiest in all the year, and keep it as a treble birth-day. Shall we, dear?" "Yes!" interposed the elder sister, eagerly, and with a radiant smile. "Yes! Alfred, don’t linger. There’s no time. Say good bye to Marion. And Heaven be with you!" He pressed the younger sister to his heart. Released from his embrace, she again clung to her sister; and her eyes, with the same blended look, again sought those so calm, serene, and cheerful. "Farewell, my boy!" said the Doctor. "To talk about any serious correspondence or serious affections, and engagements and so forth, in such a—ha ha ha!—you know what I mean—why that, of course, would be sheer nonsense. All I can say is, that if you and Marion should continue in the same foolish minds, I shall not object to have you for a son-in-law one of these days." "Over the bridge!" cried Britain. "Let it come!" said Alfred, wringing the Doctor’s hand stoutly. "Think of me sometimes, my old friend and guardian, as seriously as you can! Adieu, Mr. Snitchey! Farewell, Mr. Craggs!" "Coming down the road!" cried Britain. "A kiss of Clemency Newcome for long acquaintance’ sake—shake hands, Britain—Marion, dearest heart, good bye! Sister Grace! remember!" The quiet household figure, and the face so beautiful in its serenity, were turned towards him in reply; but Marion’s look and attitude remained unchanged. The coach was at the gate. There was a bustle with the luggage. The coach drove away. Marion never moved. "He waves his hat to you, my love," said Grace."Your chosen husband, darling. Look!" The younger sister raised her head, and, for a moment, turned it. Then, turning back again, and fully meeting, for the first time, those calm eyes, fell sobbing on her neck. "Oh, Grace. God bless you! But I cannot bear to see it, Grace! It breaks my heart." Part the Second. Snitchey and Craggs had a snug little office on the old Battle Ground, where they drove a snug little business, and fought a great many small pitched battles for a great many contending parties. Though it could hardly be said of these conflicts that they were running fights—for in truth they generally proceeded at a snail’s pace—the part the Firm had in them came so far within the general denomination, that now they took a shot at this Plaintiff, and now aimed a chop at that Defendant, now made a heavy charge at an estate in Chancery, and now had some light skirmishing among an irregular body of small debtors, just as the occasion served, and the enemy happened to present himself. The Gazette was an important and profitable feature in some of their fields, as in fields of greater renown; and in most of the Actions wherein they showed their generalship, it was afterwards observed by the combatants that they had had great difficulty in making each other out, or in knowing with any degree of distinctness what they were about, in consequence of the vast amount of smoke by which they were surrounded. The offices of Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs stood convenient with an open door, down two smooth steps in the market-place: so that any angry farmer inclining towards hot water, might tumble into it at once. Their special council-chamber and hall of conference was an old back room up stairs, with a low dark ceiling, which seemed to be knitting its brows gloomily in the consideration of tangled points of law. It was furnished with some high-backed leathern chairs, garnished with great goggle-eyed brass nails, of which, every here and there, two or three had fallen out; or had been picked out, perhaps, by the wandering thumbs and forefingers of bewildered clients. There was a framed print of a great judge in it, every curl in whose dreadful wig had made a man’s hair stand on end. Bales of papers filled the dusty closets, shelves, and tables; and round the wainscot there were tiers of boxes, padlocked and fireproof, with people’s names painted outside, which anxious visitors felt themselves, by a cruel enchantment, obliged to spell backwards and forwards, and to make anagrams of, while they sat, seeming to listen to Snitchey and Craggs, without comprehending one word of what they said. Snitchey and Craggs had each, in private life as in professional existence, a partner of his own. Snitchey and Craggs were the best friends in the world, and had a real confidence in one another; but Mrs. Snitchey, by a dispensation not uncommon in the affairs of life, was, on principle, suspicious of Mr. Craggs; and Mrs. Craggs was, on principle, suspicious of Mr. Snitchey. "Your Snitcheys indeed," the latter lady would observe, sometimes, to Mr. Craggs; using that imaginative plural as if in disparagement of an objectionable pair of pantaloons, or other articles not possessed of a singular number; "I don’t see what you want with your Snitcheys, for my part. You trust a great deal too much to your Snitcheys, I think, and I hope you may never find my words come true." While Mrs. Snitchey would observe to Mr. Snitchey, of Craggs, "that if ever he was led away by man he was led away by that man; and that if ever she read a double purpose in a mortal eye, she read that purpose in Craggs’s eye." Notwithstanding this, however, they were all very good friends in general: and Mrs. Snitchey and Mrs. Craggs maintained a close bond of alliance against "the office," which they both considered a Blue chamber, and common enemy, full of dangerous (because unknown) machinations. In this office, nevertheless, Snitchey and Craggs made honey for their several hives. Here sometimes they would linger, of a fine evening, at the window of their council-chamber, overlooking the old battle-ground, and wonder (but that was generally at assize time, when much business had made them sentimental) at the folly of mankind, who couldn’t always be at peace with one another, and go to law comfortably. Here days, and weeks, and months, and years, passed over them; their calendar, the gradually diminishing number of brass nails in the leathern chairs, and the increasing bulk of papers on the tables. Here, nearly three years’ flight had thinned the one and swelled the other, since the breakfast in the orchard; when they sat together in consultation, at night. Not alone; but with a man of thirty, or about that time of life, negligently dressed, and somewhat haggard in the face, but well-made, well-attired, and well-looking, who sat in the arm-chair of state, with one hand in his breast, and the other in his dishevelled hair, pondering moodily. Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs sat opposite each other at a neighbouring desk. One of the fire-proof boxes, unpadlocked and opened, was upon it; a part of its contents lay strewn upon the table, and the rest was then in course of passing through the hands of Mr. Snitchey, who brought it to the candle, document by document; looked at every paper singly, as he produced it, shook his head, and handed it to Mr. Craggs, who looked it over also, shook his head, and laid it down. Sometimes they would stop, and shaking their heads in concert, look towards the abstracted client; and the name on the box being Michael Warden, Esquire, we may conclude from these premises that the name and the box were both his, and that the affairs of Michael Warden, Esquire, were in a bad way. "That’s all," said Mr. Snitchey, turning up the last paper. "Really there’s no other resource. No other resource." "All lost, spent, wasted, pawned, borrowed, and sold, eh?" said the client, looking up. "All," returned Mr. Snitchey. "Nothing else to be done, you say?" "Nothing at all." The client bit his nails, and pondered again. "And I am not even personally safe in England? You hold to that, do you?" "In no part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland," replied Mr. Snitchey. "A mere prodigal son with no father to go back to, no swine to keep, and no husks to share with them? Eh?" pursued the client, rocking one leg over the other, and searching the ground with his eyes. Mr. Snitchey coughed, as if to deprecate the being supposed to participate in any figurative illustration of a legal position. Mr. Craggs, as if to express that it was a partnership view of the subject, also coughed. "Ruined at thirty!" said the client. "Humph!" "Not ruined, Mr. Warden," returned Snitchey. "Not so bad as that. You have done a good deal towards it, I must say, but you are not ruined. A little nursing—" "A little Devil," said the client. "Mr. Craggs," said Snitchey, "will you oblige me with a pinch of snuff? Thank you, Sir." As the imperturbable lawyer applied it to his nose, with great apparent relish and a perfect absorption of his attention in the proceeding, the client gradually broke into a smile, and, looking up, said: "You talk of nursing. How long nursing?" "How long nursing?" repeated Snitchey, dusting the snuff from his fingers, and making a slow calculation in his mind. "For your involved estate, Sir? In good hands? S. and C.’s, say? Six or seven years." "To starve for six or seven years!" said the client with a fretful laugh, and an impatient change of his position. "To starve for six or seven years, Mr. Warden," said Snitchey, "would be very uncommon indeed. You might get another estate by shewing yourself, the while. But, we don’t think you could do it—speaking for Self and Craggs—and consequently don’t advise it." "What do you advise?" "Nursing, I say," repeated Snitchey. "Some few years of nursing by Self and Craggs would bring it round. But to enable us to make terms, and hold terms, and you to keep terms, you must go away; you must live abroad. As to starvation, we could ensure you some hundreds a-year to starve upon, even in the beginning—I dare say, Mr. Warden." "Hundreds," said the client. "And I have spent thousands!" "That," retorted Mr. Snitchey, putting the papers slowly back into the cast-iron box, "there is no doubt about. No doubt a—bout," he repeated to himself, as he thoughtfully pursued his occupation. The lawyer very likely knew his man; at any rate his dry, shrewd, whimsical manner, had a favourable influence on the client’s moody state, and disposed him to be more free and unreserved. Or, perhaps the client knew his man, and had elicited such encouragement as he had received, to render some purpose he was about to disclose the more defensible in appearance. Gradually raising his head, he sat looking at his immovable adviser with a smile, which presently broke into a laugh. "After all," he said, "my iron-headed friend—" Mr. Snitchey pointed out his partner. "Self and—excuse me—Craggs." "I beg Mr. Craggs’s pardon," said the client. "After all, my iron-headed friends," he leaned forward in his chair, and dropped his voice a little, "you don’t know half my ruin yet." Mr. Snitchey stopped and stared at him. Mr. Craggs also stared. "I am not only deep in debt," said the client, "but I am deep in—" "Not in love!" cried Snitchey. "Yes!" said the client, falling back in his chair, and surveying the Firm with his hands in his pockets. "Deep in love." "And not with an heiress, Sir?" said Snitchey. "Not with an heiress." "Nor a rich lady?" "Nor a rich lady that I know of—except in beauty and merit." "A single lady, I trust?" said Mr. Snitchey, with great expression. "Certainly." ‘It’s not one of Doctor Jeddler’s daughters?’ said Snitchey, suddenly squaring his elbows on his knees, and advancing his face at least a yard. ‘Yes!’ returned the client. "Not his younger daughter?" said Snitchey. "Yes!" returned the client. "Mr. Craggs," said Snitchey, much relieved, "will you oblige me with another pinch of snuff? Thank you. I am happy to say it don’t signify, Mr. Warden; she’s engaged, sir, she’s bespoke. My partner can corroborate me. We know the fact." "We know the fact," repeated Craggs. "Why, so do I perhaps," returned the client quietly. "What of that? Are you men of the world, and did you never hear of a woman changing her mind?" "There certainly have been actions for breach," said Mr. Snitchey, "brought against both spinsters and widows, but in the majority of cases—" "Cases!" interposed the client, impatiently. "Don’t talk to me of cases. The general precedent is in a much larger volume than any of your law books. Besides, do you think I have lived six weeks in the Doctor’s house for nothing?" "I think, sir," observed Mr. Snitchey, gravely addressing himself to his partner, "that of all the scrapes Mr. Warden’s horses have brought him into at one time and another—and they have been pretty numerous, and pretty expensive, as none know better than himself and you and I—the worst scrape may turn out to be, if he talks in this way, this having ever been left by one of them at the Doctor’s garden wall, with three broken ribs, a snapped collar-bone, and the Lord knows how many bruises. We didn’t think so much of it, at the time when we knew he was going on well under the Doctor’s hands and roof; but it looks bad now, Sir. Bad! It looks very bad. Doctor Jeddler too—our client, Mr. Craggs." "Mr. Alfred Heathfield too—a sort of client, Mr. Snitchey," said Craggs. "Mr. Michael Warden too, a kind of client," said the careless visitor, "and no bad one either: having played the fool for ten or twelve years. However Mr. Michael Warden has sown his wild oats now—there’s their crop, in that box; and he means to repent and be wise. And in proof of it, Mr. Michael Warden means, if he can, to marry Marion, the Doctor’s lovely daughter, and to carry her away with him." "Really, Mr. Craggs," Snitchey began. "Really, Mr. Snitchey, and Mr. Craggs, partners both," said the client, interrupting him; "you know your duty to your clients, and you know well enough, I am sure, that it is no part of it to interfere in a mere love affair, which I am obliged to confide to you. I am not going to carry the young lady off, without her own consent. There’s nothing illegal in it. I never was Mr. Heathfield’s bosom friend. I violate no confidence of his. I love where he loves, and I mean to win where he would win, if I can." "He can’t, Mr. Craggs," said Snitchey, evidently anxious and discomfited. "He can’t do it, Sir. She dotes on Mr. Alfred." "Does she?" returned the client. "Mr. Craggs, she dotes on him, Sir," persisted Snitchey. "I didn’t live six weeks, some few months ago, in the Doctor’s house for nothing; and I doubted that soon," observed the client. "She would have doted on him, if her sister could have brought it about; but I watched them. Marion avoided his name, avoided the subject: shrunk from the least allusion to it, with evident distress." "Why should she, Mr. Craggs, you know? Why should she, Sir?" inquired Snitchey. "I don’t know why she should, though there are many likely reasons," said the client, smiling at the attention and perplexity expressed in Mr. Snitchey’s shining eye, and at his cautious way of carrying on the conversation, and making himself informed upon the subject; "but I know she does. She was very young when she made the engagement—if it may be called one, I am not even sure of that—and has repented of it, perhaps. Perhaps—it seems a foppish thing to say, but upon my soul I don’t mean it in that light—she may have fallen in love with me, as I have fallen in love with her." "He, he! Mr. Alfred, her old playfellow too, you remember, Mr. Craggs," said Snitchey, with a disconcerted laugh; "knew her almost from a baby!" "Which makes it the more probable that she may be tired of his idea," calmly pursued the client, "and not indisposed to exchange it for the newer one of another lover, who presents himself (or is presented by his horse) under romantic circumstances; has the not unfavourable reputation—with a country girl—of having lived thoughtlessly and gaily, without doing much harm to anybody; and who, for his youth and figure, and so forth—this may seem foppish again, but upon my soul I don’t mean it in that light—might perhaps pass muster in a crowd with Mr. Alfred himself." There was no gainsaying the last clause, certainly; and Mr. Snitchey, glancing at him, thought so. There was something naturally graceful and pleasant in the very carelessness of his air. It seemed to suggest, of his comely face and well-knit figure, that they might be greatly better if he chose: and that, once roused and made earnest (but he never had been earnest yet), he could be full of fire and purpose. "A dangerous sort of libertine," thought the shrewd lawyer, "to seem to catch the spark he wants from a young lady’s eyes." "Now, observe, Snitchey," he continued, rising and taking him by the button, "and Craggs," taking him by the button also, and placing one partner on either side of him, so that neither might evade him. "I don’t ask you for any advice. You are right to keep quite aloof from all parties in such a matter, which is not one in which grave men like you could interfere, on any side. I am briefly going to review in half-a-dozen words, my position and intention, and then I shall leave it to you to do the best for me, in money matters, that you can: seeing, that, if I run away with the Doctor’s beautiful daughter (as I hope to do, and to become another man under her bright influence), it will be, for the moment, more chargeable than running away alone. But I shall soon make all that up in an altered life." "I think it will be better not to hear this, Mr. Craggs?" said Snitchey, looking at him across the client. "I think not," said Craggs.—Both listening attentively. "Well! You needn’t hear it," replied their client. "I’ll mention it, however. I don’t mean to ask the Doctor’s consent, because he wouldn’t give it me. But I mean to do the Doctor no wrong or harm, because (besides there being nothing serious in such trifles, as he says) I hope to rescue his child, my Marion, from what I see—I know—she dreads, and contemplates with misery: that is, the return of this old lover. If anything in the world is true, it is true that she dreads his return. Nobody is injured so far. I am so harried and worried here just now, that I lead the life of a flying-fish; skulk about in the dark, I am shut out of my own house, and warned off my own grounds: but that house, and those grounds, and many an acre besides, will come back to me one day, as you know and say; and Marion will probably be richer—on your showing, who are never sanguine—ten years hence as my wife, than as the wife of Alfred Heathfield, whose return she dreads (remember that), and in whom or in any man, my passion is not surpassed. Who is injured yet? It is a fair case throughout. My right is as good as his, if she decide in my favor; and I will try my right by her alone. You will like to know no more after this, and I will tell you no more. Now you know my purpose, and wants. When must I leave here?" "In a week," said Snitchey. "Mr. Craggs?"— "In something less, I should say," responded Craggs. "In a month," said the client, after attentively watching the two faces. "This day month. To-day is Thursday. Succeed or fail, on this day month I go." "It’s too long a delay," said Snitchey; "much too long. But let it be so. I thought he’d have stipulated for three," he murmured to himself. "Are you going? Good night, Sir!" "Good night!" returned the client, shaking hands with the Firm. "You’ll live to see me making a good use of riches yet. Henceforth the star of my destiny is, Marion!" "Take care of the stairs, Sir," replied Snitchey; "for she don’t shine there. Good night!" "Good night!" So they both stood at the stair-head with a pair of office-candles, watching him down; and when he had gone away, stood looking at each other. "What do you think of all this, Mr. Craggs?" said Snitchey. Mr. Craggs shook his head. "It was our opinion, on the day when that release was executed, that there was something curious in the parting of that pair, I recollect," said Snitchey. "It was," said Mr. Craggs. "Perhaps he deceives himself altogether," pursued Mr. Snitchey, locking up the fireproof box, and putting it away; "or, if he don’t, a little bit of fickleness and perfidy is not a miracle, Mr. Craggs. And yet I thought that pretty face was very true. I thought," said Mr. Snitchey, putting on his great-coat (for the weather was very cold), drawing on his gloves, and snuffing out one candle, "that I had even seen her character becoming stronger and more resolved of late. More like her sister’s." "Mrs. Craggs was of the same opinion," returned Craggs. "I’d really give a trifle to-night," observed Mr. Snitchey, who was a good-natured man, "if I could believe that Mr. Warden was reckoning without his host; but light-headed, capricious, and unballasted as he is, he knows something of the world and its people (he ought to, for he has bought what he does know, dear enough); and I can’t quite think that. We had better not interfere: we can do nothing, Mr. Craggs, but keep quiet." "Nothing," returned Craggs. "Our friend the Doctor makes light of such things," said Mr. Snitchey, shaking his head. "I hope he mayn’t stand in need of his philosophy. Our friend Alfred talks of the battle of life," he shook his head again, "I hope he mayn’t be cut down early in the day. Have you got your hat, Mr. Craggs? I am going to put the other candle out." Mr. Craggs replying in the affirmative, Mr. Snitchey suited the action to the word, and they groped their way out of the council-chamber: now dark as the subject, or the law in general. My story passes to a quiet little study, where, on that same night, the sisters and the hale old Doctor sat by a cheerful fire-side. Grace was working at her needle. Marion read aloud from a book before her. The Doctor, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his feet spread out upon the warm rug, leaned back in his easy chair, and listened to the book, and looked upon his daughters. They were very beautiful to look upon. Two better faces for a fireside, never made a fireside bright and sacred. Something of the difference between them had been softened down in three years’ time; and enthroned upon the clear brow of the younger sister, looking through her eyes, and thrilling in her voice, was the same earnest nature that her own motherless youth had ripened in the elder sister long ago. But she still appeared at once the lovelier and weaker of the two; still seemed to rest her head upon her sister’s breast, and put her trust in her, and look into her eyes for counsel and reliance. Those loving eyes, so calm, serene, and cheerful, as of old. " 'And being in her own home,'" read Marion, from the book; " 'her home made exquisitely dear by these remembrances, she now began to know that the great trial of her heart must soon come on, and could not be delayed. O Home, our comforter and friend when others fall away, to part with whom, at any step between the cradle and the grave—'" "Marion, my love!" said Grace. "Why, Puss!" exclaimed her father, "what’s the matter?" She put her hand upon the hand her sister stretched towards her, and read on; her voice still faltering and trembling, though she made an effort to command it when thus interrupted. " 'To part with whom, at any step between the cradle and the grave, is always sorrowful. Oh Home, so true to us, so often slighted in return, be lenient to them that turn away from thee, and do not haunt their erring footsteps too reproachfully! Let no kind looks, no well-remembered smiles, be seen upon thy phantom face. Let no ray of affection, welcome, gentleness, forbearance, cordiality, shine from thy white head. Let no old loving word, or tone, rise up in judgment against thy deserter; but if thou canst look harshly and severely, do, in mercy to the Penitent!'" "Dear Marion, read no more to-night," said Grace —for she was weeping. "I cannot," she replied, and closed the book. "The words seem all on fire!" The Doctor was amused at this; and laughed as he patted her on the head. "What! overcome by a story-book!" said Doctor Jeddler. "Print and paper! Well, well, it’s all one. It’s as rational to make a serious matter of print and paper as of anything else. But dry your eyes, love, dry your eyes. I dare say the heroine has got home again long ago, and made it up all round—and if she hasn’t, a real home is only four walls; and a fictitious one, mere rags and ink. What’s the matter now?" "It’s only me, Mister," said Clemency, putting in her head at the door. "And what’s the matter with you?" said the Doctor. "Oh, bless you, nothing an’t the matter with me," returned Clemency—and truly too, to judge from her well-soaped face, in which there gleamed as usual the very soul of good humour, which, ungainly as she was, made her quite engaging. Abrasions on the elbows are not generally understood, it is true, to range within that class of personal charms called beauty-spots. But, it is better, going through the world, to have the arms chafed in that narrow passage, than the temper: and Clemency’s was sound and whole as any beauty’s in the land. "Nothing an’t the matter with me," said Clemency, entering, "but—come a little closer, Mister." The Doctor, in some astonishment, complied with this invitation. "You said I wasn’t to give you one before them, you know," said Clemency. A novice in the family might have supposed, from her extraordinary ogling as she said it, as well as from a singular rapture or ecstasy which pervaded her elbows, as if she were embracing herself, that ‘one,’ in its most favorable interpretation, meant a chaste salute. Indeed the Doctor himself seemed alarmed, for the moment; but quickly regained his composure, as Clemency, having had recourse to both her pockets—beginning with the right one, going away to the wrong one, and afterwards coming back to the right one again—produced a letter from the Post-office. "Britain was riding by on a errand," she chuckled, handing it to the Doctor, "and see the mail come in, and waited for it. There’s A. H. in the corner. Mr. Alfred’s on his journey home, I bet. We shall have a wedding in the house—there was two spoons in my saucer this morning. Oh Luck, how slow he opens it!" All this she delivered, by way of soliloquy, gradually rising higher and higher on tiptoe, in her impatience to hear the news, and making a corkscrew of her apron, and a bottle of her mouth. At last, arriving at a climax of suspense, and seeing the Doctor still engaged in the perusal of the letter, she came down flat upon the soles of her feet again, and cast her apron, as a veil, over her head, in a mute despair, and inability to bear it any longer. "Here! Girls!" cried the Doctor. "I can’t help it: I never could keep a secret in my life. There are not many secrets, indeed, worth being kept in such a—well! never mind that. Alfred’s coming home, my dears, directly." "Directly!" exclaimed Marion. "What! The story-book is soon forgotten!" said the Doctor, pinching her cheek. "I thought the news would dry those tears. Yes. 'Let it be a surprise,' he says, here. But I can’t let it be a surprise. He must have a welcome." "Directly!" repeated Marion. "Why, perhaps not what your impatience calls 'directly,’" returned the Doctor; "but pretty soon too. Let us see. Let us see. To-day is Thursday, is it not? Then he promises to be here, this day month." "This day month!" repeated Marion, softly. "A gay day and a holiday for us," said the cheerful voice of her sister Grace, kissing her in congratulation. "Long looked forward to, dearest, and come at last." She answered with a smile; a mournful smile, but full of sisterly affection. As she looked in her sister’s face, and listened to the quiet music of her voice, picturing the happiness of this return, her own face glowed with hope and joy. And with a something else: a something shining more and more through all the rest of its expression: for which I have no name. It was not exultation, triumph, proud enthusiasm. They are not so calmly shown. It was not love and gratitude alone, though love and gratitude were part of it. It emanated from no sordid thought, for sordid thoughts do not light up the brow, and hover on the lips, and move the spirit like a fluttered light, until the sympathetic figure trembles. Dr. Jeddler, in spite of his system of philosophy—which he was continually contradicting and denying in practice, but more famous philosophers have done that—could not help having as much interest in the return of his old ward and pupil, as if it had been a serious event. So he sat himself down in his easy chair again, stretched out his slippered feet once more upon the rug, read the letter over and over a great many times, and talked it over more times still. "Ah! The day was," said the Doctor, looking at the fire, "when you and he, Grace, used to trot about arm-in-arm, in his holiday time, like a couple of walking dolls. You remember?" "I remember," she answered, with her pleasant laugh, and plying her needle busily. "This day month, indeed!" mused the Doctor. "That hardly seems a twelve-month ago. And where was my little Marion then!" "Never far from her sister," said Marion, cheerily, "however little. Grace was everything to me, even when she was a young child herself." "True, Puss, true," returned the Doctor. "She was a staid little woman, was Grace, and a wise housekeeper, and a busy, quiet, pleasant body; bearing with our humours and anticipating our wishes, and always ready to forget her own, even in those times. I never knew you positive or obstinate, Grace, my darling, even then, on any subject but one." "I am afraid I have changed sadly for the worse, since," laughed Grace, still busy at her work. "What was that one, father?" "Alfred, of course," said the Doctor. "Nothing would serve you but you must be called Alfred’s wife; so we called you Alfred’s wife; and you liked it better, I believe (odd as it seems now), than being called a Duchess, if we could have made you one." "Indeed?" said Grace, placidly. "Why, don’t you remember?" inquired the Doctor. "I think I remember something of it," she returned, "but not much. It’s so long ago." And as she sat at work, she hummed the burden of an old song, which the Doctor liked. "Alfred will find a real wife soon," she said, breaking off; "and that will be a happy time indeed for all of us. My three years’ trust is nearly at an end, Marion. It has been a very easy one. I shall tell Alfred, when I give you back to him, that you have loved him dearly all the time, and that he has never once needed my good services. May I tell him so, love?" "Tell him, dear Grace," replied Marion, "that there never was a trust so generously, nobly, steadfastly discharged; and that I have loved you, all the time, dearer and dearer every day; and oh! how dearly now!" "Nay," said her cheerful sister, returning her embrace, "I can scarcely tell him that; we will leave my deserts to Alfred’s imagination. It will be liberal enough, dear Marion; like your own." With that, she resumed the work she had for a moment laid down, when her sister spoke so fervently: and with it the old song the Doctor liked to hear. And the Doctor, still reposing in his easy chair, with his slippered feet stretched out before him on the rug, listened to the tune, and beat time on his knee with Alfred’s letter, and looked at his two daughters, and thought that among the many trifles of the trifling world, these trifles were agreeable enough. Clemency Newcome, in the mean time, having accomplished her mission and lingered in the room until she had made herself a party to the news, descended to the kitchen, where her coadjutor, Mr. Britain, was regaling after supper, surrounded by such a plentiful collection of bright pot-lids, well-scoured saucepans, burnished dinner-covers, gleaming kettles, and other tokens of her industrious habits, arranged upon the walls and shelves, that he sat as in the centre of a hall of mirrors. The majority did not give forth very flattering portraits of him, certainly; nor were they by any means unanimous in their reflections; as some made him very long-faced, others very broad-faced, some tolerably well-looking, others vastly ill-looking, according to their several manners of reflecting: which were as various, in respect of one fact, as those of so many kinds of men. But they all agreed that in the midst of them sat, quite at his ease, an individual with a pipe in his mouth, and a jug of beer at his elbow, who nodded condescendingly to Clemency, when she stationed herself at the same table. "Well, Clemmy," said Britain, "how are you by this time, and what’s the news?" Clemency told him the news, which he received very graciously. A gracious change had come over Benjamin from head to foot. He was much broader, much redder, much more cheerful, and much jollier in all respects. It seemed as if his face had been tied up in a knot before, and was now untwisted and smoothed out. "There’ll be another job for Snitchey and Craggs, I suppose," he observed, puffing slowly at his pipe. "More witnessing for you and me, perhaps, Clemmy!" "Lor!" replied his fair companion, with her favorite twist of her favorite joints. "I wish it was me, Britain!" "Wish what was you?" "A going to be married," said Clemency. Benjamin took his pipe out of his mouth and laughed heartily. "Yes! you’re a likely subject for that!" he said. "Poor Clem!" Clemency for her part laughed as heartily as he, and seemed as much amused by the idea. "Yes," she assented, "I’m a likely subject for that; an’t I?" "You’ll never be married, you know," said Mr. Britain, resuming his pipe. "Don’t you think I ever shall though?" said Clemency, in perfect good faith. Mr. Britain shook his head. "Not a chance of it!" "Only think!" said Clemency. "Well!—I suppose you mean to, Britain, one of these days; don’t you?" A question so abrupt, upon a subject so momentous, required consideration. After blowing out a great cloud of smoke, and looking at it with his head now on this side and now on that, as if it were actually the question, and he were surveying it in various aspects, Mr. Britain replied that he wasn’t altogether clear about it, but—ye-es—he thought he might come to that at last. "I wish her joy, whoever she may be!" cried Clemency. "Oh she’ll have that," said Benjamin, "safe enough." "But she wouldn’t have led quite such a joyful life as she will lead, and wouldn’t have had quite such a sociable sort of husband as she will have," said Clemency, spreading herself half over the table, and staring retrospectively at the candle, "if it hadn’t been for—not that I went to do it, for it was accidental, I am sure—if it hadn’t been for me; now would she, Britain?" "Certainly not," returned Mr. Britain, by this time in that high state of appreciation of his pipe, when a man can open his mouth but a very little way for speaking purposes; and sitting luxuriously immovable in his chair, can afford to turn only his eyes towards a companion, and that very passively and gravely. "Oh! I’m greatly beholden to you, you know, Clem." "Lor, how nice that is to think of!" said Clemency. At the same time, bringing her thoughts as well as her sight to bear upon the candle-grease, and becoming abruptly reminiscent of its healing qualities as a balsam, she anointed her left elbow with a plentiful application of that remedy. "You see I’ve made a good many investigations of one sort and another in my time," pursued Mr. Britain, with the profundity of a sage, "having been always of an inquiring turn of mind; and I’ve read a good many books about the general Rights of things and Wrongs of things, for I went into the literary line myself, when I began life." "Did you though!" cried the admiring Clemency. "Yes," said Mr. Britain: "I was hid for the best part of two years behind a bookstall, ready to fly out if anybody pocketed a volume; and after that, I was light porter to a stay and mantua maker, in which capacity I was employed to carry about, in oilskin baskets, nothing but deceptions—which soured my spirits and disturbed my confidence in human nature; and after that, I heard a world of discussions in this house, which soured my spirits fresh; and my opinion after all is, that, as a safe and comfortable sweetener of the same, and as a pleasant guide through life, there’s nothing like a nutmeg-grater." Clemency was about to offer a suggestion, but he stopped her by anticipating it. "Com-bined," he added gravely, "with a thimble." "Do as you wold, you know, and cetrer, eh!" observed Clemency, folding her arms comfortably in her delight at this avowal, and patting her elbows. "Such a short cut, an’t it?" "I’m not sure," said Mr. Britain, "that it’s what would be considered good philosophy. I’ve my doubts about that: but it wears well, and saves a quantity of snarling, which the genuine article don’t always." "See how you used to go on once, yourself, you know!" said Clemency. "Ah!" said Mr. Britain. "But the most extraordinary thing, Clemmy, is that I should live to be brought round, through you. That’s the strange part of it. Through you! Why, I suppose you haven’t so much as half an idea in your head." Clemency, without taking the least offence, shook it, and laughed and hugged herself, and said, "No, she didn’t suppose she had." "I’m pretty sure of it," said Mr. Britain. "Oh! I dare say you’re right," said Clemency. "I don’t pretend to none. I don’t want any." Benjamin took his pipe from his lips, and laughed till the tears ran down his face. "What a natural you are, Clemmy!" he said, shaking his head, with an infinite relish of the joke, and wiping his eyes. Clemency, without the smallest inclination to dispute it, did the like, and laughed as heartily as he. "I can’t help liking you," said Mr. Britain; "you’re a regular good creature in your way, so shake hands, Clem. Whatever happens, I’ll always take notice of you, and be a friend to you." "Will you?" returned Clemency. "Well! that’s very good of you." "Yes, yes," said Mr. Britain, giving her his pipe to knock the ashes out of it; "I’ll stand by you. Hark! That’s a curious noise!" "Noise!" repeated Clemency. "A footstep outside. Somebody dropping from the wall, it sounded like," said Britain. "Are they all abed up-stairs?" "Yes, all abed by this time," she replied. "Didn’t you hear anything?" "No." They both listened, but heard nothing. "I tell you what," said Benjamin, taking down a lantern. "I’ll have a look round, before I go to bed myself, for satisfaction’s sake. Undo the door while I light this, Clemmy." Clemency complied briskly; but observed as she did so, that he would only have his walk for his pains, that it was all his fancy, and so forth. Mr. Britain said 'very likely;' but sallied out, nevertheless, armed with the poker, and casting the light of the lantern far and near in all directions. "It’s as quiet as a churchyard," said Clemency, looking after him; "and almost as ghostly too!" Glancing back into the kitchen, she cried fearfully, as a light figure stole into her view, "What’s that!" "Hush!" said Marion in an agitated whisper. "You have always loved me, have you not!" "Loved you, child! You may be sure I have." "I am sure. And I may trust you, may I not? There is no one else just now, in whom I can trust." "Yes," said Clemency, with all her heart. "There is some one out there," pointing to the door, "whom I must see, and speak with, to-night. Michael Warden, for God’s sake retire! Not now!" Clemency started with surprise and trouble as, following the direction of the speaker’s eyes, she saw a dark figure standing in the doorway. "In another moment you may be discovered," said Marion. "Not now! Wait, if you can, in some concealment. I will come presently." He waved his hand to her, and was gone. "Don’t go to bed. Wait here for me!" said Marion, hurriedly. "I have been seeking to speak to you for an hour past. Oh, be true to me!" Eagerly seizing her bewildered hand, and pressing it with both her own to her breast—an action more expressive, in its passion of entreaty, than the most eloquent appeal in words,—Marion withdrew; as the light of the returning lantern flashed into the room. "All still and peaceable. Nobody there. Fancy, I suppose," said Mr. Britain, as he locked and barred the door. "One of the effects of having a lively imagination. Halloa! Why, what’s the matter?" Clemency, who could not conceal the effects of her surprise and concern, was sitting in a chair: pale, and trembling from head to foot. "Matter!" she repeated, chafing her hands and elbows, nervously, and looking anywhere but at him. "That’s good in you, Britain, that is! After going and frightening one out of one’s life with noises and lanterns, and I don’t know what all. Matter! Oh, yes!" "If you’re frightened out of your life by a lantern, Clemmy," said Mr. Britain, composedly blowing it out and hanging it up again, "that apparition’s very soon got rid of. But you’re as bold as brass in general," he said, stopping to observe her; "and were, after the noise and the lantern too. What have you taken into your head? Not an idea, eh?" But as Clemency bade him good night very much after her usual fashion, and began to bustle about with a show of going to bed herself immediately, Little Britain, after giving utterance to the original remark that it was impossible to account for a woman’s whims, bade her good night in return, and taking up his candle strolled drowsily away to bed. When all was quiet, Marion returned. "Open the door," she said; "and stand there close beside me, while I speak to him, outside." Timid as her manner was, it still evinced a resolute and settled purpose, such as Clemency could not resist. She softly unbarred the door: but before turning the key, looked round on the young creature waiting to issue forth when she should open it. The face was not averted or cast down, but looking full upon her, in its pride of youth and beauty. Some simple sense of the slightness of the barrier that interposed itself between the happy home and honoured love of the fair girl, and what might be the desolation of that home, and shipwreck of its dearest treasure, smote so keenly on the tender heart of Clemency, and so filled it to overflowing with sorrow and compassion, that, bursting into tears, she threw her arms round Marion’s neck. "It’s little that I know, my dear," cried Clemency, "very little; but I know that this should not be. Think of what you do!" "I have thought of it many times," said Marion, gently. "Once more," urged Clemency. "Till to-morrow." Marion shook her head. "For Mr. Alfred’s sake," said Clemency, with homely earnestness. "Him that you used to love so dearly, once!" She hid her face, upon the instant, in her hands, repeating "Once!" as if it rent her heart. "Let me go out," said Clemency, soothing her. "I’ll tell him what you like. Don’t cross the door-step to-night. I’m sure no good will come of it. Oh, it was an unhappy day when Mr. Warden was ever brought here! Think of your good father, darling: of your sister." "I have," said Marion, hastily raising her head. "You don’t know what I do. You don't know what I do. I must speak to him. You are the best and truest friend in all the world for what you have said to me, but I must take this step. Will you go with me, Clemency," she kissed her on her friendly face, "or shall I go alone?" Sorrowing and wondering, Clemency turned the key, and opened the door. Into the dark and doubtful night that lay beyond the threshold, Marion passed quickly, holding by her hand. In the dark night he joined her, and they spoke together earnestly and long: and the hand that held so fast by Clemency’s, now trembled, now turned deadly cold, now clasped and closed on hers, in the strong feeling of the speech it emphasized unconsciously. When they returned, he followed to the door; and pausing there a moment, seized the other hand, and pressed it to his lips. Then stealthily withdrew. The door was barred and locked again, and once again she stood beneath her father’s roof. Not bowed down by the secret that she brought there, though so young; but with that same expression on her face for which I had no name before, and shining through her tears. Again she thanked and thanked her humble friend, and trusted to her, as she said, with confidence, implicitly. Her chamber safely reached, she fell upon her knees; and with her secret weighing on her heart, could pray! Could rise up from her prayers, so tranquil and serene, and bending over her fond sister in her slumber, look upon her face and smile: though sadly: murmuring as she kissed her forehead, how that Grace had been a mother to her, ever, and she loved her as a child! Could draw the passive arm about her neck when lying down to rest—it seemed to cling there, of its own will, protectingly and tenderly even in sleep—and breathe upon the parted lips, God bless her! Could sink into a peaceful sleep, herself; but for one dream, in which she cried out, in her innocent and touching voice, that she was quite alone, and they had all forgotten her. A month soon passes, even at its tardiest pace. The month appointed to elapse between that night and the return, was quick of foot, and went by, like a vapour. The day arrived. A raging winter day, that shook the old house, sometimes, as if it shivered in the blast. A day to make home doubly home. To give the chimney corner new delights. To shed a ruddier glow upon the faces gathered round the hearth; and draw each fireside group into a closer and more social league, against the roaring elements without. Such a wild winter day as best prepares the way for shut-out night; for curtained rooms, and cheerful looks; for music, laughter, dancing, light, and jovial entertainment! All these the Doctor had in store to welcome Alfred back. They knew that he could not arrive till night; and they would make the night air ring, he said, as he approached. All his old friends should congregate about him. He should not miss a face that he had known and liked. No! They should every one be there! So, guests were bidden, and musicians were engaged, and tables spread, and floors prepared for active feet, and bountiful provision made, of every hospitable kind. Because it was the Christmas season, and his eyes were all unused to English holly, and its sturdy green, the dancing room was garlanded and hung with it; and the red berries gleamed an English welcome to him, peeping from among the leaves. It was a busy day for all of them: a busier day for none of them than Grace, who noiselessly presided everywhere, and was the cheerful mind of all the preparations. Many a time that day (as well as many a time within the fleeting month preceding it), did Clemency glance anxiously, and almost fearfully, at Marion. She saw her paler, perhaps, than usual; but there was a sweet composure on her face that made it lovelier than ever. At night when she was dressed, and wore upon her head a wreath that Grace had proudly twined about it—its mimic flowers were Alfred’s favourites, as Grace remembered when she chose them—that old expression, pensive, almost sorrowful, and yet so spiritual, high, and stirring, sat again upon her brow, enhanced a hundred fold. "The next wreath I adjust on this fair head, will be a marriage wreath," said Grace; "or I am no true prophet, dear." Her sister smiled, and held her in her arms. "A moment, Grace. Don’t leave me yet. Are you sure that I want nothing more?" Her care was not for that. It was her sister’s face she thought of, and her eyes were fixed upon it, tenderly. "My art," said Grace, "can go no farther, dear girl; nor your beauty. I never saw you look so beautiful as now." "I never was so happy," she returned. "Ay, but there is a greater happiness in store. In such another home, as cheerful and as bright as this looks now," said Grace, "Alfred and his young wife will soon be living." She smiled again. "It is a happy home, Grace, in your fancy. I can see it in your eyes. I know it will be happy, dear. How glad I am to know it." "Well," cried the Doctor, bustling in. "Here we are, all ready for Alfred, eh? He can’t be here until pretty late—an hour or so before midnight—so there’ll be plenty of time for making merry before he comes. He’ll not find us with the ice unbroken. Pile up the fire here, Britain! Let it shine upon the holly till it winks again. It’s a world of nonsense, Puss; true lovers and all the rest of it—all nonsense; but we’ll be nonsensical with the rest of ’em, and give our true lover a mad welcome. Upon my word!" said the old Doctor, looking at his daughters proudly, "I’m not clear to-night, among other absurdities, but that I’m the father of two handsome girls." "All that one of them has ever done, or may do—may do, dearest father—to cause you pain or grief, forgive her," said Marion, "forgive her now, when her heart is full. Say that you forgive her. That you will forgive her. That she shall always share your love, and—," and the rest was not said, for her face was hidden on the old man’s shoulder. "Tut, tut, tut," said the Doctor gently. "Forgive! What have I to forgive? Heyday, if our true lovers come back to flurry us like this, we must hold ’em at a distance; we must send expresses out to stop ’em short upon the road, and bring ’em on a mile or two a day, until we’re properly prepared to meet ’em. Kiss me, Puss. Forgive! Why, what a silly child you are! If you had vexed and crossed me fifty times a day, instead of not at all, I’d forgive you everything, but such a supplication. Kiss me again, Puss. There! Prospective and retrospective—a clear score between us. Pile up the fire here! Would you freeze the people on this bleak December night! Let us be light, and warm, and merry, or I’ll not forgive some of you!" So gaily the old Doctor carried it! And the fire was piled up, and the lights were bright, and company arrived, and a murmuring of lively tongues began, and already there was a pleasant air of cheerful excitement stirring through all the house. More and more company came flocking in. Bright eyes sparkled upon Marion; smiling lips gave her joy of his return; sage mothers fanned themselves, and hoped she mightn’t be too youthful and inconstant for the quiet round of home; impetuous fathers fell into disgrace for too much exaltation of her beauty; daughters envied her; sons envied him; innumerable pairs of lovers profited by the occasion; all were interested, animated, and expectant. Mr. and Mrs. Craggs came arm in arm, but Mrs. Snitchey came alone. "Why, what’s become of him?" inquired the Doctor. The feather of a Bird of Paradise in Mrs. Snitchey’s turban, trembled as if the Bird of Paradise were alive again, when she said that doubtless Mr. Craggs knew. She was never told. "That nasty office," said Mrs. Craggs. "I wish it was burnt down," said Mrs. Snitchey. "He’s—he’s—there’s a little matter of business that keeps my partner rather late," said Mr. Craggs, looking uneasily about him. "Oh-h! Business. Don’t tell me!" said Mrs. Snitchey. "We know what business means," said Mrs. Craggs. But their not knowing what it meant, was perhaps the reason why Mrs. Snitchey’s Bird of Paradise feather quivered so portentously, and why all the pendant bits on Mrs. Craggs’s ear-rings shook like little bells. "I wonder you could come away, Mr. Craggs," said his wife. "Mr. Craggs is fortunate, I’m sure!" said Mrs. Snitchey. "That office so engrosses ’em," said Mrs. Craggs. "A person with an office has no business to be married at all," said Mrs. Snitchey. Then, Mrs. Snitchey said, within herself, that that look of hers had pierced to Craggs’s soul, and he knew it; and Mrs. Craggs observed to Craggs, that 'is Snitcheys’ were deceiving him behind his back, and he would find it out when it was too late. Still, Mr. Craggs, without much heeding these remarks, looked uneasily about until his eye rested on Grace, to whom he immediately presented himself. "Good evening, ma’am," said Craggs. "You look charmingly. Your—Miss—your sister, Miss Marion, is she—" "Oh, she’s quite well, Mr. Craggs." "Yes—I—is she here?" asked Craggs. "Here! Don’t you see her yonder? Going to dance?" said Grace. Mr. Craggs put on his spectacles to see the better; looked at her through them, for some time; coughed; and put them, with an air of satisfaction, in their sheath again, and in his pocket. Now the music struck up, and the dance commenced. The bright fire crackled and sparkled, rose and fell, as though it joined the dance itself, in right good fellowship. Sometimes it roared as if it would make music too. Sometimes it flashed and beamed as if it were the eye of the old room: it winked too, sometimes, like a knowing patriarch, upon the youthful whisperers in corners. Sometimes, it sported with the holly-boughs; and, shining on the leaves by fits and starts, made them look as if they were in the cold winter night again, and fluttering in the wind. Sometimes its genial humour grew obstreperous, and passed all bounds; and then it cast into the room, among the twinkling feet, with a loud burst, a shower of harmless little sparks, and in its exultation leaped and bounded, like a mad thing, up the broad old chimney. Another dance was near its close, when Mr. Snitchey touched his partner, who was looking on, upon the arm. Mr. Craggs started, as if his familiar had been a spectre. "Is he gone?" he asked. "Hush! He has been with me," said Snitchey, "for three hours and more. He went over everything. He looked into all our arrangements for him, and was very particular indeed. He—Humph!" The dance was finished. Marion passed close before him, as he spoke. She did not observe him, or his partner; but looked over her shoulder towards her sister in the distance, as she slowly made her way into the crowd, and passed out of their view. "You see! All safe and well," said Mr. Craggs. "He didn’t recur to that subject, I suppose?" "Not a word." "And is he really gone? Is he safe away?" "He keeps to his word. He drops down the river with the tide in that shell of a boat of his, and so goes out to sea on this dark night—a dare-devil he is—before the wind. There’s no such lonely road anywhere else. That’s one thing. The tide flows, he says, an hour before midnight about this time. I’m glad it’s over." Mr. Snitchey wiped his forehead, which looked hot and anxious. "What do you think," said Mr. Craggs, "about—" "Hush!" replied his cautious partner, looking straight before him. "I understand you. Don’t mention names, and don’t let us seem to be talking secrets. I don’t know what to think; and to tell you the truth, I don’t care now. It’s a great relief. His self-love deceived him, I suppose. Perhaps the young lady coquetted a little. The evidence would seem to point that way. Alfred not arrived?" "Not yet," said Mr. Craggs. "Expected every minute." "Good." Mr. Snitchey wiped his forehead again. "It’s a great relief. I haven’t been so nervous since we’ve been in partnership. I intend to spend the evening now, Mr. Craggs." Mrs. Craggs and Mrs. Snitchey joined them as he announced this intention. The Bird of Paradise was in a state of extreme vibration, and the little bells were ringing quite audibly. "It has been the theme of general comment, Mr. Snitchey," said Mrs. Snitchey. "I hope the office is satisfied." "Satisfied with what, my dear?" asked Mr. Snitchey. "With the exposure of a defenceless woman to ridicule and remark," returned his wife. "That is quite in the way of the office, that is." "I really, myself," said Mrs. Craggs, "have been so long accustomed to connect the office with everything opposed to domesticity, that I am glad to know it as the avowed enemy of my peace. There is something honest in that, at all events." "My dear," urged Mr. Craggs, "your good opinion is invaluable, but I never avowed that the office was the enemy of your peace." "No," said Mrs. Craggs, ringing a perfect peal upon the little bells. "Not you, indeed. You wouldn’t be worthy of the office, if you had the candor to." "As to my having been away to-night, my dear," said Mr. Snitchey, giving her his arm, "the deprivation has been mine, I’m sure; but, as Mr. Craggs knows—" Mrs. Snitchey cut this reference very short by hitching her husband to a distance, and asking him to look at that man. To do her the favour to look at him! "At which man, my dear?" said Mr. Snitchey. "Your chosen companion; I’m no companion to you, Mr. Snitchey." "Yes, yes, you are, my dear," he interposed. "No, no, I’m not," said Mrs. Snitchey with a majestic smile. "I know my station. Will you look at your chosen companion, Mr. Snitchey; at your referee, at the keeper of your secrets, at the man you trust; at your other self, in short?" The habitual association of Self with Craggs, occasioned Mr. Snitchey to look in that direction. "If you can look that man in the eye this night," said Mrs. Snitchey, "and not know that you are deluded, practised upon: made the victim of his arts, and bent down prostrate to his will by some unaccountable fascination which it is impossible to explain, and against which no warning of mine is of the least avail: all I can say is—I pity you!" At the very same moment Mrs. Craggs was oracular on the cross subject. Was it possible she said, that Craggs could so blind himself to his Snitcheys, as not to feel his true position? Did he mean to say that he had seen his Snitcheys come into that room, and didn’t plainly see that there was reservation, cunning, treachery, in the man? Would he tell her that his very action, when he wiped his forehead and looked so stealthily about him, didn’t show that there was something weighing on the conscience of his precious Snitcheys (if he had a conscience), that wouldn’t bear the light? Did anybody but his Snitcheys come to festive entertainments like a burglar?—which, by the way, was hardly a clear illustration of the case, as he had walked in very mildly at the door. And would he still assert to her at noon-day (it being nearly midnight), that his Snitcheys were to be justified through thick and thin, against all facts, and reason, and experience? Neither Snitchey nor Craggs openly attempted to stem the current which had thus set in, but, both were content to be carried gently along it, until its force abated; which happened at about the same time as a general movement for a country dance; when Mr. Snitchey proposed himself as a partner to Mrs. Craggs, and Mr. Craggs gallantly offered himself to Mrs. Snitchey; and after some such slight evasions as "why don’t you ask somebody else?" and "you’ll be glad, I know, if I decline," and "I wonder you can dance out of the office" (but this jocosely now), each lady graciously accepted, and took her place. It was an old custom among them, indeed, to do so, and to pair off, in like manner, at dinners and suppers; for they were excellent friends, and on a footing of easy familiarity. Perhaps the false Craggs and the wicked Snitchey were a recognised fiction with the two wives, as Doe and Roe, incessantly running up and down bailiwicks, were with the two husbands: or, perhaps the ladies had instituted, and taken upon themselves, these two shares in the business, rather than be left out of it altogether. But, certain it is, that each wife went as gravely and steadily to work in her vocation as her husband did in his: and would have considered it almost impossible for the Firm to maintain a successful and respectable existence, without her laudable exertions. But now the Bird of Paradise was seen to flutter down the middle; and the little bells began to bounce and jingle in poussette; and the Doctor’s rosy face spun round and round, like an expressive pegtop highly varnished; and breathless Mr. Craggs began to doubt already, whether country dancing had been made "too easy," like the rest of life; and Mr. Snitchey, with his nimble cuts and capers, footed it for Self and Craggs, and half a dozen more. Now, too, the fire took fresh courage, favored by the lively wind the dance awakened, and burnt clear and high. It was the Genius of the room, and present everywhere. It shone in people’s eyes, it sparkled in the jewels on the snowy necks of girls, it twinkled at their ears as if it whispered to them slyly, it flashed about their waists, it flickered on the ground and made it rosy for their feet, it bloomed upon the ceiling that its glow might set off their bright faces, and it kindled up a general illumination in Mrs. Craggs’s little belfry. Now, too, the lively air that fanned it, grew less gentle as the music quickened and the dance proceeded with new spirit; and a breeze arose that made the leaves and berries dance upon the wall, as they had often done upon the trees; and rustled in the room as if an invisible company of fairies, treading in the foot-steps of the good substantial revellers, were whirling after them. Now, too, no feature of the Doctor’s face could be distinguished as he spun and spun; and now there seemed a dozen Birds of Paradise in fitful flight; and now there were a thousand little bells at work; and now a fleet of flying skirts was ruffled by a little tempest; when the music gave in, and the dance was over. Hot and breathless as the Doctor was, it only made him the more impatient for Alfred’s coming. "Anything been seen, Britain? Anything been heard?" "Too dark to see far, Sir. Too much noise inside the house to hear." "That’s right! The gayer welcome for him. How goes the time?" "Just twelve, sir. He can’t be long, Sir." "Stir up the fire, and throw another log upon it," said the Doctor. "Let him see his welcome blazing out upon the night—good boy!—as he comes along!" He saw it—Yes! From the chaise he caught the light, as he turned the corner by the old church. He knew the room from which it shone. He saw the wintry branches of the old trees between the light and him. He knew that one of those trees rustled musically in the summer time at the window of Marion’s chamber. The tears were in his eyes. His heart throbbed so violently that he could hardly bear his happiness. How often he had thought of this time—pictured it under all circumstances—feared that it might never come—yearned, and wearied for it—far away! Again the light! Distinct and ruddy; kindled, he knew, to give him welcome, and to speed him home. He beckoned with his hand, and waved his hat, and cheered out, loud, as if the light were they, and they could see and hear him, as he dashed towards them through the mud and mire, triumphantly. Stop! He knew the Doctor, and understood what he had done. He would not let it be a surprise to them. But he could make it one, yet, by going forward on foot. If the orchard-gate were open, he could enter there; if not, the wall was easily climbed, as he knew of old; and he would be among them in an instant. He dismounted from the chaise, and telling the driver—even that was not easy in his agitation—to remain behind for a few minutes, and then to follow slowly, ran on with exceeding swiftness, tried the gate, scaled the wall, jumped down on the other side, and stood panting in the old orchard. There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands. Withered leaves crackled and snapped beneath his feet, as he crept softly on towards the house. The desolation of a winter night sat brooding on the earth, and in the sky. But the red light came cheerily towards him from the windows; figures passed and repassed there; and the hum and murmur of voices greeted his ear sweetly. Listening for hers: attempting, as he crept on, to detach it from the rest, and half believing that he heard it: he had nearly reached the door, when it was abruptly opened, and a figure coming out encountered his. It instantly recoiled with a half-suppressed cry. "Clemency," he said, "don’t you know me?" "Don’t come in!" she answered, pushing him back. "Go away. Don’t ask me why. Don’t come in." "What is the matter?" he exclaimed. "I don’t know. I—I am afraid to think. Go back. Hark!" There was a sudden tumult in the house. She put her hands upon her ears. A wild scream, such as no hands could shut out, was heard; and Grace—distraction in her looks and manner—rushed out at the door. "Grace!" He caught her in his arms. "What is it! Is she dead!" She disengaged herself, as if to recognise his face, and fell down at his feet. A crowd of figures came about them from the house. Among them was her father, with a paper in his hand. "What is it!" cried Alfred, grasping his hair with his hands, and looking in an agony from face to face, as he bent upon his knee beside the insensible girl. "Will no one look at me? Will no one speak to me? Does no one know me? Is there no voice among you all, to tell me what it is!" There was a murmur among them. "She is gone." "Gone!" he echoed. "Fled, my dear Alfred!" said the Doctor, in a broken voice, and with his hands before his face. "Gone from her home and us. To-night! She writes that she has made her innocent and blameless choice—entreats that we will forgive her—prays that we will not forget her—and is gone." "With whom? Where?" He started up, as if to follow in pursuit; but, when they gave way to let him pass, looked wildly round upon them, staggered back, and sunk down in his former attitude, clasping one of Grace’s cold hands in his own. There was a hurried running to and fro, confusion, noise, disorder, and no purpose. Some proceeded to disperse themselves about the roads, and some took horse, and some got lights, and some conversed together, urging that there was no trace or track to follow. Some approached him kindly, with the view of offering consolation; some admonished him that Grace must be removed into the house, and that he prevented it. He never heard them, and he never moved. The snow fell fast and thick. He looked up for a moment in the air, and thought that those white ashes strewn upon his hopes and misery, were suited to them well. He looked round on the whitening ground, and thought how Marion’s foot-prints would be hushed and covered up, as soon as made, and even that remembrance of her blotted out. But he never felt the weather and he never stirred. Part the Third. The world had grown six years older since that night of the return. It was a warm autumn afternoon, and there had been heavy rain. The sun burst suddenly from among the clouds; and the old battle-ground, sparkling brilliantly and cheerfully at sight of it in one green place, flashed a responsive welcome there, which spread along the country side as if a joyful beacon had been lighted up, and answered from a thousand stations. How beautiful the landscape kindling in the light, and that luxuriant influence passing on like a celestial presence, brightening everything! The wood, a sombre mass before, revealed its varied tints of yellow, green, brown, red; its different forms of trees, with raindrops glittering on their leaves and twinkling as they fell. The verdant meadow-land, bright and glowing, seemed as if it had been blind a minute since, and now had found a sense of sight wherewith to look up at the shining sky. Corn-fields, hedge-rows, fences, homesteads, the clustered roofs, the steeple of the church, the stream, the watermill, all sprang out of the gloomy darkness, smiling. Birds sang sweetly, flowers raised their drooping heads, fresh scents arose from the invigorated ground; the blue expanse above, extended and diffused itself; already the sun’s slanting rays pierced mortally the sullen bank of cloud that lingered in its flight; and a rainbow, spirit of all the colors that adorned the earth and sky, spanned the whole arch with its triumphant glory. At such a time, one little roadside Inn, snugly sheltered behind a great elm-tree with a rare seat for idlers encircling its capacious bole, addressed a cheerful front towards the traveller, as a house of entertainment ought, and tempted him with many mute but significant assurances of a comfortable welcome. The ruddy sign-board perched up in the tree, with its golden letters winking in the sun, ogled the passer-by, from among the green leaves, like a jolly face, and promised good cheer. The horse-trough, full of clear fresh water, and the ground below it, sprinkled with droppings of fragrant hay, made every horse that passed prick up his ears. The crimson curtains in the lower rooms, and the pure white hangings in the little bed-chambers above, beckoned, Come in! with every breath of air. Upon the bright green shutters, there were golden legends about beer and ale, and neat wines, and good beds; and an affecting picture of a brown jug frothing over at the top. Upon the window-sills were flowering plants in bright red pots, which made a lively show against the white front of the house; and in the darkness of the doorway there were streaks of light, which glanced off from the surfaces of bottles and tankards. On the door-step, appeared a proper figure of a landlord, too; for though he was a short man, he was round and broad; and stood with his hands in his pockets, and his legs just wide enough apart to express a mind at rest upon the subject of the cellar, and an easy confidence—too calm and virtuous to become a swagger—in the general resources of the Inn. The superabundant moisture, trickling from everything after the late rain, set him off well. Nothing near him was thirsty. Certain top-heavy dahlias, looking over the palings of his neat well-ordered garden, had swilled as much as they could carry—perhaps a trifle more—and may have been the worse for liquor; but the sweetbriar, roses, wall-flowers, the plants at the windows, and the leaves on the old tree, were in the beaming state of moderate company that had taken no more than was wholesome for them, and had served to develope their best qualities. Sprinkling dewy drops about them on the ground, they seemed profuse of innocent and sparkling mirth, that did good where it lighted, softening neglected corners which the steady rain could seldom reach, and hurting nothing. This village Inn had assumed, on being established, an uncommon sign. It was called The Nutmeg-Grater. And underneath that household word, was inscribed, up in the tree, on the same flaming board, and in the like golden characters, By Benjamin Britain. At a second glance, and on a more minute examination of his face, you might have known that it was no other than Benjamin Britain himself who stood in the doorway—reasonably changed by time, but for the better; a very comfortable host indeed. "Mrs. B.," said Mr. Britain, looking down the road, "is rather late. It’s tea time." As there was no Mrs. Britain coming, he strolled leisurely out into the road and looked up at the house, very much to his satisfaction. "It’s just the sort of house," said Benjamin, "I should wish to stop at, if I didn’t keep it." Then he strolled towards the garden paling, and took a look at the dahlias. They looked over at him, with a helpless, drowsy hanging of their heads: which bobbed again, as the heavy drops of wet dripped off them. "You must be looked after," said Benjamin. "Memorandum, not to forget to tell her so. She’s a long time coming!" Mr. Britain’s better half seemed to be by so very much his better half, that his own moiety of himself was utterly cast away and helpless without her. "She hadn’t much to do, I think," said Ben. "There were a few little matters of business after market, but not many. Oh! here we are at last!" A chaise-cart, driven by a boy, came clattering along the road: and seated in it, in a chair, with a large well-saturated umbrella spread out to dry behind her, was the plump figure of a matronly woman, with her bare arms folded across a basket which she carried on her knee, several other baskets and parcels lying crowded around her, and a certain bright good-nature in her face and contented awkwardness in her manner, as she jogged to and fro with the motion of her carriage, which smacked of old times, even in the distance. Upon her nearer approach, this relish of bygone days was not diminished; and when the cart stopped at the Nutmeg Grater door, a pair of shoes, alighting from it, slipped nimbly through Mr. Britain’s open arms, and came down with a substantial weight upon the pathway, which shoes could hardly have belonged to any one but Clemency Newcome. In fact they did belong to her, and she stood in them, and a rosy comfortable-looking soul she was: with as much soap on her glossy face as in times of yore, but with whole elbows now, that had grown quite dimpled in her improved condition. "You’re late, Clemmy!" said Mr. Britain. "Why, you see, Ben, I’ve had a deal to do!" she replied, looking busily after the safe removal into the house of all the packages and baskets: "eight, nine, ten—where’s eleven? Oh! my basket’s eleven! It’s all right. Put the horse up, Harry, and if he coughs again give him a warm mash to-night. Eight, nine, ten. Why, where’s eleven? Oh I forgot, it’s all right. How’s the children, Ben?" "Hearty, Clemmy, hearty." "Bless their precious faces!" said Mrs. Britain, unbonneting her own round countenance (for she and her husband were by this time in the bar), and smoothing her hair with her open hands. "Give us a kiss, old man." Mr. Britain promptly complied. "I think," said Mrs. Britain, applying herself to her pockets and drawing forth an immense bulk of thin books and crumpled papers, a very kennel of dogs’ ears: "I’ve done everything. Bills all settled—turnips sold—brewer’s account looked into and paid—’bacco pipes ordered—seventeen pound four paid into the Bank—Doctor Heathfield’s charge for little Clem—you’ll guess what that is—Doctor Heathfield won’t take nothing again, Ben." "I thought he wouldn’t," returned Ben. "No. He says whatever family you was to have, Ben, he’d never put you to the cost of a halfpenny. Not if you was to have twenty." Mr. Britain’s face assumed a serious expression, and he looked hard at the wall. "An’t it kind of him?" said Clemency. "Very," returned Mr. Britain. "It’s the sort of kindness that I wouldn’t presume upon, on any account." "No," retorted Clemency. "Of course not. Then there’s the pony—he fetched eight pound two; and that an’t bad, is it?" "It’s very good," said Ben. "I’m glad you’re pleased!" exclaimed his wife. "I thought you would be; and I think that’s all, and so no more at present from yours and cetrer, C. Britain. Ha ha ha! There! Take all the papers, and lock ’em. Oh! Wait a minute. Here’s a printed bill to stick on the wall. Wet from the printer’s. How nice it smells!" "What’s this?" said Ben, looking over the document. "I don’t know," replied his wife. "I haven’t read a word of it." "'To be sold by Auction,'" read the host of the Nutmeg-Grater, "'unless previously disposed of by private contract.'" "They always put that," said Clemency. "Yes, but they don’t always put this," he returned. "Look here, 'Mansion,' &c.—'offices,' &c., 'shrubberies,' &c., 'ring fence,' &c. 'Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs,' &c. 'ornamental portion of the unencumbered freehold property of Michael Warden, Esquire, intending to continue to reside abroad'!" "Intending to continue to reside abroad!" repeated Clemency. "Here it is," said Britain. "Look!" "And it was only this very day that I heard it whispered at the old house, that better and plainer news had been half promised of her, soon!" said Clemency, shaking her head sorrowfully, and patting her elbows as if the recollection of old times unconsciously awakened her old habits. "Dear, dear, dear! There’ll be heavy hearts, Ben, yonder." Mr. Britain heaved a sigh, and shook his head, and said he couldn’t make it out: he had left off trying long ago. With that remark, he applied himself to putting up the bill just inside the bar window: and Clemency, after meditating in silence for a few moments, roused herself, cleared her thoughtful brow, and bustled off to look after the children. Though the host of the Nutmeg Grater had a lively regard for his good-wife, it was of the old patronising kind; and she amused him mightily. Nothing would have astonished him so much, as to have known for certain from any third party, that it was she who managed the whole house, and made him, by her plain straightforward thrift, good-humour, honesty, and industry, a thriving man. So easy it is, in any degree of life (as the world very often finds it,) to take those cheerful natures that never assert their merit, at their own modest valuation; and to conceive a flippant liking of people for their outward oddities and eccentricities, whose innate worth, if we would look so far, might make us blush in the comparison! It was comfortable to Mr. Britain, to think of his own condescension in having married Clemency. She was a perpetual testimony to him of the goodness of his heart, and the kindness of his disposition; and he felt that her being an excellent wife was an illustration of the old precept that virtue is its own reward. He had finished wafering up the bill, and had locked the vouchers for her day’s proceedings in the cupboard—chuckling all the time, over her capacity for business—when, returning with the news that the two Master Britains were playing in the coach-house under the superintendence of one Betsey, and that little Clem was sleeping "like a picture," she sat down to tea, which had awaited her arrival, on a little table. It was a very neat little bar, with the usual display of bottles and glasses; a sedate clock, right to the minute (it was half-past five); everything in its place, and everything furbished and polished up to the very utmost. "It’s the first time I’ve sat down quietly to-day, I declare," said Mrs. Britain, taking a long breath, as if she had sat down for the night; but getting up again immediately to hand her husband his tea, and cut him his bread-and-butter; "how that bill does set me thinking of old times!" "Ah!" said Mr. Britain, handling his saucer like an oyster, and disposing of its contents on the same principle. "That same Mr. Michael Warden," said Clemency, shaking her head at the notice of sale, "lost me my old place." "And got you your husband," said Mr. Britain. "Well! So he did," retorted Clemency, "and many thanks to him." "Man’s the creature of habit," said Mr. Britain, surveying her, over his saucer. "I had somehow got used to you, Clem; and I found I shouldn’t be able to get on without you. So we went and got made man and wife. Ha! ha! We! Who’d have thought it!" "Who indeed!" cried Clemency. "It was very good of you, Ben." "No, no, no," replied Mr. Britain, with an air of self-denial. "Nothing worth mentioning." "Oh yes it was, Ben," said his wife, with great simplicity; "I’m sure I think so, and am very much obliged to you. Ah!" looking again at the bill; "when she was known to be gone, and out of reach, dear girl, I couldn’t help telling—for her sake quite as much as theirs—what I knew, could I?" "You told it, anyhow," observed her husband. "And Doctor Jeddler," pursued Clemency, putting down her tea-cup, and looking thoughtfully at the bill, "in his grief and passion, turned me out of house and home! I never have been so glad of anything in all my life, as that I didn’t say an angry word to him, and hadn’t any angry feeling towards him, even then; for he repented that truly, afterwards. How often he has sat in this room, and told me over and over again he was sorry for it!—the last time, only yesterday, when you were out. How often he has sat in this room, and talked to me, hour after hour, about one thing and another, in which he made believe to be interested!—but only for the sake of the days that are gone by, and because he knows she used to like me, Ben!" "Why, how did you ever come to catch a glimpse of that, Clem?" asked her husband: astonished that she should have a distinct perception of a truth which had only dimly suggested itself to his inquiring mind. "I don’t know, I’m sure," said Clemency, blowing her tea, to cool it. "Bless you, I couldn’t tell you, if you was to offer me a reward of a hundred pound." He might have pursued this metaphysical subject but for her catching a glimpse of a substantial fact behind him, in the shape of a gentleman attired in mourning, and cloaked and booted like a rider on horseback, who stood at the bar-door. He seemed attentive to their conversation, and not at all impatient to interrupt it. Clemency hastily rose at this sight. Mr. Britain also rose and saluted the guest. "Will you please to walk up-stairs, Sir? There’s a very nice room up-stairs, sir." "Thank you," said the stranger, looking earnestly at Mr. Britain’s wife. "May I come in here?" "Oh, surely, if you like, Sir," returned Clemency, admitting him. "What would you please to want, Sir?" The bill had caught his eye, and he was reading it. "Excellent property that, Sir," observed Mr. Britain. He made no answer; but turning round, when he had finished reading, looked at Clemency with the same observant curiosity as before. "You were asking me," he said, still looking at her,— "What you would please to take, Sir," answered Clemency, stealing a glance at him in return. "If you will let me have a draught of ale," he said, moving to a table by the window, "and will let me have it here, without being any interruption to your meal, I shall be much obliged to you." He sat down as he spoke, without any further parley, and looked out at the prospect. He was an easy, well-knit figure of a man in the prime of life. His face, much browned by the sun, was shaded by a quantity of dark hair; and he wore a moustache. His beer being set before him, he filled out a glass, and drank, good-humouredly, to the house; adding, as he put the tumbler down again: "It’s a new house, is it not?" "Not particularly new, Sir," replied Mr. Britain. "Between five and six years old," said Clemency; speaking very distinctly. "I think I heard you mention Doctor Jeddler’s name, as I came in," inquired the stranger. "That bill reminds me of him; for I happen to know something of that story, by hearsay, and through certain connexions of mine.—Is the old man living?" "Yes, he’s living, Sir," said Clemency. "Much changed?" "Since when, Sir?" returned Clemency, with remarkable emphasis and expression. "Since his daughter—went away." "Yes! he’s greatly changed since then," said Clemency. "He’s grey and old, and hasn’t the same way with him at all; but I think he’s happy now. He has taken on with his sister since then, and goes to see her very often. That did him good, directly. At first, he was sadly broken down; and it was enough to make one’s heart bleed, to see him wandering about, railing at the world; but a great change for the better came over him after a year or two, and then he began to like to talk about his lost daughter, and to praise her, ay and the world too! and was never tired of saying, with the tears in his poor eyes, how beautiful and good she was. He had forgiven her then. That was about the same time as Miss Grace’s marriage. Britain, you remember?" Mr. Britain remembered very well. "The sister is married then," returned the stranger. He paused for some time before he asked, "To whom?" Clemency narrowly escaped oversetting the tea-board, in her emotion at this question. "Did you never hear?" she said. "I should like to hear," he replied, as he filled his glass again, and raised it to his lips. "Ah! It would be a long story, if it was properly told," said Clemency, resting her chin on the palm of her left hand, and supporting that elbow on her right hand, as she shook her head, and looked back through the intervening years, as if she were looking at a fire. "It would be a long story, I am sure." "But told as a short one," suggested the stranger. "Told as a short one," repeated Clemency in the same thoughtful tone, and without any apparent reference to him, or consciousness of having auditors, "what would there be to tell? That they grieved together, and remembered her together, like a person dead; that they were so tender of her, never would reproach her, called her back to one another as she used to be, and found excuses for her? Every one knows that. I’m sure I do. No one better," added Clemency, wiping her eyes with her hand. "And so," suggested the stranger. "And so," said Clemency, taking him up mechanically, and without any change in her attitude or manner, "they at last were married. They were married on her birth-day—it comes round again to-morrow—very quiet, very humble like, but very happy. Mr. Alfred said, one night when they were walking in the orchard, 'Grace, shall our wedding-day be Marion’s birth-day?' And it was." "And they have lived happily together?" said the stranger. "Ay," said Clemency. "No two people ever more so. They have had no sorrow but this." She raised her head as with a sudden attention to the circumstances under which she was recalling these events, and looked quickly at the stranger. Seeing that his face was turned toward the window, and that he seemed intent upon the prospect, she made some eager signs to her husband, and pointed to the bill, and moved her mouth as if she were repeating with great energy, one word or phrase to him over and over again. As she uttered no sound, and as her dumb motions like most of her gestures were of a very extraordinary kind, this unintelligible conduct reduced Mr. Britain to the confines of despair. He stared at the table, at the stranger, at the spoons, at his wife—followed her pantomime with looks of deep amazement and perplexity—asked in the same language, was it property in danger, was it he in danger, was it she—answered her signals with other signals expressive of the deepest distress and confusion—followed the motions of her lips—guessed half aloud "milk and water," "monthly warning," "mice and walnuts"—and couldn’t approach her meaning. Clemency gave it up at last, as a hopeless attempt; and moving her chair by very slow degrees a little nearer to the stranger, sat with her eyes apparently cast down but glancing sharply at him now and then, waiting until he should ask some other question. She had not to wait long; for he said, presently: "And what is the after history of the young lady who went away? They know it, I suppose?" Clemency shook her head. "I’ve heard," she said, "that Doctor Jeddler is thought to know more of it than he tells. Miss Grace has had letters from her sister, saying that she was well and happy, and made much happier by her being married to Mr. Alfred: and has written letters back. But there’s a mystery about her life and fortunes, altogether, which nothing has cleared up to this hour, and which—" She faultered here, and stopped. "And which"—repeated the stranger. "Which only one other person, I believe, could explain," said Clemency, drawing her breath quickly. "Who may that be?" asked the stranger. "Mr. Michael Warden!" answered Clemency, almost in a shriek: at once conveying to her husband what she would have had him understand before, and letting Michael Warden know that he was recognised. "You remember me, sir?" said Clemency, trembling with emotion; "I saw just now you did! You remember me, that night in the garden. I was with her!" "Yes. You were," he said. "Yes, sir," returned Clemency. "Yes, to be sure. This is my husband, if you please. Ben, my dear Ben, run to Miss Grace—run to Mr. Alfred—run somewhere, Ben! Bring somebody here, directly!" "Stay!" said Michael Warden, quietly interposing himself between the door and Britain. "What would you do?" "Let them know that you are here, Sir," answered Clemency, clapping her hands in sheer agitation. "Let them know that they may hear of her, from your own lips; let them know that she is not quite lost to them, but that she will come home again yet, to bless her father and her loving sister—even her old servant, even me," she struck herself upon the breast with both hands, "with a sight of her sweet face. Run, Ben, run!" And still she pressed him on towards the door, and still Mr. Warden stood before it, with his hand stretched out, not angrily, but sorrowfully. "Or perhaps," said Clemency, running past her husband, and catching in her emotion at Mr. Warden’s cloak, "perhaps she’s here now; perhaps she’s close by. I think from your manner she is. Let me see her, Sir, if you please. I waited on her when she was a little child. I saw her grow to be the pride of all this place. I knew her when she was Mr. Alfred’s promised wife. I tried to warn her when you tempted her away. I know what her old home was when she was like the soul of it, and how it changed when she was gone and lost. Let me speak to her, if you please!" He gazed at her with compassion, not unmixed with wonder: but he made no gesture of assent. "I don’t think she can know," pursued Clemency, "how truly they forgive her; how they love her; what joy it would be to them, to see her once more. She may be timorous of going home. Perhaps if she sees me, it may give her new heart. Only tell me truly, Mr. Warden, is she with you?" "She is not," he answered, shaking his head. This answer, and his manner, and his black dress, and his coming back so quietly, and his announced intention of continuing to live abroad, explained it all. Marion was dead. He didn’t contradict her; yes, she was dead! Clemency sat down, hid her face upon the table, and cried. At that moment, a grey-headed old gentleman came running in: quite out of breath, and panting so much that his voice was scarcely to be recognised as the voice of Mr. Snitchey. "Good Heaven, Mr. Warden!" said the lawyer, taking him aside, "what wind has blown—" He was so blown himself, that he couldn’t get on any further until after a pause, when he added, feebly, "you here?" "An ill-wind, I am afraid," he answered. "If you could have heard what has just passed—how I have been besought and entreated to perform impossibilities—what confusion and affliction I carry with me!" "I can guess it all. But why did you ever come here, my good Sir?" retorted Snitchey. "Come! How should I know who kept the house? When I sent my servant on to you, I strolled in here because the place was new to me; and I had a natural curiosity in everything new and old, in these old scenes; and it was outside the town. I wanted to communicate with you first, before appearing there. I wanted to know what people would say to me. I see by your manner that you can tell me. If it were not for your confounded caution, I should have been possessed of everything long ago." "Our caution!" returned the lawyer, "speaking for Self and Craggs—deceased," here Mr. Snitchey, glancing at his hat-band, shook his head, "how can you reasonably blame us, Mr. Warden? It was understood between us that the subject was never to be renewed, and that it wasn’t a subject on which grave and sober men like us (I made a note of your observations at the time) could interfere. Our caution too! When Mr. Craggs, Sir, went down to his respected grave in the full belief—" "I had given a solemn promise of silence until I should return, whenever that might be," interrupted Mr. Warden; "and I have kept it." "Well, Sir, and I repeat it," returned Mr. Snitchey, "we were bound to silence too. We were bound to silence in our duty towards ourselves, and in our duty towards a variety of clients, you among them, who were as close as wax. It was not our place to make inquiries of you on such a delicate subject. I had my suspicions, Sir; but, it is not six months since I have known the truth, and been assured that you lost her." "By whom?" inquired his client. "By Doctor Jeddler himself, sir, who at last reposed that confidence in me voluntarily. He, and only he, has known the whole truth, years and years." "And you know it?" said his client. "I do, Sir!" replied Snitchey; "and I have also reason to know that it will be broken to her sister to-morrow evening. They have given her that promise. In the meantime, perhaps you’ll give me the honor of your company at my house; being unexpected at your own. But, not to run the chance of any more such difficulties as you have had here, in case you should be recognised—though you’re a good deal changed—I think I might have passed you myself, Mr. Warden—we had better dine here, and walk on in the evening. It’s a very good place to dine at, Mr. Warden: your own property, by the bye. Self and Craggs (deceased) took a chop here sometimes, and had it very comfortably served. Mr. Craggs, Sir," said Snitchey, shutting his eyes tight for an instant, and opening them again, "was struck off the roll of life too soon." "Heaven forgive me for not condoling with you," returned Michael Warden, passing his hand across his forehead, "but I’m like a man in a dream at present. I seem to want my wits. Mr. Craggs—yes—I am very sorry we have lost Mr. Craggs." But he looked at Clemency as he said it, and seemed to sympathise with Ben, consoling her. "Mr. Craggs, Sir," observed Snitchey, "didn’t find life, I regret to say, as easy to have and to hold as his theory made it out, or he would have been among us now. It’s a great loss to me. He was my right arm, my right leg, my right ear, my right eye, was Mr. Craggs. I am paralytic without him. He bequeathed his share of the business to Mrs. Craggs, her executors, administrators, and assigns. His name remains in the Firm to this hour. I try, in a childish sort of a way, to make believe, sometimes, that he’s alive. You may observe that I speak for Self and Craggs—deceased Sir—deceased," said the tender-hearted attorney, waving his pocket-handkerchief. Michael Warden, who had still been observant of Clemency, turned to Mr. Snitchey when he ceased to speak, and whispered in his ear. "Ah, poor thing!" said Snitchey, shaking his head. "Yes. She was always very faithful to Marion. She was always very fond of her. Pretty Marion! Poor Marion! Cheer up, Mistress—you are married now, you know, Clemency." Clemency only sighed, and shook her head. "Well, well! Wait till to-morrow," said the lawyer, kindly. "To-morrow can’t bring back the dead to life, Mister," said Clemency, sobbing. "No. It can’t do that, or it would bring back Mr. Craggs, deceased," returned the lawyer. "But it may bring some soothing circumstances; it may bring some comfort. Wait till to-morrow!" So Clemency, shaking his proffered hand, said she would; and Britain, who had been terribly cast down at sight of his despondent wife (which was like the business hanging its head), said that was right; and Mr. Snitchey and Michael Warden went up stairs; and there they were soon engaged in a conversation so cautiously conducted, that no murmur of it was audible above the clatter of plates and dishes, the hissing of the frying-pan, the bubbling of saucepans, the low monotonous waltzing of the Jack—with a dreadful click every now and then as if it had met with some mortal accident to its head, in a fit of giddiness—and all the other preparations in the kitchen, for their dinner. To-morrow was a bright and peaceful day; and nowhere were the autumn tints more beautifully seen, than from the quiet orchard of the Doctor’s house. The snows of many winter nights had melted from that ground, the withered leaves of many summer times had rustled there, since she had fled. The honey-suckle porch was green again, the trees cast bountiful and changing shadows on the grass, the landscape was as tranquil and serene as it had ever been; but where was she! Not there. Not there. She would have been a stranger sight in her old home now, even than that home had been at first, without her. But a lady sat in the familiar place, from whose heart she had never passed away; in whose true memory she lived, unchanging, youthful, radiant with all promise and all hope; in whose affection—and it was a mother’s now: there was a cherished little daughter playing by her side—she had no rival, no successor; upon whose gentle lips her name was trembling then. The spirit of the lost girl looked out of those eyes. Those eyes of Grace, her sister, sitting with her husband in the orchard, on their wedding-day, and his and Marion’s birth-day. He had not become a great man; he had not grown rich; he had not forgotten the scenes and friends of his youth; he had not fulfilled any one of the Doctor’s old predictions. But in his useful, patient, unknown visiting of poor men’s homes; and in his watching of sick beds; and in his daily knowledge of the gentleness and goodness flowering the bye-paths of the world, not to be trodden down beneath the heavy foot of poverty, but springing up, elastic, in its track, and making its way beautiful; he had better learned and proved, in each succeeding year, the truth of his old faith. The manner of his life, though quiet and remote, had shown him how often men still entertained angels, unawares, as in the olden time; and how the most unlikely forms—even some that were mean and ugly to the view, and poorly clad—became irradiated by the couch of sorrow, want, and pain, and changed to ministering spirits with a glory round their heads. He lived to better purpose on the altered battle-ground perhaps, than if he had contended restlessly in more ambitious lists; and he was happy with his wife, dear Grace. And Marion. Had he forgotten her? "The time has flown, dear Grace," he said, "since then;" they had been talking of that night; "and yet it seems a long long while ago. We count by changes and events within us. Not by years." "Yet we have years to count by, too, since Marion was with us," returned Grace. "Six times, dear husband, counting to-night as one, we have sat here on her birth-day, and spoken together of that happy return, so eagerly expected and so long deferred. Ah when will it be! When will it be!" Her husband attentively observed her, as the tears collected in her eyes; and drawing nearer, said: "But, Marion told you, in that farewell letter which she left for you upon your table, love, and which you read so often, that years must pass away before it could be. Did she not?" She took a letter from her breast, and kissed it, and said "Yes." "That through these intervening years, however happy she might be, she would look forward to the time when you would meet again, and all would be made clear: and prayed you, trustfully and hopefully to do the same. The letter runs so, does it not, my dear?" "Yes, Alfred." "And every other letter she has written since?" "Except the last—some months ago—in which she spoke of you, and what you then knew, and what I was to learn to-night." He looked towards the sun, then fast declining, and said that the appointed time was sunset. "Alfred!" said Grace, laying her hand upon his shoulder earnestly, "there is something in this letter—this old letter, which you say I read so often—that I have never told you. But to-night, dear husband, with that sunset drawing near, and all our life seeming to soften and become hushed with the departing day, I cannot keep it secret." "What is it, love?" "When Marion went away, she wrote me, here, that you had once left her a sacred trust to me, and that now she left you, Alfred, such a trust in my hands: praying and beseeching me, as I loved her, and as I loved you, not to reject the affection she believed (she knew, she said) you would transfer to me when the new wound was healed, but to encourage and return it.’ "—And make me a proud, and happy man again, Grace. Did she say so?" "She meant, to make myself so blest and honored in your love," was his wife’s answer, as he held her in his arms. "Hear me, my dear!" he said.—"No. Hear me so!"—and as he spoke, he gently laid the head she had raised, again upon his shoulder. "I know why I have never heard this passage in the letter, until now. I know why no trace of it ever showed itself in any word or look of yours at that time. I know why Grace, although so true a friend to me, was hard to win to be my wife. And knowing it, my own! I know the priceless value of the heart I gird within my arms, and thank GOD for the rich possession!" She wept, but not for sorrow, as he pressed her to his heart. After a brief space, he looked down at the child, who was sitting at their feet, playing with a little basket of flowers, and bade her look how golden and how red the sun was. "Alfred," said Grace, raising her head quickly at these words. "The sun is going down. You have not forgotten what I am to know before it sets." "You are to know the truth of Marion’s history, my love," he answered. "All the truth," she said, imploringly. "Nothing veiled from me, any more. That was the promise. Was it not?" "It was," he answered. "Before the sun went down on Marion’s birth-day. And you see it, Alfred? It is sinking fast." He put his arm about her waist; and, looking steadily into her eyes, rejoined: "That truth is not reserved so long for me to tell, dear Grace. It is to come from other lips." "From other lips!" she faintly echoed. "Yes. I know your constant heart, I know how brave you are, I know that to you a word of preparation is enough. You have said, truly, that the time is come. It is. Tell me that you have present fortitude to bear a trial—a surprise—a shock: and the messenger is waiting at the gate." "What messenger?" she said. "And what intelligence does he bring?" "I am pledged," he answered her, preserving his steady look, "to say no more. Do you think you understand me?" "I am afraid to think," she said. There was that emotion in his face, despite its steady gaze, which frightened her. Again she hid her own face on his shoulder, trembling, and entreated him to pause—a moment. "Courage, my wife! When you have firmness to receive the messenger, the messenger is waiting at the gate. The sun is setting on Marion’s birth-day. Courage, courage, Grace!" She raised her head, and, looking at him, told him she was ready. As she stood, and looked upon him going away, her face was so like Marion’s as it had been in her later days at home, that it was wonderful to see. He took the child with him. She called her back—she bore the lost girl’s name—and pressed her to her bosom. The little creature, being released again, sped after him, and Grace was left alone. She knew not what she dreaded, or what hoped; but remained there, motionless, looking at the porch by which they had disappeared. Ah! what was that, emerging from its shadow; standing on its threshold! That figure, with its white garments rustling in the evening air; its head laid down upon her father’s breast, and pressed against it to his loving heart! O God! was it a vision that came bursting from the old man’s arms, and with a cry, and with a waving of its hands, and with a wild precipitation of itself upon her in its boundless love, sank down in her embrace! "Oh, Marion, Marion! Oh, my sister! Oh, my heart’s dear love! Oh, joy and happiness unutterable, so to meet again!" It was no dream, no phantom conjured up by hope and fear, but Marion, sweet Marion! So beautiful, so happy, so unalloyed by care and trial, so elevated and exalted in her loveliness, that as the setting sun shone brightly on her upturned face, she might have been a spirit visiting the earth upon some healing mission. Clinging to her sister, who had dropped upon a seat and bent down over her: and smiling through her tears, and kneeling close before her, with both arms twining round her, and never turning for an instant from her face: and with the glory of the setting sun upon her brow, and with the soft tranquillity of evening gathering around them: Marion at length broke silence; her voice, so calm, low, clear, and pleasant, well-tuned to the time. "When this was my dear home, Grace, as it will be now again—" "Stay, my sweet love! A moment! O Marion, to hear you speak again." She could not bear the voice she loved so well, at first. "When this was my dear home, Grace, as it will be now again, I loved him from my soul. I loved him most devotedly. I would have died for him, though I was so young. I never slighted his affection in my secret breast for one brief instant. It was far beyond all price to me. Although it is so long ago, and past, and gone, and everything is wholly changed, I could not bear to think that you, who love so well, should think I did not truly love him once. I never loved him better, Grace, than when he left this very scene upon this very day. I never loved him better, dear one, than I did that night when I left here." Her sister, bending over her, could look into her face, and hold her fast. "But he had gained, unconsciously," said Marion, with a gentle smile, "another heart, before I knew that I had one to give him. That heart—yours, my sister—was so yielded up, in all its other tenderness, to me; was so devoted, and so noble; that it plucked its love away, and kept its secret from all eyes but mine—Ah! what other eyes were quickened by such tenderness and gratitude!—and was content to sacrifice itself to me. But I knew something of its depths. I knew the struggle it had made. I knew its high, inestimable worth to him, and his appreciation of it, let him love me as he would. I knew the debt I owed it. I had its great example every day before me. What you had done for me, I knew that I could do, Grace, if I would, for you. I never laid my head down on my pillow, but I prayed with tears to do it. I never laid my head down on my pillow, but I thought of Alfred’s own words on the day of his departure, and how truly he had said (for I knew that, by you) that there were victories gained every day, in struggling hearts, to which these fields of battle were nothing. Thinking more and more upon the great endurance cheerfully sustained, and never known or cared for, that there must be, every day and hour, in that great strife of which he spoke, my trial seemed to grow light and easy: and He who knows our hearts, my dearest, at this moment, and who knows there is no drop of bitterness or grief—of anything but unmixed happiness—in mine, enabled me to make the resolution that I never would be Alfred’s wife. That he should be my brother, and your husband, if the course I took could bring that happy end to pass; but that I never would (Grace, I then loved him dearly, dearly!) be his wife!" "Oh, Marion! oh, Marion!" "I had tried to seem indifferent to him;" and she pressed her sister’s face against her own; "but that was hard, and you were always his true advocate. I had tried to tell you of my resolution, but you would never hear me; you would never understand me. The time was drawing near for his return. I felt that I must act, before the daily intercourse between us was renewed. I knew that one great pang, undergone at that time, would save a lengthened agony to all of us. I knew that if I went away then, that end must follow which has followed, and which has made us both so happy, Grace! I wrote to good Aunt Martha, for a refuge in her house: I did not then tell her all, but something of my story, and she freely promised it. While I was contesting that step with myself, and with my love of you, and home, Mr. Warden, brought here by an accident, became, for some time, our companion." "I have sometimes feared of late years, that this might have been," exclaimed her sister; and her countenance was ashy-pale. "You never loved him—and you married him in your self-sacrifice to me!" "He was then," said Marion, drawing her sister closer to her, "on the eve of going secretly away for a long time. He wrote to me, after leaving here; told me what his condition and prospects really were; and offered me his hand. He told me he had seen I was not happy in the prospect of Alfred’s return. I believe he thought my heart had no part in that contract; perhaps thought I might have loved him once, and did not then; perhaps thought that when I tried to seem indifferent, I tried to hide indifference—I cannot tell. But I wished that you should feel me wholly lost to Alfred—hopeless to him—dead. Do you understand me, love?" Her sister looked into her face, attentively. She seemed in doubt. "I saw Mr. Warden, and confided in his honour; charged him with my secret, on the eve of his and my departure. He kept it. Do you understand me, dear?" Grace looked confusedly upon her. She scarcely seemed to hear. "My love, my sister!" said Marion, "recall your thoughts a moment; listen to me. Do not look so strangely on me. There are countries, dearest, where those who would abjure a misplaced passion, or would strive, against some cherished feeling of their hearts and conquer it, retire into a hopeless solitude, and close the world against themselves and worldly loves and hopes for ever. When women do so, they assume that name which is so dear to you and me, and call each other Sisters. But, there may be sisters, Grace, who, in the broad world out of doors, and underneath its free sky, and in its crowded places and among its busy life, and trying to assist and cheer it and to do some good,—learn the same lesson; and, with hearts still fresh and young, and open to all happiness and means of happiness, can say the battle is long past, the victory long won. And such a one am I! You understand me now?" Still she looked fixedly upon her, and made no reply. "Oh Grace, dear Grace," said Marion, clinging yet more tenderly and fondly to that breast from which she had been so long exiled, "if you were not a happy wife and mother—if I had no little namesake here—if Alfred, my kind brother, were not your own fond husband—from whence could I derive the ecstasy I feel to-night! But, as I left here, so I have returned. My heart has known no other love, my hand has never been bestowed apart from it. I am still your maiden sister: unmarried, unbetrothed: your own loving old Marion, in whose affection you exist alone, and have no partner, Grace!" She understood her now. Her face relaxed: sobs came to her relief; and falling on her neck, she wept and wept, and fondled her as if she were a child again. When they were more composed, they found that the Doctor, and his sister good Aunt Martha, were standing near at hand, with Alfred. "This is a weary day for me," said good Aunt Martha, smiling through her tears, as she embraced her nieces; "for I lose my dear companion in making you all happy; and what can you give me, in return for my Marion?" "A converted brother," said the Doctor. "That’s something, to be sure," retorted Aunt Martha, "in such a farce as—" "No, pray don’t," said the doctor penitently. "Well, I won’t," replied Aunt Martha. "But, I consider myself ill used. I don’t know what’s to become of me without my Marion, after we have lived together half-a-dozen years." "You must come and live here, I suppose," replied the Doctor. "We shan’t quarrel now, Martha." "Or you must get married, Aunt," said Alfred. "Indeed," returned the old lady, "I think it might be a good speculation if I were to set my cap at Michael Warden, who, I hear, is come home much the better for his absence in all respects. But as I knew him when he was a boy, and I was not a very young woman then, perhaps he mightn’t respond. So I’ll make up my mind to go and live with Marion, when she marries, and until then (it will not be very long, I dare say) to live alone. What do you say, Brother?" "I’ve a great mind to say it’s a ridiculous world altogether, and there’s nothing serious in it," observed the poor old Doctor. "You might take twenty affidavits of it if you chose, Anthony," said his sister; "but nobody would believe you with such eyes as those." "It’s a world full of hearts," said the Doctor, hugging his youngest daughter, and bending across her to hug Grace—for he couldn’t separate the sisters; "and a serious world, with all its folly—even with mine, which was enough to have swamped the whole globe; and it is a world on which the sun never rises, but it looks upon a thousand bloodless battles that are some set-off against the miseries and wickedness of Battle-Fields; and it is a world we need be careful how we libel, Heaven forgive us, for it is a world of sacred mysteries, and its Creator only knows what lies beneath the surface of His lightest image!" You would not be the better pleased with my rude pen, if it dissected and laid open to your view the transports of this family, long severed and now reunited. Therefore, I will not follow the poor Doctor through his humbled recollection of the sorrow he had had, when Marion was lost to him; nor will I tell how serious he had found that world to be, in which some love, deep-anchored, is the portion of all human creatures; nor, how such a trifle as the absence of one little unit in the great absurd account, had stricken him to the ground. Nor, how, in compassion for his distress, his sister had, long ago, revealed the truth to him by slow degrees, and brought him to the knowledge of the heart of his self-banished daughter, and to that daughter’s side. Nor, how Alfred Heathfield had been told the truth, too, in the course of that then current year; and Marion had seen him, and had promised him, as her brother, that on her birth-day, in the evening, Grace should know it from her lips at last. "I beg your pardon, Doctor," said Mr. Snitchey, looking into the orchard, "but have I liberty to come in?" Without waiting for permission, he came straight to Marion, and kissed her hand, quite joyfully. "If Mr. Craggs had been alive, my dear Miss Marion," said Mr. Snitchey, "he would have had great interest in this occasion. It might have suggested to him, Mr. Alfred, that our life is not too easy perhaps; that, taken altogether, it will bear any little smoothing we can give it; but Mr. Craggs was a man who could endure to be convinced, Sir. He was always open to conviction. If he were open to conviction, now, I—this is weakness. Mrs. Snitchey, my dear,"—at his summons that lady appeared from behind the door, "you are among old friends." Mrs. Snitchey having delivered her congratulations, took her husband aside. "One moment, Mr. Snitchey," said that lady. "It is not in my nature to rake up the ashes of the departed." "No, my dear," returned her husband. "Mr. Craggs is—" "Yes, my dear, he is deceased," said Snitchey. "But I ask you if you recollect," pursued his wife, "that evening of the ball? I only ask you that. If you do; and if your memory has not entirely failed you, Mr. Snitchey; and if you are not absolutely in your dotage; I ask you to connect this time with that—to remember how I begged and prayed you, on my knees—" "Upon your knees, my dear?" said Mr. Snitchey. "Yes," said Mrs. Snitchey, confidently, "and you know it—to beware of that man—to observe his eye—and now to tell me whether I was right, and whether at that moment he knew secrets which he didn’t choose to tell." "Mrs. Snitchey," returned her husband, in her ear, "Madam. Did you ever observe anything in my eye?" "No," said Mrs. Snitchey, sharply. "Don’t flatter yourself." "Because, Madam, that night," he continued, twitching her by the sleeve, "it happens that we both knew secrets which we didn’t choose to tell, and both knew just the same, professionally. And so the less you say about such things the better, Mrs. Snitchey; and take this as a warning to have wiser and more charitable eyes another time. Miss Marion, I brought a friend of yours along with me. Here! Mistress!" Poor Clemency, with her apron to her eyes, came slowly in, escorted by her husband; the latter doleful with the presentiment, that if she abandoned herself to grief, the Nutmeg Grater was done for. "Now, Mistress," said the lawyer, checking Marion as she ran towards her, and interposing himself between them, "what’s the matter with you?" "The matter!" cried poor Clemency. When, looking up in wonder, and in indignant remonstrance, and in the added emotion of a great roar from Mr. Britain, and seeing that sweet face so well-remembered close before her, she stared, sobbed, laughed, cried, screamed, embraced her, held her fast, released her, fell on Mr. Snitchey and embraced him (much to Mrs. Snitchey’s indignation), fell on the Doctor and embraced him, fell on Mr. Britain and embraced him, and concluded by embracing herself, throwing her apron over her head, and going into hysterics behind it. A stranger had come into the orchard, after Mr. Snitchey, and had remained apart, near the gate, without being observed by any of the group; for they had little spare attention to bestow, and that had been monopolised by the ecstasies of Clemency. He did not appear to wish to be observed, but stood alone, with downcast eyes; and there was an air of dejection about him (though he was a gentleman of a gallant appearance) which the general happiness rendered more remarkable. None but the quick eyes of Aunt Martha, however, remarked him at all; but almost as soon as she espied him, she was in conversation with him. Presently, going to where Marion stood with Grace and her little namesake, she whispered something in Marion’s ear, at which she started, and appeared surprised; but soon recovering from her confusion, she timidly approached the stranger, in Aunt Martha’s company, and engaged in conversation with him too. "Mr. Britain," said the lawyer, putting his hand in his pocket, and bringing out a legal-looking document, while this was going on, "I congratulate you. You are now the whole and sole proprietor of that freehold tenement, at present occupied and held by yourself as a licensed tavern, or house of public entertainment, and commonly called or known by the sign of the Nutmeg Grater. Your wife lost one house, through my client Mr. Michael Warden; and now gains another. I shall have the pleasure of canvassing you for the county, one of these fine mornings." "Would it make any difference in the vote if the sign was altered, Sir?" asked Britain. "Not in the least," replied the lawyer. "Then," said Mr. Britain, handing him back the conveyance, "just clap in the words, 'and Thimble,' will you be so good; and I’ll have the two mottoes painted up in the parlour instead of my wife’s portrait." "And let me," said a voice behind them; it was the stranger’s—Michael Warden’s; "let me claim the benefit of those inscriptions. Mr. Heathfield and Dr. Jeddler, I might have deeply wronged you both. That I did not, is no virtue of my own. I will not say that I am six years wiser than I was, or better. But I have known, at any rate, that term of selfreproach. I can urge no reason why you should deal gently with me. I abused the hospitality of this house; and learnt by my own demerits, with a shame I never have forgotten, yet with some profit too, I would fain hope, from one," he glanced at Marion, "to whom I made my humble supplication for forgiveness, when I knew her merit and my deep unworthiness. In a few days I shall quit this place for ever. I entreat your pardon. Do as you would be done by! Forget, and forgive!" TIME—from whom I had the latter portion of this story, and with whom I have the pleasure of a personal acquaintance of some five-and-thirty years’ duration—informed me, leaning easily upon his scythe, that Michael Warden never went away again, and never sold his house, but opened it afresh, maintained a golden means of hospitality, and had a wife, the pride and honor of that countryside, whose name was Marion. But as I have observed that Time confuses facts occasionally, I hardly know what weight to give to his authority. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/5/Sketches_by_Boz_[1850_Cheap_Edition]/1850-Sketches-by-Boz-Cheap-Edition.pdf 38a6a2740f76661cb3da5b2015e7bf53 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Short Fiction Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context short-stories Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites various short stories that Dickens wrote throughout his career for various publications, including newspapers and periodicals, and for inclusion in short story collections. Between 1833, when he tentatively submitted “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” for publication in The Monthly Magazine, and his death in 1870, Dickens as ‘BOZ,’ briefly, as ‘TIBBS,’ and as “Charles Dickens” wrote dozens of short stories and ‘sketches,’ which often moved easily between journalism and story. It was as Boz, the late Georgian literary persona, that he first endeared himself to the British reading public in the pages of such newspapers and periodicals as The Evening Chronicle, Bell’s Life in London, and Bentley's Miscellany with a unique blend of comedy and pathos. By turns scathing of observed social and personal injustices, and appreciative of London’s colourful, vibrant culture and the oddities of human nature, Boz followed in the literary footsteps of other recent metropolitan commentators like Charles Lamb (‘ELIA’), Leigh Hunt, Theodore Hook, Robert Surtees, Thomas Hood, and John Poole, and eighteenth-century Picaresque novelists, Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Soon, Dickens established his own unique voice. Prior to and following the ascension of the young Queen Victoria in 1837, Boz became a prescient spectator of both the rising empire’s rapidly developing culture in public spaces and of the domestic dramas enacted in British homes. Global fame arrived with the serial publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), marking Dickens’s shift to writing novels. In tone, this rambling comedic travelogue owed much to Boz’s voice and incidentally featured several tales unrelated to the main narrative. Dickens would sporadically publish the Mudfog stories in 1836 and 1837, enlarging on them in Sketches by Boz, a collection of many of the sketches and stories first published by John Macrone in two volumes in 1836 and 1837 and illustrated by George Cruikshank. According to Robert L. Patten, ‘When Dickens gathered up previously published writing, anonymous and pseudonymous, for republication, he identified authorship with a particular subset of his journalistic pieces, the ‘sketches’ rather than the tales or portraits of characters, and with his pseudonym. Hence, after mooting several other titles, Dickens settled on Sketches by Boz’ (44). Sketches of Young Gentlemen (1838), a joking response to Rev. Edward Caswell, or “QUIZ’s” recent effort Sketches of Young Ladies (1838), and Sketches of Couples (1840) were published by Chapman and Hall and illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne, better known as ‘PHIZ’. After this point, Dickens’s short stories were published in his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round, though after 1837 he never published them with any regularity, preferring instead to focus on writing and serialising novels. Occasionally, he contributed several chapters to a jointly authored short story, collection, or series; Christmas numbers of his periodicals provided the opportunity to feature multiple famous writers uniting to weave a Yule-tide yarn, such as The Haunted House (1859). Notably, his collaboration with Wilkie Collins resulted in such works as The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857) and No Thoroughfare (1867). Towards the end of his life, Dickens began to publish short stories again in American publications such as The New York Ledger, The Atlantic Monthly, and Our Young Folks. Until now, first printings of Dickens’s earliest short stories published between 1833 and 1836 have been difficult to find for those unable to visit the periodicals and newspaper holdings at eminent institutions such as The British Library. Similarly, the last ones written by Dickens have remained understudied due in part to their obscurity. Twentieth-century editions of the Sketches are generally based on the text of Chapman and Hall’s later 1839 single volume edition, which relies on the reissue serialised between 1837 and 1839, or the 1868 Charles Dickens Edition, which is based on the 1850 cheap (and further revised) edition. Other anthologies, for instance Selected Short Fiction (Penguin, 2005), edited by Deborah A. Thomas, choose excerpts from Dickens’s entire oeuvre in the short fiction genre. Several scholars have explored the drafting, publication, and impact of the early sketches and short stories, with notable studies including Dickens and the Short Story. (University of Philadelphia Press, 1982) by Deborah A. Thomas and Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author (Cambridge, 2012) by Patten.1 To date, the most comprehensive overview of the sketches is provided by The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (2021) edited by Paul Schlicke with David Hewitt. Others include Dickens's Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches as Originally Composed and Published 1833–1836 (2012), edited by Robert C. Hanna, and Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers (1994), edited by Michael Slater. Because Dickens made many alterations, whether significant or incidental, between the first printing of a sketch and successive editions, these changes open up a window into his editorial process and developing intentions for the ‘Boz’ legacy. Now, with this Dickens Search collection, these emendations can be studied with greater ease than ever before. Our transcription field contains text Dickens is believed to have solely authored, though our pdfs of the short story collaborations will be provided in their entirety to facilitate easier engagement and comprehension of how his narrative might interact with those constructed by other writers. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to Dickens’s words only, to avoid skewing the results. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans found on databases such as British Newspaper Archive (BNA), digital archives, and such open-access sites as Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and Google Books; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions, or to mention other short stories by Dickens that might have been overlooked. 1. See Dominic Rainsford. ‘“Luller-li-e-te”! Language, Personhood, and Sympathy in Sketches by Boz.’ In Some Keywords in Dickens. Edited by Michael Hollington, Francesca Orestano, and Nathalie Vanfasse. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021, pp. 117-130; William F. Long. ‘“Our Space is Limited”: Fitting Sketches by Boz into the Morning Chronicle”. Dickens Quarterly 4 (December 2020): pp. 325-348; William F. Long. 'Dickens before Sketches by Boz: Earliest Reactions to his Earliest Works'. Dickensian (2018), 114.505, pp.170-176; Christina Jen. '"Drop the Curtain": Astonishment and the Anxieties of Authorship in Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz. Dickens Studies Annual 49.2 (2018): pp. 249-278; Dianne F. Sadoff. ‘Boz and Beyond: “Oliver Twist” and the Dickens Legacy’. Dickens Studies Annual 45 (2014): pp. 23-44; Dickens's Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches, as Originally Composed and Published, 1833–1836, No. 46. Ed. Robert C. Hanna (2012): New York, AMS Press; Danielle Coriale. ‘Sketches by Boz, “So Frail a Machine”. SEL: Studies in English Literature 48.4 (2008): pp. 801-812; Paul Schlicke. ‘“Risen Like a Rocket”: The Impact of Sketches by Boz’. Dickens Quarterly 22.1 (2005): pp. 3-18; Ellen Miller Casey. ‘“Boz has got the Town by the ear”: Dickens and the “Athenæum Critics”’. Dickens Studies Annual 33 (2003): pp. 159-190; Richard Maxwell. ‘Dickens, the Two “Chronicles”, and the Publication of “Sketches by Boz”’. Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): pp. 21–32; Angus Easson. “Who is Boz? Dickens and His Sketches”. The Dickensian 18.1.405 (Spring 1985): pp. 13-22; Julian W. Breslow. 'The Narrator in Sketches by Boz.' ELH 44.1 (1977): pp. 127–49. Short Story Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500101 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sketches by Boz (1850 Cheap Edition) Description An account of the resource Published by Chapman and Hall, 1850 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Google Books, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sketches_by_Boz_i_e_Charles_Dickens_With/e0JWAAAAcAAJ">https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sketches_by_Boz_i_e_Charles_Dickens_With/e0JWAAAAcAAJ</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850 Type The nature or genre of the resource Short story Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-Sketches_by_Boz_Cheap_Edition Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz (Cheap Edition, 1850). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/short-stories/1850-Sketches_by_Boz_Cheap_Edition">https://www.dickenssearch.com/short-stories/1850-Sketches_by_Boz_Cheap_Edition</a>. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/5/Sketches_by_Boz_[1839]/1839-Sketches_by_Boz.pdf 213fa0bbd630cf2c17a6f7fef490c5fd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Short Fiction Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context short-stories Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites various short stories that Dickens wrote throughout his career for various publications, including newspapers and periodicals, and for inclusion in short story collections. Between 1833, when he tentatively submitted “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” for publication in The Monthly Magazine, and his death in 1870, Dickens as ‘BOZ,’ briefly, as ‘TIBBS,’ and as “Charles Dickens” wrote dozens of short stories and ‘sketches,’ which often moved easily between journalism and story. It was as Boz, the late Georgian literary persona, that he first endeared himself to the British reading public in the pages of such newspapers and periodicals as The Evening Chronicle, Bell’s Life in London, and Bentley's Miscellany with a unique blend of comedy and pathos. By turns scathing of observed social and personal injustices, and appreciative of London’s colourful, vibrant culture and the oddities of human nature, Boz followed in the literary footsteps of other recent metropolitan commentators like Charles Lamb (‘ELIA’), Leigh Hunt, Theodore Hook, Robert Surtees, Thomas Hood, and John Poole, and eighteenth-century Picaresque novelists, Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Soon, Dickens established his own unique voice. Prior to and following the ascension of the young Queen Victoria in 1837, Boz became a prescient spectator of both the rising empire’s rapidly developing culture in public spaces and of the domestic dramas enacted in British homes. Global fame arrived with the serial publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), marking Dickens’s shift to writing novels. In tone, this rambling comedic travelogue owed much to Boz’s voice and incidentally featured several tales unrelated to the main narrative. Dickens would sporadically publish the Mudfog stories in 1836 and 1837, enlarging on them in Sketches by Boz, a collection of many of the sketches and stories first published by John Macrone in two volumes in 1836 and 1837 and illustrated by George Cruikshank. According to Robert L. Patten, ‘When Dickens gathered up previously published writing, anonymous and pseudonymous, for republication, he identified authorship with a particular subset of his journalistic pieces, the ‘sketches’ rather than the tales or portraits of characters, and with his pseudonym. Hence, after mooting several other titles, Dickens settled on Sketches by Boz’ (44). Sketches of Young Gentlemen (1838), a joking response to Rev. Edward Caswell, or “QUIZ’s” recent effort Sketches of Young Ladies (1838), and Sketches of Couples (1840) were published by Chapman and Hall and illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne, better known as ‘PHIZ’. After this point, Dickens’s short stories were published in his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round, though after 1837 he never published them with any regularity, preferring instead to focus on writing and serialising novels. Occasionally, he contributed several chapters to a jointly authored short story, collection, or series; Christmas numbers of his periodicals provided the opportunity to feature multiple famous writers uniting to weave a Yule-tide yarn, such as The Haunted House (1859). Notably, his collaboration with Wilkie Collins resulted in such works as The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857) and No Thoroughfare (1867). Towards the end of his life, Dickens began to publish short stories again in American publications such as The New York Ledger, The Atlantic Monthly, and Our Young Folks. Until now, first printings of Dickens’s earliest short stories published between 1833 and 1836 have been difficult to find for those unable to visit the periodicals and newspaper holdings at eminent institutions such as The British Library. Similarly, the last ones written by Dickens have remained understudied due in part to their obscurity. Twentieth-century editions of the Sketches are generally based on the text of Chapman and Hall’s later 1839 single volume edition, which relies on the reissue serialised between 1837 and 1839, or the 1868 Charles Dickens Edition, which is based on the 1850 cheap (and further revised) edition. Other anthologies, for instance Selected Short Fiction (Penguin, 2005), edited by Deborah A. Thomas, choose excerpts from Dickens’s entire oeuvre in the short fiction genre. Several scholars have explored the drafting, publication, and impact of the early sketches and short stories, with notable studies including Dickens and the Short Story. (University of Philadelphia Press, 1982) by Deborah A. Thomas and Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author (Cambridge, 2012) by Patten.1 To date, the most comprehensive overview of the sketches is provided by The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (2021) edited by Paul Schlicke with David Hewitt. Others include Dickens's Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches as Originally Composed and Published 1833–1836 (2012), edited by Robert C. Hanna, and Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers (1994), edited by Michael Slater. Because Dickens made many alterations, whether significant or incidental, between the first printing of a sketch and successive editions, these changes open up a window into his editorial process and developing intentions for the ‘Boz’ legacy. Now, with this Dickens Search collection, these emendations can be studied with greater ease than ever before. Our transcription field contains text Dickens is believed to have solely authored, though our pdfs of the short story collaborations will be provided in their entirety to facilitate easier engagement and comprehension of how his narrative might interact with those constructed by other writers. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to Dickens’s words only, to avoid skewing the results. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans found on databases such as British Newspaper Archive (BNA), digital archives, and such open-access sites as Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and Google Books; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions, or to mention other short stories by Dickens that might have been overlooked. 1. See Dominic Rainsford. ‘“Luller-li-e-te”! Language, Personhood, and Sympathy in Sketches by Boz.’ In Some Keywords in Dickens. Edited by Michael Hollington, Francesca Orestano, and Nathalie Vanfasse. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021, pp. 117-130; William F. Long. ‘“Our Space is Limited”: Fitting Sketches by Boz into the Morning Chronicle”. Dickens Quarterly 4 (December 2020): pp. 325-348; William F. Long. 'Dickens before Sketches by Boz: Earliest Reactions to his Earliest Works'. Dickensian (2018), 114.505, pp.170-176; Christina Jen. '"Drop the Curtain": Astonishment and the Anxieties of Authorship in Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz. Dickens Studies Annual 49.2 (2018): pp. 249-278; Dianne F. Sadoff. ‘Boz and Beyond: “Oliver Twist” and the Dickens Legacy’. Dickens Studies Annual 45 (2014): pp. 23-44; Dickens's Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches, as Originally Composed and Published, 1833–1836, No. 46. Ed. Robert C. Hanna (2012): New York, AMS Press; Danielle Coriale. ‘Sketches by Boz, “So Frail a Machine”. SEL: Studies in English Literature 48.4 (2008): pp. 801-812; Paul Schlicke. ‘“Risen Like a Rocket”: The Impact of Sketches by Boz’. Dickens Quarterly 22.1 (2005): pp. 3-18; Ellen Miller Casey. ‘“Boz has got the Town by the ear”: Dickens and the “Athenæum Critics”’. Dickens Studies Annual 33 (2003): pp. 159-190; Richard Maxwell. ‘Dickens, the Two “Chronicles”, and the Publication of “Sketches by Boz”’. Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): pp. 21–32; Angus Easson. “Who is Boz? Dickens and His Sketches”. The Dickensian 18.1.405 (Spring 1985): pp. 13-22; Julian W. Breslow. 'The Narrator in Sketches by Boz.' ELH 44.1 (1977): pp. 127–49. Short Story Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18390101 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sketches by Boz (1839) Description An account of the resource Published by Chapman and Hall, 1839, 1. vol. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Google Books,  <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sketches_by_Boz/niIGAAAAQAAJ">https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sketches_by_Boz/niIGAAAAQAAJ</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1839 Type The nature or genre of the resource Short story Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1839-Sketches_by_Boz Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz (1839). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/short-stories/1839-Sketches_by_Boz">https://www.dickenssearch.com/short-stories/1839-Sketches_by_Boz</a>. Relation A related resource Table of Contents and Relation to Previous Sketches. *An asterisk marks where titles were altered, usually in punctuation, from their appearance in Sketches by Boz, First Series (1836) and Second Series (1837) published by John Macrone. Note that, due to Dickens's efforts to include both the First Series and Second Series in one organised volume, placement and/or pagination is different for a given story or sketch in the 1839 Chapman and Hall new edition (one volume) in contrast to the previous editions. Only 'The Tuggs's at Ramsgate' is included in a Sketches edition for the first time, not having been in the 1836 and 1837 editions. <ul> <li>Seven Sketches From Our Parish. <ul> <li>Chap. I. 'The Beadle—The Parish Engine—The Schoolmaster', pp. 3-8. Originally <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/43">'Sketches of London, No. IV, The Parish'</a></li> <li>Chap. II. 'The Curate—The Old Lady—The Half-Pay Captain',* pp. 9-14. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/51">'Sketches of London, No. XII, Our Parish' (I)</a></li> <li>Chap. III. 'The Four Sisters', pp. 15-20. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/53">'Sketches of London, No. XIV, Our Parish' (II)</a></li> <li>Chap. IV. 'The Election for Beadle', pp. 21-28. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/55">'Sketches of London, No. XVI, Our Parish' (III)</a></li> <li>Chap. V. 'The Broker's Man', pp. 29-38. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/57">'Sketches of London, No. XVIII, Our Parish' (IV)</a> </li> <li>Chap. VI. 'The Ladies' Societies', pp. 39-44. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/59">'Sketches of London, No. XX, Our Parish' (V)</a></li> <li>'Our Next-Door Neighbour',* pp. 45-54. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/167">'Our Next-Door Neighbours'</a>.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul> <li>Scenes. <ul> <li>'The Streets by Morning', pp. 55-60. Originally <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/56">'Sketches of London, No. XVII, The Streets—Morning'</a>.</li> <li>'The Streets by Night', pp. 61-66. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/106">'Scenes and Characters, No. 12, The Streets at Night'</a>.</li> <li>'Shops and their Tenants',* pp. 67-71. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/id/221">'Street Sketches, No. II, Shops and their Tenants'</a>.</li> <li>'Scotland Yard',* pp. 72-76. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/138">New Series, No. 2, 'Scotland Yard'</a>.</li> <li>'Seven Dials', pp. 77-81. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/64">'Scenes and Characters, No. 1, Seven Dials'</a>.</li> <li>'Meditations in Monmouth-Street', pp. 82-88. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/137">New Series, No. 1, 'Meditations in Monmouth-Street'</a>.</li> <li>'Hackney-Coach Stands', pp. 89-93. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/40">'Sketches of London, No.I. Hackney-Coach Stands'</a>. </li> <li>'Doctors' Commons', pp. 94-99. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/139">'New Series, No. 3, 'Doctors' Commons'</a>.</li> <li>'London Recreations', pp. 100-105. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/45">'Sketches of London, No. VI, London Recreations'</a>.</li> <li>'The River', pp. 106-112. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/52">'Sketches of London, No. XIII, The River'</a>. </li> <li>'Astley's', pp. 113-119. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/50">'Sketches of London, No. XI, Astley's'</a>.</li> <li>'Greenwich Fair', pp. 120-128. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/48">'Sketches of London, No. IX, Greenwich Fair'</a>. </li> <li>'Private Theatres', pp. 129-135. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/58">'Sketches of London, No. XIX, Private Theatres'</a>.</li> <li>'Vauxhall-Gardens by Day',* pp. 136-140. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/166">New Series No. 4, 'Vauxhall-Gardens by Day'.</a></li> <li>'Early Coaches', pp. 141-147. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/42">'Sketches of London, No. III, Early Coaches'</a>.</li> <li>'Omnibuses', pp. 148-152. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/id/223">'Street Sketches, No. I, Omnibuses'</a>.</li> <li>'The Last Cab Driver, and the First Omnibus Cad',* pp. 153-162. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/87">'Scenes and Characters, No. 6, Some Account of an Omnibus Cad'</a>.</li> <li>'A Parliamentary Sketch'*, pp. 163-174. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/44">'Sketches of London, No. V, The House'</a> and <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/47">'Sketches of London, No. VIII, Bellamy's'</a>.</li> <li>'Public Dinners', pp. 175-180. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/46">'Sketches of London, No. VII, Public Dinners'</a>. </li> <li>'The First of May', pp. 181-188. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/165">'A Little Talk about Spring and the Sweeps'</a>.</li> <li>'Brokers' and Marine-Store Shops', pp. 189-193. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/220">'Street Sketches, No. V, 'Brokers and Marine Store Shops'</a>.</li> <li>'Gin-Shops', pp. 194-199. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/41">'Sketches of London, No. II, Gin Shops'</a>. </li> <li>'The Pawnbroker's Shop', pp. 200-207. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/54">'Sketches of London, No. XV, The Pawnbrokers' Shop'</a>.</li> <li>'Criminal Courts', pp. 208-217. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/160">'Street Sketches. No. III. The Old Bailey'</a>.</li> <li>'A Visit to Newgate', 218-228. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/213">'A Visit to Newgate'</a> (Sketches by Boz, Vol.1, 1836).</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul> <li>Characters.  <ul> <li>'Thoughts about People', pp. 229-233. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/49">'Sketches of London, No. X, Thoughts About People'</a>. </li> <li>'A Christmas Dinner', pp. 234-238. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/104">'Scenes and Characters, No. 10, Christmas Festivities'</a>. </li> <li>'The New Year', pp. 239-244. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/105">'Scenes and Characters, No. 11, The New Year'</a>.</li> <li>'Miss Evans and the Eagle', pp. 245-249. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/65">'Scenes and Characters, No.2, Miss Evans and "The Eagle"'</a>.</li> <li>'The Parlour Orator', pp. 250-254. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/103">'Scenes and Characters, No. 9, The Parlour'</a>. </li> <li>'The Hospital Patient', pp. 255-259. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/219">'The Hospital Patient'</a>. </li> <li>'Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce', pp. 260-266. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/68">'Scenes and Characters, No. 5, Love and Oysters'</a>.</li> <li>'The Mistaken Milliner (A Tale of Ambition)',* pp. 267-273. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/101">'Scenes and Characters, No. 7, The Vocal Dressmaker'</a>.</li> <li>'The Dancing Academy', pp. 274-280. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/66">'Scenes and Characters, No. 3, The Dancing Academy'</a>.</li> <li>'Shabby-genteel People', pp. 281-285. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/id/222">'Street Sketches, No. IV, Shabby-genteel People'</a>.</li> <li>'Making a Night of It', pp. 286-291. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/67">'Scenes and Characters, No. 4, Making a Night of It'</a>.</li> <li>'The Prisoners' Van', pp. 292-296. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/102">'Scenes and Characters, No. 9, The Prisoners' Van'</a>.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul> <li>Tales. <ul> <li>‘The Boarding-House’, * pp. 297-334. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/short-stories/1834-05-The_Boarding_House_No1">'The Boarding-House No.1'</a> and <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/short-stories/1834-08-The_Boarding_House_No2">'The Boarding-House No.2'</a>.</li> <li>'Mr. Minns and His Cousin', pp. 335-345. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/39">'A Dinner at Poplar Walk'</a>.</li> <li>'Sentiment', pp. 346-357. Orig. 'Sentiment'.</li> <li>‘The Tuggs’s at Ramsgate’, pp. 358-377. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/short-stories/1836-The_Tuggss_at_Ramgate">'The Tuggs's at Ramgate'</a>.</li> <li>'Horatio Sparkins', pp. 111-141. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/132">'Horatio Sparkins'</a>.</li> <li>'The Black Veil', pp. 396-407. Orig. ‘The Black Veil’ (Sketches by Boz, 1836).</li> <li>'The Steam Excursion', pp. 408-430. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/149">'The Steam Excursion'</a>.</li> <li>'The Great Winglebury Duel', pp. 431-448. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/213">‘The Great Winglebury Duel’</a> (Sketches by Boz, Vol.2, 1836).</li> <li>'Mrs. Joseph Porter', pp. 449-459. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/133">'Mrs. Joseph Porter, "Over the Way"'</a>. </li> <li>‘Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle’,* pp. 460-496. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/150">'Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle. Chapter the First'</a> and <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/151">'Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle. Chapter the Second'</a>.</li> <li>'The Bloomsbury Christening', pp. 497-514. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/short-stories/1834-04-The_Bloomsbury_Christening">'The Bloomsbury Christening'</a>. </li> <li>‘The Drunkard’s Death’, pp. 515-525. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/159">‘The Drunkard’s Death’</a> (Sketches by Boz, 1837).</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Public domain, Google-digitised https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/5/Sketches_by_Boz_First_Series_[1836]/1836-Sketches_by_Boz_First_Series_Vol1.pdf 3a28627421db88b56578ba75e140acba https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/5/Sketches_by_Boz_First_Series_[1836]/1836-Sketches_by_Boz_First_Series_Vol2.pdf cb5c3bdbe7e1eef182ce15fd936620b0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Short Fiction Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context short-stories Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites various short stories that Dickens wrote throughout his career for various publications, including newspapers and periodicals, and for inclusion in short story collections. Between 1833, when he tentatively submitted “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” for publication in The Monthly Magazine, and his death in 1870, Dickens as ‘BOZ,’ briefly, as ‘TIBBS,’ and as “Charles Dickens” wrote dozens of short stories and ‘sketches,’ which often moved easily between journalism and story. It was as Boz, the late Georgian literary persona, that he first endeared himself to the British reading public in the pages of such newspapers and periodicals as The Evening Chronicle, Bell’s Life in London, and Bentley's Miscellany with a unique blend of comedy and pathos. By turns scathing of observed social and personal injustices, and appreciative of London’s colourful, vibrant culture and the oddities of human nature, Boz followed in the literary footsteps of other recent metropolitan commentators like Charles Lamb (‘ELIA’), Leigh Hunt, Theodore Hook, Robert Surtees, Thomas Hood, and John Poole, and eighteenth-century Picaresque novelists, Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Soon, Dickens established his own unique voice. Prior to and following the ascension of the young Queen Victoria in 1837, Boz became a prescient spectator of both the rising empire’s rapidly developing culture in public spaces and of the domestic dramas enacted in British homes. Global fame arrived with the serial publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), marking Dickens’s shift to writing novels. In tone, this rambling comedic travelogue owed much to Boz’s voice and incidentally featured several tales unrelated to the main narrative. Dickens would sporadically publish the Mudfog stories in 1836 and 1837, enlarging on them in Sketches by Boz, a collection of many of the sketches and stories first published by John Macrone in two volumes in 1836 and 1837 and illustrated by George Cruikshank. According to Robert L. Patten, ‘When Dickens gathered up previously published writing, anonymous and pseudonymous, for republication, he identified authorship with a particular subset of his journalistic pieces, the ‘sketches’ rather than the tales or portraits of characters, and with his pseudonym. Hence, after mooting several other titles, Dickens settled on Sketches by Boz’ (44). Sketches of Young Gentlemen (1838), a joking response to Rev. Edward Caswell, or “QUIZ’s” recent effort Sketches of Young Ladies (1838), and Sketches of Couples (1840) were published by Chapman and Hall and illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne, better known as ‘PHIZ’. After this point, Dickens’s short stories were published in his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round, though after 1837 he never published them with any regularity, preferring instead to focus on writing and serialising novels. Occasionally, he contributed several chapters to a jointly authored short story, collection, or series; Christmas numbers of his periodicals provided the opportunity to feature multiple famous writers uniting to weave a Yule-tide yarn, such as The Haunted House (1859). Notably, his collaboration with Wilkie Collins resulted in such works as The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857) and No Thoroughfare (1867). Towards the end of his life, Dickens began to publish short stories again in American publications such as The New York Ledger, The Atlantic Monthly, and Our Young Folks. Until now, first printings of Dickens’s earliest short stories published between 1833 and 1836 have been difficult to find for those unable to visit the periodicals and newspaper holdings at eminent institutions such as The British Library. Similarly, the last ones written by Dickens have remained understudied due in part to their obscurity. Twentieth-century editions of the Sketches are generally based on the text of Chapman and Hall’s later 1839 single volume edition, which relies on the reissue serialised between 1837 and 1839, or the 1868 Charles Dickens Edition, which is based on the 1850 cheap (and further revised) edition. Other anthologies, for instance Selected Short Fiction (Penguin, 2005), edited by Deborah A. Thomas, choose excerpts from Dickens’s entire oeuvre in the short fiction genre. Several scholars have explored the drafting, publication, and impact of the early sketches and short stories, with notable studies including Dickens and the Short Story. (University of Philadelphia Press, 1982) by Deborah A. Thomas and Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author (Cambridge, 2012) by Patten.1 To date, the most comprehensive overview of the sketches is provided by The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (2021) edited by Paul Schlicke with David Hewitt. Others include Dickens's Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches as Originally Composed and Published 1833–1836 (2012), edited by Robert C. Hanna, and Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers (1994), edited by Michael Slater. Because Dickens made many alterations, whether significant or incidental, between the first printing of a sketch and successive editions, these changes open up a window into his editorial process and developing intentions for the ‘Boz’ legacy. Now, with this Dickens Search collection, these emendations can be studied with greater ease than ever before. Our transcription field contains text Dickens is believed to have solely authored, though our pdfs of the short story collaborations will be provided in their entirety to facilitate easier engagement and comprehension of how his narrative might interact with those constructed by other writers. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to Dickens’s words only, to avoid skewing the results. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans found on databases such as British Newspaper Archive (BNA), digital archives, and such open-access sites as Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and Google Books; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions, or to mention other short stories by Dickens that might have been overlooked. 1. See Dominic Rainsford. ‘“Luller-li-e-te”! Language, Personhood, and Sympathy in Sketches by Boz.’ In Some Keywords in Dickens. Edited by Michael Hollington, Francesca Orestano, and Nathalie Vanfasse. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021, pp. 117-130; William F. Long. ‘“Our Space is Limited”: Fitting Sketches by Boz into the Morning Chronicle”. Dickens Quarterly 4 (December 2020): pp. 325-348; William F. Long. 'Dickens before Sketches by Boz: Earliest Reactions to his Earliest Works'. Dickensian (2018), 114.505, pp.170-176; Christina Jen. '"Drop the Curtain": Astonishment and the Anxieties of Authorship in Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz. Dickens Studies Annual 49.2 (2018): pp. 249-278; Dianne F. Sadoff. ‘Boz and Beyond: “Oliver Twist” and the Dickens Legacy’. Dickens Studies Annual 45 (2014): pp. 23-44; Dickens's Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches, as Originally Composed and Published, 1833–1836, No. 46. Ed. Robert C. Hanna (2012): New York, AMS Press; Danielle Coriale. ‘Sketches by Boz, “So Frail a Machine”. SEL: Studies in English Literature 48.4 (2008): pp. 801-812; Paul Schlicke. ‘“Risen Like a Rocket”: The Impact of Sketches by Boz’. Dickens Quarterly 22.1 (2005): pp. 3-18; Ellen Miller Casey. ‘“Boz has got the Town by the ear”: Dickens and the “Athenæum Critics”’. Dickens Studies Annual 33 (2003): pp. 159-190; Richard Maxwell. ‘Dickens, the Two “Chronicles”, and the Publication of “Sketches by Boz”’. Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): pp. 21–32; Angus Easson. “Who is Boz? Dickens and His Sketches”. The Dickensian 18.1.405 (Spring 1985): pp. 13-22; Julian W. Breslow. 'The Narrator in Sketches by Boz.' ELH 44.1 (1977): pp. 127–49. Short Story Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18360101 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sketches by Boz, First Series (1836) Description An account of the resource Published by John Macrone, 1836, 2 vols. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Google Books, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sketches_by_Boz/_P5NAAAAcAAJ">https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sketches_by_Boz/_P5NAAAAcAAJ</a> (Vol.1) Google Books, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sketches_by_Boz/Ff9NAAAAcAAJ">https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sketches_by_Boz/Ff9NAAAAcAAJ</a> (Vol.2) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1836 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Illustrated by George Cruikshank Type The nature or genre of the resource Short story Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1836-Sketches_by_Boz Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz (1836). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/short-stories/1836-Sketches_by_Boz">https://www.dickenssearch.com/short-stories/1836-Sketches_by_Boz</a>. Relation A related resource Table of Contents and Relation to Previous Sketches: Vol. I: <ul> <li>The Parish. <ul> <li>Chapter I. 'The Beadle—The Parish-Engine—The Schoolmaster', pp. 1-11. Originally <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/43">'Sketches of London, No. IV, The Parish'</a></li> <li>Chapter II. 'The Curate—The Old Lady—The Captain', pp. 12-23. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/51">'Sketches of London, No. XII, Our Parish' (I)</a></li> <li>Chapter III. 'The Four Sisters', pp. 24-33. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/53">'Sketches of London, No. XIV, Our Parish' (II)</a> </li> <li>Chapter IV. 'The Election for Beadle', pp. 34-47. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/55">'Sketches of London, No. XVI, Our Parish' (III)</a></li> <li>Chapter V. 'The Broker's Man', pp. 48-66. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/57">'Sketches of London, No. XVIII, Our Parish' (IV)</a></li> <li>Chapter VI. 'The Ladies' Societies', pp. 67-78. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/59">'Sketches of London, No. XX, Our Parish' (V)</a></li> </ul> </li> <li>'Miss Evans and the Eagle', pp. 79-87. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/65">'Scenes and Characters, No.2, Miss Evans and "The Eagle"'</a>.</li> <li>'Shops, and their Tenants', pp. 88-96. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/id/221">'Street Sketches, No. II, Shops and their Tenants'</a>.</li> <li>'Thoughts about People', pp. 97-106. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/49">'Sketches of London, No. X, Thoughts About People'</a>. </li> <li>'A Visit to Newgate', 107-135. First Printing.</li> <li>'London Recreations', pp. 136-146. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/45">'Sketches of London, No. VI, London Recreations'</a>.</li> <li>The Boarding House. <ul> <li>Chapter the First, pp. 147-180. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/short-stories/1834-05-The_Boarding_House_No1">'The Boarding-House No.1'</a></li> <li>Chapter the Second, pp. 181-223. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/short-stories/1834-08-The_Boarding_House_No2">'The Boarding-House No.2'</a>.</li> </ul> </li> <li>'Hackney-Coach Stands', pp. 224-232. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/40">'Sketches of London, No.I. Hackney-Coach Stands'</a>. </li> <li>'Brokers' and Marine-Store Shops', pp. 233-241. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/220">'Street Sketches, No. V, 'Brokers and Marine Store Shops'</a>.</li> <li>'The Bloomsbury Christening', pp. 242-275. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/short-stories/1834-04-The_Bloomsbury_Christening">'The Bloomsbury Christening'</a>. </li> <li>'Gin-Shops', pp. 276-287. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/41">'Sketches of London, No. II, Gin Shops'</a>. </li> <li>'Public Dinners', pp. 288-299. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/46">'Sketches of London, No. VII, Public Dinners'</a>. </li> <li>'Astley's', pp. 300-313. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/50">'Sketches of London, No. XI, Astley's'</a>.</li> <li>'Greenwich Fair', pp. 314-330. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/48">'Sketches of London, No. IX, Greenwich Fair'</a>. </li> <li>'The Prisoners' Van', pp. 331-337. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/102">'Scenes and Characters, No. 9, The Prisoners' Van'</a>.</li> <li>'A Christmas Dinner', pp. 338-348. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/104">'Scenes and Characters, No. 10, Christmas Festivities'</a>. </li> </ul> Vol. II: <ul> <li>Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle. <ul> <li>Chapter the First, pp. 1-29. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/150">'Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle. Chapter the First'</a> </li> <li>Chapter the Second, pp. 30-76. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/151">'Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle. Chapter the Second'</a>.</li> </ul> </li> <li>'The Black Veil', pp. 77-100. First Printing.</li> <li>'Shabby-genteel People', pp. 101-110. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/id/222">'Street Sketches, No. IV, Shabby-genteel People'</a>.</li> <li>'Horatio Sparkins', pp. 111-141. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/132">'Horatio Sparkins'</a>.</li> <li>'The Pawnbroker's Shop', pp. 142-157. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/54">'Sketches of London, No. XV, The Pawnbrokers' Shop'</a>.</li> <li>'The Dancing Academy', pp. 158-170. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/66">'Scenes and Characters, No. 3, The Dancing Academy'</a>.</li> <li>'Early Coaches', pp. 171-181. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/42">'Sketches of London, No. III, Early Coaches'</a>.</li> <li>'The River', pp. 182-195. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/52">'Sketches of London, No. XIII, The River'</a>. </li> <li>'Private Theatres', pp. 196-208. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/58">'Sketches of London, No. XIX, Private Theatres'</a>.</li> <li>'The Great Winglebury Duel', pp. 209-243. First Printing.</li> <li>'Omnibuses', pp. 244-252. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/id/223">'Street Sketches, No. I, Omnibuses'</a>.</li> <li>'Mrs. Joseph Porter', pp. 253-272. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/133">'Mrs. Joseph Porter, "Over the Way"'</a>. </li> <li>'The Steam Excursion', pp. 273-318. Orig. <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/items/show/149">'The Steam Excursion'</a>.</li> <li>'Sentiment', pp. 319-342. Orig. 'Sentiment'.</li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Public domain, Google-digitised Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. THE PARISH. CHAPTER I. THE BEADLE—THE PARISH ENGINE—THE SCHOOLMASTER. How much is conveyed is those two short words—"The Parish!" And with how many tales of distress and misery, of broken fortune, and ruined hopes, too often of unrelieved wretchedness and successful knavery, are they associated! A poor man, with small earnings, and a large family, just manages to live on from hand to mouth, and to procure food from day to day; he has barely sufficient to satisfy the present cravings of nature, and can take no heed of the future; his taxes are in arrear; quarter day passes by; another quarter day arrives: he can procure no more quarter for himself, and is summoned by—the parish. His goods are distrained, his children are crying with cold and hunger, and the very bed on which his sick wife is lying is dragged from beneath her. What can he do? To whom is he to apply for relief? To private charity? To benevolent individuals? Certainly not—there is his parish. There are the parish vestry, the parish infirmary, the parish surgeon, the parish officers, the parish beadle. Excellent institutions, and gentle, kind-hearted men. The woman dies—she is buried by the parish. The children have no protector—they are taken care of by the parish. The man first neglects, and afterwards cannot obtain, work—he is relieved by the parish; and when distress and drunkenness have done their work upon him, he is maintained a harmless babbling idiot in the parish asylum. The parish beadle is one of the most, perhaps the most, important member of the local administration. He is not so well off as the churchwardens certainly, nor is he as learned as the vestry-clerk, nor does he order things quite so much his own way as either of them. But his power is very great, notwithstanding; and the dignity of his office, is never impaired by the absence of efforts on his part to maintain it. The beadle of our parish is a splendid fellow. It's quite delightful to hear him, as he explains the state of the existing poor laws to the deaf old women in the board-room-passage on business nights; and to hear what he said to the senior churchwarden, and what the senior churchwarden said to him; and what "we" (the beadle and the other gentlemen) came to the determination of doing. A miserable looking woman is called into the board-room, and represents a case of extreme destitution, affecting herself—a widow, with six small children. "Where do you live?" inquires one of the overseers. "I rents a two-pair back, gentlemen, at Mrs. Brown's, Number 3, Little King William’s-alley, which has lived there these fifteen year, and knows me to be very hardworking and industrious, and when my poor husband was alive, gentlemen, as died in the hospital"—"Well, well," interrupts the overseer, taking a note of the address, "I’ll send Simmons, the beadle, to-morrow morning to ascertain whether your story is correct; and if so, I suppose you must have an order into the house—Simmons, go to this woman’s the first thing to-morrow morning, will you?" Simmons bows assent, and ushers the woman out. Her previous admiration of "the board" (who all sit behind great books, and with their hats on) fades into nothing before her respect for her lace-trimmed conductor; and her account of what has passed inside, increases—if that be possible—the marks of respect shown by the assembled crowd to that solemn functionary. As to taking out a summons, it's quite a hopeless case if Simmons attends it on behalf of the parish. He knows all the titles of the Lord Mayor by heart; states the case without a single stammer, and it is even reported that on one occasion he ventured to make a joke, which the Lord Mayor’s head footman (who happened to be present) afterwards told an intimate friend confidentially was almost equal to one of Mr. Hobler’s! See him again on Sunday in his state-coat, and cocked hat, with a large-headed staff for show in his left hand, and a small cane for use in his right. How pompously he marshals the children into their places, and how demurely the little urchins look at him askance as he surveys them, when they are all seated, with a glare of the eye peculiar to beadles. The churchwardens and overseers being duly installed in their curtained pews, he seats himself on a mahogany bracket, erected expressly for him at the top of the aisle, and divides his attention between his prayer-book and the boys. Suddenly, just at the commencement of the communion service, when the whole congregation is hushed into a profound silence, broken only by the deep voice of the officiating clergyman, a penny is heard to ring on the stone floor of the aisle with astounding clearness. Observe the generalship of the beadle. His involuntary look of horror is instantly changed into one of perfect indifference, as if he were the only person present who had not heard the noise. The artifice succeeds. After putting forth his right leg now and then, as a feeler, the victim who dropped the money ventures to make one or two distinct dives after it; and the beadle, gliding softly round, salutes his little round head, when it again appears above the seat, with divers double knocks, administered with the cane before noticed, to the intense delight of three young men in an adjacent pew, who cough violently at intervals until the conclusion of the sermon. Such are a few traits of the importance and gravity of a parish-beadle—a gravity which has never been disturbed in any case that has come under our observation, except when the services of that particularly useful machine, a parish fire-engine, are required: then indeed all is bustle. Two little boys run to the beadle as fast as their legs will carry them, and report from their own personal observation that some neighbouring chimney is on fire: the engine is hastily got out, and a plentiful supply of boys being obtained, and harnessed to it with ropes, away they rattle over the pavement, the beadle, running—we do not exaggerate—running at the side, until they arrive at some house smelling strongly of soot, at the door of which the beadle knocks with considerable gravity for half an hour. No attention being paid to these manual applications, and the turncock having turned on the water, the engine turns off amidst the shouts of the boys; it pulls up once more at the workhouse, and the beadle "pulls up" the unfortunate householder next day, for the amount of his legal reward. We never saw a parish engine at a regular fire but once. It came up in gallant style—three miles and a half an hour, at least; there was a capital supply of water, and it was first on the spot. Bang went the pumps—the people cheered—the beadle perspired profusely; but it was unfortunately discovered, just as they were going to put the fire out, that nobody understood the process by which the engine was filled with water: and that eighteen boys and a man had exhausted themselves in pumping for twenty minutes, without producing the slightest effect. The personages next in importance to the beadle, are the master of the workhouse, and the parish schoolmaster. The vestry-clerk, as every body knows, is a short, pudgy little man, in black, with a thick gold watch-chain, of considerable length, terminating in two large seals and a key. He is an attorney, and generally in a bustle; at no time more so than when he is hurrying to some parochial meeting, with his gloves crumpled up in one hand, and a large red book under the other arm. As to the churchwardens and overseers, we exclude them altogether, because all we know of them is that they are usually respectable tradesmen, who wear hats with brims inclined to flatness, and who occasionally testify in gilt letters on a blue ground, in some conspicuous part of the church, to the important fact of a gallery having being enlarged and beautified, or an organ rebuilt. The master of the workhouse is not, in our parish—nor is he usually in any other—one of that class of men the better part of whose existence has passed away, and who drag out the remainder in some inferior situation, with just enough thought of the past, to feel degraded by, and discontented with, the present. We are unable to guess precisely to our own satisfaction what station the man can have occupied before; we should think he had been an inferior sort of attorney’s clerk, or else the master of a national school— whatever he was, it is clear his present position is a change for the better. His income is small certainly, as the rusty black coat and threadbare velvet collar demonstrate; but then he lives free of house-rent, has a limited allowance of coals and candles, and an almost unlimited allowance of authority in his petty kingdom. He is a tall, thin, bony man; always wears shoes and black cotton stockings with his surtout; and eyes you as you pass his parlour window as if he wished you were a pauper, just to give you a specimen of his power. He is an admirable specimen of a small tyrant; morose, brutish, and ill-tempered; bullying to his inferiors, cringing to his superiors, and jealous of the influence and authority of the beadle. Our schoolmaster is just the very reverse of this amiable official. He has been one of those men one occasionally hears of, on whom misfortune seems to have set her mark; nothing he ever did, or was concerned in, appears to have prospered. A rich old relation who had brought him up, and openly announced his intention of providing for him, left him 10,000l. in his will, and revoked the bequest in a codicil. Thus unexpectedly reduced to the necessity of providing for himself, he procured a situation in a public office. The young clerks below him, died off as if there were a plague among them; but the old fellows over his head, for the reversion of whose places he was anxiously waiting, lived on and on as if they were immortal. He speculated, and lost. He speculated again, and won—but never got his money. His talents were great; his disposition, easy, generous, and liberal. His friends profited by the one, and abused the other. Loss succeeded loss; misfortune crowded on misfortune; each successive day brought him nearer the verge of hopeless penury, and the quondam friends who had been warmest in their professions grew strangely cold and indifferent. He had children whom he loved, and a wife on whom he doted; the former turned their backs on him; the latter died broken-hearted. He went with the stream—it had ever been his failing, and he had not courage sufficient to bear up against so many shocks—he had never cared for himself, and the only being who had cared for him in his poverty and distress, was spared to him no longer. It was at this period that he applied for parochial relief. Some kind-hearted man who had known him in happier times chanced to be churchwarden that year, and through his interest he was appointed to his present situation. He is an old man now. Of the many who once crowded round him in all the hollow friendship of boon-companionship, some have died, some have fallen like himself, some have prospered—all have forgotten him. Time and misfortune have mercifully been permitted to impair his memory, and use has habituated him to his present condition. Meek, uncomplaining, and zealous in the discharge of his duties, he has been allowed to hold his situation long beyond the usual period; and he will no doubt continue to hold it, until infirmity renders him incapable, or death releases him. As the grey-headed old man feebly paces up and down the sunny side of the little court-yard between school hours, it would be difficult indeed for the most intimate of his former friends to recognise their once gay and happy associate in the person of the Pauper Schoolmaster. CHAPTER II. THE CURATE—THE OLD LADY—THE CAPTAIN. We commenced our last chapter with the beadle of our parish, because we are deeply sensible of the importance and dignity of his office. We will begin the present paper with the clergyman. Our curate is a young gentleman of such prepossessing appearance and fascinating manners, that within one month after his first appearance in the parish, half the young-lady inhabitants were melancholy with religion, and the other half desponding with love. Never were so many young ladies seen in our parish-church on Sunday before; and never had the little round angel's faces on Mr. Tomkins's monument in the side aisle, beheld such devotion on earth as they all exhibited. He was about five-and-twenty when he first came to astonish the parishioners; parted his hair on the centre of his forehead in the form of a Saxon arch, wore a brilliant of the first water on the fourth finger of his left hand (which he always applied to his left cheek when he read prayers); and had a deep sepulchral voice of unusual solemnity. Innumerable were the calls made by prudent mamas on our new curate; and innumerable the invitations with which he was assailed, and which, to do him justice, he readily accepted. If his manner in the pulpit had created an impression in his favour, the sensation was increased tenfold by his appearance in private circles. Pews in the immediate vicinity of the pulpit or reading-desk rose in value; sittings in the centre circle were at a premium: an inch of room in the front row of the gallery could not be procured for love or money; and some people even went so far as to assert that the three Miss Browns, who had an obscure family pew just behind the churchwardens', were detected one Sunday, in the free seats by the communion-table, actually lying in wait for the curate as he passed to the vestry! He began to preach extempore sermons, and even grave papas caught the infection; he got out of bed at half-past twelve o'clock one winter's night to half-baptize a washerwoman's child in a slop-basin; and the gratitude of the parishioners knew no bounds—the very churchwardens grew generous, and insisted on the parish defraying the expense of the watch-box on wheels, which the new curate had ordered for himself to perform the funeral service in, in wet weather. He sent three pints of gruel and a quarter of a pound of tea to a poor woman who had been brought to bed of four small children, all at once—the parish were charmed. He got up a subscription for her—the woman's fortune was made. He spoke for one hour and twenty-five minutes at an anti-slavery meeting at the Goat and Boots—the enthusiasm was at its height. A proposal was set on foot for presenting the curate with a piece of plate, as a mark of esteem for his valuable services rendered to the parish. The list of subscriptions was filled up in no time; the contest was, not who should escape the contribution, but who should be the foremost to subscribe. A splendid silver inkstand was made, and engraved with an appropriate inscription; the curate was invited to a public breakfast, at the before-mentioned Goat in Boots: the inkstand was presented in a neat speech by Mr. Gubbins, the ex-churchwarden, and acknowledged by the curate in terms which drew tears into the eyes of all present—the very waiters were melted. One would have supposed that by this time the theme of universal admiration was lifted to the very pinnacle of popularity. No such thing. The curate began to cough—four fits of coughing one morning between the Litany and the Epistle; and five in the afternoon service. Here was a discovery—the curate was consumptive. How interestingly melancholy! If the young ladies were energetic before, their sympathy and solicitude now knew no bounds. Such a man as the curate—such a dear—such a perfect love—to be consumptive! It was too much. Anonymous presents of black-currant jam, and lozenges; elastic waistcoats, bosom friends, and warm stockings, poured in upon the curate until he was as completely fitted out with winter clothing as if he were on the verge of an expedition to the North Pole; verbal bulletins of the state of his health were circulated throughout the parish half-a-dozen times a day; and the curate was at the height, indeed, in the very zenith of his popularity. About this period, a change came over the spirit of the parish. A very quiet, respectable, dozing old gentleman, who had officiated in one chapel of ease for twelve years previously, died one fine morning, without having given any notice whatever of his intention. This circumstance gave rise to counter-sensation the first; and the arrival of his successor occasioned counter-sensation the second. He was a pale, thin, cadaverous man, with large black eyes, and long straggling black hair: his dress was slovenly in the extreme; his manner ungainly; his doctrines startling; in short, he was in every respect the antipodes of the curate. Crowds of our female parishioners flocked to hear him: at first, because he was so odd-looking, then because his face was so expressive; then because he preached so well; and at last, because they really thought that, after all, there was something about him which it was quite impossible to describe. As to the curate, he was all very well; but certainly, after all, there was no denying that—that—in short the curate wasn't a novelty, and the other clergyman was. The inconstancy of public opinion is proverbial: the congregation migrated one by one; the curate coughed till he was black in the face—it was in vain. He respired with difficulty—it was equally ineffectual in awakening sympathy. Seats are once again to be had in any part of our parish church, and our chapel-of-ease is going to be enlarged, as it is crowded to suffocation every Sunday! The best known and most respected among our parishioners is an old lady, who resided in our parish long before our name was registered in the list of baptisms. Our parish is a suburban one, and the old lady lives in a neat row of houses in the most airy and pleasant part of it. The house is her own, and it, and every thing about it, except the old lady herself, who looks a little older than she did ten years ago, is in just the same state as when the old gentleman was living. The little front parlour, which is the old lady's ordinary sitting-room, is a perfect picture of quiet neatness: the carpet is covered with brown Holland, the glass and picture-frames are carefully enveloped in yellow muslin; the table-covers are never taken off, except when the leaves are turpentined and bees' waxed, an operation which is regularly commenced every other morning at half-past nine o'clock—and the little nicnacs are always arranged in precisely the same manner. The greater part of these are presents from little girls whose parents live in the same row; but some of them, such as the two old-fashioned watches (which never keep the same time, one being always a quarter of an hour too slow, and the other a quarter of an hour too fast), the little picture of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold as they appeared in the Royal Box at Drury-lane Theatre, and others of the same class, have been in the old lady's possession for many years. Here the old lady sits with her spectacles on, busily engaged in needle-work—near the window in summer time; and if she sees you coming up the steps, and you happen to be a favourite, she trots out to open the street door for you before you knock, and as you must be fatigued after that hot walk, insists on your swallowing two glasses of sherry before you exert yourself by talking. If you call in the evening, you will find her cheerful, but rather more serious than usual, with an open Bible on the table before her, of which "Sarah," who is just as neat and methodical as her mistress, regularly reads two or three chapters in the parlour aloud. The old lady sees scarcely any company, except the little girls before noticed, each of whom has always a regular fixed day for a periodical tea-drinking with her, to which she child looks forward as the greatest treat of its existence. She seldom visits at a greater distance than the next door but one on either side; and when she drinks tea here, Sarah runs out first and knocks a double knock, to prevent the possibility of her "Missis's" catching cold by having to wait at the door. She is very scrupulous in returning these little invitations; and when she asks Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so to meet Mr. and Mrs. Somebody-else, Sarah and she dust the urn, and the best china service, and the Pope Joan board; and the visiters are received in the drawing-room in great state. She has but few relations, and they are scattered about in different parts of the country, and she seldom sees them. She has a son in India, whom she always describes to you as a fine, handsome fellow—so like the profile of his poor dear father over the sideboard; but the old lady adds, with a mournful shake of the head, that he's always been one of her greatest trials, and that indeed he once almost broke her heart; but it pleased God to enable her to get the better of it, and she'd prefer your never mentioning the subject to her again. She has a great number of pensioners; and on Saturday, after she comes back from market, there is a regular levee of old men and women in the passage, waiting for their weekly gratuity. Her name always heads the list of any benevolent subscriptions, and hers are always the most liberal donations to the Winter Coal and Soup Distribution Society. She subscribed twenty pounds towards the erection of an organ in our parish church, and was so overcome the first Sunday the children sang to it, that she was obliged to be carried out by the pew-opener. Her entrance into church on Sunday is always the signal for a little bustle in the side aisle, occasioned by a general rise among the poor people, who bow and curtsy until the pew-opener has ushered the old lady unto her accustomed seat, dropped a respectful curtsy, and shut the door; and the same ceremony is repeated on her leaving church, when she walks home with the family next door but one, and talks about the sermon all the way, invariably opening the conversation by asking the youngest boy where the text was. Thus, with the annual variation of a trip to some quiet place on the sea-coast, passes the old lady's life. It has rolled on in the same unvarying and benevolent course for many years now, and must at no distant period be brought to its final close. She looks forward to its termination with calmness, and without apprehension. She has every thing to hope and nothing to fear. A very different personage, but one who has rendered himself very conspicuous in our parish, is one of the old lady's next door neighbours. He is an old naval officer on half-pay; and his bluff and unceremonious behaviour disturbs the old lady's domestic economy, not a little. In the first place he will smoke cigars in the front court; and when he wants something to drink with them—which is by no means an uncommon circumstance—he lifts up the old lady's knocker with his walking-stick, and demands to have a glass of table ale handed over the rails. In addition to this cool proceeding, he is a bit of a Jack of all trades, or to use his own words, "A regular Robinson Crusoe;" and nothing delights him better than to experimentalize on the old lady's property. One morning he got up early and planted three or four roots of full-blown marigolds in every bed of her front garden, to the inconceivable astonishment of the old lady, who actually thought when she got up and looked out of the window, that it was some strange eruption which had come out in the night. Another time he took to pieces the eight-day clock on the front landing, under pretence of cleaning the works, which he put together again by some undiscovered process in so wonderful a manner, that the large hand has done nothing but trip up the little one ever since. Then he took to breeding silkworms, which he would bring in two or three times a day, in little paper boxes, to show the old lady, generally dropping a worm or two at every visit. The consequence was, that one morning a very stout silk-worm was discovered in the act of walking up stairs—probably with the view of inquiring after his friends, for, on further inspection, it appeared that some of his companions had already found their way to every room in the house. The old lady went to the sea-side in despair; and during her absence he completely effaced the name from her brass door-plate, in his attempts to polish it with aqua fortis. But all this is nothing to his seditious conduct in public life. He attends every vestry meeting that is held; always opposes the constituted authorities of the parish; denounces the profligacy of the churchwardens, contests legal points against the vestry-clerk, will make the tax-gatherer call for his money till he won't call any longer, and then he sends it: finds fault with the sermon every Sunday; says that the organist ought to be ashamed of himself; offers to back himself for any amount to sing the psalms better than all the children put together, male and female; and, in short, conducts himself in the most turbulent and uproarious manner. The worst of it is, that having a high regard for the old lady, he wants to make her a convert to his views, and therefore walks into her little parlour with his newspaper in his hand, and talks violent politics by the hour. He is a cheritable, open-handed old fellow at bottom, after all; so, although he puts the old lady a little out occasionally, they agree very well in the main, and she laughs as much at each feat of his handiwork, when it's all over, as any body else.  CHAPTER III. THE FOUR SISTERS. The row of houses in which the old lady and her troublesome neighbour reside, comprises, beyond all doubt, a greater number of characters in its circumscribed limits than all the rest of our parish put together. As we cannot, consistently with our present plan, however, extend the number of our parochial sketches beyond six, it will be better perhaps to select the most peculiar, and to introduce them at once without further preface. The four Miss Willises, then, settled in our parish thirteen years ago: it is a melancholy reflection that the old adage, "time and tide wait for no man," applies with equal force to the fairer portion of the creation; and willingly would we conceal the fact, that even thirteen years ago the Miss Willises were far from juvenile; our duty as faithful parochial chroniclers, however, is paramount to every other consideration, and we are bound to state that thirteen years since the authorities in matrimonial cases considered the youngest Miss Willis in a very precarious state, while the eldest sister was positively given over as being far beyond all human hope. Well, the Miss Willises took a lease of the house; it was fresh painted and papers from top to bottom; the paint inside was all wainscoted; the marble all cleaned; the old grates taken down, and register-stoves, you could see to dress in, put up; four trees were planted in the back garden; several small baskets of gravel sprinkled over the front one; vans of elegant furniture arrived; spring blinds were fitted to the windows; carpenters who had been employed in the various preparations, alterations, and repairs, made confidential statements to the different maid-servants in the row, relative to the magnificent scale on which the Miss Willises were commencing; the maid-servants told their "Missises;" the Missises told their friends, and vague rumours were circulated throughout the parish, that No. 25, in Gordon-place, had been taken by four maiden ladies of immense property. At last the Miss Willises moved in; and then the "calling" began. The house was the perfection of neatness—so were the four Miss Willises. Every thing was formal, stiff, and cold—so were the four Miss Willises. Not a single chair of the whole set was ever seen out of its place—not a single Miss Willis was ever seen out of hers. There they always sat, in the same places, doing precisely the same things at the same hour. The eldest Miss Willis used to knit, the second to draw, the two others to play duets on the piano. They seemed to have no separate existence, but to have made up their minds just to winter through life together. They were three long graces in drapery, with the addition—like a school-dinner—of another long grace afterwards—the three fates with another sister—the Siamese twins multiplied by two. The eldest Miss Willis grew bilious— the four Miss Willises became bilious immediately. The eldest Miss Willis grew ill-tempered and religious—the four Miss Willises were ill-tempered and religious directly. Whatever the eldest did the others did, and whatever any body else did, they all disapproved of; and thus they vegetated—living in Polar harmony among themselves; and as they sometimes went out, or saw company "in a quiet-way" at home, occasionally iceing the neighbours. Three years passed over in this way, when an unlooked-for and extraordinary phenomenon occurred. The Miss Willises showed symptoms of summer, the frost gradually broke up; a complete thaw took place. Was it possible? one of the four Miss Willises was going to be married! Now, where on earth the husband came from, by what feelings the poor man could have been actuated, or by what process of reasoning the four Miss Willises succeeded in persuading themselves that it was possible for a man to marry one of them without marrying them all, are questions too profound for us to resolve: certain it is however, that the visits of Mr. Robinson (a gentleman in a public office, with a good salary and a little property of his own beside) were received—that the four Miss Willises were courted in due form by the said Mr. Robinson—that the neighbours were perfectly frantic in their anxiety to discover which of the four Miss Willises was the fortunate fair, and that the difficulty they experienced in solving the problem was not at all lessened by the announcement of Miss Willis—"We are going to marry Mr. Robinson." It was very extraordinary; they were so completely identified, the one with the other, that the curiosity of the whole row—even of the old lady herself—was roused almost beyond endurance. The subject was discussed at every little card table and tea-drinking; the old gentleman of silk-worm notoriety didn't hesitate to express his decided opinion that Mr. Robinson was of Eastern descent, and contemplated marrying the whole family at once; and the row generally shook their heads with considerable gravity, and declared the business to be very mysterious. They hoped it might all end well;—it certainly had a very singular appearance, but still it would be uncharitable to express any opinion without good grounds to go upon; and certainly the Miss Willises were quite old enough to judge for themselves, and to be sure people ought to know their own business best, and so forth. At last, one fine morning, at a quarter before eight o'clock, A.M., two glass-coaches drove up to the Miss Willises' door, at which Mr. Robinson had arrived in a cab ten minutes before, dressed in a light blue coat and a double-milled kersey pantaloons, white neckerchief, pumps, and dress gloves, his manner denoting, as appeared from the evidence of the housemaid at No. 23, who was sweeping the door-steps at the time, a considerable degree of nervous excitement. It was also hastily reported on the same testimony, that the cook, who opened the door, wore a large white bow of unusual dimensions, in a much smarter head-dress than the regulation cap to which the Miss Willises invariably restricted the somewhat excursive taste of female servants in general. The intelligence spread rapidly from house to house; it was quite clear that the eventful morning had at length arrived; the whole row stationed themselves behind their first and second floor blinds, and waited the result in breathless expectation. At last the Miss Willises' door opened; the door of the first glass-coach did the same; two gentlemen, and a pair of ladies to correspond—friends of the family no doubt; up went the steps, bang went the door; off went the first glass-coach, and up came the second. The street door opened again; the excitement of the whole row increased—Mr. Robinson and the eldest Miss Willis. "I thought so," said the lady at No. 19; "I always said it was Miss Willis!" "Well I never!" ejaculated the young lady at No. 18 to the young lady at No. 17—"Did you ever, dear!" responded the young lady at No. 17, to the young lady at No. 18. "It's too ridiculous!" exclaimed a spinster of an uncertain age, at No. 16, joining in the conversation. But who shall portray the astonishment of Gordon-place when Mr. Robinson handed in all the Miss Willises, one after the other, and then squeezed himself into an acute angle of the glass-coach, which forthwith proceeded at a brisk pace after the other glass-coach? which other glass-coach had itself proceeded at a brisk pace in the direction of the parish church. Who shall depict the perplexity of the clergyman when all the Miss Willises knelt down at the communion-table, and repeated the responses incidental to the marriage service in an audible voice?—or who shall describe the confusion which prevailed, when—even after the difficulties thus occasioned had been adjusted—all the Miss Willises went into hysterics at the conclusion of the ceremony, until the sacred edifice resounded with their united wailings! As the four sisters and Mr. Robinson continued to occupy the same house after this memorable occasion, and as the married sister, whoever she was, never appeared in public without the other three, we are not quite clear that the neighbours would ever have discovered the real Mrs. Robinson, but for a circumstance of the most gratifying description, which will happen occasionally in the best-regulated families. Three quarter-days elapsed, and the row, on whom a new light appeared to have been bursting for some time, began to speak with a sort of implied confidence on the subject, and to wonder how Mrs. Robinson—the youngest Miss Willis that was—got on; and servants might be seen running up the steps about nine or ten o'clock every morning, with "Missis's compliments, and wishes to know how Mrs. Robinson finds herself this morning?" And the answer always was, "Mrs. Robinson's compliments, and she's in very good spirits, and doesn't find herself any worse." The piano was heard no longer—the knitting-needles were laid aside—drawing was neglected—and mantua-making and millinery, on the smallest scale imaginable, appeared to have become the favourite amusement of the whole family. The parlour wasn't quite as tidy as it used to be; and if you called in the morning, you would see lying on a table, with an old newspaper carelessly thrown over them, two or three particularly small caps—rather larger than if they had been made for a moderate-sized doll, with a small piece of lace, in the shape of a horse-shoe, let in behind: or perhaps a white robe, not very large in circumference, but very much out of proportion in point of length, with a little tucker round the top, and a frill round the bottom; and once when we called we saw a long white roller, with a kind of blue margin down each side, the probable use of which we were at a loss to conjecture. Then we fanced that Mr. Dawson, the surgeon, &c., who displays a large lamp with a different colour in every pane of glass, at the corner of the row, began to be knocked up at night oftener than he used to be; and once we were very much alarmed by hearing a hackney-coach stop at Mrs. Robinson's door, at half-past two o'clock in the morning, out of which there emerged a fat old woman, in a cloak and nightcap, with a bundle in one hand and a pair of pattens in the other, who looked as if she had been suddenly knocked up out of bed for some purpose or other; and when we got up in the morning we saw the knocker was tied up in an old white kid glove; and we, in our innocence (we are in a state of bachelorship), wondered what on earth it all meant, until we heard the eldest Miss Willis, in propriâ personâ, say with great dignity, in answer to the next inquiry, "My compliments, and Mrs. Robinson's doing as well as can be expected, and the little girl thrives wonderfully." And then, in common with the rest of the row, our curiosity was satisfied, and we began to wonder it had never occurred to us what the matter was, before. CHAPTER IV. THE ELECTION FOR BEADLE. A great event has recently occurred in our parish. A contest of paramount interest has just terminated; a parochial convulsion has taken place. It has been succeeded by a glorious triumph, which the country—or at least the parish, it's all the same—will long remember. The supporters of the old beadle system have been defeated in their stronghold, and the advocates of the great new beadle principles have achieved a proud victory. Our parish—which, like all other parishes, is a little world of its own—has long been divided into two parties, whose contentions, slumbering for a while, have never failed to burst forth with unabated vigour on any occasion on which they could by possibility be renewed. Watching rates, lighting rates, paving rates, sewer's rates, church rates, poor's rates—all sorts of rates, have been in their turn the subjects of a grand struggle; and as to questions of patronage, the asperity and determination with which they have been contested is scarcely credible. The leader of the official party—the steady advocate of the churchwardens and the unflinching supporter of the overseers—is an old gentleman who lives in our row. He owns some half-dozen houses in it, and always walks on the opposite side of the way so that he may be able to take in a view of the whole of his property at once. He is a tall, thin, bony man, with an interrogative nose, and little restless perking eyes, which appear to have been given him for the sole purpose of peeping into other people's affairs with. He is deeply impressed with the importance of our parish business, and prides himself not a little on his style of addressing the parishioners in vestry assembled. His views are rather confined than extensive; his principles more narrow than liberal. He has been heard to declaim very loudly in favour of the liberty of the press, and advocates the repeal of the stamp duty on newspapers, because the daily journals, who now have a monopoly of the public, never give verbatim reports of vestry meetings. He would not appear egotistical for the world; but at the same time he must say, that there are speeches—that celebrated speech of his own on the emoluments of the sexton, and the duties of the office, for instance—which might be communicated to the public, greatly to their improvement and advantage. His great opponent in public life is Captain Purday, the old naval officer on half-pay, to whom we introduced our readers. The captain being a determined opponent of the constituted authorities, whoever they may chance to be—and our other friend being their steady supporter, with an equal disregard of their individual merits—it will readily be supposed that occasions for their coming into direct collision are neither few nor far between. They divided the vestry fourteen times on a motion for heating the church with warm water instead of coals; and made speeches about liberty and expenditure, and prodigality and hot water, which threw the whole parish into a state of excitement. Then the captain, when he was on the visiting committee, and his opponent overseer brought forward certain distinct and specific charges relative to the management of the workhouse, boldly expressed his total want of confidence in the existing authorities, and moved for "a copy of the recipe by which the paupers' soup was prepared, together with any documents relating thereto." This the overseer steadily resisted; he fortified himself by precedent, appealed to the established usage, and declined to produce the papers, on the ground of the injury that would be done to the public service, if documents of a strictly private nature, passing between the master of the workhouse and the cook, were to be thus dragged to light on the motion of any individual member of the vestry. The motion was lost by a majority of two; and then the captain, who never allows himself to be defeated, moved for a committee of inquiry into the whole subject. The affair grew serious; the question was discussed at meeting after meeting, and vestry after vestry; speeches were made, attacks repudiated, personal defiances exchanged, explanations received, and the greatest excitement prevailed, until at last, just as the question was going to be finally decided, the vestry found that somehow or other they had become entangled in a point of form from which it was impossible to escape with propriety. So the motion was dropped, and every body looked extremely important, and seemed quite satisfied with the meritorious nature of the whole proceeding. This was the state of affairs in our parish a week or two since, when Simmons, the beadle, suddenly died. The lamented deceased had over-exerted himself a day or two previously, in conveying an aged female, highly intoxicated, to the strong room of the work house. The excitement thus occasioned, added to a severe cold, which this indefatigable officer had caught in his capacity of director of the parish-engine, by inadvertently playing over himself instead of a fire, proved too much for a constitution already enfeebled by age; and the intelligence was conveyed to the Board one evening that Simmons had died, and left his respects. The breath was scarcely out of the body of the deceased functionary when the field was filled with competitors for the vacant office, each of whom rested his claims to public support entirely on the number and extent of his family, as if the office of beadle were originally instituted as an encouragement for the propagation of the human species. "Bung for Beadle. Five small children!"—"Hopkins for Beadle. Seven small children!!"—"Timkins for Beadle. Nine small children!!!" Such were the placards in large black letters on a white ground, which were plentifully pasted on the walls and posted in the windows of the principal shops. Timkins’s success was considered certain: several mothers of families half promised their votes, and the nine small children would have run over the course, but for the production of another placard, announcing the appearance of a still more meritorious candidate. "Spruggins for Beadle. Ten small children (two of them twins) and a wife!!!" There was no resisting this; ten small children would have been almost irresistible in themselves without the twins; but the touching parenthesis about that interesting production of nature, and the still more touching allusion to Mrs. Spruggins, must ensure success. Spruggins was the favourite at once; and the appearance of his lady, as she went about to solicit votes (which encouraged confident hopes of a still further addition to the house of Spruggins at no remote period), increased the general prepossession in his favour. The other candidates, Bung alone excepted, resigned in despair; the day of election was fixed; and the canvass proceeded with briskness and perseverance on both sides. The members of the vestry could not be supposed to escape the contagious excitement inseparable from the occasion. The majority of the lady inhabitants of the parish declared at once for Spruggins, and the quondam overseer took the same side, on the ground that men with large families always had been elected to the office, and that, although he must admit that, in other respects, Spruggins was the least qualified candidate of the two, still it was an old practice, and he saw no reason why an old practice should be departed from. This was enough for the captain. He immediately sided with Bung; canvassed for him personally in all directions, wrote squibs on Spruggins, and got his butcher to skewer them up on conspicuous joints in his shop-front; frightened his neighbour, the old lady, into a palpitation of the heart by his awful denunciations of Spruggins’s party; and bounced in and out, and up and down, and backwards and forwards, until all the sober inhabitants of the parish thought it inevitable that he must die of a brain fever long before the election began. The day of election arrived; it was no longer an individual struggle but a party contest between the ins and outs. The question was, whether the withering influence of the overseers, the domination of the church-wardens, and the blighting despotism of the vestry-clerk, should be allowed to render the election of beadle a form—a nullity; whether they should impose a vestry-elected beadle on the parish, to do their bidding and forward their views, or whether the parishioners, fearlessly asserting their undoubted rights, should elect an independent beadle of their own. The nomination was fixed to take place in the vestry, but so great was the throng of anxious spectators, that it was found necessary to adjourn to the church, where the ceremony commenced with due solemnity. The appearance of the churchwardens and overseers, and the ex-churchwardens and ex-overseers, with Spruggins in the rear, excited general attention. Spruggins was a little thin man, in rusty black, with a long pale face, and a countenance expressive of care and fatigue, which might either be attributed to the extent of his family or the anxiety of his feelings. His opponent appeared in a cast-off coat of the captain’s—a blue coat with bright buttons; white trousers, and that description of shoes familiarly known by the appellation of "high-lows." There was a serenity in the open countenance of Bung—a kind of moral dignity in his confident air—an "I wish you may get it" sort of expression in his eye—which infused animation into his supporters, and evidently dispirited his opponents. The ex-churchwarden rose to propose Thomas Spruggins for beadle. He had known him long; he had had his eye upon him closely for years; he had watched him with twofold vigilance for months. (A parishioner here suggested that this might be termed "taking a double sight," but the observation was drowned in loud cries of "Order!"). He would repeat that he had had his eye upon him for years; and this he would say, that a more well-conducted, a more well-behaved, a more sober, a more quiet man, with a more well-regulated mind, he had never met with. A man with a larger family he had never known (cheers). The parish required a man who could be depended on ("Hear!" from the Spruggins side, answered by ironical cheers from the Bung party). Such a man he now proposed ("No," "Yes"). He would not allude to individuals (the ex-churchwarden continued, in the celebrated negative style adopted by great speakers). He would not advert to a gentleman who had once held a high rank in the service of his majesty; he would not say that that gentleman was no gentleman; he would not assert that that man was no man; he would not say that he was a turbulent parishioner; he would not say that he had grossly misbehaved himself, not only on this but on former occasions; he would not say that he was one of those discontented and treasonable spirits, who carried confusion and disorder wherever they went; he would not say that he harboured in his heart envy, and hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. No! He wished to have everything comfortable and pleasant; and therefore, he would say—nothing about him (cheers). The captain replied in a similar parliamentary style. He would not say he was astonished at the speech they had just heard; he would not say he was disgusted (cheers); he would not retort the epithets which had been hurled against him (renewed cheering); he would not allude to men once in office, but now happily out of it, who had mismanaged the workhouse, ground the paupers, diluted the beer, slack-baked the bread, boned the meat, heightened the work, and lowered the soup (tremendous cheers). He would not ask what such men deserved (a voice, "Nothing a day, and find themselves!"). He would not say that one burst of general indignation should drive them from the parish they polluted with their presence ("Give it him!"). He would not allude to the unfortunate man who had been proposed—he would not say, as the vestry’s tool, but as Beadle. He would not advert to that individual’s family; he would not say that nine children, twins, and a wife, were very bad examples for pauper imitation (loud cheers). He would not advert in detail to the qualifications of Bung. The man stood before him, and he would not say in his presence what he might be disposed to say of him, if he were absent. (Here Mr. Bung telegraphed to a friend near him under cover of his hat, by contracting his left eye, and applying his right thumb to the tip of his nose). It had been objected to Bung that he had only five children ("Hear, hear!" from the opposition). Well, he had yet to learn that the legislature had affixed any precise amount of infantine qualification to the office of beadle; but taking it for granted that an extensive family were a great requisite, he entreated them to look to facts and compare data, about which there could be no mistake. Bung was 35 years of age. Spruggins—of whom he wished to speak with all possible respect—was 50. Was it not more than possible—was it not very probable—that by the time Bung attained the latter age, he might see around him a family, even exceeding in number and extent, that to which Spruggins at present laid claim (deafening cheers and waving of handkerchiefs)? The captain concluded amidst loud applause by calling upon the parishioners to sound the tocsin, rush to the poll, free themselves from dictation, or be slaves for ever. On the following day the polling began, and we never have had such a bustle in our parish since we got up our famous anti-slavery petition, which was such an important one that the House of Commons ordered it to be printed, on the motion of the member for the district. The captain engaged two hackney-coaches and a cab for Bung’s people—the cab for the drunken voters, and the two coaches for the old ladies, the greater portion of whom, owing to the captain’s impetuosity, were driven up to the poll and home again, before they recovered from their flurry sufficiently to know with any degree of clearness what they had been doing: the opposite party wholly neglected these precautions, and the consequence was, that a great many ladies who were walking leisurely up to the church—for it was a very hot day—to vote for Spruggins, were artfully decoyed into the coaches, and voted for Bung. The captain’s arguments, too, had produced considerable effect: the attempted influence of the vestry produced a greater. A threat of exclusive dealing was clearly established against the vestry-clerk—a case of heartless and profligate atrocity. It appeared that the delinquent had been in the habit of purchasing six penn’orth of muffins weekly from an old woman who rents a small house in the parish, and resides among the original settlers; on her last weekly visit a message was conveyed to her through the medium of the cook, couched in mysterious terms, but indicating with sufficient clearness, that the vestry-clerk’s appetite for muffins in future depended entirely on her vote on the beadleship. This was sufficient: the stream had been turning previously, and the impulse thus administered directed its final course. The Bung party ordered one shillingsworth of muffins weekly for the remainder of the old woman’s natural life; the parishioners were loud in their exclamations; and the fate of Spruggins was sealed. It was in vain that the twins were exhibited in dresses of the same pattern, and nightcaps to match at the church-door; the boy in Mrs. Spruggins’s right arm and the girl in her left— even Mrs. Spruggins herself failed to be an object of sympathy any longer. The majority attained by Bung on the gross poll was four hundred and twenty-eight, and the cause of the parishioners triumphed. CHAPTER V. THE BROKERS' MAN. The excitement of the late election has subsided, and our parish being once again restored to a state of comparative tranquillity, we are enabled to devote our attention to those parishioners who take little share in our party contests or in the turmoil and bustle of public life. And we feel sincere pleasure in acknowledging here, that in collecting materials for this task we have been greatly assisted by Mr. Bung himself, who has imposed on us a debt of obligation which we fear we can never repay. The life of this gentleman has been one of a very chequered description: he has undergone transitions—not from grave to gay, for he never was grave—not from lively to severe, for severity forms no part of his disposition; his fluctuations have been between poverty in the extreme and poverty modified, or, to use his own emphatic language, "between nothing to eat and just half enough." He is not, as he forcibly remarks, "One of those fortunate men who, if they were to dive under one side of a barge stark-naked, would come up on the other, with a new suit of clothes on, and a ticket for soup in the waistcoat-pocket:" neither is he one of those, whose spirit has been broken beyond redemption by misfortune and want. He is just one of the careless, good-for-nothing, happy fellows, who float cork-like on the surface, for the world to play at hockey with: knocked here and there and every where: now to the right, then to the left, again up in the air, and anon to the bottom, but always reappearing, and bounding with the stream, buoyantly and merrily along. Some few months before he was prevailed upon to stand a contested election for the office of beadle, necessity attached him to the service of a broker; and on the opportunities he here acquired of ascertaining the condition of most of the poorer inhabitants of the parish, his patron, the captain, first grounded his claims to public support. Chance threw the man in our way a short time since. We were, in the first instance, attracted by his prepossessing impudence at the election; we were not surprised, on further acquaintance, to find him a shrewd knowing fellow, with no inconsiderable power of observation, and after conversing with him a little, were somewhat struck (as we dare say our readers have frequently been in other cases) with the power some men seem to have, not only of sympathising with, but to all appearance of understanding feelings, to which they themselves are entire strangers. We had been expressing to the new functionary our surprise that he should ever have served in the capacity to which we have just adverted, when we gradually led him into one or two professional anecdotes. As we are induced to think, on reflection, that they will tell better, in nearly his own words, than with any attempted embellishments of ours, we will at once entitle them                      MR. BUNG'S NARRATIVE. "It's very true, as you say sir," Mr. Bung commenced, "that a broker's man's is not a life to envied; and in course you know as well as I do, though you don't say it, that people hate and scout 'em, because they're the ministers of wretchedness, like, to poor people. But what could I do, sir? The thing was no worse because I did it instead of somebody else, and if putting me in possession of a house would put me in possession of three and sixpence a day, and levying a distress on another man's goods would relieve my distress and that of my family, it can't be expected but what I'd take the job and go through with it. I never liked it, God knows; I always looked out for something else, and the moment I got other work to do I left it: if there is any thing wrong in being the agent in such matters—not the principal, mind you—I'm sure the business, to a beginning like I was, at all events carries its own punishment along with it. I wished again and again that the people would only blow me up, or pitch into me—that I wouldn't have minded: it's all in my way; but it's the being shut up by yourself in one room for three days, without so much as an old newspaper to look at, or any thing to see out o' the winder but the roofs and chimneys at the back of the house, or any thing to listen to but the ticking perhaps of an old Dutch clock, the sobbing of the missis now and then, the low talking of friends in the next room, who speak in whispers, lest 'the man' should overhear them, or perhaps the occasional opening of the door, as a child peeps in to look at you, and then runs half frightened away.—It's all this that makes you feel sneaking somehow, and ashamed of yourself; and then, if it's winter time, they just give you fire enough to make you think you'd like more, and bring in your grub as if they wish it u'd choke you—as I dare say they do, for the matter of that, most heartily. If they're very civil, they make you up a bed in the room at night; and if they don't, your master sends one in for you; but there you are, without being washed or shaved all the time, shunned by every body, and spoken to by no one, unless some one comes in at dinner time, and asks you whether you want any more, in a tone as much as to say, 'I hope you don't;' or, in the evening, to inquire whether you wouldn't rather have a candle, after you've been sitting in the dark half the night. When I was left in this way, I used to sit, think, think, thinking, till I felt as lonesome as a kitten in a wash-house copper with the lid on; but I believe the old brokers' men, who are regularly trained to it, never think at all. I have heard some on 'em say, indeed, that they don't know how!  "I put in a good many distresses in my time (continued Mr. Bung), and in course I wasn't long in finding that some people are not as much to be pitied as others are, and that people with good incomes, who get into difficulties, which they keep patching up day after day, and week after week, get so used to these sorts of things in time, that at last they come scarcely to feel them at all. I remember the very first place I was put in possession of, was a gentleman's house in this parish here, that every body would suppose couldn't help having money if he tried. I went with old Fixem, my old master, 'bout half arter eight in the morning, rang the area-bell, servant in livery opened the door; 'Governor at home?'—'Yes, he is,' says the man; 'but he's a breakfasting just now.' 'Never mind,' says Fixem, 'just you tell him there's a gentleman here as wants to speak to him partickler." So the servant he opens his eyes, and stares about him all ways—looking for the gentleman as it struck me; for I don't think anybody but a man as was stone-blind would mistake Fixem for one; and as for me, I was as seedy as a cheap cowcumber. Hows'ever he turns round and goes to the breakfast-parlour, which was a little snug sort of room at the end of the passage, and Fixem (as we always did in that profession), without waiting to be announced, walks in arter him; and before the servant could get out—'Please sir, here's a man as wants to speak to you,' looks in at the door as familiar and pleasant as may be. 'Who the devil are you, and how dare you walk into a gentleman's house without leave?' says the master, as fierce as a bull in fits. 'My name,' says Fixem, winking at the master to send the servant away, and putting the warrant into his hands folded up like a note, 'My name's Smith,' says he,' and I called from Johnson's about that business of Thompson's.'—'Oh,' says the other, quite down upon him directly, 'How is Thompson?' says he; 'Pray sit down, Mr. Smith: John, leave the room.' Out went the servant, and the gentleman and Fixem looked at one another till they couldn't look any longer, and then they varied the amusement by looking at me, who had been standing on the mat all this time. 'Hundred and fifty pounds, I see,' said the gentleman at last. 'Hundred and fifty pounds,' said Fixem, 'besides cost of levy, sheriff's poundage, and all other incidental expenses.'—'Um,' says the gentleman, 'I shan't be able to settle this before to-morrow afternoon.'—'Very sorry; but I shall be obliged to leave my man here till then,' replies Fixem, pretending to look very miserable over it. 'That's very unfort'nate,' says the gentleman, 'for I've got a large party here to-night; and I'm ruined if those fellows of mine get an inkling of the matter—just step here, Mr. Smith,' says he, after a short pause; so Fixem walks with him up to the window, and after a good deal of whispering, and a little chinking of suverins, and looking at me, he comes back and says 'Bung, you're a handy fellow, and very honest I know. This gentleman wants an assistant to clean the plate and wait at table to-day; and if you're not particularly engaged,' says old Fixem, grinning like mad, and shoving a couple of suverins into my hand, 'he'll be very glad to avail himself of your services.' Well, I laughed, and the gentleman laughed, and we all laughed; and I went home and cleaned myself, leaving Fixem there; and when I went back, Fixem went away, and I polished up the plate, and waited at table, and gammoned the servants, and nobody had the least idea I was in possession; though it very nearly came out after all; for one of the last gentlemen who remained, came down stairs into the hall where I was sitting pretty late at night, and putting half a crown into my hand, says, 'Here, my man,' says he, 'run and get me a coach, will you?' I thought it was a do to get me out of the house, and was just going to say so, sulkily enough, when the gentleman (who was up to every thing) came running down stairs as if he was in great anxiety. 'Bung,' says he, pretending to be in a consuming passion, 'Sir,' says I. 'Why the devil an't you looking after that plate?'—'I was just going to send him for a coach for me,' says the other gentleman. 'And I was just a going to say,' says I—'Any body else, my dear fellow,' interrupts the master of the house, pushing me down the passage to get me out of the way—'anybody else; but I have put this man in possession of all the plate and valuables, and I cannot allow him on any consideration whatever to leave the house. Bung, damn you, go and count those forks in the breakfast-parlour instantly.' You may be sure I went laughing pretty hearty when I found it was all right. The money was paid next day, with the addition of something else for myself, and that was the best job that I (and I suspect old Fixem too) ever got in that line. "But this is the bright side of the picture, sir, after all," resumed Mr. Bung, laying aside the knowing look and flash air with which he had repeated the previous anecdote—"and I'm sorry to say it's the side one sees very—very seldom, in comparison with the dark one. The civility which money will purchase is rarely extended to those who have none; and there's a consolation even in being able to patch up one difficulty to make way for another, to which very poor people are strangers. I was once put into a house down George's-yard—that little dirty court at the back of the gas-works; and I never shall forget the misery of them people, dear me! It was a distress for half a year's rent—two pound ten I think. There were only two rooms in the house, as there was no passage, the lodgers up stairs always went through the room of the people of the house, as they passed in and out, and every time they did so—which, on the average, was about four times every quarter of an hour—they blowed up quite frightful: for their things had been seized too, and included in the inventory. There was a little piece of enclosed dust in front of the house, with a cinder path leading up to the door, and an open rain-water butt on one side. A dirty striped curtain, on a very slack string, hung in the window, and a little triangular bit of broken looking-glass rested on the sill inside. I suppose it was meant for the people's use, but their appearance was so wretched and so miserable, that I'm certain they never could have plucked up courage to look themselves in the face a second time, if they survived the fright of doing so once. There was two or three chairs, that might have been worth, in their best days, from eightpence to a shilling apiece; a small deal table; an old corner cupboard, with nothing in it, and one of those bedsteads which turn up half way, and leave the bottom legs sticking out for you to knock your head against, or hang your hat upon; no bed, no bedding. There was an old sack, by way of rug, before the fireplace, and four or five children were grovelling about among the sand on the floor. The execution was only put in to get 'em out of the house, for there was nothing to take to pay the expenses; and here I stopped for three days, though that was a mere form too: for in course I knew, and we all knew, they could never pay the money. In one of the chairs, by the side of the place where the fire ought to have been, was an old 'ooman—the ugliest and dirtiest I ever see—who sat rocking herself backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, without once stopping, except for an instant, now and then, to clasp together the withered hands which, with these exceptions, she kept constantly rubbing upon her knees, just raising and depressing her fingers convulsively, in time to the rocking of the chair. On the other side sat the mother with an infant in her arms, which cried till it cried itself to sleep, and when it woke, cried till it cried itself off again. The old 'ooman's voice I never heard she seemed completely stupified; and as to the mother's, it would have been better if she had  been so too; for misery had changed her to a devil. If you had heard how she cursed the little naked children as was rolling on the floor, and seen how savagely she struck the infant when it cried with hunger, you'd have shuddered as much as I did. There they remained all the time: the children eat a morsel of bread once or twice, and I gave 'em best part of the dinners my missis brought me; but the women eat nothing: they never even laid down on the bedstead, nor was the room swept or cleaned all the time. The neighbours were all too poor themselves to take any notice of 'em; but from what I could make out from the abuse of the woman up stairs, it seemed the husband had been transported a few weeks before. When the time was up, the landlord, and old Fixem too, got rather frightened about the family; and so they made a stir about it, and got 'em taken to the workhouse. They sent the sick couch for the old 'ooman; and Simmons took the children away at night. The old 'ooman went into the infirmary, and very soon died. The children are all in the house to this day, and very comfortable they are in comparison; as to the mother, there was no taming her at all. She had been a quiet, hardworking woman, I believe, but her misery had actually drove her wild; so after she had been sent to the house of correction half-a- dozen times, for throwing inkstands at the overseers, blaspheming the churchwardens, and smashing every body as come near her, she burst a blood-vessel one mornin', and died too; and a happy release it was, both for herself and the old paupers, male and female, which she used to tip over in all directions, as if they were so many skittles, and she the ball.  "Now this was bad enough," resumed Mr. Bung, taking a half-step towards the door, as if to intimate that he had nearly concluded. "This was bad enough, but there was a sort of quiet misery—if you understand what I mean by that, sir—about a lady at one house I was put into, as touched me a good deal more. It doesn't matter where it was exactly: indeed, I'd rather not say; but it was the same sort o'job. I went with Fixem in the usual way—there was a year's rent in arrear; a very small servant-girl opened the door, and three or four fine- looking little children was in the front parlour we was shown into, which was very clean, but very scantily furnished, much like the children themselves. 'Bung,' says Fixem to me, in a low voice, when we were left alone for a minute, 'I know something about this here family, and my opinion is, it's no go.' 'Do you think they can't settle?' says I, quite anxiously; for I liked the looks of them children. Fixem shook his head, and was just about to reply when the door opened, and in come a lady as white as ever I see any one in my days, except about the eyes, which were red with crying. She walked in as firm as I could have done; shut the door carefully after her, and sat herself down with a face as composed as if it was made of stone. 'What is the matter, gentlemen?' says she, in a surprisin' steady voice. 'Is this an execution?'—'It is, mum,' says Fixem. The lady looked at him as steady as ever: she didn't seem to have understood him. 'It is, mum,' says Fixem again; 'this is my warrant of distress, mum,' says he, handing it over as polite as if it was a newspaper which had been bespoke arter the next gentleman. The lady's lip trembled as she took the printed paper. She cast her eye over it, and old Fixem began to explain the form, but I saw she wasn't reading it, plain enough, poor thing. 'Oh, my God!' says she, suddenly a-bursting out crying, letting the warrant fall, and hiding her fact in her hands. 'Oh, my God! what will become of us?' The noise she made brought in a young lady of about nineteen or twenty, who, I suppose, had been a-listening at the door: she'd got a little boy in her arms: she sat him down in the lady's lap, without speaking, and she hugged the poor little fellow to her bosom and cried over him, till even old Fixem put on his blue spectacles to hide the two tears that was a-trickling down, one on each side of his dirty face. 'Now, dear ma,' says the young lady, 'you know how much you have borne. For all our sakes—for pa's sake,' says she, 'don't give way to this!'—'No, no, I won't!' says the lady, gathering herself up hastily, and drying her eyes; 'I am very foolish, but I'm better now—much better.' And then she roused herself up; went with us into every room while we took the inventory; opened all the drawers of her own accord; sorted the children's little clothes to make the work easier; and, except doing everything in a strange sort of hurry, seemed as calm and composed as if nothing had happened. When we came down stairs again, she hesitated a minute or two, and at last says, 'Gentleman,' says she, 'I am afraid I have done wrong, and perhaps it may bring you into trouble. I secreted just now,' she says, 'the only trinket I have left in the world— here it is.' So she lays down on the table a little miniature mounted in gold. 'It's a miniature,' she says, 'of my poor dear father! I little thought, once that I should ever thank God for depriving me of the original; but I do, and have done for years back, most fervently. Take it away, sir,' she says, 'it's a face that never turned from me in sickness or distress, and I can hardly bear to turn from it now, when, God knows, I suffer both in no ordinary degree.' I couldn't say nothing, but I raised my head from the inventory which I was filling up, and looked at Fixem: the old fellow nodded to me significantly; so I ran my pen through the 'Mini' I had just written, and left the miniature on the table.  "Well, sir, to make short of a long story, I was left in possession, and in possession I remained; and though I was an ignorant man, and the master of the house a clever one, I saw what he never did, but what he would give worlds now (if he had 'em) to have seen in time. I saw, sir, that his wife was wasting away beneath cares of which she never complained, and griefs she never told. I saw that she was dying before his eyes; I knew that an exertion from him might have saved her; but he never made it. I don't blame him: I don't think he could rouse himself. She had for so long anticipated all his wishes, and acted for him, that he was a lost man when left to himself. I used to think when I caught sight of her, in the clothes she used to wear, which looked shabby even upon her, and would have been scarcely decent on any one else, that if I was a gentleman it would wring my very heart to see the woman that was a smart and merry girl when I courted her, so altered through her love for me. Bitter cold and damp weather it was; yet though her dress was thin, and her shoes none of the best, during the whole three days, from morning to night, she was out of doors running about to try and raise the money. The money was raised, and the execution was paid out. The whole family crowded into the room where I was, when the money arrived. The father was quite happy as the inconvenience was removed—I dare say he didn't know how—the children looked merry and cheerful again; the eldest girl was bustling about, making preparations for the first comfortable meal they had had since the distress was put in—and the mother looked pleased to see them all so; but if ever I saw death in a woman's face, I saw it in hers that night. "I was right, sir," concluded Mr. Bung, hurriedly passing his coat-sleeve over his face. "The family grew more prosperous, and good fortune arrived. But it was too late. Those children are motherless now, and their father would give up all that he has since gained—house, home, goods, money; all that he has, or ever can have, to restore the wife he has lost." CHAPTER VI. LADIES' SOCIETIES. Our Parish is very prolific in ladies’ charitable institutions. In winter, when wet feet are common and colds not scarce, we have the ladies’ soup distribution society, the ladies’ coal distribution society, and the ladies’ blanket distribution society: in summer, when stone fruits flourish and stomach-aches prevail, we have the ladies’s dispensary, and the ladies’ sick visitation committee; and all the year round we have the ladies’ child’s examination society, the ladies’ bible and prayer-book circulation society, and the ladies’ childbed linen monthly loan society. The two latter are decidedly the most important; whether they are productive of more benefit than the rest is not for us to say, but we can take upon ourselves to affirm, with the utmost solemnity, that they create a greater stir and more bustle than all the others put together. We should be disposed to say, on the first blush of the matter, that the bible and prayer-book society is not so popular as the childbed linen society; the bible and prayer-book society has, however, considerably increased in importance within the last year or two: having derived some adventitious aid from the factious opposition of the child’s examination society, which factious opposition originated in manner following:—When the young curate was popular, and all the unmarried ladies in the parish took a serious turn, the charity children all at once became objects of peculiar and especial interest. The three Miss Browns (enthusiastic admirers of the curate) taught, and exercised, and examined, and re-examined the unfortunate children, until the boys grew pale, and the girls consumptive, with study and fatigue. The three Miss Browns stood it out very well, because they relieved each other; but the children, having no relief at all, exhibited decided symptoms of weariness and care. The unthinking part of the parishioners laughed at all this, but the more reflective portion of the inhabitants abstained from expressing any opinion on the subject until that of the curate had been clearly ascertained. The opportunity was not long wanting. The curate preached a charity sermon on behalf of the charity school; and in the charity sermon aforesaid, expatiated in glowing terms on the praiseworthy and indefatigable exertions of certain estimable individuals. Sobs were heard to issue from the three Miss Browns’ pew; the pew-opener of the division was seen to hurry down the centre aisle to the vestry-door, and to return immediately, bearing a glass of water in her hand; a low moaning ensued; two more pew-openers rushed to the spot, and the three Miss Browns, each supported by a pew-opener, were led out of the church, and led in again after a lapse of five minutes with white pocket-handkerchiefs to their eyes, as if they had been attending a funeral in the churchyard adjoining. If any doubt had for a moment existed, as to whom the allusion was intended to apply, it was at once removed. The wish to enlighten the charity children became universal, and the three Miss Browns were unanimously besought to divide the school into classes, and to assign each class to the superintendence of two young ladies. A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a little patronage is more so: the three Miss Browns appointed all the old maids, and carefully excluded the young ones. Maiden aunts triumphed: mammas were reduced to the lowest depths of despair; and there is no telling in what act of violence the general indignation against the three Miss Browns might have vented itself, had not a perfectly providential occurrence changed the tide of public feeling. Mrs. Johnson Parker, the mother of seven extremely fine girls—all unmarried—hastily reported to several other mammas of several other unmarried families, that five old men, six old women, and children innumerable, in the free seats near her pew, were in the habit of coming to church every Sunday without either bible or prayer-book. Was this to be borne in a civilized country? Could such things be tolerated in a Christian land? Never! A ladies’ bible and prayer-book distribution society was instantly formed: president, Mrs. Johnson Parker; treasurers, auditors, and secretary, the Misses Johnson Parker: subscriptions were entered into; books were bought, all the free-seat people provided therewith; and when the first lesson was given out on the first Sunday succeeding these events, there was such a dropping of books, and rustling of leaves, that it was morally impossible to hear one word of the service for five minutes afterwards. The three Miss Browns and their party saw the approaching danger, and endeavoured to avert it by ridicule and sarcasm. Neither the old men nor the old women could read their books now they had got 'em, said the three Miss Browns. Never mind; they could learn, replied Mrs. Johnson Parker. The children couldn’t read either, suggested the three Miss Browns. No matter; they could be taught, retorted Mrs. Johnson Parker. A balance of parties took place. The Miss Browns publicly examined—popular feeling inclined to the child’s examination society. The Miss Johnson Parkers' publicly distributed—a reaction took place in favour of the prayer-book distribution. A feather would have turned the scale, and a feather did turn it. A missionary returned from the West Indies; he was to be presented to the Dissenters’ Missionary Society on his marriage with a wealthy widow. Overtures were made to the Dissenters by the Johnson Parkers. Their object was the same, and why not have a joint meeting of the two societies? The proposition was accepted. The meeting was duly heralded by public announcement, and the room was crowded to suffocation. The missionary appeared on the platform; he was hailed with enthusiasm. He repeated a dialogue he had heard between two negroes behind a hedge on the subject of distribution societies; the approbation was tumultuous. He gave an imitation of the two negroes in broken English; the roof was rent with applause. From that period we date (with one trifling exception) a daily increase in the popularity of the distribution society—an increase of popularity which the feeble and impotent opposition of the examination party has only tended to augment. Now, the great points about the childbed linen monthly loan society are, that it is less dependent on the fluctuations of public opinion than either the distribution or the child’s examination; and that come what may, there is never any lack of objects on which to exercise its benevolence. Our parish is a very populous one, and, if any thing, contributes, we should be disposed to say, rather more than its due share to the aggregate amount of births in the metropolis and its environs. The consequence is, that the monthly loan society flourishes, and invests its members with a most enviable amount of bustling patronage. The society (whose only notion of dividing time, would appear to be its allotment into months) holds monthly tea-drinkings, at which the monthly report is received, a secretary elected for the month ensuing, and such of the monthly boxes as may not happen to be out on loan for the month, carefully examined. We were never present at one of these meetings, from all of which it is scarcely necessary to say gentlemen are carefully excluded; but Mr. Bung has been called before the board once or twice; and we have his authority for stating that its proceedings are conducted with great order and regularity, not more than four members being allowed to speak at one time on any pretence whatever. The regular committee is composed exclusively of married ladies, but a vast number of young unmarried ladies of from eighteen to twenty-five years of age, respectively, are admitted as honorary members; partly because they are very useful in replenishing the boxes, and visiting the confined; partly because it is highly desirable that they should be initiated, at an early period, into the more serious and matronly duties of after life; and partly because prudent mammas have not unfrequently been known to turn this circumstance to wonderfully good account in matrimonial speculations. In addition to the loan of the monthly boxes (which are always painted blue, with the name of the society in large white letters on the lid), the society dispense occasional grants of beef tea, and a composition of warm beer, spice, eggs, and sugar, commonly known by the name of "caudle," to its patients. And here again the services of the honorary members are called into requisition, and most cheerfully conceded. Deputations of twos or threes are sent out to visit the patients, and on these occasions there is such a tasting of caudle and beef-tea, such a stirring about of little messes in tiny saucepans on the hob, such a dressing and undressing of infants, such a tying and folding, and pinning, such a nursing and warming of little legs and feet before the fire, such a delightful confusion of talking and cooking, bustle, importance, and officiousness, as never can be enjoyed in its full extent but on similar occasions. In rivalry of these two institutions, and as a last expiring effort to acquire parochial popularity, the child’s examination people determined the other day on having a grand public examination of the pupils; and the large school-room of the national seminary was, by and with the consent of the parish authorities, devoted to the purpose. Invitation circulars were forwarded to all the principal parishioners, including of course the heads of the other two societies, for whose especial behoof and edification the display was intended; and a large audience was confidently anticipated on the occasion. The floor was carefully scrubbed the day before, under the immediate superintendence of the three Miss Browns; forms were placed across the room for the accommodation of the visiters; specimens in writing were carefully selected, and as carefully patched and touched up, until they astonished the children who had written them, rather more than the company who read them; sums in compound addition were re-hearsed and re-rehearsed until all the children had the totals by heart; and the preparations altogether were on the most laborious and most comprehensive scale. The morning arrived, the children were yellow-soaped, and flannelled, and towelled, 'til their faces shone again; every pupil’s hair was carefully combed into his or her eyes, as the case might be; the girls were adorned with snow-white tippets, and caps bound round the head by a single purple ribbon: the necks of the elder boys were fixed into collars of startling dimensions. The doors were thrown open and the Miss Browns and Co. were discovered in plain white muslin dresses, and caps of the same —the child’s examination uniform. The room filled; the greetings of the company were loud and cordial; the distributionists trembled, for their popularity was at stake. The eldest boy fell forward, and delivered a propitiatory address from behind his collar. It was from the pen of Mr. Henry Brown; the applause was universal, and the Johnson Parkers were aghast. The examination proceeded with success, and terminated in triumph. The child’s examination society gained a momentary victory, and the Johnson Parkers retreated in despair. A secret council of the distributionists was held that night—Mrs. Johnson Parker in the chair—to consider of the best means of recovering the ground they had lost in the favour of the parish. What could be done? Another meeting! Alas! who was to attend it? The Missionary would not do twice; and the slaves were emancipated. A bold step must be taken; the parish must be astonished in some way or other; but no one was able to suggest what the step should be. At length a very old lady was heard to mumble in indistinct tones, "Exeter Hall." A sudden light broke in upon the meeting. It was unanimously resolved that a deputation of old ladies should wait upon Mr. Mortimer O'Silly-one, a celebrated Catholic renegade and Protestant bigot, imploring his assistance, and the favour of a speech; and that the deputation should also wait on two or three other imbecile old women, not resident in the parish, and entreat their attendance. The application was successful; the meeting was held; the Irishman came: he talked of green isles—other shores—vast Atlantic—bosom of the deep—Christian charity—blood and extermination—mercy in hearts—arms in hands—altars and homes—household gods—wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and quoted Latin. The effect was tremendous—the Latin was a decided hit. Nobody knew exactly what it was about, but every body knew it must be affecting, because even the orator was overcome. The popularity of the distribution society among the ladies of our parish is unprecedented; and the child’s examination is going fast to decay. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/7/The_Cricket_on_the_Hearth._A_Fairy_Tale_of_Home/1845-12-The_Cricket_on_the_Hearth.pdf 6eadf210c7cdea624578aee03f169ba0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christmas Books Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context christmas-books Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites the five Christmas books that Dickens wrote between 1843 and 1848 and published firstly with Chapman and Hall and secondly with Bradbury and Evans. Charles Dickens wrote the first of five Christmas books in 1843. A Christmas Carol, the story of a miser's slow repentance and decision to make amends, under the influence of the Ghosts of his old law partner Jacob Marley, Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future, would prove to be a timeless classic. In Scrooge's realization of his own selfishness, mortality, and responsibility towards both his impoverished employee and the faceless London poor, readers are compelled to reassess their own social actions evidenced over the course of a lifetime. Consequently, this Christmas book's cultural and academic legacy has overshadowed the other four subsequently penned by Dickens in response to public interest. Due to Dickens's use of various passages for public readings, it instantly commenced a theatrical life as well, and continues to be the most adapted of his works for film and stage. Though the financial success of A Christmas Carol did not benefit Dickens to the degree he had hoped, its immediate attraction to Victorians and enduring legacy opened up a seasonal niche that author and publishers were eager to exploit annually, for multiple reasons. The Christmas books provided Dickens with a way to morally encourage and exhort his readers to better themselves and society under the influence of holiday sentiment. They also offered the chance to acquire some much-needed revenue.  Next, he wrote The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (Chapman and Hall, 1844). Continuing to point out socioeconomic discrepancies between Victorian strata, Dickens induces sympathy for the straitened porter Toby Veck, and the endangered future life of his beloved daughter, Meg, who is headed for catastrophe unless she can marry her sweetheart despite the ill-intentioned advice of politicians and the barrier of her own poverty.  The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home (Bradbury and Evans, 1845) dealt with the spectre of adultery in an age-gap marriage, later to be explored with a similar resolution in Dickens's novel David Copperfield (1850). Due to the evil Mr. Tackleton, a sinister toy-merchant, John Peerybingle comes to doubt the fidelity of his beloved young wife, Dot. The cricket, a chirping guardian spirit of the home, plays a significant part in the action that ensues. In this story, Dickens also features a blind girl, Bertha Plummer, one of his most extensive explorations of disability.  In 1846, The Battle of Life. A Love Story was published by Bradbury and Evans, a romantic tale set in the eighteenth century on the site of an ancient battle-field. Interestingly, it centres around the relationship between two sisters, Grace and Marion Jeddler, and the latter's engagement to a childhood friend, Alfred Heathfield. Several characters in this tale elicit interest, such as the intimate partners-in-law Mr. Snitchey and Mr. Craggs and the semi-literate maid Clemency. What might be the reader's philosophy of life is brought into question under the influence of the dramatic events that so greatly unsettle the rural village.  The last of these Christmas books, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (Bradbury and Evans, 1848) represents a more sinister view of Christmas, with the full powers of a menacing double of the brooding Chemist Mr. Redlaw spiritually contending with the cheerful good-will of Milly Swidger. Like another of Dickens's domestic paragons, Esther Summerson, Milly endeavours to brighten the lives of those around her while the double seeks to provoke their regrets.  Ultimately, Dickens would never pen another Christmas book, though he wrote the short reflective pieces "A Christmas Tree" (1850) and "What Christmas is, as we Grow Older" (1851) for Household Words. However, between 1852 and 1867, he annually orchestrated and significantly contributed to a Christmas number, either published in his periodicals Household Words or All the Year Round. In most cases, a scan of each full number - and Dickens's specific contributions, transcribed - can be accessed in the Dickens Search collection <a href="http://dickenssearch.com/admin/collections/show/8">Christmas Stories</a>. Before citing the five texts in this collection of the Christmas books, please consult the metadata and pdf scan. In most cases, the edition is not the first, but the earliest that can be found freely digitised on the internet. Eventually, these will hopefully be replaced by scans of first editions, with the transcriptions updated, when necessary. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans found on databases such as Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and Google Books; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions. 1. See Christine Schintgen. 'Dickens and the Specter of Materialism: The Spiritual Significance of Ghosts in the Christmas Books and Ghost Stories'. In The Theological Dickens. Routledge, 2021; Emily Moody. '"Implausible and inappropriate"?: A Defense of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Dickens Quarterly 37.4 (2020): pp. 393-408; Aubrey Plourde. '"Another Man from What I Was": Enchanted Reading and Ethical Selfhood in A Christmas Carol'. Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies 43.2 (Fall 2017): 271-286; Brandon Chitwood. 'Eternal Returns: A Christmas Carol's Ghosts of Repetition'. Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): pp. 675-687; Phillip V. Allingham. 'Charles "Carlo" Dickens In and Out of Italy in 1844: The Chimes'. Dickens Studies Annual 41 (2010): pp. 127-149; Michael Slater. 'Carlyle and Jerrold Into Dickens: A Study of The Chimes'. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24.4 (Mar 1970): pp. 506-52; David Raybin. 'Chaucer on the Hearth'. Dickens Studies Annual 49.1 (2018): pp. 1-25; Heather Anne Tilley. 'Sentiment and Vision in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth'. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 4 (2007): 1-22; Elisabeth G. Gitter. 'The Blind Daughter in Charles Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth'. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39.4 (Autumn 1999): pp. 675-689; Goldie Morgentaler. 'The Doppelganger Effect: Dickens, Heredity, and the Double in The Battle of Life'. Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 42 (2011): 159-175; Phillip V. Allingham. 'The Illustrations in Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain: Public and Private Spheres and Spaces'. Dickens Studies Annual 36 (2005): pp. 75-123. Short Story Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18451201 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Chirp the First The Kettle began it! Don’t tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that she couldn’t say which of them began it; but, I say the Kettle did. I ought to know, I hope? The Kettle began it, full five minutes by the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner before the Cricket uttered a chirp. As if the clock hadn’t finished striking, and the convulsive little Haymaker at the top of it, jerking away right and left with a scythe in front of a Moorish Palace, hadn’t mowed down half an acre of imaginary grass before the Cricket joined in at all! Why, I am not naturally positive. Every one knows that. I wouldn’t set my own opinion against the opinion of Mrs. Peerybingle, unless I were quite sure, on any account whatever. Nothing should induce me. But this is a question of fact. And the fact is, that the Kettle began it, at least five minutes before the Cricket gave any sign of being in existence. Contradict me: and I’ll say ten. Let me narrate exactly how it happened. I should have proceeded to do so in my very first word, but for this plain consideration—if I am to tell a story I must begin at the beginning; and how is it possible to begin at the beginning, without beginning at the Kettle? It appeared as if there were a sort of match, or trial of skill, you must understand, between the Kettle and the Cricket. And this is what led to it, and how it came about. Mrs. Peerybingle going out into the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard—Mrs. Peerybingle filled the Kettle at the water butt. Presently returning, less the pattens: and a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but short: she set the Kettle on the fire. In doing which she lost her temper, or mislaid it for an instant; for the water being uncomfortably cold, and in that slippy, slushy, sleety sort of state wherein it seems to penetrate through every kind of substance, patten rings included—had laid hold of Mrs. Peerybingle’s toes, and even splashed her legs. And when we rather plume ourselves (with reason too) upon our legs, and keep ourselves particularly neat in point of stockings, we find this, for the moment, hard to bear. Besides, the Kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It wouldn’t allow itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it wouldn’t hear of accommodating itself kindly to the knobs of coal; it would lean forward with a drunken air, and dribble, a very Idiot of a Kettle, on the hearth. It was quarrelsome; and hissed and spluttered morosely at the fire. To sum up all, the lid, resisting Mrs. Peerybingle’s fingers, first of all turned topsy-turvy, and then, with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a better cause, dived sideways in—down to the very bottom of the Kettle. And the hull of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous resistance to coming out of the water, which the lid of that Kettle employed against Mrs. Peerybingle, before she got it up again. It looked sullen and pig-headed enough, even then; carrying its handle with an air of defiance, and cocking its spout pertly and mockingly at Mrs. Peerybingle, as if it said, "I won’t boil. Nothing shall induce me!" But Mrs. Peerybingle, with restored good humour, dusted her chubby little hands against each other, and sat down before the Kettle: laughing. Meantime, the jolly blaze uprose and fell, flashing and gleaming on the little Haymaker at the top of the Dutch clock, until one might have thought he stood stock still before the Moorish Palace, and nothing was in motion but the flame. He was on the move, however; and had his spasms, two to the second, all right and regular. But, his sufferings when the clock was going to strike, were frightful to behold; and, when a Cuckoo looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six times, it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice—or like a something wiry, plucking at his legs. It was not until a violent commotion and a whirring noise among the weights and ropes below him had quite subsided, that this terrified Haymaker became himself again. Nor was he startled without reason; for these rattling, bony skeletons of clocks are very disconcerting in their operation, and I wonder very much how any set of men, but most of all how Dutchmen, can have had a liking to invent them. There is a popular belief that Dutchmen love broad cases and much clothing for their own lower selves; and they might know better than to leave their clocks so very lank and unprotected, surely. Now it was, you observe, that the Kettle began to spend the evening. Now it was, that the Kettle, growing mellow and musical, began to have irrepressible gurglings in its throat, and to indulge in short vocal snorts, which it checked in the bud, as if it hadn’t quite made up its mind yet, to be good company. Now it was, that after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst into a stream of song so cosy and hilarious, as never maudlin nightingale yet formed the least idea of. So plain too! Bless you, you might have understood it like a book—better than some books you and I could name, perhaps. With its warm breath gushing forth in a light cloud which merrily and gracefully ascended a few feet, then hung about the chimney-corner as its own domestic Heaven, it trolled its song with that strong energy of cheerfulness, that its iron body hummed and stirred upon the fire; and the lid itself, the recently rebellious lid—such is the influence of a bright example—performed a sort of jig, and clattered like a deaf and dumb young cymbal that had never known the use of its twin brother. That this song of the Kettle’s, was a song of invitation and welcome to somebody out of doors; to somebody at that moment coming on, towards the snug small home and the crisp fire; there is no doubt whatever. Mrs. Peerybingle knew it, perfectly, as she sat musing before the hearth. It’s a dark night, sang the Kettle, and the rotten leaves are lying by the way; and, above, all is mist and darkness, and below, all is mire and clay; and there’s only one relief in all the sad and murky air; and I don’t know that it is one, for it’s nothing but a glare, of deep and angry crimson, where the sun and wind together, set a brand upon the clouds for being guilty of such weather; and the widest open country is a long dull streak of black; and there’s hoar-frost on the finger-post, and thaw upon the track; and the ice it isn’t water, and the water isn’t free; and you couldn’t say that anything is what it ought to be; but he’s coming, coming, coming!— And here, if you like, the Cricket DID chime in! with a Chirrup, Chirrup, Chirrup of such magnitude, by way of chorus; with a voice so astoundingly disproportionate to its size, as compared with the Kettle; (size! you couldn’t See it!) that if it had then and there burst itself like an overcharged gun: if it had fallen a victim on the spot, and chirruped its little body into fifty pieces: it would have seemed a natural and inevitable consequence, for which it had expressly laboured. The Kettle had had the last of its solo performance. It persevered with undiminished ardour; but the Cricket took first fiddle and kept it. Good Heaven, how it chirped! Its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the outer darkness like a Star. There was an indescribable little trill and tremble in it, at its loudest, which suggested its being carried off its legs, and made to leap again, by its own intense enthusiasm. Yet they went very well together, the Cricket and the Kettle. The burden of the song was still the same; and louder, louder, louder still, they sang it in their emulation. The fair little listener; for fair she was, and young—though something of what is called the dumpling shape; but I don’t myself object to that—lighted a candle; glanced at the Haymaker on the top of the clock, who was getting in a pretty average crop of minutes; and looked out of the window, where she saw nothing, owing to the darkness, but her own face imaged in the glass. And my opinion is (and so would your's have been), that she might have looked a long way, and seen nothing half so agreeable. When she came back, and sat down in her former seat, the Cricket and the Kettle were still keeping it up, with a perfect fury of competition. The Kettle’s weak side clearly being that he didn’t know when he was beat. There was all the excitement of a race about it. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket a mile ahead. Hum, hum, hum—m—m! Kettle making play in the distance, like a great top. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket round the corner. Hum, hum, hum—m—m! Kettle sticking to him in his own way; no idea of giving in. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket fresher than ever. Hum, hum, hum—m—m! Kettle slow and steady. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket going in to finish him. Hum, hum, hum—m—m! Kettle not to be finished. Until at last, they got so jumbled together, in the hurry-skurry, helter-skelter, of the match, that whether the Kettle chirped and the Cricket hummed, or the Cricket chirped and the Kettle hummed, or they both chirped and both hummed, it would have taken a clearer head than your's or mine to have decided with anything like certainty. But of this, there is no doubt: that the Kettle and the Cricket, at one and the same moment, and by some power of amalgamation best known to themselves, sent, each, his fireside song of comfort streaming into a ray of the candle that shone out through the window; and a long way down the lane. And this light, bursting on a certain person who, on the instant, approached towards it through the gloom, expressed the whole thing to him, literally in a twinkling, and cried, "Welcome home, old fellow! Welcome home, my Boy!" This end attained, the Kettle, being dead beat, boiled over, and was taken off the fire. Mrs. Peerybingle then went running to the door, where, what with the wheels of a cart, the tramp of a horse, the voice of a man, the tearing in and out of an excited dog, and the surprising and mysterious appearance of a Baby, there was soon the very What’s-his-name to pay. Where the Baby came from, or how Mrs. Peerybingle got hold of it in that flash of time, I don’t know. But a live Baby there was, in Mrs. Peerybingle’s arms; and a pretty tolerable amount of pride she seemed to have in it, when she was drawn gently to the fire, by a sturdy figure of a man, much taller and much older than herself; who had to stoop a long way down, to kiss her. But she was worth the trouble. Six foot six, with the lumbago, might have done it. "Oh goodness, John!" said Mrs. P. "What a state you are in with the weather!" He was something the worse for it, undeniably. The thick mist hung in clots upon his eyelashes like candied thaw; and between the fog and fire together, there were rainbows in his very whiskers. "Why, you see, Dot," John made answer, slowly, as he unrolled a shawl from about his throat; and warmed his hands; "it—it an’t exactly summer weather. So, no wonder." "I wish you wouldn’t call me Dot, John. I don’t like it," said Mrs. Peerybingle: pouting in a way that clearly showed she did like it, very much. "Why what else are you?" returned John, looking down upon her with a smile, and giving her waist as light a squeeze as his huge hand and arm could give. "A dot and"—here he glanced at the Baby—"a dot and carry—I won’t say it, for fear I should spoil it; but I was very near a joke. I don’t know as ever I was nearer." He was often near to something or other very clever, by his own account: this lumbering, slow, honest John; this John so heavy but so light of spirit; so rough upon the surface, but so gentle at the core; so dull without, so quick within; so stolid, but so good! Oh Mother Nature, give thy children the true Poetry of Heart that hid itself in this poor Carrier’s breast—he was but a Carrier by the way—and we can bear to have them talking Prose, and leading lives of Prose; and bear to bless Thee for their company! It was pleasant to see Dot, with her little figure and her Baby in her arms: a very doll of a Baby: glancing with a coquettish thoughtfulness at the fire, and inclining her delicate little head just enough on one side to let it rest in an odd, half-natural, half-affected, wholly nestling and agreeable manner, on the great rugged figure of the Carrier. It was pleasant to see him, with his tender awkwardness, endeavouring to adapt his rude support to her slight need, and make his burly middle-age a leaning-staff not inappropriate to her blooming youth. It was pleasant to observe how Tilly Slowboy, waiting in the background for the Baby, took special cognizance (though in her earliest teens) of this grouping; and stood with her mouth and eyes wide open, and her head thrust forward, taking it in as if it were air. Nor was it less agreeable to observe how John the Carrier, reference being made by Dot to the aforesaid Baby, checked his hand when on the point of touching the infant, as if he thought he might crack it; and bending down, surveyed it from a safe distance, with a kind of puzzled pride: such as an amiable mastiff might be supposed to show, if he found himself, one day, the father of a young canary. "An’t he beautiful, John? Don’t he look precious in his sleep?" "Very precious," said John. "Very much so. He generally is asleep, an’t he?" "Lor, John! Good gracious no!" "Oh," said John, pondering. "I thought his eyes was generally shut. Halloa!" "Goodness, John, how you startle one!" "It an’t right for him to turn ’em up in that way!" said the astonished Carrier, "is it? See how he’s winking with both of ’em at once! and look at his mouth! why he’s gasping like a gold and silver fish!" "You don’t deserve to be a father, you don’t," said Dot, with all the dignity of an experienced matron. "But how should you know what little complaints children are troubled with, John! You wouldn’t so much as know their names, you stupid fellow." And when she had turned the Baby over on her left arm, and had slapped its back as a restorative, she pinched her husband’s ear, laughing. "No," said John, pulling off his outer coat. "It’s very true, Dot. I don’t know much about it. I only know that I’ve been fighting pretty stiffly with the Wind to-night. It’s been blowing north-east, straight into the cart, the whole way home." "Poor old man, so it has!" cried Mrs. Peerybingle, instantly becoming very active. "Here! Take the precious darling, Tilly, while I make myself of some use. Bless it, I could smother it with kissing it; I could! Hie then, good dog! Hie Boxer, boy! Only let me make the tea first, John; and then I’ll help you with the parcels, like a busy bee. 'How doth the little'—and all the rest of it, you know John. Did you ever learn 'how doth the little,' when you went to school, John?" "Not to quite know it," John returned. "I was very near it once. But I should only have spoilt it, I dare say." "Ha ha!" laughed Dot. She had the blithest little laugh you ever heard. "What a dear old darling of a dunce you are, John, to be sure!" Not at all disputing this position, John went out to see that the boy with the lantern, which had been dancing to and fro before the door and window, like a Will of the Wisp, took due care of the horse; who was fatter than you would quite believe, if I gave you his measure, and so old that his birthday was lost in the mists of antiquity. Boxer, feeling that his attentions were due to the family in general, and must be impartially distributed, dashed in and out with bewildering inconstancy: now, describing a circle of short barks round the horse, where he was being rubbed down at the stable-door; now feigning to make savage rushes at his mistress, and facetiously bringing himself to sudden stops; now eliciting a shriek from Tilly Slowboy, in the low nursing-chair near the fire, by the unexpected application of his moist nose to her countenance; now exhibiting an obtrusive interest in the Baby; now going round and round upon the hearth, and lying down as if he had established himself for the night; now getting up again, and taking that nothing of a fag-end of a tail of his, out into the weather, as if he had just remembered an appointment, and was off, at a round trot, to keep it. "There! There’s the teapot, ready on the hob!" said Dot; as briskly busy as a child at play at keeping house. "And there’s the old knuckle of ham; and there’s the butter; and there’s the crusty loaf, and all! Here’s the clothes-basket for the small parcels, John, if you’ve got any there—where are you, John? Don’t let the dear child fall under the grate, Tilly, whatever you do!" It may be noted of Miss Slowboy, in spite of her rejecting the caution with some vivacity, that she had a rare and surprising talent for getting this Baby into difficulties: and had several times imperilled its short life, in a quiet way peculiarly her own. She was of a spare and straight shape, this young lady, insomuch that her garments appeared to be in constant danger of sliding off those sharp pegs, her shoulders, on which they were loosely hung. Her costume was remarkable for the partial development, on all possible occasions, of some flannel vestment of a singular structure; also for affording glimpses, in the region of the back, of a corset, or pair of stays, in colour a dead-green. Being always in a state of gaping admiration at everything, and absorbed, besides, in the perpetual contemplation of her mistress’s perfections and the Baby’s, Miss Slowboy, in her little errors of judgment, may be said to have done equal honour to her head and to her heart; and though these did less honour to the Baby’s head, which they were the occasional means of bringing into contact with deal doors, dressers, stair-rails, bedposts, and other foreign substances, still they were the honest results of Tilly Slowboy’s constant astonishment at finding herself so kindly treated, and installed in such a comfortable home. For, the maternal and paternal Slowboy were alike unknown to Fame, and Tilly had been bred by public charity, a Foundling; which word, though only differing from Fondling by one vowel’s length, is very different in meaning, and expresses quite another thing. To have seen little Mrs. Peerybingle come back with her husband; tugging at the clothes-basket, and making the most strenuous exertions to do nothing at all (for he carried it); would have amused you almost as much as it amused him. It may have entertained the Cricket too, for anything I know; but, certainly, it now began to chirp again, vehemently. "Heyday!" said John, in his slow way. "It’s merrier than ever, to-night, I think." "And it’s sure to bring us good fortune, John! It always has done so. To have a Cricket on the Hearth, is the luckiest thing in all the world!" John looked at her as if he had very nearly got the thought into his head, that she was his Cricket in chief, and he quite agreed with her. But, it was probably one of his narrow escapes, for he said nothing. "The first time I heard its cheerful little note, John, was on that night when you brought me home—when you brought me to my new home here; its little mistress. Nearly a year ago. You recollect, John?" O yes. John remembered. I should think so! "Its chirp was such a welcome to me! It seemed so full of promise and encouragement. It seemed to say, you would be kind and gentle with me, and would not expect (I had a fear of that, John, then) to find an old head on the shoulders of your foolish little wife." John thoughtfully patted one of the shoulders, and then the head, as though he would have said No, No; he had had no such expectation; he had been quite content to take them as they were. And really he had reason. They were very comely. "It spoke the truth, John, when it seemed to say so: for you have ever been, I am sure, the best, the most considerate, the most affectionate of husbands to me. This has been a happy home, John; and I love the Cricket for its sake!" "Why so do I then," said the Carrier. "So do I, Dot." "I love it for the many times I have heard it, and the many thoughts its harmless music has given me. Sometimes, in the twilight, when I have felt a little solitary and down-hearted, John—before Baby was here to keep me company and make the house gay; when I have thought how lonely you would be if I should die; how lonely I should be if I could know that you had lost me, dear; its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp upon the hearth, has seemed to tell me of another little voice, so sweet, so very dear to me, before whose coming sound, my trouble vanished like a dream. And when I used to fear—I did fear once, John; I was very young you know—that ours might prove to be an ill-assorted marriage: I being such a child, and you more like my guardian than my husband: and that you might not, however hard you tried, be able to learn to love me, as you hoped and prayed you might; its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp, has cheered me up again, and filled me with new trust and confidence. I was thinking of these things to-night, dear, when I sat expecting you; and I love the Cricket for their sake!" "And so do I," repeated John. "But, Dot? I hope and pray that I might learn to love you? How you talk! I had learnt that, long before I brought you here, to be the Cricket’s little mistress, Dot!" She laid her hand, an instant, on his arm, and looked up at him with an agitated face, as if she would have told him something. Next moment, she was down upon her knees before the basket; speaking in a sprightly voice, and busy with the parcels. "There are not many of them to-night, John, but I saw some goods behind the cart, just now; and though they give more trouble, perhaps, still they pay as well; so we have no reason to grumble, have we? Besides, you have been delivering, I dare say, as you came along?" Oh yes, John said. A good many. "Why what’s this round box? Heart alive, John, it’s a wedding-cake!" "Leave a woman alone to find out that," said John, admiringly. "Now a man would never have thought of it! whereas, it’s my belief that if you was to pack a wedding-cake up in a tea-chest, or a turn-up bedstead, or a pickled salmon keg, or any unlikely thing, a woman would be sure to find it out directly. Yes; I called for it at the pastry-cook’s." "And it weighs I don’t know what—whole hundredweights!" cried Dot, making a great demonstration of trying to lift it. "Whose is it, John? Where is it going?" "Read the writing on the other side," said John. "Why, John! My Goodness, John!" "Ah! who’d have thought it!" John returned. "You never mean to say," pursued Dot, sitting on the floor and shaking her head at him, "that it’s Gruff and Tackleton the toymaker!" John nodded. Mrs. Peerybingle nodded also, fifty times at least. Not in assent: in dumb and pitying amazement; screwing up her lips, the while, with all their little force (they were never made for screwing up; I am clear of that), and looking the good Carrier through and through, in her abstraction. Miss Slowboy, in the mean time, who had a mechanical power of reproducing scraps of current conversation for the delectation of the Baby, with all the sense struck out of them, and all the Nouns changed into the Plural number, inquired aloud of that young creature, Was it Gruffs and Tackletons the toymakers then, and Would it call at Pastry-cooks for wedding-cakes, and Did its mothers know the boxes when its fathers brought them homes; and so on. "And that is really to come about!" said Dot. "Why, she and I were girls at school together, John." He might have been thinking of her: or nearly thinking of her, perhaps: as she was in that same school time. He looked upon her with a thoughtful pleasure, but he made no answer. "And he’s as old! As unlike her!—Why, how many years older than you, is Gruff and Tackleton, John?" "How many more cups of tea shall I drink to-night at one sitting, than Gruff and Tackleton ever took in four, I wonder!" replied John, good-humouredly, as he drew a chair to the round table, and began at the cold Ham. "As to eating, I eat but little; but that little I enjoy, Dot." Even this; his usual sentiment at meal times; one of his innocent delusions (for his appetite was always obstinate, and flatly contradicted him); awoke no smile in the face of his little wife, who stood among the parcels, pushing the cake-box slowly from her with her foot, and never once looked, though her eyes were cast down too, upon the dainty shoe she generally was so mindful of. Absorbed in thought, she stood there, heedless alike of the tea and John (although he called to her, and rapped the table with his knife to startle her), until he rose and touched her on the arm; when she looked at him for a moment, and hurried to her place behind the teaboard, laughing at her negligence. But not as she had laughed before. The manner, and the music, were quite changed. The Cricket, too, had stopped. Somehow the room was not so cheerful as it had been. Nothing like it. "So, these are all the parcels, are they, John?" she said: breaking a long silence, which the honest Carrier had devoted to the practical illustration of one part of his favourite sentiment—certainly enjoying what he ate, if it couldn’t be admitted that he ate but little. "So these are all the parcels; are they, John?" "That’s all," said John. "Why—no—I—" laying down his knife and fork, and taking a long breath. "I declare—I’ve clean forgotten the old gentleman!" "The old gentleman?" "In the cart," said John. "He was asleep, among the straw, the last time I saw him. I’ve very nearly remembered him, twice, since I came in; but he went out of my head again. Halloa! Yahip there! rouse up! That’s my hearty!" John said these latter words, outside the door, whither he had hurried with the candle in his hand. Miss Slowboy, conscious of some mysterious reference to The Old Gentleman, and connecting in her mystified imagination certain associations of a religious nature with the phrase, was so disturbed, that hastily rising from the low chair by the fire to seek protection near the skirts of her mistress, and coming into contact as she crossed the doorway with an ancient Stranger, she instinctively made a charge or butt at him with the only offensive instrument within her reach. This instrument happening to be the Baby, great commotion and alarm ensued, which the sagacity of Boxer rather tended to increase; for, that good dog, more thoughtful than its master, had, it seemed, been watching the old gentleman in his sleep lest he should walk off with a few young Poplar trees that were tied up behind the cart; and he still attended on him very closely; worrying his gaiters in fact, and making dead sets at the buttons. "You’re such an undeniable good sleeper, Sir," said John when tranquillity was restored; in the mean time the old gentleman had stood, bare-headed and motionless, in the centre of the room; "that I have half a mind to ask you where the other six are: only that would be a joke, and I know I should spoil it. Very near though," murmured the Carrier, with a chuckle; "very near!" The Stranger, who had long white hair; good features, singularly bold and well defined for an old man, and dark, bright, penetrating eyes, looked round with a smile, and saluted the Carrier’s wife by gravely inclining his head. His garb was very quaint and odd—a long, long way behind the time. Its hue was brown, all over. In his hand he held a great brown club or walking-stick; and striking this upon the floor, it fell asunder, and became a chair. On which he sat down, quite composedly. "There!" said the Carrier, turning to his wife. "That’s the way I found him, sitting by the roadside! upright as a milestone. And almost as deaf." "Sitting in the open air, John!" "In the open air," replied the Carrier, "just at dusk. 'Carriage Paid,' he said; and gave me eighteenpence. Then he got in. And there he is." "He’s going, John, I think!" Not at all. He was only going to speak. "If you please, I was to be left till called for," said the Stranger, mildly. "Don’t mind me." With that, he took a pair of spectacles from one of his large pockets, and a book from another; and leisurely began to read. Making no more of Boxer than if he had been a house lamb! The Carrier and his wife exchanged a look of perplexity. The Stranger raised his head; and glancing from the latter to the former, said: "Your daughter, my good friend?" "Wife," returned John. "Niece?" said the Stranger. "Wife," roared John. "Indeed?" observed the Stranger. "Surely? Very young!" He quietly turned over, and resumed his reading. But, before he could have read two lines, he again interrupted himself to say: "Baby, yours?" John gave him a gigantic nod; equivalent to an answer in the affirmative, delivered through a speaking trumpet. "Girl?" "Bo-o-oy!' roared John. "Also very young, eh?" Mrs. Peerybingle instantly struck in. "Two months and three da-ays! Vaccinated just six weeks ago-o! Took very fine-ly! Considered, by the doctor, a remarkably beautiful chi-ild! Equal to the general run of children at five months o-old! Takes notice, in a way quite won-der-ful! May seem impossible to you, but feels his legs al-ready!" Here the breathless little mother, who had been shrieking these short sentences into the old man’s ear, until her pretty face was crimsoned, held up the Baby before him as a stubborn and triumphant fact; while Tilly Slowboy, with a melodious cry of Ketcher, Ketcher—which sounded like some unknown words, adapted to a popular Sneeze—performed some cow-like gambols round that all unconscious Innocent. "Hark! He’s called for, sure enough," said John. "There’s somebody at the door. Open it, Tilly." Before she could reach it, however, it was opened from without; being a primitive sort of door, with a latch, that any one could lift if he chose—and a good many people did choose, I can tell you; for all kinds of neighbours liked to have a cheerful word or two with the Carrier, though he was no great talker for the matter of that. Being opened, it gave admission to a little, meagre, thoughtful, dingy-faced man, who seemed to have made himself a great-coat from the sack-cloth covering of some old box; for when he turned to shut the door, and keep the weather out, he disclosed upon the back of that garment, the inscription G & T in large black capitals. Also the word GLASS in bold characters. "Good evening John!" said the little man. "Good evening Mum. Good evening Tilly. Good evening Unbeknown! How’s Baby Mum? Boxer’s pretty well I hope?" "All thriving, Caleb," replied Dot. "I am sure you need only look at the dear child, for one, to know that." "And I’m sure I need only look at you for another," said Caleb. He didn’t look at her though; he had a wandering and thoughtful eye which seemed to be always projecting itself into some other time and place, no matter what he said; a description which will equally apply to his voice. "Or at John for another," said Caleb. "Or at Tilly, as far as that goes. Or certainly at Boxer." "Busy just now, Caleb?" asked the Carrier. "Why, pretty well, John," he returned, with the distraught air of a man who was casting about for the Philosopher’s stone, at least. "Pretty much so. There’s rather a run on Noah’s Arks at present. I could have wished to improve upon the Family, but I don’t see how it’s to be done at the price. It would be a satisfaction to one’s mind, to make it clearer which was Shems and Hams, and which was Wives. Flies an’t on that scale neither, as compared with elephants you know! Ah! well! Have you got anything in the parcel line for me, John?" The Carrier put his hand into a pocket of the coat he had taken off; and brought out, carefully preserved in moss and paper, a tiny flower-pot. "There it is!" he said, adjusting it with great care. "Not so much as a leaf damaged. Full of buds!" Caleb’s dull eye brightened, as he took it, and thanked him. "Dear, Caleb," said the Carrier. "Very dear at this season." "Never mind that. It would be cheap to me, whatever it cost," returned the little man. "Anything else, John?" "A small box," replied the Carrier. "Here you are!" "'For Caleb Plummer,'" said the little man, spelling out the direction. "'With Cash.' With Cash, John? I don’t think it’s for me." "With Care," returned the Carrier, looking over his shoulder. "Where do you make out cash?" "Oh! To be sure!" said Caleb. "It’s all right. With care! Yes, yes; that’s mine. It might have been with cash, indeed, if my dear Boy in the Golden South Americas had lived, John. You loved him like a son; didn’t you? You needn’t say you did. I know, of course. 'Caleb Plummer. With care.' Yes, yes, it’s all right. It’s a box of dolls’ eyes for my daughter’s work. I wish it was her own sight in a box, John." "I wish it was, or could be!" cried the Carrier. "Thank’ee," said the little man. "You speak very hearty. To think that she should never see the Dolls; and them a-staring at her, so bold, all day long! That’s where it cuts. What’s the damage, John?" "I’ll damage you," said John, "if you inquire. Dot! Very near?" "Well! it’s like you to say so," observed the little man. "It’s your kind way. Let me see. I think that’s all." "I think not," said the Carrier. "Try again." "Something for our Governor, eh?" said Caleb, after pondering a little while. "To be sure. That’s what I came for; but my head’s so running on them Arks and things! He hasn’t been here, has he?" "Not he," returned the Carrier. "He’s too busy, courting." "He’s coming round though," said Caleb; "for he told me to keep on the near side of the road going home, and it was ten to one he’d take me up. I had better go, by the bye.—You couldn’t have the goodness to let me pinch Boxer’s tail, Mum, for half a moment, could you?" "Why, Caleb! what a question!" "Oh never mind, Mum," said the little man. "He mightn’t like it perhaps. There’s a small order just come in, for barking dogs; and I should wish to go as close to Natur’ as I could, for sixpence. That’s all. Never mind, Mum." It happened opportunely, that Boxer, without receiving the proposed stimulus, began to bark with great zeal. But, as this implied the approach of some new visitor, Caleb, postponing his study from the life to a more convenient season, shouldered the round box, and took a hurried leave. He might have spared himself the trouble, for he met the visitor upon the threshold. "Oh! You are here, are you? Wait a bit. I’ll take you home. John Peerybingle, my service to you. More of my service to your pretty wife. Handsomer every day! Better too, if possible! And younger," mused the speaker, in a low voice; "that’s the Devil of it!" "I should be astonished at your paying compliments, Mr. Tackleton," said Dot, not with the best grace in the world; "but for your condition." "You know all about it then?" "I have got myself to believe it, somehow," said Dot. "After a hard struggle, I suppose?" "Very." Tackleton the Toy-merchant, pretty generally known as Gruff and Tackleton—for that was the firm, though Gruff had been bought out long ago; only leaving his name, and as some said his nature, according to its Dictionary meaning, in the business—Tackleton the Toy merchant, was a man whose vocation had been quite misunderstood by his Parents and Guardians. If they had made him a Money Lender, or a sharp Attorney, or a Sheriff’s Officer, or a Broker, he might have sown his discontented oats in his youth, and, after having had the full-run of himself in ill-natured transactions, might have turned out amiable, at last, for the sake of a little freshness and novelty. But, cramped and chafing in the peaceable pursuit of toy-making, he was a domestic Ogre, who had been living on chiidren all his life, and was their implacable enemy. He despised all toys; wouldn’t have bought one for the world; delighted, in his malice, to insinuate grim expressions into the faces of brown-paper farmers who drove pigs to market, bellmen who advertised lost lawyers’ consciences, movable old ladies who darned stockings or carved pies; and other like samples of his stock in trade. In appalling masks; hideous, hairy, red-eyed Jacks in Boxes; Vampire Kites; demoniacal Tumblers who wouldn’t lie down, and were perpetually flying forward, to stare infants out of countenance; his soul perfectly revelled. They were his only relief, and safety-valve. He was great in such inventions. Anything suggestive of a Pony-nightmare, was delicious to him. He had even lost money (and he took to that toy very kindly) by getting up Goblin slides for magic lanterns, whereon the Powers of Darkness were depicted as a sort of supernatural shell-fish, with human faces. In intensifying the portraiture of Giants, he had sunk quite a little capital; and, though no painter himself, he could indicate, for the instruction of his artists, with a piece of chalk, a certain furtive leer for the countenances of those monsters, which was safe to destroy the peace of mind of any young gentleman between the ages of six and eleven, for the whole Christmas or Midsummer Vacation. What he was in toys, he was (as most men are) in all other things. You may easily suppose, therefore, that within the great green cape, which reached down to the calves of his legs, there was buttoned up to the chin an uncommonly pleasant fellow; and that he was about as choice a spirit and as agreeable a companion, as ever stood in a pair of bull-headed-looking boots with mahogany-colored tops. Still, Tackleton, the Toy-merchant, was going to be married. In spite of all this, he was going to be married. And to a young wife too; a beautiful young wife. He didn’t look much like a Bridegroom, as he stood in the Carrier’s kitchen, with a twist in his dry face, and a screw in his body, and his hat jerked over the bridge of his nose, and his hands tucked down into the bottoms of his pockets, and his whole sarcastic ill-conditioned self peering out of one little corner of one little eye, like the concentrated essence of any number of ravens. But, a Bridegroom he designed to be. "In three days’ time. Next Thursday. The last day of the first month in the year. That’s my wedding-day," said Tackleton. Did I mention that he had always one eye wide open, and one eye nearly shut; and that the one eye nearly shut, was always the expressive eye? I don’t think I did. "That’s my wedding-day!" said Tackleton, rattling his money. "Why, it’s our wedding-day too," exclaimed the Carrier. "Ha ha!" laughed Tackleton. "Odd! You’re just such another couple. Just!" The indignation of Dot at this presumptuous assertion is not to be described. What next? His imagination would compass the possibility of just such another Baby, perhaps. The man was mad. "I say! A word with you," murmured Tackleton, nudging the Carrier with his elbow, and taking him a little apart. "You’ll come to the wedding? We’re in the same boat, you know." "How in the same boat?" inquired the Carrier. "A little disparity, you know;" said Tackleton, with another nudge. "Come and spend an evening with us, beforehand." "Why?" demanded John, astonished at this pressing hospitality. "Why?" returned the other. "That’s a new way of receiving an invitation. Why, for pleasure—sociability, you know, and all that!" "I thought you were never sociable," said John, in his plain way. "Tchah! It’s of no use to be anything but free with you I see," said Tackleton. "Why, then, the truth is you have a—what tea-drinking people call a sort of a comfortable appearance together, you and your wife. We know better, you know, but—" "No, we don’t know better," interposed John. "What are you talking about?" "Well! We don’t know better, then," said Tackleton. "We’ll agree that we don’t. As you like; what does it matter? I was going to say, as you have that sort of appearance, your company will produce a favourable effect on Mrs. Tackleton that will be. And, though I don’t think your good lady’s very friendly to me, in this matter, still she can’t help herself from falling into my views, for there’s a compactness and cosiness of appearance about her that always tells, even in an indifferent case. You’ll say you’ll come?" "We have arranged to keep our Wedding-Day (as far as that goes) at home," said John. "We have made the promise to ourselves these six months. We think, you see, that home—" "Bah! what’s home?" cried Tackleton. "Four walls and a ceiling! (why don’t you kill that Cricket? I would! I always do. I hate their noise.) There are four walls and a ceiling at my house. Come to me!" "You kill your Crickets, eh?" said John. "Scrunch ’em, sir," returned the other, setting his heel heavily on the floor. "You’ll say you’ll come? It’s as much your interest as mine, you know, that the women should persuade each other that they’re quiet and contented, and couldn’t be better off. I know their way. Whatever one woman says, another woman is determined to clinch, always. There’s that spirit of emulation among ’em, Sir, that if your wife says to my wife, 'I’m the happiest woman in the world, and mine’s the best husband in the world, and I dote on him,' my wife will say the same to yours, or more, and half believe it." "Do you mean to say she don’t, then?" asked the Carrier. "Don’t!" cried Tackleton, with a short, sharp laugh. "Don’t what?" The Carrier had some faint idea of adding, "dote upon you." But, happening to meet the half-closed eye, as it twinkled upon him over the turned-up collar of the cape, which was within an ace of poking it out, he felt it such an unlikely part and parcel of anything to be doted on, that he substituted, "that she don’t believe it?" "Ah you dog! you’re joking," said Tackleton. But the Carrier, though slow to understand the full drift of his meaning, eyed him in such a serious manner, that he was obliged to be a little more explanatory. "I have the humour," said Tackleton: holding up the fingers of his left hand, and tapping the forefinger, to imply 'there I am, Tackleton to wit:’ ‘I have the humour, Sir, to marry a young wife, and a pretty wife:" here he rapped his little finger, to express the Bride; not sparingly, but sharply; with a sense of power. "I’m able to gratify that humour and I do. It’s my whim. But—now look there." He pointed to where Dot was sitting, thoughtfully, before the fire; leaning her dimpled chin upon her hand, and watching the bright blaze. The Carrier looked at her, and then at him, and then at her, and then at him again. "She honours and obeys, no doubt, you know," said Tackleton; "and that, as I am not a man of sentiment, is quite enough for me. But do you think there’s anything more in it?" "I think," observed the Carrier, "that I should chuck any man out of window, who said there wasn’t." "Exactly so," returned the other with an unusual alacrity of assent. "To be sure! Doubtless you would. Of course. I’m certain of it. Good night. Pleasant dreams!" The Carrier was puzzled, and made uncomfortable and uncertain, in spite of himself. He couldn’t help showing it, in his manner. "Good night, my dear friend!" said Tackleton, compassionately. "I’m off. We’re exactly alike, in reality, I see. You won’t give us to-morrow evening? Well! Next day you go out visiting, I know. I’ll meet you there, and bring my wife that is to be. It’ll do her good. You’re agreeable? Thankee. What’s that!" It was a loud cry from the Carrier’s wife; a loud, sharp, sudden cry, that made the room ring, like a glass vessel. She had risen from her seat, and stood like one transfixed by terror and surprise. The Stranger had advanced towards the fire, to warm himself, and stood within a short stride of her chair. But quite still. "Dot!" cried the Carrier. "Mary! Darling! What’s the matter?" They were all about her in a moment. Caleb, who had been dozing on the cake-box, in the first imperfect recovery of his suspended presence of mind seized Miss Slowboy by the hair of her head, but immediately apologised. "Mary!" exclaimed the Carrier, supporting her in his arms. "Are you ill! what is it? Tell me dear!" She only answered by beating her hands together, and falling into a wild fit of laughter. Then, sinking from his grasp upon the ground, she covered her face with her apron, and wept bitterly. And then she laughed again; and then she cried again; and then she said how cold it was, and suffered him to lead her to the fire, where she sat down as before. The old man standing, as before; quite still. "I’m better, John," she said. "I’m quite well now—I—" John! But John was on the other side of her. Why turn her face towards the strange old gentleman, as if addressing him! Was her brain wandering? "Only a fancy, John dear—a kind of shock—a something coming suddenly before my eyes—I don’t know what it was. It’s quite gone; quite gone." "I’m glad it’s gone," muttered Tackleton, turning the expressive eye all round the room. "I wonder where it’s gone, and what it was. Humph! Caleb, come here! Who’s that with the grey hair?" "I don’t know Sir," returned Caleb in a whisper. "Never see him before, in all my life. A beautiful figure for a nut-cracker; quite a new model. With a screw-jaw opening down into his waistcoat, he’d be lovely." "Not ugly enough," said Tackleton. "Or for a firebox, either," observed Caleb, in deep contemplation, "what a model! Unscrew his head to put the matches in; turn him heels up’ards for the light; and what a firebox for a gentleman’s mantel-shelf, just as he stands!" "Not half ugly enough," said Tackleton. "Nothing in him at all! Come! Bring that box! All right now, I hope?" "Oh quite gone! Quite gone!" said the little woman, waving him hurriedly away. "Good night!" "Good night," said Tackleton. "Good night, John Peerybingle! Take care how you carry that box, Caleb. Let it fall, and I’ll murder you! Dark as pitch, and weather worse than ever, eh? Good night!" So, with another sharp look round the room, he went out at the door; followed by Caleb with the wedding-cake on his head. The Carrier had been so much astounded by his little wife, and so busily engaged in soothing and tending her, that he had scarcely been conscious of the Stranger’s presence, until now, when he again stood there, their only guest. "He don’t belong to them, you see," said John. "I must give him a hint to go." "I beg your pardon, friend," said the old gentleman, advancing to him; "the more so, as I fear your wife has not been well; but the Attendant whom my infirmity," he touched his ears and shook his head, "renders almost indispensable, not having arrived, I fear there must be some mistake. The bad night which made the shelter of your comfortable cart (may I never have a worse!) so acceptable, is still as bad as ever. Would you, in your kindness, suffer me to rent a bed here?" "Yes, yes," cried Dot. "Yes! Certainly!" "Oh!" said the Carrier, surprised by the rapidity of this consent. "Well! I don’t object; but, still I’m not quite sure that—" "Hush!" she interrupted. "Dear John!" "Why, he’s stone deaf," urged John. "I know he is, but—Yes, Sir, certainly. Yes! certainly! I’ll make him up a bed, directly, John." As she hurried off to do it, the flutter of her spirits, and the agitation of her manner, were so strange, that the Carrier stood looking after her, quite confounded. "Did its mothers make it up a Beds then!" cried Miss Slowboy to the Baby; "and did its hair grow brown and curly, when its caps was lifted off, and frighten it, a precious Pets, a sitting by the fires!" With that unaccountable attraction of the mind to trifles, which is often incidental to a state of doubt and confusion, the Carrier, as he walked slowly to and fro, found himself mentally repeating even these absurd words, many times. So many times that he got them by heart, and was still conning them over and over, like a lesson, when Tilly, after administering as much friction to the little bald head with her hand as she thought wholesome (according to the practice of nurses), had once more tied the Baby’s cap on. "And frighten it, a Precious Pets, a sitting by the fires. What frightened Dot, I wonder!" mused the Carrier, pacing to and fro. He scouted, from his heart, the insinuations of the Toy merchant, and yet they filled him with a vague, indefinite uneasiness; for Tackleton was quick and sly; and he had that painful sense, himself, of being a man of slow perception, that a broken hint was always worrying to him. He certainly had no intention in his mind of linking anything that Tackleton had said, with the unusual conduct of his wife; but the two subjects of reflection came into his mind together, and he could not keep them asunder. The bed was soon made ready; and the visitor, declining all refreshment but a cup of tea, retired. Then, Dot: quite well again, she said, quite well again: arranged the great chair in the chimney corner for her husband; filled his pipe and gave it him; and took her usual little stool beside him on the hearth. She always would sit on that little stool; I think she must have had a kind of notion that it was a coaxing, wheedling, little stool. She was, out and out, the very best filler of a pipe, I should say, in the four quarters of the globe. To see her put that chubby little finger in the bowl, and then blow down the pipe to clear the tube; and when she had done so, affect to think that there was really something in the tube, and blow a dozen times, and hold it to her eye like a telescope, with a most provoking twist in her capital little face, as she looked down it; was quite a brilliant thing. As to the tobacco, she was perfect mistress of the subject; and her lighting of the pipe, with a wisp of paper, when the Carrier had it in his mouth—going so very near his nose, and yet not scorching it—was Art: high Art, Sir. And the Cricket and the Kettle, turning up again, acknowledged it! The bright fire, blazing up again, acknowledged it! The little Mower on the clock, in his unheeded work, acknowledged it! The Carrier, in his smoothing forehead and expanding face, acknowledged it, the readiest of all. And as he soberly and thoughtfully puffed at his old pipe; and as the Dutch clock ticked; and as the red fire gleamed; and as the Cricket chirped; that Genius of his Hearth and Home (for such the Cricket was) came out, in fairy shape, into the room, and summoned many forms of Home about him. Dots of all ages, and all sizes, filled the chamber. Dots who were merry children, running on before him, gathering flowers, in the fields; coy Dots, half shrinking from, half yielding to, the pleading of his own rough image; newly-married Dots, alighting at the door, and taking wondering possession of the household keys; motherly little Dots, attended by fictitious Slowboys, bearing babies to be christened; matronly Dots, still young and blooming, watching Dots of daughters, as they danced at rustic balls; fat Dots, encircled and beset by troops of rosy grand-children; withered Dots, who leaned on sticks, and tottered as they crept along. Old Carriers too, appeared, with blind old Boxers lying at their feet; and newer carts with younger drivers ("Peerybingle Brothers" on the tilt); and sick old Carriers, tended by the gentlest hands; and graves of dead and gone old Carriers, green in the churchyard. And as the Cricket showed him all these things—he saw them plainly, though his eyes were fixed upon the fire—the Carrier’s heart grew light and happy, and he thanked his Household Gods with all his might, and cared no more for Gruff and Tackleton than you do. But, what was that young figure of a man, which the same Fairy Cricket set so near Her stool, and which remained there, singly and alone? Why did it linger still, so near her, with its arm upon the chimney-piece, ever repeating "Married! and not to me!" O Dot! O failing Dot! There is no place for it in all your husband’s visions; why has its shadow fallen on his hearth! Chirp the Second Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves, as the Story-books say—and my blessing, with yours to back it I hope, on the Story-books, for saying anything in this workaday world!—Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves, in a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house, which was, in truth, no better than a pimple on the prominent red-brick nose of Gruff and Tackleton. The premises of Gruff and Tackleton were the great feature of the street; but you might have knocked down Caleb Plummer’s dwelling with a hammer or two, and carried off the pieces in a cart. If any one had done the dwelling-house of Caleb Plummer the honour to miss it after such an inroad, it would have been, no doubt, to commend its demolition as a vast improvement. It stuck to the premises of Gruff and Tackleton, like a barnacle to a ship’s keel, or a snail to a door, or a little bunch of toadstools to the stem of a tree. But it was the germ from which the full-grown trunk of Gruff and Tackleton had sprung; and under its crazy roof, the Gruff before last, had, in a small way, made toys for a generation of old boys and girls, who had played with them, and found them out, and broken them, and gone to sleep. I have said that Caleb and his poor Blind Daughter lived here; but I should have said that Caleb lived here, and his poor Blind Daughter somewhere else; in an enchanted home of Caleb’s furnishing, where scarcity and shabbiness were not, and trouble never entered. Caleb was no Sorcerer, but in the only magic art that still remains to us: the magic of devoted, deathless love: Nature had been the mistress of his study; and from her teaching, all the wonder came. The Blind Girl never knew that ceilings were discoloured; walls blotched, and bare of plaster here and there; high crevices unstopped, and widening every day; beams mouldering and tending downward. The Blind Girl never knew that iron was rusting, wood rotting, paper peeling off; the very size, and shape, and true proportion of the dwelling, withering away. The Blind Girl never knew that ugly shapes of delf and earthenware were on the board; that sorrow and faint-heartedness were in the house; that Caleb’s scanty hairs were turning greyer and more grey before her sightless face. The Blind Girl never knew they had a master, cold, exacting, and uninterested: never knew that Tackleton was Tackleton in short; but lived in the belief of an eccentric humourist who loved to have his jest with them; and while he was the Guardian Angel of their lives, disdained to hear one word of thankfulness. And all was Caleb’s doing; all the doing of her simple father! But he too had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its music when the motherless Blind Child was very young, that Spirit had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation might be almost changed into a blessing, and the girl made happy by these little means. For all the Cricket Tribe are potent Spirits, even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it (which is frequently the case); and there are not in the Unseen World, Voices more gentle and more true; that may be so implicitly relied on, or that are so certain to give none but tenderest counsel; as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and the Hearth, address themselves to human kind. Caleb and his daughter were at work together in their usual working-room, which served them for their ordinary living-room as well; and a strange place it was. There were houses in it, finished and unfinished, for Dolls of all stations in life. Suburban tenements for Dolls of moderate means; kitchens and single apartments for Dolls of the lower classes; capital town residences for Dolls of high estate. Some of these establishments were already furnished according to estimate, with a view to the convenience of Dolls of limited income; others could be fitted on the most expensive scale, at a moment’s notice, from whole shelves of chairs and tables, sofas, bedsteads, and upholstery. The nobility and gentry and public in general, for whose accommodation these tenements were designed, lay, here and there, in baskets, staring straight up at the ceiling; but in denoting their degrees in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often froward and perverse; for, they, not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton-print, and bits of rag, had superadded striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus, the Doll-lady of distinction had wax limbs of perfect symmetry; but only she and her compeers; the next grade in the social scale being made of leather; and the next of coarse linen stuff. As to the common-people, they had just so many matches out of tinder-boxes for their arms and legs, and there they were—established in their sphere at once, beyond the possibility of getting out of it. There were various other samples of his handicraft, besides Dolls, in Caleb Plummer’s room. There were Noah’s Arks, in which the Birds and Beasts were an uncommonly tight fit, I assure you; though they could be crammed in, anyhow, at the roof, and rattled and shaken into the smallest compass. By a bold poetical licence, most of these Noah’s Arks had knockers on the doors; inconsistent appendages, perhaps, as suggestive of morning callers and a Postman, yet a pleasant finish to the outside of the building. There were scores of melancholy little carts which, when the wheels went round, performed most doleful music. Many small fiddles, drums, and other instruments of torture; no end of cannon, shields, swords, spears, and guns. There were little tumblers in red breeches, incessantly swarming up high obstacles of red-tape, and coming down, head first, upon the other side; and there were innumerable old gentlemen of respectable, not to say venerable appearance, insanely flying over horizontal pegs, inserted, for the purpose, in their own street doors. There were beasts of all sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed; from the spotted barrel on four pegs, with a small tippet for a mane, to the thoroughbred rocker on his highest mettle. As it would have been hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdities, on the turning of a handle; so it would have been no easy task to mention any human folly, vice, or weakness, that had not its type, immediate or remote, in Caleb Plummer’s room. And not in an exaggerated form; for very little handles will move men and women to as strange performances, as any Toy was ever made to undertake. In the midst of all these objects, Caleb and his daughter sat at work. The Blind Girl busy as a Doll’s dressmaker; and Caleb painting and glazing the four-pair front of a desirable family mansion. The care imprinted in the lines of Caleb’s face, and his absorbed and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his occupation, and the trivialities about him. But trivial things, invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of fact; and, apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared to say, myself, that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain, or a Member of Parliament, or a lawyer, or even a great speculator, he would have dealt in toys one whit less whimsical; while I have a very great doubt whether they would have been as harmless. "So you were out in the rain last night, father, in your beautiful, new, great-coat," said Caleb’s daughter. "In my beautiful new great-coat," answered Caleb, glancing towards a clothes-line in the room, on which the sack-cloth garment previously described, was carefully hung up to dry. "How glad I am you bought it, father!" "And of such a tailor, too," said Caleb. "Quite a fashionable tailor. It’s too good for me." The Blind Girl rested from her work, and laughed with delight. "Too good, father! What can be too good for you?" "I’m half-ashamed to wear it though," said Caleb, watching the effect of what he said, upon her brightening face; "upon my word! When I hear the boys and people say behind me, 'Hal-loa! Here’s a swell!' I don’t know which way to look. And when the beggar wouldn’t go away last night; and when I said I was a very common man, said 'No, your Honour! Bless your Honour don’t say that!' I was quite ashamed. I really felt as if I hadn’t a right to wear it." Happy Blind Girl! How merry she was, in her exultation! "I see you, father," she said, clasping her hands, "as plainly, as if I had the eyes I never want when you are with me. A blue coat—" "Bright blue," said Caleb. "Yes, yes! Bright blue!" exclaimed the girl, turning up her radiant face; "the colour I can just remember in the blessed sky! You told me it was blue before! A bright blue coat—" "Made loose to the figure," suggested Caleb. "Made loose to the figure!" cried the Blind Girl, laughing heartily; "and in it, you, dear father, with your merry eye, your smiling face, your free step, and your dark hair: looking so young and handsome!" "Halloa! Halloa!" said Caleb. "I shall be vain, presently!" "I think you are, already," cried the Blind Girl, pointing at him, in her glee. "I know you, father! Ha ha ha! I’ve found you out, you see!" How different the picture in her mind, from Caleb, as he sat observing her! She had spoken of his free step. She was right in that. For years and years, he had never once crossed that threshold at his own slow pace, but with a footfall counterfeited for her ear; and never had he, when his heart was heaviest, forgotten the light tread that was to render hers so cheerful and courageous! Heaven knows! But I think Caleb’s vague bewilderment of manner may have half originated in his having confused himself about himself and everything around him, for the love of his Blind Daughter. How could the little man be otherwise than bewildered, after labouring for so many years to destroy his own identity, and that of all the objects that had any bearing on it! "There we are," said Caleb, falling back a pace or two to form the better judgment of his work; "as near the real thing as sixpenn’orth of halfpence is to sixpence. What a pity that the whole front of the house opens at once! If there was only a staircase in it now, and regular doors to the rooms to go in at! But that’s the worst of my calling, I’m always deluding myself, and swindling myself." "You are speaking quite softly. You are not tired, father?" "Tired!" echoed Caleb, with a great burst of animation, "what should tire me, Bertha? I was never tired. What does it mean?" To give the greater force to his words, he checked himself in an involuntary imitation of two half-length stretching and yawning figures on the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling Bowl; and he sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice, that made his face a thousand times more meagre and more thoughtful than ever. "What! You’re singing, are you?" said Tackleton, putting his head in at the door. "Go it! I can’t sing." Nobody would have suspected him of it. He hadn’t what is generally termed a singing face, by any means. "I can’t afford to sing," said Tackleton. "I’m glad you can. I hope you can afford to work too. Hardly time for both, I should think?" "If you could only see him, Bertha, how he’s winking at me!" whispered Caleb. "Such a man to joke! you’d think, if you didn’t know him, he was in earnest—wouldn’t you now?" The Blind Girl smiled and nodded. "The bird that can sing and won’t sing, must be made to sing, they say," grumbled Tackleton. "What about the owl that can’t sing, and oughtn’t to sing, and will sing; is there anything that he should be made to do?" "The extent to which he’s winking at this moment!" whispered Caleb to his daughter. "Oh, my gracious!" "Always merry and light-hearted with us!" cried the smiling Bertha. "Oh, you’re there, are you?" answered Tackleton. "Poor Idiot!" He really did believe she was an Idiot; and he founded the belief, I can’t say whether consciously or not, upon her being fond of him. "Well! and being there,—how are you?" said Tackleton, in his grudging way. "Oh! well; quite well. And as happy as even you can wish me to be. As happy as you would make the whole world, if you could!" "Poor Idiot!" muttered Tackleton. "No gleam of reason. Not a gleam!" The Blind Girl took his hand and kissed it; held it for a moment in her own two hands; and laid her cheek against it tenderly, before releasing it. There was such unspeakable affection and such fervent gratitude in the act, that Tackleton himself was moved to say, in a milder growl than usual: "What’s the matter now?" "I stood it close beside my pillow when I went to sleep last night, and remembered it in my dreams. And when the day broke, and the glorious red sun—the red sun, father?" "Red in the mornings and the evenings, Bertha," said poor Caleb, with a woeful glance at his employer. "When it rose, and the bright light I almost fear to strike myself against in walking, came into the room, I turned the little tree towards it, and blessed Heaven for making things so precious, and blessed you for sending them to cheer me!" "Bedlam broke loose!" said Tackleton under his breath. "We shall arrive at the strait-waistcoat and mufflers soon. We’re getting on!" Caleb, with his hands hooked loosely in each other, stared vacantly before him while his daughter spoke, as if he really were uncertain (I believe he was) whether Tackleton had done anything to deserve her thanks, or not. If he could have been a perfectly free agent, at that moment, required, on pain of death, to kick the Toy-merchant, or fall at his feet, according to his merits, I believe it would have been an even chance which course he would have taken. Yet, Caleb knew that with his own hands he had brought the little rose tree home for her, so carefully; and that with his own lips he had forged the innocent deception which should help to keep her from suspecting how much, how very much, he every day denied himself, that she might be the happier. "Bertha!" said Tackleton, assuming, for the nonce, a little cordiality. "Come here." "Oh! I can come straight to you! You needn’t guide me!" she rejoined. "Shall I tell you a secret, Bertha?" "If you will!" she answered, eagerly. How bright the darkened face! How adorned with light, the listening head! "This is the day on which little what’s-her-name; the spoilt child; Peerybingle’s wife; pays her regular visit to you—makes her fantastic Pic-Nic here; an’t it?" said Tackleton, with a strong expression of distaste for the whole concern. "Yes," replied Bertha. "This is the day." "I thought so," said Tackleton. "I should like to join the party." "Do you hear that, father!" cried the Blind Girl in an ecstasy. "Yes, yes, I hear it," murmured Caleb, with the fixed look of a sleep-walker; "but I don’t believe it. It’s one of my lies, I’ve no doubt." "You see I—I want to bring the Peerybingles a little more into company with May Fielding," said Tackleton. "I am going to be married to May." "Married!" cried the Blind Girl, starting from him. "She’s such a con-founded Idiot," muttered Tackleton, "that I was afraid she’d never comprehend me. Ah, Bertha! Married! Church, parson, clerk, beadle, glass-coach, bells, breakfast, bride-cake, favours, marrow-bones, cleavers, and all the rest of the tom-foolery. A wedding, you know; a wedding. Don’t you know what a wedding is?" "I know," replied the Blind Girl, in a gentle tone. "I understand!" "Do you?" muttered Tackleton. "It’s more than I expected. Well! on that account I want to join the party, and to bring May and her mother. I’ll send in a little something or other, before the afternoon. A cold leg of mutton, or some comfortable trifle of that sort. You’ll expect me?" "Yes," she answered. She had drooped her head, and turned away; and so stood, with her hands crossed, musing. "I don’t think you will," muttered Tackleton, looking at her; "for you seem to have forgotten all about it, already. Caleb!" "I may venture to say I’m here, I suppose," thought Caleb. "Sir!" "Take care she don’t forget what I’ve been saying to her." "She never forgets," returned Caleb. "It’s one of the few things she an’t clever in." "Every man thinks his own geese swans," observed the Toy merchant, with a shrug. "Poor devil!" Having delivered himself of which remark, with infinite contempt, old Gruff and Tackleton withdrew. Bertha remained where he had left her, lost in meditation. The gaiety had vanished from her downcast face, and it was very sad. Three or four times, she shook her head, as if bewailing some remembrance or some loss; but her sorrowful reflections found no vent in words. It was not until Caleb had been occupied, some time, in yoking a team of horses to a waggon by the summary process of nailing the harness to the vital parts of their bodies, that she drew near to his working-stool, and sitting down beside him, said: "Father, I am lonely in the dark. I want my eyes: my patient, willing eyes." "Here they are," said Caleb. "Always ready. They are more your's than mine, Bertha, any hour in the four and twenty. What shall your eyes do for you, dear?" "Look round the room, father." "All right," said Caleb. "No sooner said than done, Bertha." "Tell me about it." "It’s much the same as usual," said Caleb. "Homely, but very snug. The gay colors on the walls; the bright flowers on the plates and dishes; the shining wood, where there are beams or panels; the general cheerfulness and neatness of the building; make it very pretty." Cheerful and neat it was wherever Bertha’s hands could busy themselves. But nowhere else, were cheerfulness and neatness possible, in the old crazy shed which Caleb’s fancy so transformed. "You have your working dress on, and are not so gallant as when you wear the handsome coat?" said Bertha, touching him. "Not quite so gallant," answered Caleb. "Pretty brisk though." "Father," said the Blind Girl, drawing close to his side, and stealing one arm round his neck "Tell me something about May. She is very fair?" "She is indeed," said Caleb. And she was indeed. It was quite a rare thing to Caleb, not to have to draw on his invention. "Her hair is dark," said Bertha, pensively, "darker than mine. Her voice is sweet and musical, I know. I have often loved to hear it. Her shape—" "There’s not a Doll’s in all the room to equal it," said Caleb. "And her eyes!—" He stopped; for Bertha had drawn closer round his neck; and, from the arm that clung about him, came a warning pressure which he understood too well. He coughed a moment, hammered for a moment, and then fell back upon the song about the Sparkling Bowl; his infallible resource in all such difficulties. "Our friend, father; our benefactor. I am never tired you know of hearing about him.—Now was I, ever?" she said, hastily. "Of course not," answered Caleb. "And with reason." "Ah! With how much reason!" cried the Blind Girl. With such fervency, that Caleb, though his motives were so pure, could not endure to meet her face; but dropped his eyes, as if she could have read in them his innocent deceit. "Then, tell me again about him, dear father," said Bertha. "Many times again! His face is benevolent, kind, and tender. Honest and true, I am sure it is. The manly heart that tries to cloak all favours with a show of roughness and unwillingness, beats in its every look and glance." "And makes it noble!" added Caleb, in his quiet desperation. "And makes it noble!" cried the Blind Girl. "He is older than May, father." "Ye-es," said Caleb, reluctantly. "He’s a little older than May. But that don’t signify." "Oh father, yes! To be his patient companion in infirmity and age; to be his gentle nurse in sickness, and his constant friend in suffering and sorrow; to know no weariness in working for his sake; to watch him, tend him, sit beside his bed and talk to him awake; and pray for him asleep; what privileges these would be! What opportunities for proving all her truth and devotion to him! Would she do all this, dear father?" "No doubt of it," said Caleb. "I love her, father; I can love her from my soul!" exclaimed the Blind Girl. And saying so, she laid her poor blind face on Caleb’s shoulder, and so wept and wept, that he was almost sorry to have brought that tearful happiness upon her. In the mean time, there had been a pretty sharp commotion at John Peerybingle’s; for little Mrs. Peerybingle naturally couldn’t think of going anywhere without the Baby; and to get the Baby under weigh, took time. Not that there was much of the Baby: speaking of it as a thing of weight and measure: but there was a vast deal to do about and about it, and it all had to be done by easy stages. For instance, when the Baby was got, by hook and by crook, to a certain point of dressing, and you might have rationally supposed that another touch or two would finish him off, and turn him out a tip-top Baby, challenging the world, he was unexpectedly extinguished in a flannel cap, and hustled off to bed; where he simmered (so to speak) between two blankets for the best part of an hour. From this state of inaction he was then recalled, shining very much and roaring violently, to partake of—well! I would rather say, if you’ll permit me to speak generally—of a slight repast. After which, he went to sleep again. Mrs. Peerybingle took advantage of this interval, to make herself as smart in a small way as ever you saw anybody in all your life; and, during the same short truce, Miss Slowboy insinuated herself into a spencer of a fashion so surprising and ingenious, that it had no connection with herself or anything else in the universe, but was a shrunken, dog’s-eared, independent fact, pursuing its lonely course without the least regard to anybody. By this time, the Baby, being all alive again, was invested, by the united efforts of Mrs. Peerybingle and Miss Slowboy, with a cream-coloured mantle for its body, and a sort of nankeen raised-pie for its head; and so in course of time they all three got down to the door, where the old horse had already taken more than the full value of his day’s toll out of the Turnpike Trust, by tearing up the road with his impatient autographs—and whence Boxer might be dimly seen in the remote perspective, standing looking back, and tempting him to come on without orders. As to a chair, or anything of that kind for helping Mrs. Peerybingle into the cart, you know very little of John, I flatter myself, if you think that was necessary. Before you could have seen him lift her from the ground, there she was in her place, fresh and rosy, saying, "John! How can you! Think of Tilly!" If I might be allowed to mention a young lady’s legs, on any terms, I would observe of Miss Slowboy’s that there was a fatality about them which rendered them singularly liable to be grazed; and that she never effected the smallest ascent or descent, without recording the circumstance upon them with a notch, as Robinson Crusoe marked the days upon his wooden calendar. But as this might be considered ungenteel, I’ll think of it. "John? You’ve got the Basket with the Veal and Ham-Pie and things, and the bottles of Beer?’ said Dot. ‘If you haven’t, you must turn round again, this very minute." "You’re a nice little article," returned the Carrier, "to be talking about turning round, after keeping me a full quarter of an hour behind my time." "I am sorry for it, John," said Dot in a great bustle, "but I really could not think of going to Bertha’s—I would not do it, John, on any account—without the Veal and Ham-Pie and things, and the bottles of Beer. Way!" This monosyllable was addressed to the horse, who didn’t mind it at all. "Oh do way, John!" said Mrs. Peerybingle. "Please!" "It’ll be time enough to do that," returned John, "when I begin to leave things behind me. The basket’s here, safe enough." "What a hard-hearted monster you must be, John, not to have said so, at once, and saved me such a turn! I declare I wouldn’t go to Bertha’s without the Veal and Ham-Pie and things, and the bottles of Beer, for any money. Regularly once a fortnight ever since we have been married, John, have we made our little Pic-Nic there. If anything was to go wrong with it, I should almost think we were never to be lucky again." "It was a kind thought in the first instance," said the Carrier: "and I honour you for it, little woman." "My dear John," replied Dot, turning very red. "Don’t talk about honouring me. Good Gracious!’ "By the bye—" observed the Carrier. "That old gentleman,—" Again so visibly, and instantly embarrassed! "He’s an odd fish," said the Carrier, looking straight along the road before them. "I can’t make him out. I don’t believe there’s any harm in him." "None at all. I’m—I’m sure there’s none at all." "Yes," said the Carrier, with his eyes attracted to her face by the great earnestness of her manner. "I am glad you feel so certain of it, because it’s a confirmation to me. It’s curious that he should have taken it into his head to ask leave to go on lodging with us; an’t it? Things come about so strangely." "So very strangely," she rejoined in a low voice: scarcely audible. "However, he’s a good-natured old gentleman," said John, "and pays as a gentleman, and I think his word is to be relied upon, like a gentleman’s. I had quite a long talk with him this morning: he can hear me better already, he says, as he gets more used to my voice. He told me a great deal about himself, and I told him a great deal about myself, and a rare lot of questions he asked me. I gave him information about my having two beats, you know, in my business; one day to the right from our house and back again; another day to the left from our house and back again (for he’s a stranger and don’t know the names of places about here); and he seemed quite pleased. 'Why, then I shall be returning home to-night your way,' he says, 'when I thought you’d be coming in an exactly opposite direction. That’s capital! I may trouble you for another lift perhaps, but I’ll engage not to fall so sound asleep again.' He was sound asleep, sure-ly!—Dot! what are you thinking of?" "Thinking of, John? I—I was listening to you." "Oh! That’s all right!" said the honest Carrier. "I was afraid, from the look of your face, that I had gone rambling on so long, as to set you thinking about something else. I was very near it, I’ll be bound." Dot making no reply, they jogged on, for some little time, in silence. But, it was not easy to remain silent very long in John Peerybingle’s cart, for everybody on the road had something to say. Though it might only be "How are you!" and indeed it was very often nothing else, still, to give that back again in the right spirit of cordiality, required, not merely a nod and a smile, but as wholesome an action of the lungs withal, as a long-winded Parliamentary speech. Sometimes, passengers on foot, or horseback, plodded on a little way beside the cart, for the express purpose of having a chat; and then there was a great deal to be said, on both sides. Then, Boxer gave occasion to more good-natured recognitions of and by the Carrier, than half a dozen Christians could have done! Everybody knew him, all along the road, especially the fowls and pigs, who when they saw him approaching, with his body all on one side, and his ears pricked up inquisitively, and that knob of a tail making the most of itself in the air, immediately withdrew into remote back settlements, without waiting for the honour of a nearer acquaintance. He had business everywhere; going down all the turnings, looking into all the wells, bolting in and out of all the cottages, dashing into the midst of all the Dame-Schools, fluttering all the pigeons, magnifying the tails of all the cats, and trotting into the public-houses like a regular customer. Wherever he went, somebody or other might have been heard to cry, "Halloa! Here’s Boxer!" and out came that somebody forthwith, accompanied by at least two or three other somebodies, to give John Peerybingle and his pretty wife, Good Day. The packages and parcels for the errand cart, were numerous; and there were many stoppages to take them in and give them out; which were not by any means the worst parts of the journey. Some people were so full of expectation about their parcels, and other people were so full of wonder about their parcels, and other people were so full of inexhaustible directions about their parcels, and John had such a lively interest in all the parcels, that it was as good as a play. Likewise, there were articles to carry, which required to be considered and discussed, and in reference to the adjustment and disposition of which, councils had to be holden by the Carrier and the senders: at which Boxer usually assisted, in short fits of the closest attention, and long fits of tearing round and round the assembled sages and barking himself hoarse. Of all these little incidents, Dot was the amused and open-eyed spectatress from her chair in the cart; and as she sat there, looking on: a charming little portrait framed to admiration by the tilt: there was no lack of nudgings and glancings and whisperings and envyings among the younger men, I promise you. And this delighted John the Carrier, beyond measure; for he was proud to have his little wife admired, knowing that she didn’t mind it—that, if anything, she rather liked it perhaps. The trip was a little foggy, to be sure, in the January weather; and was raw and cold. But who cared for such trifles? Not Dot, decidedly. Not Tilly Slowboy, for she deemed sitting in a cart, on any terms, to be the highest point of human joys; the crowning circumstance of earthly hopes. Not the Baby, I’ll be sworn; for it’s not in Baby nature to be warmer or more sound asleep, though its capacity is great in both respects, than that blessed young Peerybingle was, all the way. You couldn’t see very far in the fog, of course; but you could see a great deal, oh a great deal! It’s astonishing how much you may see, in a thicker fog than that, if you will only take the trouble to look for it. Why, even to sit watching for the Fairy-rings in the fields, and for the patches of hoar-frost still lingering in the shade, near hedges and by trees, was a pleasant occupation: to make no mention of the unexpected shapes in which the trees themselves came starting out of the mist, and glided into it again. The hedges were tangled and bare, and waved a multitude of blighted garlands in the wind; but there was no discouragement in this. It was agreeable to contemplate; for it made the fireside warmer in possession, and the summer greener in expectancy. The river looked chilly; but it was in motion, and moving at a good pace; which was a great point. The canal was rather slow and torpid; that must be admitted. Never mind. It would freeze the sooner when the frost set fairly in, and then there would be skating, and sliding; and the heavy old barges, frozen up somewhere, near a wharf, would smoke their rusty iron chimney-pipes all day, and have a lazy time of it. In one place, there was a great mound of weeds or stubble burning; and they watched the fire, so white in the day time, flaring through the fog, with only here and there a dash of red in it, until, in consequence as she observed, of the smoke "getting up her nose," Miss Slowboy choked—she could do anything of that sort, on the smallest provocation—and woke the Baby, who wouldn’t go to sleep again. But Boxer, who was in advance some quarter of a mile or so, had already passed the outposts of the town, and gained the corner of the street where Caleb and his daughter lived; and long before they had reached the door, he and the Blind Girl were on the pavement waiting to receive them. Boxer, by the way, made certain delicate distinctions of his own, in his communication with Bertha, which persuade me fully that he knew her to be blind. He never sought to attract her attention by looking at her, as he often did with other people, but touched her, invariably. What experience he could ever have had of blind people or blind dogs, I don’t know. He had never lived with a blind master; nor had Mr. Boxer the elder, nor Mrs. Boxer, nor any of his respectable family on either side, ever been visited with blindness, that I am aware of. He may have found it out for himself, perhaps, but he had got hold of it somehow; and therefore he had hold of Bertha too, by the skirt, and kept hold, until Mrs. Peerybingle and the Baby, and Miss Slowboy, and the basket, were all got safely within doors. May Fielding was already come; and so was her mother—a little querulous chip of an old lady with a peevish face, who, in right of having preserved a waist like a bedpost, was supposed to be a most transcendent figure; and who, in consequence of having once been better off, or of labouring under an impression that she might have been, if something had happened which never did happen, and seemed to have never been particularly likely to come to pass—but it’s all the same—was very genteel and patronising indeed. Gruff and Tackleton was also there, doing the agreeable; with the evident sensation of being as perfectly at home, and as unquestionably in his own element, as a fresh young salmon on the top of the Great Pyramid. "May! My dear old friend!" cried Dot, running up to meet her. "What a happiness to see you." Her old friend was, to the full, as hearty and as glad as she; and it really was, if you’ll believe me, quite a pleasant sight to see them embrace. Tackleton was a man of taste, beyond all question. May was very pretty. You know sometimes, when you are used to a pretty face, how, when it comes into contact and comparison with another pretty face, it seems for the moment to be homely and faded, and hardly to deserve the high opinion you have had of it. Now, this was not at all the case, either with Dot or May; for May’s face set off Dot’s, and Dot’s face set off May’s, so naturally and agreeably, that, as John Peerybingle was very near saying when he came into the room, they ought to have been born sisters: which was the only improvement you could have suggested. Tackleton had brought his leg of mutton, and, wonderful to relate, a tart besides—but we don’t mind a little dissipation when our brides are in the case; we don’t get married every day—and in addition to these dainties, there were the Veal and Ham-Pie, and "things," as Mrs. Peerybingle called them; which were chiefly nuts and oranges, and cakes, and such small deer. When the repast was set forth on the board, flanked by Caleb’s contribution, which was a great wooden bowl of smoking potatoes (he was prohibited, by solemn compact, from producing any other viands), Tackleton led his intended mother-in-law to the post of honour. For the better gracing of this place at the high Festival, the majestic old Soul had adorned herself with a cap, calculated to inspire the thoughtless with sentiments of awe. She also wore her gloves. But let us be genteel, or die! Caleb sat next his daughter; Dot and her old schoolfellow were side by side; the good Carrier took care of the bottom of the table. Miss Slowboy was isolated, for the time being, from every article of furniture but the chair she sat on, that she might have nothing else to knock the Baby’s head against. As Tilly stared about her at the Dolls and Toys, they stared at her and at the company. The venerable old gentlemen at the street doors (who were all in full action) showed especial interest in the party: pausing occasionally before leaping, as if they were listening to the conversation: and then plunging wildly over and over, a great many times, without halting for breath—as in a frantic state of delight with the whole proceedings. Certainly, if these old gentlemen were inclined to have a fiendish joy in the contemplation of Tackleton’s discomfiture, they had good reason to be satisfied. Tackleton couldn’t get on at all; and the more cheerful his intended Bride became in Dot’s society, the less he liked it, though he had brought them together for that purpose. For he was a regular Dog in the Manger, was Tackleton; and when they laughed, and he couldn’t, he took it into his head, immediately, that they must be laughing at him. "Ah, May!" said Dot. "Dear dear, what changes! To talk of those merry school-days makes one young again." "Why, you an’t particularly old, at any time; are you?" said Tackleton. "Look at my sober plodding husband there," returned Dot. "He adds Twenty years to my age at least. Don’t you John?" "Forty," John replied. "How many you’ll add to May’s, I am sure I don’t know," said Dot, laughing. "But she can’t be much less than a hundred years of age on her next birthday." "Ha ha!" laughed Tackleton. Hollow as a drum, that laugh though. And he looked as if he could have twisted Dot’s neck: comfortably. "Dear dear!" said Dot. "Only to remember how we used to talk, at school, about the husbands we would choose. I don’t know how young, and how handsome, and how gay, and how lively, mine was not to be! and as to May’s!—Ah dear! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, when I think what silly girls we were." May seemed to know which to do; for the colour flushed into her face, and tears stood in her eyes. "Even the very persons themselves—real live young men—were fixed on sometimes," said Dot. "We little thought how things would come about. I never fixed on John I’m sure; I never so much as thought of him. And if I had told you, you were ever to be married to Mr. Tackleton, why you’d have slapped me. Wouldn’t you, May?" Though May didn’t say yes, she certainly didn’t say no, or express no, by any means. Tackleton laughed—quite shouted, he laughed so loud. John Peerybingle laughed too, in his ordinary good-natured and contented manner; but his was a mere whisper of a laugh, to Tackleton’s. "You couldn’t help yourselves, for all that. You couldn’t resist us, you see," said Tackleton. "Here we are! Here we are!" "Where are your gay young bridegrooms now!" "Some of them are dead," said Dot; "and some of them forgotten. Some of them, if they could stand among us at this moment, would not believe we were the same creatures; would not believe that what they saw and heard was real, and we could forget them so. No! they would not believe one word of it!" "Why, Dot!" exclaimed the Carrier. "Little woman!" She had spoken with such earnestness and fire, that she stood in need of some recalling to herself, without doubt. Her husband’s check was very gentle, for he merely interfered, as he supposed, to shield old Tackleton; but it proved effectual, for she stopped, and said no more. There was an uncommon agitation, even in her silence, which the wary Tackleton, who had brought his half-shut eye to bear upon her, noted closely; and remembered to some purpose too, as you will see. May uttered no word, good or bad, but sat quite still, with her eyes cast down; and made no sign of interest in what had passed. The good lady her mother now interposed: observing, in the first instance, that girls were girls, and byegones byegones, and that so long as young people were young and thoughtless, they would probably conduct themselves like young and thoughtless persons: with two or three other positions of a no less sound and incontrovertible character. She then remarked, in a devout spirit, that she thanked Heaven she had always found in her daughter May, a dutiful and obedient child; for which she took no credit to herself, though she had every reason to believe it was entirely owing to herself. With regard to Mr. Tackleton she said, That he was in a moral point of view an undeniable individual; and That he was in an eligible point of view a son-in-law to be desired, no one in their senses could doubt. (She was very emphatic here). With regard to the family into which he was so soon about, after some solicitation, to be admitted, she believed Mr. Tackleton knew that, although reduced in purse, it had some pretensions to gentility; and if certain circumstances, not wholly unconnected, she would go so far as to say, with the Indigo Trade, but to which she would not more particularly refer, had happened differently, it might perhaps have been in possession of Wealth. She then remarked that she would not allude to the past, and would not mention that her daughter had for some time rejected the suit of Mr. Tackleton; and that she would not say a great many other things which she did say, at great length. Finally, she delivered it as the general result of her observation and experience, that those marriages in which there was least of what was romantically and sillily called love, were always the happiest; and that she anticipated the greatest possible amount of bliss—not rapturous bliss; but the solid, steady-going article—from the approaching nuptials. She concluded by informing the company that to-morrow was the day she had lived for, expressly; and that when it was over, she would desire nothing better than to be packed up and disposed of, in any genteel place of burial. As these remarks were quite unanswerable: which is the happy property of all remarks that are sufficiently wide of the purpose: they changed the current of the conversation, and diverted the general attention to the Veal and Ham-Pie, the cold mutton, the potatoes, and the tart. In order that the bottled beer might not be slighted, John Peerybingle proposed To-morrow: the Wedding-Day: and called upon them to drink a bumper to it, before he proceeded on his journey. For you ought to know that he only rested there, and gave the old horse a bait. He had to go some four or five miles farther on; and when he returned in the evening, he called for Dot, and took another rest on his way home. This was the order of the day on all the Pic-Nic occasions, had been, ever since their institution. There were two persons present, besides the bride and bridegroom elect, who did but indifferent honour to the toast. One of these was Dot, too flushed and discomposed to adapt herself to any small occurrence of the moment; the other Bertha, who rose up hurriedly, before the rest, and left the table. "Good bye!" said stout John Peerybingle, pulling on his dreadnought coat. "I shall be back at the old time. Good bye all!" "Good bye John," returned Caleb. He seemed to say it by rote, and to wave his hand in the same unconscious manner; for he stood observing Bertha with an anxious wondering face, that never altered its expression. "Good bye young shaver!" said the jolly Carrier, bending down to kiss the child; which Tilly Slowboy, now intent upon her knife and fork, had deposited asleep (and strange to say, without damage) in a little cot of Bertha’s furnishing; "good bye! Time will come, I suppose, when you’ll turn out into the cold, my little friend, and leave your old father to enjoy his pipe and his rheumatics in the chimney-corner; eh? Where’s Dot?" "I’m here, John!" she said, starting. "Come, come!’ returned the Carrier, clapping his sounding hands. "Where’s the pipe?" "I quite forgot the pipe, John." Forgot the pipe! Was such a wonder ever heard of! She! Forgot the pipe! "I’ll—I’ll fill it directly. It’s soon done." But it was not so soon done, either. It lay in the usual place; the Carrier’s dreadnought pocket; with the little pouch, her own work, from which she was used to fill it, but her hand shook so, that she entangled it (and yet her hand was small enough to have come out easily, I am sure), and bungled terribly. The filling of the pipe and lighting it; those little offices in which I have commended her discretion, if you recollect; were vilely done, from first to last. During the whole process, Tackleton stood looking on maliciously with the half-closed eye; which, whenever it met her's—or caught it, for it can hardly be said to have ever met another eye: rather being a kind of trap to snatch it up—augmented her confusion in a most remarkable degree. "Why, what a clumsy Dot you are, this afternoon!" said John. "I could have done it better myself, I verily believe!" With these good-natured words, he strode away; and presently was heard, in company with Boxer, and the old horse, and the cart, making lively music down the road. What time the dreamy Caleb still stood, watching his Blind Daughter, with the same expression on his face. "Bertha!" said Caleb, softly. "What has happened? How changed you are, my Darling, in a few hours—since this morning. You silent and dull all day! What is it? Tell me!" "Oh father, father!" cried the Blind Girl, bursting into tears. "Oh my hard, hard Fate!" Caleb drew his hand across his eyes before he answered her. "But think how cheerful and how happy you have been, Bertha! How good, and how much loved, by many people." "That strikes me to the heart, dear father! Always so mindful of me! Always so kind to me!" Caleb was very much perplexed to understand her. "To be—to be blind, Bertha, my poor dear," he faultered, "is a great affliction; but—" "I have never felt it!" cried the Blind Girl. "I have never felt it, in its fulness. Never! I have sometimes wished that I could see you, or could see him; only once, dear father; only for one little minute; that I might know what it is I treasure up," she laid her hands upon her breast, "and hold here! That I might be sure and have it right! And sometimes (but then I was a child) I have wept in my prayers at night, to think that when your images ascended from my heart to Heaven, they might not be the true resemblance of yourselves. But I have never had these feelings long. They have passed away and left me tranquil and contented." "And they will again," said Caleb. "But, father! Oh my good, gentle father, bear with me, if I am wicked!" said the Blind Girl. "This is not the sorrow that so weighs me down!" Her father could not choose but let his moist eyes overflow; she was so earnest and pathetic, but he did not understand her, yet. "Bring her to me," said Bertha. "I cannot hold it closed and shut within myself. Bring her to me, father!" She knew he hesitated, and said, "May. Bring May!" May heard the mention of her name, and coming quietly towards her, touched her on the arm. The Blind Girl turned immediately, and held her by both hands. "Look into my face, Dear heart, Sweet heart!" said Bertha. "Read it with your beautiful eyes, and tell me if the truth is written on it." "Dear Bertha, Yes!" The Blind Girl still, upturning the blank sightless face, down which the tears were coursing fast, addressed her in these words: "There is not, in my Soul, a wish or thought that is not for your good, bright May! There is not, in my Soul, a grateful recollection stronger than the deep remembrance which is stored there, of the many many times when, in the full pride of Sight and Beauty, you have had consideration for Blind Bertha, even when we two were children, or when Bertha was as much a child as ever blindness can be! Every blessing on your head! Light upon your happy course! Not the less, my dear May;" and she drew towards her, in a closer grasp; "not the less, my Bird, because, to-day, the knowledge that you are to be His wife has wrung my heart almost to breaking! Father, May, Mary! oh forgive me that it is so, for the sake of all he has done to relieve the weariness of my dark life: and for the sake of the belief you have in me, when I call Heaven to witness that I could not wish him married to a wife more worthy of his Goodness!" While speaking, she had released May Fielding’s hands, and clasped her garments in an attitude of mingled supplication and love. Sinking lower and lower down, as she proceeded in her strange confession, she dropped at last at the feet of her friend, and hid her blind face in the folds of her dress. "Great Power!" exclaimed her father, smitten at one blow with the truth, "have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart at last!" It was well for all of them that Dot, that beaming, useful, busy little Dot—for such she was, whatever faults she had; and however you may learn to hate her, in good time—it was well for all of them, I say, that she was there: or where this would have ended, it were hard to tell. But Dot, recovering her self-possession, interposed, before May could reply, or Caleb say another word. "Come, come, dear Bertha! come away with me! Give her your arm, May. So! How composed she is, you see, already; and how good it is of her to mind us," said the cheery little woman, kissing her upon the forehead. "Come away, dear Bertha. Come! and here’s her good father will come with her; won’t you, Caleb? To—be—sure!" Well, well! she was a noble little Dot in such things, and it must have been an obdurate nature that could have withstood her influence. When she had got poor Caleb and his Bertha away, that they might comfort and console each other, as she knew they only could, she presently came bouncing back,—the saying is, as fresh as any daisy; I say fresher—to mount guard over that bridling little piece of consequence in the cap and gloves, and prevent the dear old creature from making discoveries. "So bring me the precious Baby, Tilly," said she, drawing a chair to the fire; "and while I have it in my lap, here’s Mrs. Fielding, Tilly, will tell me all about the management of Babies, and put me right in twenty points where I’m as wrong as can be. Won’t you, Mrs. Fielding?" Not even the Welsh Giant, who, according to the popular expression, was so "slow" as to perform a fatal surgical operation upon himself, in emulation of a juggling-trick achieved by his arch-enemy at breakfast-time; not even he fell half so readily into the Snare prepared for him, as the old lady did into this artful Pitfall. The fact of Tackleton having walked out; and furthermore, of two or three people having been talking together at a distance, for two minutes, leaving her to her own resources; was quite enough to have put her on her dignity, and the bewailment of that mysterious convulsion in the Indigo trade, for four-and-twenty hours. But this becoming deference to her experience, on the part of the young mother, was so irresistible, that after a short affectation of humility, she began to enlighten her with the best grace in the world; and sitting bolt upright before the wicked Dot, she did, in half an hour, deliver more infallible domestic recipes and precepts, than would (if acted on) have utterly destroyed and done up that Young Peerybingle, though he had been an Infant Samson. To change the theme, Dot did a little needlework—she carried the contents of a whole workbox in her pocket; how ever she contrived it, I don’t know—then did a little nursing; then a little more needlework; then had a little whispering chat with May, while the old lady dozed; and so in little bits of bustle, which was quite her manner always, found it a very short afternoon. Then, as it grew dark, and as it was a solemn part of this Institution of the Pic-Nic that she should perform all Bertha’s household tasks, she trimmed the fire, and swept the hearth, and set the tea-board out, and drew the curtain, and lighted a candle. Then she played an air or two on a rude kind of harp, which Caleb had contrived for Bertha, and played them very well; for Nature had made her delicate little ear as choice a one for music as it would have been for jewels, if she had had any to wear. By this time it was the established hour for having tea; and Tackleton came back again, to share the meal, and spend the evening. Caleb and Bertha had returned some time before, and Caleb had sat down to his afternoon’s work. But he couldn’t settle to it, poor fellow, being anxious and remorseful for his daughter. It was touching to see him sitting idle on his working-stool, regarding her so wistfully; and always saying in his face, "have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart!" When it was night, and tea was done, and Dot had nothing more to do in washing up the cups and saucers; in a word—for I must come to it, and there is no use in putting it off—when the time drew nigh for expecting the Carrier’s return in every sound of distant wheels; her manner changed again; her colour came and went, and she was very restless. Not as good wives are, when listening for their husbands. No, no, no. It was another sort of restlessness from that. Wheels heard. A horse’s feet. The barking of a dog. The gradual approach of all the sounds. The scratching paw of Boxer at the door! "Whose step is that!" cried Bertha, starting up. "Whose step?" returned the Carrier, standing in the portal, with his brown face ruddy as a winter berry from the keen night air. "Why, mine." "The other step," said Bertha. "The man’s tread behind you!" "She is not to be deceived," observed the Carrier, laughing. "Come along, Sir. You’ll be welcome, never fear!" He spoke in a loud tone; and as he spoke, the deaf old gentleman entered. "He’s not so much a stranger, that you haven’t seen him once, Caleb," said the Carrier. "You’ll give him house-room till we go?" "Oh surely, John; and take it as an honour." "He’s the best company on earth, to talk secrets in," said John. "I have reasonable good lungs, but he tries ’em, I can tell you. Sit down, Sir. All friends here, and glad to see you!" When he had imparted this assurance, in a voice that amply corroborated what he had said about his lungs, he added in his natural tone, "A chair in the chimney-corner, and leave to sit quite silent and look pleasantly about him, is all he cares for. He’s easily pleased." Bertha had been listening intently. She called Caleb to her side, when he had set the chair, and asked him, in a low voice, to describe their visitor. When he had done so (truly now; with scrupulous fidelity), she moved, for the first time since he had come in; and sighed; and seemed to have no further interest concerning him. The Carrier was in high spirits, good fellow that he was; and fonder of his little wife than ever. "A clumsy Dot she was, this afternoon!" he said, encircling her with his rough arm, as she stood, removed from the rest; "and yet I like her somehow. See yonder, Dot!" He pointed to the old man. She looked down. I think she trembled. "He’s—ha ha ha!—he’s full of admiration for you!" said the Carrier. "Talked of nothing else, the whole way here. Why, he’s a brave old boy. I like him for it!" "I wish he had had a better subject, John;" she said, with an uneasy glance about the room. At Tackleton especially. "A better subject!" cried the jovial John. "There’s no such thing. Come, off with the great-coat, off with the thick shawl, off with the heavy wrappers! and a cosy half-hour by the fire! My humble service, Mistress. A game at cribbage, you and I? That’s hearty. The cards and board, Dot. And a glass of beer here, if there’s any left, small wife!" His challenge was addressed to the old lady, who accepting it with gracious readiness, they were soon engaged upon the game. At first, the Carrier looked about him sometimes, with a smile, or now and then called Dot to peep over his shoulder at his hand, and advise him on some knotty point. But his adversary being a rigid disciplinarian, and subject to an occasional weakness in respect of pegging more than she was entitled to, required such vigilance on his part, as left him neither eyes nor ears to spare. Thus, his whole attention gradually became absorbed upon the cards; and he thought of nothing else, until a hand upon his shoulder restored him to a consciousness of Tackleton. "I am sorry to disturb you—but a word, directly." "I’m going to deal," returned the Carrier. "It’s a crisis." "It is," said Tackleton. "Come here, man!" There was that in his pale face which made the other rise immediately, and ask him, in a hurry, what the matter was. "Hush! John Peerybingle," said Tackleton. "I am sorry for this. I am indeed. I have been afraid of it. I have suspected it from the first." "What is it?" asked the Carrier, with a frightened aspect. "Hush! I’ll show you, if you’ll come with me." The Carrier accompanied him, without another word. They went across a yard, where the stars were shining; and by a little side-door, into Tackleton’s own counting-house, where there was a glass window, commanding the ware-room: which was closed for the night. There was no light in the counting-house itself, but there were lamps in the long narrow ware-room; and consequently the window was bright. "A moment!" said Tackleton. "Can you bear to look through that window, do you think?" "Why not?" returned the Carrier. "A moment more," said Tackleton. "Don’t commit any violence. It’s of no use. It’s dangerous too. You’re a strong-made man; and you might do Murder before you know it." The Carrier looked him in the face, and recoiled a step as if he had been struck. In one stride he was at the window, and he saw— Oh Shadow on the Hearth! Oh truthful Cricket! Oh perfidious Wife! He saw her, with the old man; old no longer, but erect and gallant: bearing in his hand the false white hair that had won his way into their desolate and miserable home. He saw her listening to him, as he bent his head to whisper in her ear; and suffering him to clasp her round the waist, as they moved slowly down the dim wooden gallery towards the door by which they had entered it. He saw them stop, and saw her turn—to have the face, the face he loved so, so presented to his view!—and saw her, with her own hands, adjust the Lie upon his head, laughing, as she did it, at his unsuspicious nature! He clenched his strong right hand at first, as if it would have beaten down a lion. But opening it immediately again, he spread it out before the eyes of Tackleton (for he was tender of her, even then), and so, as they passed out, fell down upon a desk, and was as weak as any infant. He was wrapped up to the chin, and busy with his horse and parcels, when she came into the room, prepared for going home. "Now, John, dear! Good night, May! Good night, Bertha!" Could she kiss them? Could she be blithe and cheerful in her parting? Could she venture to reveal her face to them without a blush? Yes. Tackleton observed her closely, and she did all this. Tilly was hushing the Baby; and she crossed and re-crossed Tackleton, a dozen times, repeating drowsily: "Did the knowledge that it was to be its wifes, then, wring its hearts almost to breaking; and did its fathers deceive it from its cradles but to break its hearts at last!" "Now, Tilly, give me the Baby! Good night, Mr. Tackleton. Where’s John, for Goodness’ sake?" "He’s going to walk beside the horse’s head," said Tackleton; who helped her to her seat. "My dear John. Walk? To-night?" The muffled figure of her husband made a hasty sign in the affirmative; and the false Stranger and the little nurse being in their places, the old horse moved off. Boxer, the unconscious Boxer, running on before, running back, running round and round the cart, and barking as triumphantly and merrily as ever. When Tackleton had gone off likewise, escorting May and her mother home, poor Caleb sat down by the fire beside his daughter; anxious and remorseful at the core; and still saying in his wistful contemplation of her, "have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart at last!" The toys that had been set in motion for the Baby, had all stopped, and run down, long ago. In the faint light and silence, the imperturbably calm dolls; the agitated rocking-horses with distended eyes and nostrils; the old gentlemen at the street-doors, standing half doubled up upon their failing knees and ankles; the wry-faced nut-crackers; the very Beasts upon their way into the Ark, in twos, like a Boarding School out walking; might have been imagined to be stricken motionless with fantastic wonder, at Dot being false, or Tackleton beloved, under any combination of circumstances. Chirp the Third The Dutch clock in the corner struck Ten, when the Carrier sat down by his fireside. So troubled and grief-worn, that he seemed to scare the Cuckoo, who, having cut his ten melodious announcements as short as possible, plunged back into the Moorish Palace again, and clapped his little door behind him, as if the unwonted spectacle were too much for his feelings. If the little Haymaker had been armed with the sharpest of scythes, and had cut at every stroke into the Carrier’s heart, he never could have gashed and wounded it, as Dot had done. It was a heart so full of love for her; so bound up and held together by innumerable threads of winning remembrance, spun from the daily working of her many qualities of endearment; it was a heart in which she had enshrined herself so gently and so closely; a heart so single and so earnest in its Truth: so strong in right, so weak in wrong: that it could cherish neither passion nor revenge at first, and had only room to hold the broken image of its Idol. But, slowly, slowly; as the Carrier sat brooding on his hearth, now cold and dark; other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him, as an angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his outraged roof. Three steps would take him to his chamber door. One blow would beat it in. "You might do Murder before you know it," Tackleton had said. How could it be Murder, if he gave the Villain time to grapple with him hand to hand! He was the younger man. It was an ill-timed thought, bad for the dark mood of his mind. It was an angry thought, goading him to some avenging act, that should change the cheerful house into a haunted place which lonely travellers would dread to pass by night; and where the timid would see shadows struggling in the ruined windows when the moon was dim, and hear wild noises in the stormy weather. He was the younger man! Yes, yes; some lover who had won the heart that he had never touched. Some lover of her early choice: of whom she had thought and dreamed: for whom she had pined and pined: when he had fancied her so happy by his side. Oh agony to think of it! She had been above-stairs with the Baby, getting it to bed. As he sat brooding on the hearth, she came close beside him, without his knowledge—in the turning of the rack of his great misery, he lost all other sounds—and put her little stool at his feet. He only knew it, when he felt her hand upon his own, and saw her looking up into his face. With wonder? No. It was his first impression, and he was fain to look at her again, to set it right. No, not with wonder. With an eager and enquiring look; but not with wonder. At first it was alarmed and serious; then, it changed into a strange, wild, dreadful smile of recognition of his thoughts; then, there was nothing but her clasped hands on her brow, and her bent head, and falling hair. Though the power of Omnipotence had been his to wield at that moment, he had too much of its Diviner property of Mercy in his breast, to have turned one feather’s weight of it against her. But he could not bear to see her crouching down upon the little seat where he had often looked on her, with love and pride, so innocent and gay; and, when she rose and left him, sobbing as she went, he felt it a relief to have the vacant place beside him rather than her so long-cherished presence. This in itself was anguish keener than all: reminding him how desolate he was become, and how the great bond of his life was rent asunder. The more he felt this, and the more he knew he could have better borne to see her lying prematurely dead before him with their little child upon her breast, the higher and the stronger rose his wrath against his enemy. He looked about him for a weapon. There was a Gun, hanging on the wall. He took it down, and moved a pace or two towards the door of the perfidious Stranger’s room. He knew the Gun was loaded. Some shadowy idea that it was just to shoot this man like a Wild Beast, seized him; and dilated in his mind until it grew into a monstrous demon in complete possession of him, casting out all milder thoughts and setting up its undivided empire. That phrase is wrong. Not casting out his milder thoughts, but artfully transforming them. Changing them into scourges to drive him on. Turning water into blood, Love into hate, Gentleness into blind ferocity. Her image, sorrowing, humbled, but still pleading to his tenderness and mercy with resistless power, never left his mind; but staying there, it urged him to the door; raised the weapon to his shoulder; fitted and nerved his finger to the trigger; and cried "Kill him! In his Bed!" He reversed the Gun to beat the stock upon the door; he already held it lifted in the air; some indistinct design was in his thoughts of calling out to him to fly, for God’s sake, by the window— When, suddenly, the struggling fire illumined the whole chimney with a glow of light; and the Cricket on the Hearth began to chirp! No sound he could have heard; no human voice, not even her's; could so have moved and softened him. The artless words in which she had told him of her love for this same Cricket, were once more freshly spoken; her trembling, earnest manner at the moment, was again before him; her pleasant voice—oh what a voice it was, for making household music at the fireside of an honest man!—thrilled through and through his better nature, and awoke it into life and action. He recoiled from the door, like a man walking in his sleep, awakened from a frightful dream; and put the Gun aside. Clasping his hands before his face, he then sat down again beside the fire, and found relief in tears. The Cricket on the Hearth came out into the room, and stood in Fairy shape before him. "'I love it,'" said the Fairy Voice, repeating what he well remembered, "'for the many times I have heard it, and the many thoughts its harmless music has given me.'" "She said so!" cried the Carrier. "True!" "'This has been a happy Home, John; and I love the Cricket for its sake!'" "It has been, Heaven knows," returned the Carrier. "She made it happy, always,—until now." "So gracefully sweet-tempered; so domestic, joyful, busy, and light-hearted!" said the Voice. "Otherwise I never could have loved her as I did," returned the Carrier. The Voice, correcting him, said "do." The Carrier repeated "as I did." But not firmly. His faltering tongue resisted his controul, and would speak in its own way, for itself and him. The Figure, in an attitude of invocation, raised its hand and said: "Upon your own hearth"— "The hearth she has blighted," interposed the Carrier. "The hearth she has—how often!—blessed and brightened," said the Cricket: "the hearth which, but for her, were only a few stones and bricks and rusty bars, but which has been, through her, the Altar of your Home; on which you have nightly sacrificed some petty passion, selfishness, or care, and offered up the homage of a tranquil mind, a trusting nature, and an overflowing heart; so that the smoke from this poor chimney has gone upward with a better fragrance than the richest incense that is burnt before the richest shrines in all the gaudy Temples of this World!—Upon your own hearth; in its quiet sanctuary; surrounded by its gentle influences and associations; hear her! Hear me! Hear everything that speaks the language of your hearth and home!" "And pleads for her?" inquired the Carrier. "All things that speak the language of your hearth and home, must plead for her!" returned the Cricket. "For they speak the Truth." And while the Carrier, with his head upon his hands, continued to sit meditating in his chair, the Presence stood beside him; suggesting his reflections by its power, and presenting them before him, as in a Glass or Picture. It was not a solitary Presence. From the hearthstone, from the chimney; from the clock, the pipe, the kettle, and the cradle; from the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and the stairs; from the cart without, and the cupboard within, and the household implements; from every thing and every place with which she had ever been familiar, and with which she had ever entwined one recollection of herself in her unhappy husband’s mind; Fairies came trooping forth. Not to stand beside him as the Cricket did, but to busy and bestir themselves. To do all honor to her image. To pull him by the skirts, and point to it when it appeared. To cluster round it, and embrace it, and strew flowers for it to tread on. To try to crown its fair head with their tiny hands. To show that they were fond of it and loved it; and that there was not one ugly, wicked or accusatory creature to claim knowledge of it—none but their playful and approving selves. His thoughts were constant to her Image. It was always there. She sat plying her needle, before the fire, and singing to herself. Such a blithe, thriving, steady little Dot! The fairy figures turned upon him all at once, by one consent, with one prodigious concentrated stare; and seemed to say, "Is this the light wife you are mourning for!" There were sounds of gaiety outside: musical instruments, and noisy tongues, and laughter. A crowd of young merry-makers came pouring in; among whom were May Fielding and a score of pretty girls. Dot was the fairest of them all; as young as any of them too. They came to summon her to join their party. It was a dance. If ever little foot were made for dancing, hers was, surely. But she laughed, and shook her head, and pointed to her cookery on the fire, and her table ready spread: with an exulting defiance that rendered her more charming than she was before. And so she merrily dismissed them: nodding to her would-be partners, one by one, as they passed, but with a comical indifference, enough to make them go and drown themselves immediately if they were her admirers—and they must have been so, more or less; they couldn’t help it. And yet indifference was not her character. O no! For presently, there came a certain Carrier to the door; and bless her what a welcome she bestowed upon him! Again the staring figures turned upon him all at once, and seemed to say, "Is this the wife who has forsaken you!" A shadow fell upon the mirror or the picture: call it what you will. A great shadow of the Stranger, as he first stood underneath their roof; covering its surface, and blotting out all other objects. But the nimble Fairies worked like Bees to clear it off again; and Dot again was there. Still bright and beautiful. Rocking her little Baby in its cradle; singing to it softly; and resting her head upon a shoulder which had its counterpart in the musing figure by which the Fairy Cricket stood. The night—I mean the real night: not going by Fairy clocks—was wearing now; and in this stage of the Carrier’s thoughts, the moon burst out, and shone brightly in the sky. Perhaps some calm and quiet light had risen also, in his mind; and he could think more soberly of what had happened. Although the shadow of the Stranger fell at intervals upon the glass—always distinct, and big, and thoroughly defined—it never fell so darkly as at first. Whenever it appeared, the Fairies uttered a general cry of consternation, and plied their little arms and legs, with inconceivable activity, to rub it out. And whenever they got at Dot again, and showed her to him once more, bright and beautiful, they cheered in the most inspiring manner. They never showed her, otherwise than beautiful and bright, for they were Household Spirits to whom falsehood is annihilation; and being so, what Dot was there for them, but the one active, beaming, pleasant little creature who had been the light and sun of the Carrier’s Home! The Fairies were prodigiously excited when they showed her, with the Baby, gossiping among a knot of sage old matrons, and affecting to be wondrous old and matronly herself, and leaning in a staid, demure old way upon her husband’s arm, attempting—she! such a bud of a little woman—to convey the idea of having abjured the vanities of the world in general, and of being the sort of person to whom it was no novelty at all to be a mother; yet in the same breath, they showed her, laughing at the Carrier for being awkward, and pulling up his shirt-collar to make him smart, and mincing merrily about that very room to teach him how to dance! They turned, and stared immensely at him when they showed her with the Blind Girl; for, though she carried cheerfulness and animation with her wheresoever she went, she bore those influences into Caleb Plummer’s home, heaped up and running over. The Blind Girl’s love for her, and trust in her, and gratitude to her; her own good busy way of setting Bertha’s thanks aside; her dexterous little arts for filling up each moment of the visit in doing something useful to the house, and really working hard while feigning to make holiday; her bountiful provision of those standing delicacies, the Veal and Ham-Pie and the bottles of Beer; her radiant little face arriving at the door, and taking leave; the wonderful expression in her whole self, from her neat foot to the crown of her head, of being a part of the establishment—a something necessary to it, which it couldn’t be without; all this the Fairies revelled in, and loved her for. And once again they looked upon him all at once, appealingly; and seemed to say, while some among them nestled in her dress and fondled her, "Is this the Wife who has betrayed your confidence!" More than once, or twice, or thrice, in the long thoughtful night, they showed her to him sitting on her favourite seat, with her bent head, her hands clasped on her brow, her falling hair. As he had seen her last. And when they found her thus, they neither turned nor looked upon him, but gathered close round her, and comforted and kissed her: and pressed on one another to show sympathy and kindness to her: and forgot him altogether. Thus the night passed. The moon went down; the stars grew pale; the cold day broke; the sun rose. The Carrier still sat, musing, in the chimney corner. He had sat there, with his head upon his hands, all night. All night the faithful Cricket had been Chirp, Chirp, Chirping on the Hearth. All night he had listened to its voice. All night the household Fairies had been busy with him. All night she had been amiable and blameless in the Glass, except when that one shadow fell upon it. He rose up when it was broad day, and washed and dressed himself. He couldn’t go about his customary cheerful avocations; he wanted spirit for them; but it mattered the less, that it was Tackleton’s wedding-day, and he had arranged to make his rounds by proxy. He thought to have gone merrily to church with Dot. But such plans were at an end. It was their own wedding-day too. Ah! how little he had looked for such a close to such a year! The Carrier had expected that Tackleton would pay him an early visit; and he was right. He had not walked to and fro before his own door, many minutes, when he saw the Toy Merchant coming in his chaise along the road. As the chaise drew nearer, he perceived that Tackleton was dressed out sprucely for his marriage: and that he had decorated his horse’s head with flowers and favors. The horse looked much more like a Bridegroom than Tackleton, whose half-closed eye was more disagreeably expressive than ever. But the Carrier took little heed of this. His thoughts had other occupation. "John Peerybingle!" said Tackleton, with an air of condolence. "My good fellow, how do you find yourself this morning?" "I have had but a poor night, Master Tackleton," returned the Carrier, shaking his head: "for I have been a good deal disturbed in my mind. But it’s over now! Can you spare me half an hour or so, for some private talk?" "I came on purpose," returned Tackleton, alighting. "Never mind the horse. He’ll stand quiet enough, with the reins over this post, if you’ll give him a mouthful of hay." The Carrier having brought it from his stable and set it before him, they turned into the house. "You are not married before noon," he said, "I think?" "No," answered Tackleton. "Plenty of time. Plenty of time." When they entered the kitchen, Tilly Slowboy was rapping at the Stranger’s door; which was only removed from it by a few steps. One of her very red eyes (for Tilly had been crying all night long, because her mistress cried) was at the keyhole; and she was knocking very loud; and seemed frightened. "If you please I can’t make nobody hear," said Tilly, looking round. "I hope nobody an’t gone and been and died if you please!" This philanthropic wish, Miss Slowboy emphasised with various new raps and kicks at the door; which led to no result whatever. "Shall I go?" said Tackleton. "It’s curious." The Carrier who had turned his face from the door, signed to him to go if he would. So Tackleton went to Tilly Slowboy’s relief; and he too kicked and knocked; and he too failed to get the least reply. But he thought of trying the handle of the door; and as it opened easily, he peeped in, looked in, went in; and soon came running out again. "John Peerybingle," said Tackleton, in his ear. "I hope there has been nothing—nothing rash in the night?" The Carrier turned upon him quickly. "Because he’s gone!" said Tackleton; "and the window’s open. I don’t see any marks—to be sure it’s almost on a level with the garden: but I was afraid there might have been some—some scuffle. Eh?" He nearly shut up the expressive eye altogether; he looked at him so hard. And he gave his eye, and his face, and his whole person, a sharp twist. As if he would have screwed the truth out of him. "Make yourself easy," said the Carrier. "He went into that room last night, without harm in word or deed from me, and no one has entered it since. He is away of his own free will. I’d go out gladly at that door, and beg my bread from house to house, for life, if I could so change the past that he had never come. But he has come and gone. And I have done with him!" "Oh!—Well, I think he has got off pretty easy," said Tackleton, taking a chair. The sneer was lost upon the Carrier, who sat down too: and shaded his face with his hand, for some little time, before proceeding. "You showed me last night," he said at length, "my wife; my wife that I love; secretly—" "And tenderly," insinuated Tackleton. "Conniving at that man’s disguise, and giving him opportunities of meeting her alone. I think there’s no sight I wouldn’t have rather seen than that. I think there’s no man in the world I wouldn’t have rather had to show it me." "I confess to having had my suspicions always," said Tackleton. "And that has made me objectionable here, I know." "But as you did show it me," pursued the Carrier, not minding him; "and as you saw her; my wife; my wife that I love"—his voice, and eye, and hand, grew steadier and firmer as he repeated these words: evidently in pursuance of a stedfast purpose—"as you saw her at this disadvantage, it is right and just that you should also see with my eyes, and look into my breast, and know what my mind is, upon the subject. For it’s settled," said the Carrier, regarding him attentively. "And nothing can shake it now." Tackleton muttered a few general words of assent, about its being necessary to vindicate something or other; but he was overawed by the manner of his companion. Plain and unpolished as it was, it had a something dignified and noble in it, which nothing but the soul of generous Honor dwelling in the man could have imparted. "I am a plain, rough man," pursued the Carrier, "with very little to recommend me. I am not a clever man, as you very well know. I am not a young man. I loved my little Dot, because I had seen her grow up, from a child, in her father’s house; because I knew how precious she was; because she had been my Life, for years and years. There’s many men I can’t compare with, who never could have loved my little Dot like me, I think!" He paused, and softly beat the ground a short time with his foot, before resuming: "I often thought that though I wasn’t good enough for her, I should make her a kind husband, and perhaps know her value better than another; and in this way I reconciled it to myself, and came to think it might be possible that we should be married. And in the end it came about, and we were married." "Hah!" said Tackleton, with a significant shake of the head. "I had studied myself; I had had experience of myself; I knew how much I loved her, and how happy I should be," pursued the Carrier. "But I had not—I feel it now—sufficiently considered her." "To be sure," said Tackleton. "Giddiness, frivolity, fickleness, love of admiration! Not considered! All left out of sight! Hah!" "You had best not interrupt me," said the Carrier, with some sternness, "till you understand me; and you’re wide of doing so. If, yesterday, I’d have struck that man down at a blow, who dared to breathe a word against her, to-day I’d set my foot upon his face, if he was my brother!" The Toy Merchant gazed at him in astonishment. He went on in a softer tone: "Did I consider," said the Carrier, "that I took her; at her age, and with her beauty; from her young companions, and the many scenes of which she was the ornament; in which she was the brightest little star that ever shone; to shut her up from day to day in my dull house, and keep my tedious company? Did I consider how little suited I was to her sprightly humour, and how wearisome a plodding man like me must be, to one of her quick spirit? Did I consider that it was no merit in me, or claim in me, that I loved her, when everybody must, who knew her? Never. I took advantage of her hopeful nature and her cheerful disposition; and I married her. I wish I never had! For her sake; not for mine!" The Toy Merchant gazed at him, without winking. Even the half-shut eye was open now. "Heaven bless her!" said the Carrier, "for the cheerful constancy with which she tried to keep the knowledge of this from me! And Heaven help me, that, in my slow mind, I have not found it out before! Poor child! Poor Dot! I not to find it out, who have seen her eyes fill with tears, when such a marriage as our own was spoken of! I, who have seen the secret trembling on her lips a hundred times, and never suspected it till last night! Poor girl! That I could ever hope she would be fond of me! That I could ever believe she was!" "She made a show of it," said Tackleton. "She made such a show of it, that to tell you the truth it was the origin of my misgivings." And here he asserted the superiority of May Fielding, who certainly made no sort of show of being fond of him. "She has tried," said the poor Carrier, with greater emotion than he had exhibited yet; "I only now begin to know how hard she has tried, to be my dutiful and zealous wife. How good she has been; how much she has done; how brave and strong a heart she has; let the happiness I have known under this roof bear witness! It will be some help and comfort to me, when I am here alone." "Here alone?" said Tackleton. "Oh! Then you do mean to take some notice of this?" "I mean," returned the Carrier, "to do her the greatest kindness, and make her the best reparation, in my power. I can release her from the daily pain of an unequal marriage, and the struggle to conceal it. She shall be as free as I can render her." "Make her reparation!" exclaimed Tackleton, twisting and turning his great ears with his hands. "There must be something wrong here. You didn’t say that, of course." The Carrier set his grip upon the collar of the Toy Merchant, and shook him like a reed. "Listen to me!" he said. "And take care that you hear me right. Listen to me. Do I speak plainly?" "Very plainly indeed," answered Tackleton. "As if I meant it?" "Very much as if you meant it." "I sat upon that hearth, last night, all night," exclaimed the Carrier. "On the spot where she has often sat beside me, with her sweet face looking into mine. I called up her whole life, day by day; I had her dear self, in its every passage, in review before me. And upon my soul she is innocent, if there is One to judge the innocent and guilty!" Staunch Cricket on the Hearth! Loyal household Fairies! "Passion and distrust have left me!" said the Carrier; "and nothing but my grief remains. In an unhappy moment some old lover, better suited to her tastes and years than I; forsaken, perhaps, for me, against her will; returned. In an unhappy moment: taken by surprise, and wanting time to think of what she did: she made herself a party to his treachery, by concealing it. Last night she saw him, in the interview we witnessed. It was wrong. But otherwise than this, she is innocent if there is Truth on earth!" "If that is your opinion"—Tackleton began. "So, let her go!" pursued the Carrier. "Go, with my blessing for the many happy hours she has given me, and my forgiveness for any pang she has caused me. Let her go, and have the peace of mind I wish her! She’ll never hate me. She’ll learn to like me better, when I’m not a drag upon her, and she wears the chain I have rivetted, more lightly. This is the day on which I took her, with so little thought for her enjoyment, from her home. To-day she shall return to it; and I will trouble her no more. Her father and mother will be here to-day—we had made a little plan for keeping it together—and they shall take her home. I can trust her, there, or anywhere. She leaves me without blame, and she will live so I am sure. If I should die—I may perhaps while she is still young; I have lost some courage in a few hours—she’ll find that I remembered her, and loved her to the last! This is the end of what you showed me. Now, it’s over!" "Oh no, John, not over. Do not say it’s over yet! Not quite yet. I have heard your noble words. I could not steal away, pretending to be ignorant of what has affected me with such deep gratitude. Do not say it’s over, ‘till the clock has struck again!" She had entered shortly after Tackleton; and had remained there. She never looked at Tackleton, but fixed her eyes upon her husband. But she kept away from him, setting as wide a space as possible between them; and though she spoke with most impassioned earnestness, she went no nearer to him even then. How different in this from her old self! "No hand can make the clock which will strike again for me the hours that are gone," replied the Carrier, with a faint smile. "But let it be so, if you will, my dear. It will strike soon. It’s of little matter what we say. I’d try to please you in a harder case than that." "Well!" muttered Tackleton. "I must be off: for when the clock strikes again, it’ll be necessary for me to be upon my way to church. Good morning, John Peerybingle. I’m sorry to be deprived of the pleasure of your company. Sorry for the loss, and the occasion of it too!" "I have spoken plainly?" said the Carrier, accompanying him to the door. "Oh quite!" "And you’ll remember what I have said?" "Why, if you compel me to make the observation," said Tackleton; previously taking the precaution of getting into his chaise; "I must say that it was so very unexpected, that I’m far from being likely to forget it." "The better for us both," returned the Carrier. "Good bye. I give you joy!" "I wish I could give it to you," said Tackleton. "As I can’t; thank’ee. Between ourselves, (as I told you before, eh?) I don’t much think I shall have the less joy in my married life, because May hasn’t been too officious about me, and too demonstrative. Good bye! Take care of yourself." The Carrier stood looking after him until he was smaller in the distance than his horse’s flowers and favours near at hand; and then, with a deep sigh, went strolling like a restless, broken man, among some neighbouring elms; unwilling to return until the clock was on the eve of striking. His little wife, being left alone, sobbed piteously; but often dried her eyes and checked herself, to say how good he was, how excellent he was! and once or twice she laughed; so heartily, triumphantly, and incoherently (still crying all the time), that Tilly was quite horrified. "Ow if you please don’t!" said Tilly. "It’s enough to dead and bury the Baby, so it is if you please." "Will you bring him sometimes, to see his father, Tilly," inquired her mistress, drying her eyes; "when I can’t live here, and have gone to my old home?" "Ow if you please don’t!" cried Tilly, throwing back her head, and bursting out into a howl; she looked at the moment uncommonly like Boxer. "Ow if you please don’t! Ow, what has everybody gone and been and done with everybody, making everybody else so wretched! Ow-w-w-w!" The soft-hearted Slowboy trailed off at this juncture, into such a deplorable howl: the more tremendous from its long suppression: that she must infallibly have awakened the Baby, and frightened him into something serious (probably convulsions), if her eyes had not encountered Caleb Plummer, leading in his daughter. This spectacle restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few moments silent, with her mouth wide open: and then, posting off to the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a Weird, Saint Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes: apparently deriving much relief from those extraordinary operations. "Mary!" said Bertha. "Not at the marriage!" "I told her you would not be there Mum," whispered Caleb. "I heard as much last night. But bless you," said the little man, taking her tenderly by both hands, "I don’t care for what they say. I don’t believe them. There an’t much of me, but that little should be torn to pieces sooner than I’d trust a word against you!" He put his arms about her and hugged her, as a child might have hugged one of his own dolls. "Bertha couldn’t stay at home this morning," said Caleb. "She was afraid, I know, to hear the Bells ring: and couldn’t trust herself to be so near them on their wedding-day. So we started in good time, and came here. I have been thinking of what I have done," said Caleb, after a moment’s pause; "I have been blaming myself till I hardly knew what to do or where to turn, for the distress of mind I have caused her; and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d better, if you’ll stay with me, Mum, the while, tell her the truth. You’ll stay with me the while?" he enquired, trembling from head to foot. "I don’t know what effect it may have upon her; I don’t know what she’ll think of me; I don’t know that she’ll ever care for her poor father afterwards. But it’s best for her that she should be undeceived, and I must bear the consequences as I deserve!" "Mary," said Bertha, "where is your hand! Ah! Here it is here it is!" pressing it to her lips, with a smile, and drawing it through her arm. "I heard them speaking softly among themselves, last night, of some blame against you. They were wrong." The Carrier’s Wife was silent. Caleb answered for her. "They were wrong," he said. "I knew it!" cried Bertha, proudly. "I told them so. I scorned to hear a word! Blame her with justice!" she pressed the hand between her own, and the soft cheek against her face. "No! I am not so blind as that." Her father went on one side of her, while Dot remained upon the other: holding her hand. "I know you all," said Bertha, "better than you think. But none so well as her. Not even you, father. There is nothing half so real and so true about me, as she is. If I could be restored to sight this instant, and not a word were spoken, I could choose her from a crowd! My Sister!" "Bertha, my dear!" said Caleb, "I have something on my mind I want to tell you, while we three are alone. Hear me kindly! I have a confession to make to you, my Darling." "A confession, father?" "I have wandered from the Truth and lost myself, my child," said Caleb, with a pitiable expression in his bewildered face. "I have wandered from the truth, intending to be kind to you; and have been cruel." She turned her wonder-stricken face towards him, and repeated "Cruel!" "He accuses himself too strongly, Bertha," said Dot. "You’ll say so, presently. You’ll be the first to tell him so." "He cruel to me!" cried Bertha, with a smile of incredulity. "Not meaning it, my child," said Caleb. "But I have been; though I never suspected it, till yesterday. My dear Blind Daughter, hear me and forgive me! The world you live in, heart of mine, doesn’t exist as I have represented it. The eyes you have trusted in, have been false to you." She turned her wonder-stricken face towards him still; but drew back, and clung closer to her friend. "Your road in life was rough, my poor one," said Caleb, "and I meant to smooth it for you. I have altered objects, changed the characters of people, invented many things that never have been, to make you happier. I have had concealments from you, put deceptions on you, God forgive me! and surrounded you with fancies." "But living people are not fancies!" she said hurriedly, and turning very pale, and still retiring from him. "You can’t change them." "I have done so, Bertha," pleaded Caleb. "There is one person that you know, my Dove—" "Oh father! why do you say, I know?" she answered, in a term of keen reproach. "What and whom do I know! I who have no leader! I so miserably blind." In the anguish of her heart, she stretched out her hands, as if she were groping her way; then spread them, in a manner most forlorn and sad, upon her face. "The marriage that takes place to-day," said Caleb, "is with a stern, sordid, grinding man. A hard master to you and me, my dear, for many years. Ugly in his looks, and in his nature. Cold and callous always. Unlike what I have painted him to you in everything, my child. In everything." "Oh why," cried the Blind Girl, tortured, as it seemed, almost beyond endurance, "why did you ever do this! Why did you ever fill my heart so full, and then come in like Death, and tear away the objects of my love! O Heaven, how blind I am! How helpless and alone!" Her afflicted father hung his head, and offered no reply but in his penitence and sorrow. She had been but a short time in this passion of regret, when the Cricket on the Hearth, unheard by all but her, began to chirp. Not merrily, but in a low, faint, sorrowing way. It was so mournful that her tears began to flow; and when the Presence which had been beside the Carrier all night, appeared behind her, pointing to her father, they fell down like rain. She heard the Cricket-voice more plainly soon; and was conscious, through her blindness, of the Presence hovering about her father. "Mary," said the Blind Girl, "tell me what my Home is. What it truly is." "It is a poor place, Bertha; very poor and bare indeed. The house will scarcely keep out wind and rain another winter. It is as roughly shielded from the weather, Bertha," Dot continued in a low, clear voice, "as your poor father in his sackcloth coat." The Blind Girl, greatly agitated, rose, and led the Carrier’s little wife aside. "Those presents that I took such care of; that came almost at my wish, and were so dearly welcome to me"’ she said, trembling; "where did they come from? Did you send them?" "No." "Who then?" Dot saw she knew, already; and was silent. The Blind Girl spread her hands before her face again. But in quite another manner now. "Dear Mary, a moment. One moment! More this way. Speak softly to me. You are true, I know. You’d not deceive me now; would you?" "No, Bertha, indeed!" "No, I am sure you would not. You have too much pity for me. Mary, look across the room to where we were just now; to where my father is—my father, so compassionate and loving to me—and tell me what you see." "I see," said Dot, who understood her well, "an old man sitting in a chair, and leaning sorrowfully on the back, with his face resting on his hand. As if his child should comfort him, Bertha." "Yes, yes. She will. Go on." "He is an old man, worn with care and work. He is a spare, dejected, thoughtful, grey-haired man. I see him now, despondent and bowed down, and striving against nothing. But, Bertha, I have seen him many times before; and striving hard in many ways for one great sacred object. And I honor his grey head, and bless him!" The Blind Girl broke away from her; and throwing herself upon her knees before him, took the grey head to her breast. "It is my sight restored. It is my sight!" she cried. "I have been blind, and now my eyes are open. I never knew him! To think I might have died, and never truly seen the father who has been so loving to me!" There were no words for Caleb’s emotion. "There is not a gallant figure on this earth," exclaimed the Blind Girl, holding him in her embrace, "that I would love so dearly, and would cherish so devotedly, as this! The greyer, and more worn, the dearer, father! Never let them say I am blind again. There’s not a furrow in his face, there’s not a hair upon his head, that shall be forgotten in my prayers and thanks to Heaven!" Caleb managed to articulate "My Bertha!" "And in my Blindness, I believed him," said the girl, caressing him with tears of exquisite affection, "to be so different! And having him beside me, day by day, so mindful of me always, never dreamed of this!" "The fresh smart father in the blue coat, Bertha," said poor Caleb. "He’s gone!" "Nothing is gone," she answered. "Dearest father, no! Everything is here—in you. The father that I loved so well; the father that I never loved enough, and never knew; the Benefactor whom I first began to reverence and love, because he had such sympathy for me; All are here in you. Nothing is dead to me. The Soul of all that was most dear to me is here—here, with the worn face, and the grey head. And I am NOT blind, father, any longer!" Dot’s whole attention had been concentrated, during this discourse, upon the father and daughter; but looking, now, towards the little Haymaker in the Moorish meadow, she saw that the clock was within a few minutes of striking, and fell, immediately, into a nervous and excited state. "Father," said Bertha, hesitating. "Mary." "Yes, my dear," returned Caleb. "Here she is." "There is no change in her. You never told me anything of her that was not true?’ "I should have done it, my dear, I am afraid," returned Caleb, "if I could have made her better than she was. But I must have changed her for the worse, if I had changed her at all. Nothing could improve her, Bertha." Confident as the Blind Girl had been when she asked the question, her delight and pride in the reply, and her renewed embrace of Dot, were charming to behold. "More changes than you think for, may happen though, my dear," said Dot. "Changes for the better, I mean; changes for great joy to some of us. You mustn’t let them startle you too much, if any such should ever happen, and affect you? Are those wheels upon the road? You’ve a quick ear, Bertha. Are they wheels?" "Yes. Coming very fast." "I—I—I know you have a quick ear," said Dot, placing her hand upon her heart, and evidently talking on, as fast as she could, to hide its palpitating state, "because I have noticed it often, and because you were so quick to find out that strange step last night. Though why you should have said, as I very well recollect you did say, Bertha, 'whose step is that!' and why you should have taken any greater observation of it than of any other step, I don’t know. Though as I said just now, there are great changes in the world: great changes: and we can’t do better than prepare ourselves to be surprised at hardly anything." Caleb wondered what this meant; perceiving that she spoke to him, no less than to his daughter. He saw her, with astonishment, so fluttered and distressed that she could scarcely breathe; and holding to a chair, to save herself from falling. "They are wheels indeed!" she panted. "Coming nearer! Nearer! Very close! And now you hear them stopping at the garden gate! And now you hear a step outside the door—the same step, Bertha, is it not!—and now!"— She uttered a wild cry of uncontrollable delight; and running up to Caleb put her hands upon his eyes, as a young man rushed into the room, and flinging away his hat into the air, came sweeping down upon them. "Is it over?" cried Dot. "Yes!" "Happily over?" "Yes!" "Do you recollect the voice, dear Caleb? Did you ever hear the like of it before?" cried Dot. "If my boy in the Golden South Americas was alive"—said Caleb, trembling. "He is alive!" shrieked Dot, removing her hands from his eyes, and clapping them in ecstasy; "look at him! See where he stands before you, healthy and strong! Your own dear son! Your own dear living, loving brother, Bertha!" All honor to the little creature for her transports! All honor to her tears and laughter, when the three were locked in one another’s arms! All honour to the heartiness with which she met the sunburnt Sailor-fellow, with his dark streaming hair, half way, and never turned her rosy little mouth aside, but suffered him to kiss it, freely, and to press her to his bounding heart! And honour to the Cuckoo too—why not!—for bursting out of the trap-door in the Moorish Palace like a housebreaker, and hiccoughing twelve times on the assembled company, as if he had got drunk for joy! The Carrier, entering, started back: and well he might: to find himself in such good company. "Look, John!" said Caleb, exultingly, "look here! My own boy from the Golden South Americas! My own son! Him that you fitted out, and sent away yourself; Him that you were always such a friend to!" The Carrier advanced to seize him by the hand; but, recoiling, as some feature in his face awakened a remembrance of the Deaf Man in the Cart, said: "Edward! Was it you?" "Now tell him all!" cried Dot. "Tell him all, Edward; and don’t spare me, for nothing shall make me spare myself in his eyes, ever again." "I was the man," said Edward. "And could you steal, disguised, into the house of your old friend?" rejoined the Carrier. "There was a frank boy once—how many years is it, Caleb, since we heard that he was dead, and had it proved, we thought?—who never would have done that." "There was a generous friend of mine, once; more a father to me than a friend;" said Edward, "who never would have judged me, or any other man, unheard. You were he. So I am certain you will hear me now." The Carrier, with a troubled glance at Dot, who still kept far away from him, replied, "Well! that’s but fair. I will." "You must know that when I left here, a boy," said Edward, "I was in love, and my love was returned. She was a very young girl, who perhaps (you may tell me) didn’t know her own mind. But I knew mine, and I had a passion for her." "You had!" exclaimed the Carrier. "You!" "Indeed I had," returned the other. "And she returned it. I have ever since believed she did; and now I am sure she did." "Heaven help me!" said the Carrier. "This is worse than all." "Constant to her," said Edward, "and returning, full of hope, after many hardships and perils, to redeem my part of our old contract, I heard, twenty miles away, that she was false to me; that she had forgotten me; and had bestowed herself upon another and a richer man. I had no mind to reproach her; but I wished to see her, and to prove beyond dispute that this was true. I hoped she might have been forced into it, against her own desire and recollection. It would be small comfort, but it would be some, I thought: and on I came. That I might have the truth, the real truth; observing freely for myself, and judging for myself, without obstruction on the one hand, or presenting my own influence (if I had any) before her, on the other; I dressed myself unlike myself—you know how; and waited on the road—you know where. You had no suspicion of me; neither had—had she," pointing to Dot, "until I whispered in her ear at that fireside, and she so nearly betrayed me." "But when she knew that Edward was alive, and had come back," sobbed Dot, now speaking for herself, as she had burned to do, all through this narrative; "and when she knew his purpose, she advised him by all means to keep his secret close; for his old friend John Peerybingle was much too open in his nature, and too clumsy in all artifice—being a clumsy man in general," said Dot, half laughing and half crying—"to keep it for him. And when she—that’s me, John," sobbed the little woman—"told him all, and how his sweetheart had believed him to be dead; and how she had at last been over-persuaded by her mother into a marriage which the silly, dear old thing called advantageous; and when she—that’s me again, John—told him they were not yet married (though close upon it), and that it would be nothing but a sacrifice if it went on, for there was no love on her side; and when he went nearly mad with joy to hear it; then she—that’s me again—said she would go between them, as she had often done before in old times, John, and would sound his sweetheart and be sure that what she—me again, John—said and thought was right. And it WAS right, John! And they were brought together, John! And they were married, John, an hour ago! And here’s the Bride! And Gruff and Tackleton may die a bachelor! And I’m a happy little woman, May, God bless you!" She was an irresistible little woman, if that be anything to the purpose; and never so completely irresistible as in her present transports. There never were congratulations so endearing and delicious, as those she lavished on herself and on the Bride. Amid the tumult of emotions in his breast, the honest Carrier had stood, confounded. Flying, now, towards her, Dot stretched out her hand to stop him, and retreated as before. "No, John, no! Hear all! Don’t love me any more, John, 'till you’ve heard every word I have to say. It was wrong to have a secret from you, John. I’m very sorry. I didn’t think it any harm, till I came and sat down by you on the little stool last night. But when I knew by what was written in your face, that you had seen me walking in the gallery with Edward; and knew what you thought; I felt how giddy and how wrong it was. But oh, dear John, how could you, could you, think so!" Little woman, how she sobbed again! John Peerybingle would have caught her in his arms. But no; she wouldn’t let him. "Don’t love me yet, please, John! Not for a long time yet! When I was sad about this intended marriage, dear, it was because I remembered May and Edward such young lovers; and knew that her heart was far away from Tackleton. You believe that, now. Don’t you John?" John was going to make another rush at this appeal; but she stopped him again. "No; keep there, please, John! When I laugh at you, as I sometimes do, John; and call you clumsy, and a dear old goose, and names of that sort, it’s because I love you, John, so well; and take such pleasure in your ways, and wouldn’t see you altered in the least respect to have you made a King to-morrow." "Hooroar!" said Caleb with unusual vigour. "My opinion!" "And when I speak of people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it’s only because I’m such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and all that: and make believe." She saw that he was coming; and stopped him again. But she was very nearly too late. "No, don’t love me for another minute or two, if you please, John! What I want most to tell you, I have kept to the last. My dear, good, generous John; when we were talking the other night about the Cricket, I had it on my lips to say, that at first I did not love you quite so dearly as I do now; that when I first came home here, I was half afraid I mightn’t learn to love you every bit as well as I hoped and prayed I might—being so very young, John! But, dear John, every day and hour, I loved you more and more. And if I could have loved you better than I do, the noble words I heard you say this morning, would have made me. But I can’t. All the affection that I had (it was a great deal John) I gave you, as you well deserve, long, long ago, and I have no more left to give. Now, my dear Husband, take me to your heart again! That’s my home, John; and never, never think of sending me to any other!" You never will derive so much delight from seeing a glorious little woman in the arms of a third party, as you would have felt if you had seen Dot run into the Carrier’s embrace. It was the most complete, unmitigated, soul-fraught little piece of earnestness that ever you beheld in all your days. You may be sure the Carrier was in a state of perfect rapture; and you may be sure Dot was likewise; and you may be sure they all were, inclusive of Miss Slowboy, who cried copiously for joy, and, wishing to include her young charge in the general interchange of congratulations, handed round the Baby to everybody in succession, as if it were something to drink. But now the sound of wheels was heard again outside the door; and somebody exclaimed that Gruff and Tackleton was coming back. Speedily that worthy gentleman appeared: looking warm and flustered. "Why, what the Devil’s this, John Peerybingle!" said Tackleton. "There’s some mistake. I appointed Mrs. Tackleton to meet me at the church; and I’ll swear I passed her on the road, on her way here. Oh! here she is! I beg your pardon Sir; I haven’t the pleasure of knowing you; but if you can do me the favour to spare this young lady, she has rather a particular engagement this morning." "But I can’t spare her," returned Edward. "I couldn’t think of it." "What do you mean, you vagabond?" said Tackleton. "I mean, that as I can make allowance for your being vexed," returned the other, with a smile, "I am as deaf to harsh discourse this morning, as I was to all discourse last night." The look that Tackleton bestowed upon him, and the start he gave! "I am sorry Sir," said Edward, holding out May’s left hand, and especially the third finger; "that the young lady can’t accompany you to church; but as she has been there once, this morning, perhaps you’ll excuse her." Tackleton looked hard at the third finger: and took a little piece of silver-paper, apparently containing a ring, from his waistcoat-pocket. "Miss Slowboy," said Tackleton. "Will you have the kindness to throw that in the fire? Thank’ee." "It was a previous engagement; quite an old engagement: that prevented my wife from keeping her appointment with you, I assure you," said Edward. "Mr. Tackleton will do me the justice to acknowledge that I revealed it to him faithfully; and that I told him, many times, I never could forget it," said May, blushing. "Oh certainly!" said Tackleton. "Oh to be sure. Oh it’s all right. It’s quite correct. Mrs. Edward Plummer, I infer?" "That’s the name," returned the bridegroom. "Ah, I shouldn’t have known you Sir," said Tackleton, scrutinising his face narrowly, and making a low bow. "I give you joy Sir!" "Thank’ee." "Mrs. Peerybingle," said Tackleton, turning suddenly to where she stood with her husband; "I am sorry. You haven’t done me a very great kindness, but, upon my life I am sorry. You are better than I thought you. John Peerybingle, I am sorry. You understand me; that’s enough. It’s quite correct, ladies and gentlemen all, and perfectly satisfactory. Good morning!" With these words he carried it off, and carried himself off too: merely stopping at the door, to take the flowers and favours from his horse’s head, and to kick that animal once, in the ribs, as a means of informing him that there was a screw loose in his arrangements. Of course it became a serious duty now, to make such a day of it, as should mark these events for a high Feast and Festival in the Peerybingle Calendar for evermore. Accordingly, Dot went to work to produce such an entertainment, as should reflect undying honour on the house and on every one concerned; and in a very short space of time, she was up to her dimpled elbows in flour, and whitening the Carrier’s coat, every time he came near her, by stopping him to give him a kiss. That good fellow washed the greens, and peeled the turnips, and broke the plates, and upset iron pots full of cold water on the fire, and made himself useful in all sorts of ways: while a couple of professional assistants, hastily called in from somewhere in the neighbourhood, as on a point of life or death, ran against each other in all the doorways and round all the corners; and everybody tumbled over Tilly Slowboy and the Baby, everywhere. Tilly never came out in such force before. Her ubiquity was the theme of general admiration. She was a stumbling-block in the passage at five-and-twenty minutes past two; a man-trap in the kitchen at half-past two precisely; and a pitfall in the garret at five-and-twenty minutes to three. The Baby’s head was, as it were, a test and touchstone for every description of matter, animal, vegetable, and mineral. Nothing was in use that day that didn’t come, at some time or other, into close acquaintance with it. Then, there was a great Expedition set on foot to go and find out Mrs. Fielding; and to be dismally penitent to that excellent gentlewoman; and to bring her back, by force, if needful, to be happy and forgiving. And when the Expedition first discovered her, she would listen to no terms at all, but said, an unspeakable number of times, that ever she should have lived to see the day! and couldn’t be got to say anything else, except, "Now carry me to the grave;" which seemed absurd, on account of her not being dead, or anything at all like it. After a time, she lapsed into a state of dreadful calmness, and observed, that when that unfortunate train of circumstances had occurred in the Indigo Trade, she had foreseen that she would be exposed, during her whole life, to every species of insult and contumely; and that she was glad to find it was the case; and begged they wouldn’t trouble themselves about her,—for what was she? oh, dear! a nobody!—but would forget that such a being lived, and would take their course in life without her. From this bitterly sarcastic mood, she passed into an angry one, in which she gave vent to the remarkable expression that the worm would turn if trodden on; and, after that, she yielded to a soft regret, and said, if they had only given her their confidence, what might she not have had it in her power to suggest! Taking advantage of this crisis in her feelings, the Expedition embraced her; and she very soon had her gloves on, and was on her way to John Peerybingle’s in a state of unimpeachable gentility; with a paper parcel at her side containing a cap of state, almost as tall, and quite as stiff, as a Mitre. Then, there were Dot’s father and mother to come, in another little chaise; and they were behind their time; and fears were entertained; and there was much looking out for them down the road; and Mrs. Fielding always would look in the wrong and morally impossible direction; and being apprised thereof, hoped she might take the liberty of looking where she pleased. At last they came: a chubby little couple, jogging along in a snug and comfortable little way that quite belonged to the Dot family: and Dot and her mother, side by side, were wonderful to see. They were so like each other. Then, Dot’s mother had to renew her acquaintance with May’s mother; and May’s mother always stood on her gentility; and Dot’s mother never stood on anything but her active little feet. And old Dot—so to call Dot’s father; I forgot it wasn’t his right name, but never mind: took liberties, and shook hands at first sight, and seemed to think a cap but so much starch and muslin, and didn’t defer himself at all to the Indigo trade, but said there was no help for it now; and, in Mrs. Fielding’s summing up, was a good-natured kind of man—but coarse, my dear. I wouldn’t have missed Dot, doing the honors in her wedding-gown, my benison on her bright face! for any money. No! nor the good Carrier, so jovial and so ruddy, at the bottom of the table. Nor the brown, fresh sailor-fellow, and his handsome wife. Nor any one among them. To have missed the dinner would have been to miss as jolly and as stout a meal as man need eat; and to have missed the overflowing cups in which they drank The Wedding Day, would have been the greatest miss of all. After dinner, Caleb sang the song about the Sparkling Bowl! As I’m a living man: hoping to keep so, for a year or two, he sang it through. And, by-the-by, a most unlooked-for incident occurred, just as he finished the last verse. There was a tap at the door; and a man came staggering in, without saying with your leave, or by your leave, with something heavy on his head. Setting this down in the middle of the table, symmetrically in the centre of the nuts and apples, he said: "Mr. Tackleton’s compliments, and as he hasn’t got no use for the cake himself, p’raps you’ll eat it." And with those words, he walked off. There was some surprise among the company, as you may imagine. Mrs. Fielding, being a lady of infinite discernment, suggested that the cake was poisoned; and related a narrative of a cake, which, within her knowledge, had turned a seminary for young ladies, blue. But she was overruled by acclamation; and the cake was cut by May, with much ceremony and rejoicing. I don’t think any one had tasted it, when there came another tap at the door; and the same man appeared again, having under his arm a vast brown-paper parcel. "Mr. Tackleton’s compliments, and he’s sent a few toys for the Babby. They ain’t ugly." After the delivery of which expressions, he retired again. The whole party would have experienced great difficulty in finding words for their astonishment, even if they had had ample time to seek them. But they had none at all; for the messenger had scarcely shut the door behind him, when there came another tap, and Tackleton himself walked in. "Mrs. Peerybingle!" said the Toy-merchant, hat in hand. "I’m sorry. I’m more sorry than I was this morning. I have had time to think of it. John Peerybingle! I’m sour by disposition; but I can’t help being sweetened, more or less, by coming face to face with such a man as you. Caleb! This unconscious little nurse gave me a broken hint last night, of which I have found the thread. I blush to think how easily I might have bound you and your daughter to me; and what a miserable idiot I was, when I took her for one! Friends, one and all, my house is very lonely to-night. I have not so much as a Cricket on my Hearth. I have scared them all away. Be gracious to me; let me join this happy party!" He was at home in five minutes. You never saw such a fellow. What had he been doing with himself all his life, never to have known, before, his great capacity of being jovial! Or what had the Fairies been doing with him, to have effected such a change! "John! you won’t send me home this evening; will you?" whispered Dot. He had been very near it though! There wanted but one living creature to make the party complete; and, in the twinkling of an eye, there he was: very thirsty with hard running, and engaged in hopeless endeavours to squeeze his head into a narrow pitcher. He had gone with the cart to its journey’s-end, very much disgusted with the absence of his master, and stupendously rebellious to the Deputy. After lingering about the stable for some little time, vainly attempting to incite the old horse to the mutinous act of returning on his own account, he had walked into the tap-room and laid himself down before the fire. But suddenly yielding to the conviction that the Deputy was a humbug, and must be abandoned, he had got up again, turned tail and come home. There was a dance in the evening. With which general mention of that recreation, I should have left it alone, if I had not some reason to suppose that it was quite an original dance, and one of a most uncommon figure. It was formed in an odd way; in this way. Edward, that sailor-fellow—a good free dashing sort of a fellow he was—had been telling them various marvels concerning parrots, and mines, and Mexicans, and gold dust, when all at once he took it in his head to jump up from his seat and propose a dance; for Bertha’s harp was there, and she had such a hand upon it as you seldom hear. Dot (sly little piece of affectation when she chose) said her dancing days were over; I think because the Carrier was smoking his pipe, and she liked sitting by him, best. Mrs. Fielding had no choice, of course, but to say her dancing days were over, after that; and everybody said the same, except May; May was ready. So, May and Edward get up, amid great applause, to dance alone; and Bertha plays her liveliest tune. Well! if you’ll believe me, they have not been dancing five minutes, when suddenly the Carrier flings his pipe away, takes Dot round the waist, dashes out into the room, and starts off with her, toe and heel, quite wonderfully. Tackleton no sooner sees this, than he skims across to Mrs. Fielding, takes her round the waist, and follows suit. Old Dot no sooner sees this, than up he is, all alive, whisks off Mrs. Dot in the middle of the dance, and is the foremost there. Caleb no sooner sees this, than he clutches Tilly Slowboy by both hands and goes off at score; Miss Slowboy, firm in the belief that diving hotly in among the other couples, and effecting any number of concussions with them, is your only principle of footing it. Hark! how the Cricket joins the music with its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp; and how the kettle hums! * * * * * But what is this! Even as I listen to them, blithely, and turn towards Dot, for one last glimpse of a little figure very pleasant to me, she and the rest have vanished into air, and I am left alone. A Cricket sings upon the Hearth; a broken child’s-toy lies upon the ground; and nothing else remains. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home Description An account of the resource Published by Bradbury and Evans, 1845 (Eleventh Edition) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Hathi Trust, <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102287704">https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102287704</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1845-12 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Illustrated by Daniel Maclise, John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edwin Henry Landseer Type The nature or genre of the resource Christmas Book Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1845-12-The_Cricket_on_the_Hearth Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home (1845). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-books/1845-12-The_Cricket_on_the_Hearth">https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-books/1845-12-The_Cricket_on_the_Hearth</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Chirp the First The Kettle began it! Don’t tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that she couldn’t say which of them began it; but, I say the Kettle did. I ought to know, I hope? The Kettle began it, full five minutes by the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner before the Cricket uttered a chirp. As if the clock hadn’t finished striking, and the convulsive little Haymaker at the top of it, jerking away right and left with a scythe in front of a Moorish Palace, hadn’t mowed down half an acre of imaginary grass before the Cricket joined in at all! Why, I am not naturally positive. Every one knows that. I wouldn’t set my own opinion against the opinion of Mrs. Peerybingle, unless I were quite sure, on any account whatever. Nothing should induce me. But this is a question of fact. And the fact is, that the Kettle began it, at least five minutes before the Cricket gave any sign of being in existence. Contradict me: and I’ll say ten. Let me narrate exactly how it happened. I should have proceeded to do so in my very first word, but for this plain consideration—if I am to tell a story I must begin at the beginning; and how is it possible to begin at the beginning, without beginning at the Kettle? It appeared as if there were a sort of match, or trial of skill, you must understand, between the Kettle and the Cricket. And this is what led to it, and how it came about. Mrs. Peerybingle going out into the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard—Mrs. Peerybingle filled the Kettle at the water butt. Presently returning, less the pattens: and a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but short: she set the Kettle on the fire. In doing which she lost her temper, or mislaid it for an instant; for the water being uncomfortably cold, and in that slippy, slushy, sleety sort of state wherein it seems to penetrate through every kind of substance, patten rings included—had laid hold of Mrs. Peerybingle’s toes, and even splashed her legs. And when we rather plume ourselves (with reason too) upon our legs, and keep ourselves particularly neat in point of stockings, we find this, for the moment, hard to bear. Besides, the Kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It wouldn’t allow itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it wouldn’t hear of accommodating itself kindly to the knobs of coal; it would lean forward with a drunken air, and dribble, a very Idiot of a Kettle, on the hearth. It was quarrelsome; and hissed and spluttered morosely at the fire. To sum up all, the lid, resisting Mrs. Peerybingle’s fingers, first of all turned topsy-turvy, and then, with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a better cause, dived sideways in—down to the very bottom of the Kettle. And the hull of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous resistance to coming out of the water, which the lid of that Kettle employed against Mrs. Peerybingle, before she got it up again. It looked sullen and pig-headed enough, even then; carrying its handle with an air of defiance, and cocking its spout pertly and mockingly at Mrs. Peerybingle, as if it said, "I won’t boil. Nothing shall induce me!" But Mrs. Peerybingle, with restored good humour, dusted her chubby little hands against each other, and sat down before the Kettle: laughing. Meantime, the jolly blaze uprose and fell, flashing and gleaming on the little Haymaker at the top of the Dutch clock, until one might have thought he stood stock still before the Moorish Palace, and nothing was in motion but the flame. He was on the move, however; and had his spasms, two to the second, all right and regular. But, his sufferings when the clock was going to strike, were frightful to behold; and, when a Cuckoo looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six times, it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice—or like a something wiry, plucking at his legs. It was not until a violent commotion and a whirring noise among the weights and ropes below him had quite subsided, that this terrified Haymaker became himself again. Nor was he startled without reason; for these rattling, bony skeletons of clocks are very disconcerting in their operation, and I wonder very much how any set of men, but most of all how Dutchmen, can have had a liking to invent them. There is a popular belief that Dutchmen love broad cases and much clothing for their own lower selves; and they might know better than to leave their clocks so very lank and unprotected, surely. Now it was, you observe, that the Kettle began to spend the evening. Now it was, that the Kettle, growing mellow and musical, began to have irrepressible gurglings in its throat, and to indulge in short vocal snorts, which it checked in the bud, as if it hadn’t quite made up its mind yet, to be good company. Now it was, that after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst into a stream of song so cosy and hilarious, as never maudlin nightingale yet formed the least idea of. So plain too! Bless you, you might have understood it like a book—better than some books you and I could name, perhaps. With its warm breath gushing forth in a light cloud which merrily and gracefully ascended a few feet, then hung about the chimney-corner as its own domestic Heaven, it trolled its song with that strong energy of cheerfulness, that its iron body hummed and stirred upon the fire; and the lid itself, the recently rebellious lid—such is the influence of a bright example—performed a sort of jig, and clattered like a deaf and dumb young cymbal that had never known the use of its twin brother. That this song of the Kettle’s, was a song of invitation and welcome to somebody out of doors; to somebody at that moment coming on, towards the snug small home and the crisp fire; there is no doubt whatever. Mrs. Peerybingle knew it, perfectly, as she sat musing before the hearth. It’s a dark night, sang the Kettle, and the rotten leaves are lying by the way; and, above, all is mist and darkness, and below, all is mire and clay; and there’s only one relief in all the sad and murky air; and I don’t know that it is one, for it’s nothing but a glare, of deep and angry crimson, where the sun and wind together, set a brand upon the clouds for being guilty of such weather; and the widest open country is a long dull streak of black; and there’s hoar-frost on the finger-post, and thaw upon the track; and the ice it isn’t water, and the water isn’t free; and you couldn’t say that anything is what it ought to be; but he’s coming, coming, coming!— And here, if you like, the Cricket DID chime in! with a Chirrup, Chirrup, Chirrup of such magnitude, by way of chorus; with a voice so astoundingly disproportionate to its size, as compared with the Kettle; (size! you couldn’t See it!) that if it had then and there burst itself like an overcharged gun: if it had fallen a victim on the spot, and chirruped its little body into fifty pieces: it would have seemed a natural and inevitable consequence, for which it had expressly laboured. The Kettle had had the last of its solo performance. It persevered with undiminished ardour; but the Cricket took first fiddle and kept it. Good Heaven, how it chirped! Its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the outer darkness like a Star. There was an indescribable little trill and tremble in it, at its loudest, which suggested its being carried off its legs, and made to leap again, by its own intense enthusiasm. Yet they went very well together, the Cricket and the Kettle. The burden of the song was still the same; and louder, louder, louder still, they sang it in their emulation. The fair little listener; for fair she was, and young—though something of what is called the dumpling shape; but I don’t myself object to that—lighted a candle; glanced at the Haymaker on the top of the clock, who was getting in a pretty average crop of minutes; and looked out of the window, where she saw nothing, owing to the darkness, but her own face imaged in the glass. And my opinion is (and so would your's have been), that she might have looked a long way, and seen nothing half so agreeable. When she came back, and sat down in her former seat, the Cricket and the Kettle were still keeping it up, with a perfect fury of competition. The Kettle’s weak side clearly being that he didn’t know when he was beat. There was all the excitement of a race about it. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket a mile ahead. Hum, hum, hum—m—m! Kettle making play in the distance, like a great top. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket round the corner. Hum, hum, hum—m—m! Kettle sticking to him in his own way; no idea of giving in. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket fresher than ever. Hum, hum, hum—m—m! Kettle slow and steady. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket going in to finish him. Hum, hum, hum—m—m! Kettle not to be finished. Until at last, they got so jumbled together, in the hurry-skurry, helter-skelter, of the match, that whether the Kettle chirped and the Cricket hummed, or the Cricket chirped and the Kettle hummed, or they both chirped and both hummed, it would have taken a clearer head than your's or mine to have decided with anything like certainty. But of this, there is no doubt: that the Kettle and the Cricket, at one and the same moment, and by some power of amalgamation best known to themselves, sent, each, his fireside song of comfort streaming into a ray of the candle that shone out through the window; and a long way down the lane. And this light, bursting on a certain person who, on the instant, approached towards it through the gloom, expressed the whole thing to him, literally in a twinkling, and cried, "Welcome home, old fellow! Welcome home, my Boy!" This end attained, the Kettle, being dead beat, boiled over, and was taken off the fire. Mrs. Peerybingle then went running to the door, where, what with the wheels of a cart, the tramp of a horse, the voice of a man, the tearing in and out of an excited dog, and the surprising and mysterious appearance of a Baby, there was soon the very What’s-his-name to pay. Where the Baby came from, or how Mrs. Peerybingle got hold of it in that flash of time, I don’t know. But a live Baby there was, in Mrs. Peerybingle’s arms; and a pretty tolerable amount of pride she seemed to have in it, when she was drawn gently to the fire, by a sturdy figure of a man, much taller and much older than herself; who had to stoop a long way down, to kiss her. But she was worth the trouble. Six foot six, with the lumbago, might have done it. "Oh goodness, John!" said Mrs. P. "What a state you are in with the weather!" He was something the worse for it, undeniably. The thick mist hung in clots upon his eyelashes like candied thaw; and between the fog and fire together, there were rainbows in his very whiskers. "Why, you see, Dot," John made answer, slowly, as he unrolled a shawl from about his throat; and warmed his hands; "it—it an’t exactly summer weather. So, no wonder." "I wish you wouldn’t call me Dot, John. I don’t like it," said Mrs. Peerybingle: pouting in a way that clearly showed she did like it, very much. "Why what else are you?" returned John, looking down upon her with a smile, and giving her waist as light a squeeze as his huge hand and arm could give. "A dot and"—here he glanced at the Baby—"a dot and carry—I won’t say it, for fear I should spoil it; but I was very near a joke. I don’t know as ever I was nearer." He was often near to something or other very clever, by his own account: this lumbering, slow, honest John; this John so heavy but so light of spirit; so rough upon the surface, but so gentle at the core; so dull without, so quick within; so stolid, but so good! Oh Mother Nature, give thy children the true Poetry of Heart that hid itself in this poor Carrier’s breast—he was but a Carrier by the way—and we can bear to have them talking Prose, and leading lives of Prose; and bear to bless Thee for their company! It was pleasant to see Dot, with her little figure and her Baby in her arms: a very doll of a Baby: glancing with a coquettish thoughtfulness at the fire, and inclining her delicate little head just enough on one side to let it rest in an odd, half-natural, half-affected, wholly nestling and agreeable manner, on the great rugged figure of the Carrier. It was pleasant to see him, with his tender awkwardness, endeavouring to adapt his rude support to her slight need, and make his burly middle-age a leaning-staff not inappropriate to her blooming youth. It was pleasant to observe how Tilly Slowboy, waiting in the background for the Baby, took special cognizance (though in her earliest teens) of this grouping; and stood with her mouth and eyes wide open, and her head thrust forward, taking it in as if it were air. Nor was it less agreeable to observe how John the Carrier, reference being made by Dot to the aforesaid Baby, checked his hand when on the point of touching the infant, as if he thought he might crack it; and bending down, surveyed it from a safe distance, with a kind of puzzled pride: such as an amiable mastiff might be supposed to show, if he found himself, one day, the father of a young canary. "An’t he beautiful, John? Don’t he look precious in his sleep?" "Very precious," said John. "Very much so. He generally is asleep, an’t he?" "Lor, John! Good gracious no!" "Oh," said John, pondering. "I thought his eyes was generally shut. Halloa!" "Goodness, John, how you startle one!" "It an’t right for him to turn ’em up in that way!" said the astonished Carrier, "is it? See how he’s winking with both of ’em at once! and look at his mouth! why he’s gasping like a gold and silver fish!" "You don’t deserve to be a father, you don’t," said Dot, with all the dignity of an experienced matron. "But how should you know what little complaints children are troubled with, John! You wouldn’t so much as know their names, you stupid fellow." And when she had turned the Baby over on her left arm, and had slapped its back as a restorative, she pinched her husband’s ear, laughing. "No," said John, pulling off his outer coat. "It’s very true, Dot. I don’t know much about it. I only know that I’ve been fighting pretty stiffly with the Wind to-night. It’s been blowing north-east, straight into the cart, the whole way home." "Poor old man, so it has!" cried Mrs. Peerybingle, instantly becoming very active. "Here! Take the precious darling, Tilly, while I make myself of some use. Bless it, I could smother it with kissing it; I could! Hie then, good dog! Hie Boxer, boy! Only let me make the tea first, John; and then I’ll help you with the parcels, like a busy bee. 'How doth the little'—and all the rest of it, you know John. Did you ever learn 'how doth the little,' when you went to school, John?" "Not to quite know it," John returned. "I was very near it once. But I should only have spoilt it, I dare say." "Ha ha!" laughed Dot. She had the blithest little laugh you ever heard. "What a dear old darling of a dunce you are, John, to be sure!" Not at all disputing this position, John went out to see that the boy with the lantern, which had been dancing to and fro before the door and window, like a Will of the Wisp, took due care of the horse; who was fatter than you would quite believe, if I gave you his measure, and so old that his birthday was lost in the mists of antiquity. Boxer, feeling that his attentions were due to the family in general, and must be impartially distributed, dashed in and out with bewildering inconstancy: now, describing a circle of short barks round the horse, where he was being rubbed down at the stable-door; now feigning to make savage rushes at his mistress, and facetiously bringing himself to sudden stops; now eliciting a shriek from Tilly Slowboy, in the low nursing-chair near the fire, by the unexpected application of his moist nose to her countenance; now exhibiting an obtrusive interest in the Baby; now going round and round upon the hearth, and lying down as if he had established himself for the night; now getting up again, and taking that nothing of a fag-end of a tail of his, out into the weather, as if he had just remembered an appointment, and was off, at a round trot, to keep it. "There! There’s the teapot, ready on the hob!" said Dot; as briskly busy as a child at play at keeping house. "And there’s the old knuckle of ham; and there’s the butter; and there’s the crusty loaf, and all! Here’s the clothes-basket for the small parcels, John, if you’ve got any there—where are you, John? Don’t let the dear child fall under the grate, Tilly, whatever you do!" It may be noted of Miss Slowboy, in spite of her rejecting the caution with some vivacity, that she had a rare and surprising talent for getting this Baby into difficulties: and had several times imperilled its short life, in a quiet way peculiarly her own. She was of a spare and straight shape, this young lady, insomuch that her garments appeared to be in constant danger of sliding off those sharp pegs, her shoulders, on which they were loosely hung. Her costume was remarkable for the partial development, on all possible occasions, of some flannel vestment of a singular structure; also for affording glimpses, in the region of the back, of a corset, or pair of stays, in colour a dead-green. Being always in a state of gaping admiration at everything, and absorbed, besides, in the perpetual contemplation of her mistress’s perfections and the Baby’s, Miss Slowboy, in her little errors of judgment, may be said to have done equal honour to her head and to her heart; and though these did less honour to the Baby’s head, which they were the occasional means of bringing into contact with deal doors, dressers, stair-rails, bedposts, and other foreign substances, still they were the honest results of Tilly Slowboy’s constant astonishment at finding herself so kindly treated, and installed in such a comfortable home. For, the maternal and paternal Slowboy were alike unknown to Fame, and Tilly had been bred by public charity, a Foundling; which word, though only differing from Fondling by one vowel’s length, is very different in meaning, and expresses quite another thing. To have seen little Mrs. Peerybingle come back with her husband; tugging at the clothes-basket, and making the most strenuous exertions to do nothing at all (for he carried it); would have amused you almost as much as it amused him. It may have entertained the Cricket too, for anything I know; but, certainly, it now began to chirp again, vehemently. "Heyday!" said John, in his slow way. "It’s merrier than ever, to-night, I think." "And it’s sure to bring us good fortune, John! It always has done so. To have a Cricket on the Hearth, is the luckiest thing in all the world!" John looked at her as if he had very nearly got the thought into his head, that she was his Cricket in chief, and he quite agreed with her. But, it was probably one of his narrow escapes, for he said nothing. "The first time I heard its cheerful little note, John, was on that night when you brought me home—when you brought me to my new home here; its little mistress. Nearly a year ago. You recollect, John?" O yes. John remembered. I should think so! "Its chirp was such a welcome to me! It seemed so full of promise and encouragement. It seemed to say, you would be kind and gentle with me, and would not expect (I had a fear of that, John, then) to find an old head on the shoulders of your foolish little wife." John thoughtfully patted one of the shoulders, and then the head, as though he would have said No, No; he had had no such expectation; he had been quite content to take them as they were. And really he had reason. They were very comely. "It spoke the truth, John, when it seemed to say so: for you have ever been, I am sure, the best, the most considerate, the most affectionate of husbands to me. This has been a happy home, John; and I love the Cricket for its sake!" "Why so do I then," said the Carrier. "So do I, Dot." "I love it for the many times I have heard it, and the many thoughts its harmless music has given me. Sometimes, in the twilight, when I have felt a little solitary and down-hearted, John—before Baby was here to keep me company and make the house gay; when I have thought how lonely you would be if I should die; how lonely I should be if I could know that you had lost me, dear; its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp upon the hearth, has seemed to tell me of another little voice, so sweet, so very dear to me, before whose coming sound, my trouble vanished like a dream. And when I used to fear—I did fear once, John; I was very young you know—that ours might prove to be an ill-assorted marriage: I being such a child, and you more like my guardian than my husband: and that you might not, however hard you tried, be able to learn to love me, as you hoped and prayed you might; its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp, has cheered me up again, and filled me with new trust and confidence. I was thinking of these things to-night, dear, when I sat expecting you; and I love the Cricket for their sake!" "And so do I," repeated John. "But, Dot? I hope and pray that I might learn to love you? How you talk! I had learnt that, long before I brought you here, to be the Cricket’s little mistress, Dot!" She laid her hand, an instant, on his arm, and looked up at him with an agitated face, as if she would have told him something. Next moment, she was down upon her knees before the basket; speaking in a sprightly voice, and busy with the parcels. "There are not many of them to-night, John, but I saw some goods behind the cart, just now; and though they give more trouble, perhaps, still they pay as well; so we have no reason to grumble, have we? Besides, you have been delivering, I dare say, as you came along?" Oh yes, John said. A good many. "Why what’s this round box? Heart alive, John, it’s a wedding-cake!" "Leave a woman alone to find out that," said John, admiringly. "Now a man would never have thought of it! whereas, it’s my belief that if you was to pack a wedding-cake up in a tea-chest, or a turn-up bedstead, or a pickled salmon keg, or any unlikely thing, a woman would be sure to find it out directly. Yes; I called for it at the pastry-cook’s." "And it weighs I don’t know what—whole hundredweights!" cried Dot, making a great demonstration of trying to lift it. "Whose is it, John? Where is it going?" "Read the writing on the other side," said John. "Why, John! My Goodness, John!" "Ah! who’d have thought it!" John returned. "You never mean to say," pursued Dot, sitting on the floor and shaking her head at him, "that it’s Gruff and Tackleton the toymaker!" John nodded. Mrs. Peerybingle nodded also, fifty times at least. Not in assent: in dumb and pitying amazement; screwing up her lips, the while, with all their little force (they were never made for screwing up; I am clear of that), and looking the good Carrier through and through, in her abstraction. Miss Slowboy, in the mean time, who had a mechanical power of reproducing scraps of current conversation for the delectation of the Baby, with all the sense struck out of them, and all the Nouns changed into the Plural number, inquired aloud of that young creature, Was it Gruffs and Tackletons the toymakers then, and Would it call at Pastry-cooks for wedding-cakes, and Did its mothers know the boxes when its fathers brought them homes; and so on. "And that is really to come about!" said Dot. "Why, she and I were girls at school together, John." He might have been thinking of her: or nearly thinking of her, perhaps: as she was in that same school time. He looked upon her with a thoughtful pleasure, but he made no answer. "And he’s as old! As unlike her!—Why, how many years older than you, is Gruff and Tackleton, John?" "How many more cups of tea shall I drink to-night at one sitting, than Gruff and Tackleton ever took in four, I wonder!" replied John, good-humouredly, as he drew a chair to the round table, and began at the cold Ham. "As to eating, I eat but little; but that little I enjoy, Dot." Even this; his usual sentiment at meal times; one of his innocent delusions (for his appetite was always obstinate, and flatly contradicted him); awoke no smile in the face of his little wife, who stood among the parcels, pushing the cake-box slowly from her with her foot, and never once looked, though her eyes were cast down too, upon the dainty shoe she generally was so mindful of. Absorbed in thought, she stood there, heedless alike of the tea and John (although he called to her, and rapped the table with his knife to startle her), until he rose and touched her on the arm; when she looked at him for a moment, and hurried to her place behind the teaboard, laughing at her negligence. But not as she had laughed before. The manner, and the music, were quite changed. The Cricket, too, had stopped. Somehow the room was not so cheerful as it had been. Nothing like it. "So, these are all the parcels, are they, John?" she said: breaking a long silence, which the honest Carrier had devoted to the practical illustration of one part of his favourite sentiment—certainly enjoying what he ate, if it couldn’t be admitted that he ate but little. "So these are all the parcels; are they, John?" "That’s all," said John. "Why—no—I—" laying down his knife and fork, and taking a long breath. "I declare—I’ve clean forgotten the old gentleman!" "The old gentleman?" "In the cart," said John. "He was asleep, among the straw, the last time I saw him. I’ve very nearly remembered him, twice, since I came in; but he went out of my head again. Halloa! Yahip there! rouse up! That’s my hearty!" John said these latter words, outside the door, whither he had hurried with the candle in his hand. Miss Slowboy, conscious of some mysterious reference to The Old Gentleman, and connecting in her mystified imagination certain associations of a religious nature with the phrase, was so disturbed, that hastily rising from the low chair by the fire to seek protection near the skirts of her mistress, and coming into contact as she crossed the doorway with an ancient Stranger, she instinctively made a charge or butt at him with the only offensive instrument within her reach. This instrument happening to be the Baby, great commotion and alarm ensued, which the sagacity of Boxer rather tended to increase; for, that good dog, more thoughtful than its master, had, it seemed, been watching the old gentleman in his sleep lest he should walk off with a few young Poplar trees that were tied up behind the cart; and he still attended on him very closely; worrying his gaiters in fact, and making dead sets at the buttons. "You’re such an undeniable good sleeper, Sir," said John when tranquillity was restored; in the mean time the old gentleman had stood, bare-headed and motionless, in the centre of the room; "that I have half a mind to ask you where the other six are: only that would be a joke, and I know I should spoil it. Very near though," murmured the Carrier, with a chuckle; "very near!" The Stranger, who had long white hair; good features, singularly bold and well defined for an old man, and dark, bright, penetrating eyes, looked round with a smile, and saluted the Carrier’s wife by gravely inclining his head. His garb was very quaint and odd—a long, long way behind the time. Its hue was brown, all over. In his hand he held a great brown club or walking-stick; and striking this upon the floor, it fell asunder, and became a chair. On which he sat down, quite composedly. "There!" said the Carrier, turning to his wife. "That’s the way I found him, sitting by the roadside! upright as a milestone. And almost as deaf." "Sitting in the open air, John!" "In the open air," replied the Carrier, "just at dusk. 'Carriage Paid,' he said; and gave me eighteenpence. Then he got in. And there he is." "He’s going, John, I think!" Not at all. He was only going to speak. "If you please, I was to be left till called for," said the Stranger, mildly. "Don’t mind me." With that, he took a pair of spectacles from one of his large pockets, and a book from another; and leisurely began to read. Making no more of Boxer than if he had been a house lamb! The Carrier and his wife exchanged a look of perplexity. The Stranger raised his head; and glancing from the latter to the former, said: "Your daughter, my good friend?" "Wife," returned John. "Niece?" said the Stranger. "Wife," roared John. "Indeed?" observed the Stranger. "Surely? Very young!" He quietly turned over, and resumed his reading. But, before he could have read two lines, he again interrupted himself to say: "Baby, yours?" John gave him a gigantic nod; equivalent to an answer in the affirmative, delivered through a speaking trumpet. "Girl?" "Bo-o-oy!' roared John. "Also very young, eh?" Mrs. Peerybingle instantly struck in. "Two months and three da-ays! Vaccinated just six weeks ago-o! Took very fine-ly! Considered, by the doctor, a remarkably beautiful chi-ild! Equal to the general run of children at five months o-old! Takes notice, in a way quite won-der-ful! May seem impossible to you, but feels his legs al-ready!" Here the breathless little mother, who had been shrieking these short sentences into the old man’s ear, until her pretty face was crimsoned, held up the Baby before him as a stubborn and triumphant fact; while Tilly Slowboy, with a melodious cry of Ketcher, Ketcher—which sounded like some unknown words, adapted to a popular Sneeze—performed some cow-like gambols round that all unconscious Innocent. "Hark! He’s called for, sure enough," said John. "There’s somebody at the door. Open it, Tilly." Before she could reach it, however, it was opened from without; being a primitive sort of door, with a latch, that any one could lift if he chose—and a good many people did choose, I can tell you; for all kinds of neighbours liked to have a cheerful word or two with the Carrier, though he was no great talker for the matter of that. Being opened, it gave admission to a little, meagre, thoughtful, dingy-faced man, who seemed to have made himself a great-coat from the sack-cloth covering of some old box; for when he turned to shut the door, and keep the weather out, he disclosed upon the back of that garment, the inscription G & T in large black capitals. Also the word GLASS in bold characters. "Good evening John!" said the little man. "Good evening Mum. Good evening Tilly. Good evening Unbeknown! How’s Baby Mum? Boxer’s pretty well I hope?" "All thriving, Caleb," replied Dot. "I am sure you need only look at the dear child, for one, to know that." "And I’m sure I need only look at you for another," said Caleb. He didn’t look at her though; he had a wandering and thoughtful eye which seemed to be always projecting itself into some other time and place, no matter what he said; a description which will equally apply to his voice. "Or at John for another," said Caleb. "Or at Tilly, as far as that goes. Or certainly at Boxer." "Busy just now, Caleb?" asked the Carrier. "Why, pretty well, John," he returned, with the distraught air of a man who was casting about for the Philosopher’s stone, at least. "Pretty much so. There’s rather a run on Noah’s Arks at present. I could have wished to improve upon the Family, but I don’t see how it’s to be done at the price. It would be a satisfaction to one’s mind, to make it clearer which was Shems and Hams, and which was Wives. Flies an’t on that scale neither, as compared with elephants you know! Ah! well! Have you got anything in the parcel line for me, John?" The Carrier put his hand into a pocket of the coat he had taken off; and brought out, carefully preserved in moss and paper, a tiny flower-pot. "There it is!" he said, adjusting it with great care. "Not so much as a leaf damaged. Full of buds!" Caleb’s dull eye brightened, as he took it, and thanked him. "Dear, Caleb," said the Carrier. "Very dear at this season." "Never mind that. It would be cheap to me, whatever it cost," returned the little man. "Anything else, John?" "A small box," replied the Carrier. "Here you are!" "'For Caleb Plummer,'" said the little man, spelling out the direction. "'With Cash.' With Cash, John? I don’t think it’s for me." "With Care," returned the Carrier, looking over his shoulder. "Where do you make out cash?" "Oh! To be sure!" said Caleb. "It’s all right. With care! Yes, yes; that’s mine. It might have been with cash, indeed, if my dear Boy in the Golden South Americas had lived, John. You loved him like a son; didn’t you? You needn’t say you did. I know, of course. 'Caleb Plummer. With care.' Yes, yes, it’s all right. It’s a box of dolls’ eyes for my daughter’s work. I wish it was her own sight in a box, John." "I wish it was, or could be!" cried the Carrier. "Thank’ee," said the little man. "You speak very hearty. To think that she should never see the Dolls; and them a-staring at her, so bold, all day long! That’s where it cuts. What’s the damage, John?" "I’ll damage you," said John, "if you inquire. Dot! Very near?" "Well! it’s like you to say so," observed the little man. "It’s your kind way. Let me see. I think that’s all." "I think not," said the Carrier. "Try again." "Something for our Governor, eh?" said Caleb, after pondering a little while. "To be sure. That’s what I came for; but my head’s so running on them Arks and things! He hasn’t been here, has he?" "Not he," returned the Carrier. "He’s too busy, courting." "He’s coming round though," said Caleb; "for he told me to keep on the near side of the road going home, and it was ten to one he’d take me up. I had better go, by the bye.—You couldn’t have the goodness to let me pinch Boxer’s tail, Mum, for half a moment, could you?" "Why, Caleb! what a question!" "Oh never mind, Mum," said the little man. "He mightn’t like it perhaps. There’s a small order just come in, for barking dogs; and I should wish to go as close to Natur’ as I could, for sixpence. That’s all. Never mind, Mum." It happened opportunely, that Boxer, without receiving the proposed stimulus, began to bark with great zeal. But, as this implied the approach of some new visitor, Caleb, postponing his study from the life to a more convenient season, shouldered the round box, and took a hurried leave. He might have spared himself the trouble, for he met the visitor upon the threshold. "Oh! You are here, are you? Wait a bit. I’ll take you home. John Peerybingle, my service to you. More of my service to your pretty wife. Handsomer every day! Better too, if possible! And younger," mused the speaker, in a low voice; "that’s the Devil of it!" "I should be astonished at your paying compliments, Mr. Tackleton," said Dot, not with the best grace in the world; "but for your condition." "You know all about it then?" "I have got myself to believe it, somehow," said Dot. "After a hard struggle, I suppose?" "Very." Tackleton the Toy-merchant, pretty generally known as Gruff and Tackleton—for that was the firm, though Gruff had been bought out long ago; only leaving his name, and as some said his nature, according to its Dictionary meaning, in the business—Tackleton the Toy merchant, was a man whose vocation had been quite misunderstood by his Parents and Guardians. If they had made him a Money Lender, or a sharp Attorney, or a Sheriff’s Officer, or a Broker, he might have sown his discontented oats in his youth, and, after having had the full-run of himself in ill-natured transactions, might have turned out amiable, at last, for the sake of a little freshness and novelty. But, cramped and chafing in the peaceable pursuit of toy-making, he was a domestic Ogre, who had been living on chiidren all his life, and was their implacable enemy. He despised all toys; wouldn’t have bought one for the world; delighted, in his malice, to insinuate grim expressions into the faces of brown-paper farmers who drove pigs to market, bellmen who advertised lost lawyers’ consciences, movable old ladies who darned stockings or carved pies; and other like samples of his stock in trade. In appalling masks; hideous, hairy, red-eyed Jacks in Boxes; Vampire Kites; demoniacal Tumblers who wouldn’t lie down, and were perpetually flying forward, to stare infants out of countenance; his soul perfectly revelled. They were his only relief, and safety-valve. He was great in such inventions. Anything suggestive of a Pony-nightmare, was delicious to him. He had even lost money (and he took to that toy very kindly) by getting up Goblin slides for magic lanterns, whereon the Powers of Darkness were depicted as a sort of supernatural shell-fish, with human faces. In intensifying the portraiture of Giants, he had sunk quite a little capital; and, though no painter himself, he could indicate, for the instruction of his artists, with a piece of chalk, a certain furtive leer for the countenances of those monsters, which was safe to destroy the peace of mind of any young gentleman between the ages of six and eleven, for the whole Christmas or Midsummer Vacation. What he was in toys, he was (as most men are) in all other things. You may easily suppose, therefore, that within the great green cape, which reached down to the calves of his legs, there was buttoned up to the chin an uncommonly pleasant fellow; and that he was about as choice a spirit and as agreeable a companion, as ever stood in a pair of bull-headed-looking boots with mahogany-colored tops. Still, Tackleton, the Toy-merchant, was going to be married. In spite of all this, he was going to be married. And to a young wife too; a beautiful young wife. He didn’t look much like a Bridegroom, as he stood in the Carrier’s kitchen, with a twist in his dry face, and a screw in his body, and his hat jerked over the bridge of his nose, and his hands tucked down into the bottoms of his pockets, and his whole sarcastic ill-conditioned self peering out of one little corner of one little eye, like the concentrated essence of any number of ravens. But, a Bridegroom he designed to be. "In three days’ time. Next Thursday. The last day of the first month in the year. That’s my wedding-day," said Tackleton. Did I mention that he had always one eye wide open, and one eye nearly shut; and that the one eye nearly shut, was always the expressive eye? I don’t think I did. "That’s my wedding-day!" said Tackleton, rattling his money. "Why, it’s our wedding-day too," exclaimed the Carrier. "Ha ha!" laughed Tackleton. "Odd! You’re just such another couple. Just!" The indignation of Dot at this presumptuous assertion is not to be described. What next? His imagination would compass the possibility of just such another Baby, perhaps. The man was mad. "I say! A word with you," murmured Tackleton, nudging the Carrier with his elbow, and taking him a little apart. "You’ll come to the wedding? We’re in the same boat, you know." "How in the same boat?" inquired the Carrier. "A little disparity, you know;" said Tackleton, with another nudge. "Come and spend an evening with us, beforehand." "Why?" demanded John, astonished at this pressing hospitality. "Why?" returned the other. "That’s a new way of receiving an invitation. Why, for pleasure—sociability, you know, and all that!" "I thought you were never sociable," said John, in his plain way. "Tchah! It’s of no use to be anything but free with you I see," said Tackleton. "Why, then, the truth is you have a—what tea-drinking people call a sort of a comfortable appearance together, you and your wife. We know better, you know, but—" "No, we don’t know better," interposed John. "What are you talking about?" "Well! We don’t know better, then," said Tackleton. "We’ll agree that we don’t. As you like; what does it matter? I was going to say, as you have that sort of appearance, your company will produce a favourable effect on Mrs. Tackleton that will be. And, though I don’t think your good lady’s very friendly to me, in this matter, still she can’t help herself from falling into my views, for there’s a compactness and cosiness of appearance about her that always tells, even in an indifferent case. You’ll say you’ll come?" "We have arranged to keep our Wedding-Day (as far as that goes) at home," said John. "We have made the promise to ourselves these six months. We think, you see, that home—" "Bah! what’s home?" cried Tackleton. "Four walls and a ceiling! (why don’t you kill that Cricket? I would! I always do. I hate their noise.) There are four walls and a ceiling at my house. Come to me!" "You kill your Crickets, eh?" said John. "Scrunch ’em, sir," returned the other, setting his heel heavily on the floor. "You’ll say you’ll come? It’s as much your interest as mine, you know, that the women should persuade each other that they’re quiet and contented, and couldn’t be better off. I know their way. Whatever one woman says, another woman is determined to clinch, always. There’s that spirit of emulation among ’em, Sir, that if your wife says to my wife, 'I’m the happiest woman in the world, and mine’s the best husband in the world, and I dote on him,' my wife will say the same to yours, or more, and half believe it." "Do you mean to say she don’t, then?" asked the Carrier. "Don’t!" cried Tackleton, with a short, sharp laugh. "Don’t what?" The Carrier had some faint idea of adding, "dote upon you." But, happening to meet the half-closed eye, as it twinkled upon him over the turned-up collar of the cape, which was within an ace of poking it out, he felt it such an unlikely part and parcel of anything to be doted on, that he substituted, "that she don’t believe it?" "Ah you dog! you’re joking," said Tackleton. But the Carrier, though slow to understand the full drift of his meaning, eyed him in such a serious manner, that he was obliged to be a little more explanatory. "I have the humour," said Tackleton: holding up the fingers of his left hand, and tapping the forefinger, to imply 'there I am, Tackleton to wit:’ ‘I have the humour, Sir, to marry a young wife, and a pretty wife:" here he rapped his little finger, to express the Bride; not sparingly, but sharply; with a sense of power. "I’m able to gratify that humour and I do. It’s my whim. But—now look there." He pointed to where Dot was sitting, thoughtfully, before the fire; leaning her dimpled chin upon her hand, and watching the bright blaze. The Carrier looked at her, and then at him, and then at her, and then at him again. "She honours and obeys, no doubt, you know," said Tackleton; "and that, as I am not a man of sentiment, is quite enough for me. But do you think there’s anything more in it?" "I think," observed the Carrier, "that I should chuck any man out of window, who said there wasn’t." "Exactly so," returned the other with an unusual alacrity of assent. "To be sure! Doubtless you would. Of course. I’m certain of it. Good night. Pleasant dreams!" The Carrier was puzzled, and made uncomfortable and uncertain, in spite of himself. He couldn’t help showing it, in his manner. "Good night, my dear friend!" said Tackleton, compassionately. "I’m off. We’re exactly alike, in reality, I see. You won’t give us to-morrow evening? Well! Next day you go out visiting, I know. I’ll meet you there, and bring my wife that is to be. It’ll do her good. You’re agreeable? Thankee. What’s that!" It was a loud cry from the Carrier’s wife; a loud, sharp, sudden cry, that made the room ring, like a glass vessel. She had risen from her seat, and stood like one transfixed by terror and surprise. The Stranger had advanced towards the fire, to warm himself, and stood within a short stride of her chair. But quite still. "Dot!" cried the Carrier. "Mary! Darling! What’s the matter?" They were all about her in a moment. Caleb, who had been dozing on the cake-box, in the first imperfect recovery of his suspended presence of mind seized Miss Slowboy by the hair of her head, but immediately apologised. "Mary!" exclaimed the Carrier, supporting her in his arms. "Are you ill! what is it? Tell me dear!" She only answered by beating her hands together, and falling into a wild fit of laughter. Then, sinking from his grasp upon the ground, she covered her face with her apron, and wept bitterly. And then she laughed again; and then she cried again; and then she said how cold it was, and suffered him to lead her to the fire, where she sat down as before. The old man standing, as before; quite still. "I’m better, John," she said. "I’m quite well now—I—" John! But John was on the other side of her. Why turn her face towards the strange old gentleman, as if addressing him! Was her brain wandering? "Only a fancy, John dear—a kind of shock—a something coming suddenly before my eyes—I don’t know what it was. It’s quite gone; quite gone." "I’m glad it’s gone," muttered Tackleton, turning the expressive eye all round the room. "I wonder where it’s gone, and what it was. Humph! Caleb, come here! Who’s that with the grey hair?" "I don’t know Sir," returned Caleb in a whisper. "Never see him before, in all my life. A beautiful figure for a nut-cracker; quite a new model. With a screw-jaw opening down into his waistcoat, he’d be lovely." "Not ugly enough," said Tackleton. "Or for a firebox, either," observed Caleb, in deep contemplation, "what a model! Unscrew his head to put the matches in; turn him heels up’ards for the light; and what a firebox for a gentleman’s mantel-shelf, just as he stands!" "Not half ugly enough," said Tackleton. "Nothing in him at all! Come! Bring that box! All right now, I hope?" "Oh quite gone! Quite gone!" said the little woman, waving him hurriedly away. "Good night!" "Good night," said Tackleton. "Good night, John Peerybingle! Take care how you carry that box, Caleb. Let it fall, and I’ll murder you! Dark as pitch, and weather worse than ever, eh? Good night!" So, with another sharp look round the room, he went out at the door; followed by Caleb with the wedding-cake on his head. The Carrier had been so much astounded by his little wife, and so busily engaged in soothing and tending her, that he had scarcely been conscious of the Stranger’s presence, until now, when he again stood there, their only guest. "He don’t belong to them, you see," said John. "I must give him a hint to go." "I beg your pardon, friend," said the old gentleman, advancing to him; "the more so, as I fear your wife has not been well; but the Attendant whom my infirmity," he touched his ears and shook his head, "renders almost indispensable, not having arrived, I fear there must be some mistake. The bad night which made the shelter of your comfortable cart (may I never have a worse!) so acceptable, is still as bad as ever. Would you, in your kindness, suffer me to rent a bed here?" "Yes, yes," cried Dot. "Yes! Certainly!" "Oh!" said the Carrier, surprised by the rapidity of this consent. "Well! I don’t object; but, still I’m not quite sure that—" "Hush!" she interrupted. "Dear John!" "Why, he’s stone deaf," urged John. "I know he is, but—Yes, Sir, certainly. Yes! certainly! I’ll make him up a bed, directly, John." As she hurried off to do it, the flutter of her spirits, and the agitation of her manner, were so strange, that the Carrier stood looking after her, quite confounded. "Did its mothers make it up a Beds then!" cried Miss Slowboy to the Baby; "and did its hair grow brown and curly, when its caps was lifted off, and frighten it, a precious Pets, a sitting by the fires!" With that unaccountable attraction of the mind to trifles, which is often incidental to a state of doubt and confusion, the Carrier, as he walked slowly to and fro, found himself mentally repeating even these absurd words, many times. So many times that he got them by heart, and was still conning them over and over, like a lesson, when Tilly, after administering as much friction to the little bald head with her hand as she thought wholesome (according to the practice of nurses), had once more tied the Baby’s cap on. "And frighten it, a Precious Pets, a sitting by the fires. What frightened Dot, I wonder!" mused the Carrier, pacing to and fro. He scouted, from his heart, the insinuations of the Toy merchant, and yet they filled him with a vague, indefinite uneasiness; for Tackleton was quick and sly; and he had that painful sense, himself, of being a man of slow perception, that a broken hint was always worrying to him. He certainly had no intention in his mind of linking anything that Tackleton had said, with the unusual conduct of his wife; but the two subjects of reflection came into his mind together, and he could not keep them asunder. The bed was soon made ready; and the visitor, declining all refreshment but a cup of tea, retired. Then, Dot: quite well again, she said, quite well again: arranged the great chair in the chimney corner for her husband; filled his pipe and gave it him; and took her usual little stool beside him on the hearth. She always would sit on that little stool; I think she must have had a kind of notion that it was a coaxing, wheedling, little stool. She was, out and out, the very best filler of a pipe, I should say, in the four quarters of the globe. To see her put that chubby little finger in the bowl, and then blow down the pipe to clear the tube; and when she had done so, affect to think that there was really something in the tube, and blow a dozen times, and hold it to her eye like a telescope, with a most provoking twist in her capital little face, as she looked down it; was quite a brilliant thing. As to the tobacco, she was perfect mistress of the subject; and her lighting of the pipe, with a wisp of paper, when the Carrier had it in his mouth—going so very near his nose, and yet not scorching it—was Art: high Art, Sir. And the Cricket and the Kettle, turning up again, acknowledged it! The bright fire, blazing up again, acknowledged it! The little Mower on the clock, in his unheeded work, acknowledged it! The Carrier, in his smoothing forehead and expanding face, acknowledged it, the readiest of all. And as he soberly and thoughtfully puffed at his old pipe; and as the Dutch clock ticked; and as the red fire gleamed; and as the Cricket chirped; that Genius of his Hearth and Home (for such the Cricket was) came out, in fairy shape, into the room, and summoned many forms of Home about him. Dots of all ages, and all sizes, filled the chamber. Dots who were merry children, running on before him, gathering flowers, in the fields; coy Dots, half shrinking from, half yielding to, the pleading of his own rough image; newly-married Dots, alighting at the door, and taking wondering possession of the household keys; motherly little Dots, attended by fictitious Slowboys, bearing babies to be christened; matronly Dots, still young and blooming, watching Dots of daughters, as they danced at rustic balls; fat Dots, encircled and beset by troops of rosy grand-children; withered Dots, who leaned on sticks, and tottered as they crept along. Old Carriers too, appeared, with blind old Boxers lying at their feet; and newer carts with younger drivers ("Peerybingle Brothers" on the tilt); and sick old Carriers, tended by the gentlest hands; and graves of dead and gone old Carriers, green in the churchyard. And as the Cricket showed him all these things—he saw them plainly, though his eyes were fixed upon the fire—the Carrier’s heart grew light and happy, and he thanked his Household Gods with all his might, and cared no more for Gruff and Tackleton than you do. But, what was that young figure of a man, which the same Fairy Cricket set so near Her stool, and which remained there, singly and alone? Why did it linger still, so near her, with its arm upon the chimney-piece, ever repeating "Married! and not to me!" O Dot! O failing Dot! There is no place for it in all your husband’s visions; why has its shadow fallen on his hearth! Chirp the Second Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves, as the Story-books say—and my blessing, with yours to back it I hope, on the Story-books, for saying anything in this workaday world!—Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves, in a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house, which was, in truth, no better than a pimple on the prominent red-brick nose of Gruff and Tackleton. The premises of Gruff and Tackleton were the great feature of the street; but you might have knocked down Caleb Plummer’s dwelling with a hammer or two, and carried off the pieces in a cart. If any one had done the dwelling-house of Caleb Plummer the honour to miss it after such an inroad, it would have been, no doubt, to commend its demolition as a vast improvement. It stuck to the premises of Gruff and Tackleton, like a barnacle to a ship’s keel, or a snail to a door, or a little bunch of toadstools to the stem of a tree. But it was the germ from which the full-grown trunk of Gruff and Tackleton had sprung; and under its crazy roof, the Gruff before last, had, in a small way, made toys for a generation of old boys and girls, who had played with them, and found them out, and broken them, and gone to sleep. I have said that Caleb and his poor Blind Daughter lived here; but I should have said that Caleb lived here, and his poor Blind Daughter somewhere else; in an enchanted home of Caleb’s furnishing, where scarcity and shabbiness were not, and trouble never entered. Caleb was no Sorcerer, but in the only magic art that still remains to us: the magic of devoted, deathless love: Nature had been the mistress of his study; and from her teaching, all the wonder came. The Blind Girl never knew that ceilings were discoloured; walls blotched, and bare of plaster here and there; high crevices unstopped, and widening every day; beams mouldering and tending downward. The Blind Girl never knew that iron was rusting, wood rotting, paper peeling off; the very size, and shape, and true proportion of the dwelling, withering away. The Blind Girl never knew that ugly shapes of delf and earthenware were on the board; that sorrow and faint-heartedness were in the house; that Caleb’s scanty hairs were turning greyer and more grey before her sightless face. The Blind Girl never knew they had a master, cold, exacting, and uninterested: never knew that Tackleton was Tackleton in short; but lived in the belief of an eccentric humourist who loved to have his jest with them; and while he was the Guardian Angel of their lives, disdained to hear one word of thankfulness. And all was Caleb’s doing; all the doing of her simple father! But he too had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its music when the motherless Blind Child was very young, that Spirit had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation might be almost changed into a blessing, and the girl made happy by these little means. For all the Cricket Tribe are potent Spirits, even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it (which is frequently the case); and there are not in the Unseen World, Voices more gentle and more true; that may be so implicitly relied on, or that are so certain to give none but tenderest counsel; as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and the Hearth, address themselves to human kind. Caleb and his daughter were at work together in their usual working-room, which served them for their ordinary living-room as well; and a strange place it was. There were houses in it, finished and unfinished, for Dolls of all stations in life. Suburban tenements for Dolls of moderate means; kitchens and single apartments for Dolls of the lower classes; capital town residences for Dolls of high estate. Some of these establishments were already furnished according to estimate, with a view to the convenience of Dolls of limited income; others could be fitted on the most expensive scale, at a moment’s notice, from whole shelves of chairs and tables, sofas, bedsteads, and upholstery. The nobility and gentry and public in general, for whose accommodation these tenements were designed, lay, here and there, in baskets, staring straight up at the ceiling; but in denoting their degrees in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often froward and perverse; for, they, not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton-print, and bits of rag, had superadded striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus, the Doll-lady of distinction had wax limbs of perfect symmetry; but only she and her compeers; the next grade in the social scale being made of leather; and the next of coarse linen stuff. As to the common-people, they had just so many matches out of tinder-boxes for their arms and legs, and there they were—established in their sphere at once, beyond the possibility of getting out of it. There were various other samples of his handicraft, besides Dolls, in Caleb Plummer’s room. There were Noah’s Arks, in which the Birds and Beasts were an uncommonly tight fit, I assure you; though they could be crammed in, anyhow, at the roof, and rattled and shaken into the smallest compass. By a bold poetical licence, most of these Noah’s Arks had knockers on the doors; inconsistent appendages, perhaps, as suggestive of morning callers and a Postman, yet a pleasant finish to the outside of the building. There were scores of melancholy little carts which, when the wheels went round, performed most doleful music. Many small fiddles, drums, and other instruments of torture; no end of cannon, shields, swords, spears, and guns. There were little tumblers in red breeches, incessantly swarming up high obstacles of red-tape, and coming down, head first, upon the other side; and there were innumerable old gentlemen of respectable, not to say venerable appearance, insanely flying over horizontal pegs, inserted, for the purpose, in their own street doors. There were beasts of all sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed; from the spotted barrel on four pegs, with a small tippet for a mane, to the thoroughbred rocker on his highest mettle. As it would have been hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdities, on the turning of a handle; so it would have been no easy task to mention any human folly, vice, or weakness, that had not its type, immediate or remote, in Caleb Plummer’s room. And not in an exaggerated form; for very little handles will move men and women to as strange performances, as any Toy was ever made to undertake. In the midst of all these objects, Caleb and his daughter sat at work. The Blind Girl busy as a Doll’s dressmaker; and Caleb painting and glazing the four-pair front of a desirable family mansion. The care imprinted in the lines of Caleb’s face, and his absorbed and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his occupation, and the trivialities about him. But trivial things, invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of fact; and, apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared to say, myself, that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain, or a Member of Parliament, or a lawyer, or even a great speculator, he would have dealt in toys one whit less whimsical; while I have a very great doubt whether they would have been as harmless. "So you were out in the rain last night, father, in your beautiful, new, great-coat," said Caleb’s daughter. "In my beautiful new great-coat," answered Caleb, glancing towards a clothes-line in the room, on which the sack-cloth garment previously described, was carefully hung up to dry. "How glad I am you bought it, father!" "And of such a tailor, too," said Caleb. "Quite a fashionable tailor. It’s too good for me." The Blind Girl rested from her work, and laughed with delight. "Too good, father! What can be too good for you?" "I’m half-ashamed to wear it though," said Caleb, watching the effect of what he said, upon her brightening face; "upon my word! When I hear the boys and people say behind me, 'Hal-loa! Here’s a swell!' I don’t know which way to look. And when the beggar wouldn’t go away last night; and when I said I was a very common man, said 'No, your Honour! Bless your Honour don’t say that!' I was quite ashamed. I really felt as if I hadn’t a right to wear it." Happy Blind Girl! How merry she was, in her exultation! "I see you, father," she said, clasping her hands, "as plainly, as if I had the eyes I never want when you are with me. A blue coat—" "Bright blue," said Caleb. "Yes, yes! Bright blue!" exclaimed the girl, turning up her radiant face; "the colour I can just remember in the blessed sky! You told me it was blue before! A bright blue coat—" "Made loose to the figure," suggested Caleb. "Made loose to the figure!" cried the Blind Girl, laughing heartily; "and in it, you, dear father, with your merry eye, your smiling face, your free step, and your dark hair: looking so young and handsome!" "Halloa! Halloa!" said Caleb. "I shall be vain, presently!" "I think you are, already," cried the Blind Girl, pointing at him, in her glee. "I know you, father! Ha ha ha! I’ve found you out, you see!" How different the picture in her mind, from Caleb, as he sat observing her! She had spoken of his free step. She was right in that. For years and years, he had never once crossed that threshold at his own slow pace, but with a footfall counterfeited for her ear; and never had he, when his heart was heaviest, forgotten the light tread that was to render hers so cheerful and courageous! Heaven knows! But I think Caleb’s vague bewilderment of manner may have half originated in his having confused himself about himself and everything around him, for the love of his Blind Daughter. How could the little man be otherwise than bewildered, after labouring for so many years to destroy his own identity, and that of all the objects that had any bearing on it! "There we are," said Caleb, falling back a pace or two to form the better judgment of his work; "as near the real thing as sixpenn’orth of halfpence is to sixpence. What a pity that the whole front of the house opens at once! If there was only a staircase in it now, and regular doors to the rooms to go in at! But that’s the worst of my calling, I’m always deluding myself, and swindling myself." "You are speaking quite softly. You are not tired, father?" "Tired!" echoed Caleb, with a great burst of animation, "what should tire me, Bertha? I was never tired. What does it mean?" To give the greater force to his words, he checked himself in an involuntary imitation of two half-length stretching and yawning figures on the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling Bowl; and he sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice, that made his face a thousand times more meagre and more thoughtful than ever. "What! You’re singing, are you?" said Tackleton, putting his head in at the door. "Go it! I can’t sing." Nobody would have suspected him of it. He hadn’t what is generally termed a singing face, by any means. "I can’t afford to sing," said Tackleton. "I’m glad you can. I hope you can afford to work too. Hardly time for both, I should think?" "If you could only see him, Bertha, how he’s winking at me!" whispered Caleb. "Such a man to joke! you’d think, if you didn’t know him, he was in earnest—wouldn’t you now?" The Blind Girl smiled and nodded. "The bird that can sing and won’t sing, must be made to sing, they say," grumbled Tackleton. "What about the owl that can’t sing, and oughtn’t to sing, and will sing; is there anything that he should be made to do?" "The extent to which he’s winking at this moment!" whispered Caleb to his daughter. "Oh, my gracious!" "Always merry and light-hearted with us!" cried the smiling Bertha. "Oh, you’re there, are you?" answered Tackleton. "Poor Idiot!" He really did believe she was an Idiot; and he founded the belief, I can’t say whether consciously or not, upon her being fond of him. "Well! and being there,—how are you?" said Tackleton, in his grudging way. "Oh! well; quite well. And as happy as even you can wish me to be. As happy as you would make the whole world, if you could!" "Poor Idiot!" muttered Tackleton. "No gleam of reason. Not a gleam!" The Blind Girl took his hand and kissed it; held it for a moment in her own two hands; and laid her cheek against it tenderly, before releasing it. There was such unspeakable affection and such fervent gratitude in the act, that Tackleton himself was moved to say, in a milder growl than usual: "What’s the matter now?" "I stood it close beside my pillow when I went to sleep last night, and remembered it in my dreams. And when the day broke, and the glorious red sun—the red sun, father?" "Red in the mornings and the evenings, Bertha," said poor Caleb, with a woeful glance at his employer. "When it rose, and the bright light I almost fear to strike myself against in walking, came into the room, I turned the little tree towards it, and blessed Heaven for making things so precious, and blessed you for sending them to cheer me!" "Bedlam broke loose!" said Tackleton under his breath. "We shall arrive at the strait-waistcoat and mufflers soon. We’re getting on!" Caleb, with his hands hooked loosely in each other, stared vacantly before him while his daughter spoke, as if he really were uncertain (I believe he was) whether Tackleton had done anything to deserve her thanks, or not. If he could have been a perfectly free agent, at that moment, required, on pain of death, to kick the Toy-merchant, or fall at his feet, according to his merits, I believe it would have been an even chance which course he would have taken. Yet, Caleb knew that with his own hands he had brought the little rose tree home for her, so carefully; and that with his own lips he had forged the innocent deception which should help to keep her from suspecting how much, how very much, he every day denied himself, that she might be the happier. "Bertha!" said Tackleton, assuming, for the nonce, a little cordiality. "Come here." "Oh! I can come straight to you! You needn’t guide me!" she rejoined. "Shall I tell you a secret, Bertha?" "If you will!" she answered, eagerly. How bright the darkened face! How adorned with light, the listening head! "This is the day on which little what’s-her-name; the spoilt child; Peerybingle’s wife; pays her regular visit to you—makes her fantastic Pic-Nic here; an’t it?" said Tackleton, with a strong expression of distaste for the whole concern. "Yes," replied Bertha. "This is the day." "I thought so," said Tackleton. "I should like to join the party." "Do you hear that, father!" cried the Blind Girl in an ecstasy. "Yes, yes, I hear it," murmured Caleb, with the fixed look of a sleep-walker; "but I don’t believe it. It’s one of my lies, I’ve no doubt." "You see I—I want to bring the Peerybingles a little more into company with May Fielding," said Tackleton. "I am going to be married to May." "Married!" cried the Blind Girl, starting from him. "She’s such a con-founded Idiot," muttered Tackleton, "that I was afraid she’d never comprehend me. Ah, Bertha! Married! Church, parson, clerk, beadle, glass-coach, bells, breakfast, bride-cake, favours, marrow-bones, cleavers, and all the rest of the tom-foolery. A wedding, you know; a wedding. Don’t you know what a wedding is?" "I know," replied the Blind Girl, in a gentle tone. "I understand!" "Do you?" muttered Tackleton. "It’s more than I expected. Well! on that account I want to join the party, and to bring May and her mother. I’ll send in a little something or other, before the afternoon. A cold leg of mutton, or some comfortable trifle of that sort. You’ll expect me?" "Yes," she answered. She had drooped her head, and turned away; and so stood, with her hands crossed, musing. "I don’t think you will," muttered Tackleton, looking at her; "for you seem to have forgotten all about it, already. Caleb!" "I may venture to say I’m here, I suppose," thought Caleb. "Sir!" "Take care she don’t forget what I’ve been saying to her." "She never forgets," returned Caleb. "It’s one of the few things she an’t clever in." "Every man thinks his own geese swans," observed the Toy merchant, with a shrug. "Poor devil!" Having delivered himself of which remark, with infinite contempt, old Gruff and Tackleton withdrew. Bertha remained where he had left her, lost in meditation. The gaiety had vanished from her downcast face, and it was very sad. Three or four times, she shook her head, as if bewailing some remembrance or some loss; but her sorrowful reflections found no vent in words. It was not until Caleb had been occupied, some time, in yoking a team of horses to a waggon by the summary process of nailing the harness to the vital parts of their bodies, that she drew near to his working-stool, and sitting down beside him, said: "Father, I am lonely in the dark. I want my eyes: my patient, willing eyes." "Here they are," said Caleb. "Always ready. They are more your's than mine, Bertha, any hour in the four and twenty. What shall your eyes do for you, dear?" "Look round the room, father." "All right," said Caleb. "No sooner said than done, Bertha." "Tell me about it." "It’s much the same as usual," said Caleb. "Homely, but very snug. The gay colors on the walls; the bright flowers on the plates and dishes; the shining wood, where there are beams or panels; the general cheerfulness and neatness of the building; make it very pretty." Cheerful and neat it was wherever Bertha’s hands could busy themselves. But nowhere else, were cheerfulness and neatness possible, in the old crazy shed which Caleb’s fancy so transformed. "You have your working dress on, and are not so gallant as when you wear the handsome coat?" said Bertha, touching him. "Not quite so gallant," answered Caleb. "Pretty brisk though." "Father," said the Blind Girl, drawing close to his side, and stealing one arm round his neck "Tell me something about May. She is very fair?" "She is indeed," said Caleb. And she was indeed. It was quite a rare thing to Caleb, not to have to draw on his invention. "Her hair is dark," said Bertha, pensively, "darker than mine. Her voice is sweet and musical, I know. I have often loved to hear it. Her shape—" "There’s not a Doll’s in all the room to equal it," said Caleb. "And her eyes!—" He stopped; for Bertha had drawn closer round his neck; and, from the arm that clung about him, came a warning pressure which he understood too well. He coughed a moment, hammered for a moment, and then fell back upon the song about the Sparkling Bowl; his infallible resource in all such difficulties. "Our friend, father; our benefactor. I am never tired you know of hearing about him.—Now was I, ever?" she said, hastily. "Of course not," answered Caleb. "And with reason." "Ah! With how much reason!" cried the Blind Girl. With such fervency, that Caleb, though his motives were so pure, could not endure to meet her face; but dropped his eyes, as if she could have read in them his innocent deceit. "Then, tell me again about him, dear father," said Bertha. "Many times again! His face is benevolent, kind, and tender. Honest and true, I am sure it is. The manly heart that tries to cloak all favours with a show of roughness and unwillingness, beats in its every look and glance." "And makes it noble!" added Caleb, in his quiet desperation. "And makes it noble!" cried the Blind Girl. "He is older than May, father." "Ye-es," said Caleb, reluctantly. "He’s a little older than May. But that don’t signify." "Oh father, yes! To be his patient companion in infirmity and age; to be his gentle nurse in sickness, and his constant friend in suffering and sorrow; to know no weariness in working for his sake; to watch him, tend him, sit beside his bed and talk to him awake; and pray for him asleep; what privileges these would be! What opportunities for proving all her truth and devotion to him! Would she do all this, dear father?" "No doubt of it," said Caleb. "I love her, father; I can love her from my soul!" exclaimed the Blind Girl. And saying so, she laid her poor blind face on Caleb’s shoulder, and so wept and wept, that he was almost sorry to have brought that tearful happiness upon her. In the mean time, there had been a pretty sharp commotion at John Peerybingle’s; for little Mrs. Peerybingle naturally couldn’t think of going anywhere without the Baby; and to get the Baby under weigh, took time. Not that there was much of the Baby: speaking of it as a thing of weight and measure: but there was a vast deal to do about and about it, and it all had to be done by easy stages. For instance, when the Baby was got, by hook and by crook, to a certain point of dressing, and you might have rationally supposed that another touch or two would finish him off, and turn him out a tip-top Baby, challenging the world, he was unexpectedly extinguished in a flannel cap, and hustled off to bed; where he simmered (so to speak) between two blankets for the best part of an hour. From this state of inaction he was then recalled, shining very much and roaring violently, to partake of—well! I would rather say, if you’ll permit me to speak generally—of a slight repast. After which, he went to sleep again. Mrs. Peerybingle took advantage of this interval, to make herself as smart in a small way as ever you saw anybody in all your life; and, during the same short truce, Miss Slowboy insinuated herself into a spencer of a fashion so surprising and ingenious, that it had no connection with herself or anything else in the universe, but was a shrunken, dog’s-eared, independent fact, pursuing its lonely course without the least regard to anybody. By this time, the Baby, being all alive again, was invested, by the united efforts of Mrs. Peerybingle and Miss Slowboy, with a cream-coloured mantle for its body, and a sort of nankeen raised-pie for its head; and so in course of time they all three got down to the door, where the old horse had already taken more than the full value of his day’s toll out of the Turnpike Trust, by tearing up the road with his impatient autographs—and whence Boxer might be dimly seen in the remote perspective, standing looking back, and tempting him to come on without orders. As to a chair, or anything of that kind for helping Mrs. Peerybingle into the cart, you know very little of John, I flatter myself, if you think that was necessary. Before you could have seen him lift her from the ground, there she was in her place, fresh and rosy, saying, "John! How can you! Think of Tilly!" If I might be allowed to mention a young lady’s legs, on any terms, I would observe of Miss Slowboy’s that there was a fatality about them which rendered them singularly liable to be grazed; and that she never effected the smallest ascent or descent, without recording the circumstance upon them with a notch, as Robinson Crusoe marked the days upon his wooden calendar. But as this might be considered ungenteel, I’ll think of it. "John? You’ve got the Basket with the Veal and Ham-Pie and things, and the bottles of Beer?’ said Dot. ‘If you haven’t, you must turn round again, this very minute." "You’re a nice little article," returned the Carrier, "to be talking about turning round, after keeping me a full quarter of an hour behind my time." "I am sorry for it, John," said Dot in a great bustle, "but I really could not think of going to Bertha’s—I would not do it, John, on any account—without the Veal and Ham-Pie and things, and the bottles of Beer. Way!" This monosyllable was addressed to the horse, who didn’t mind it at all. "Oh do way, John!" said Mrs. Peerybingle. "Please!" "It’ll be time enough to do that," returned John, "when I begin to leave things behind me. The basket’s here, safe enough." "What a hard-hearted monster you must be, John, not to have said so, at once, and saved me such a turn! I declare I wouldn’t go to Bertha’s without the Veal and Ham-Pie and things, and the bottles of Beer, for any money. Regularly once a fortnight ever since we have been married, John, have we made our little Pic-Nic there. If anything was to go wrong with it, I should almost think we were never to be lucky again." "It was a kind thought in the first instance," said the Carrier: "and I honour you for it, little woman." "My dear John," replied Dot, turning very red. "Don’t talk about honouring me. Good Gracious!’ "By the bye—" observed the Carrier. "That old gentleman,—" Again so visibly, and instantly embarrassed! "He’s an odd fish," said the Carrier, looking straight along the road before them. "I can’t make him out. I don’t believe there’s any harm in him." "None at all. I’m—I’m sure there’s none at all." "Yes," said the Carrier, with his eyes attracted to her face by the great earnestness of her manner. "I am glad you feel so certain of it, because it’s a confirmation to me. It’s curious that he should have taken it into his head to ask leave to go on lodging with us; an’t it? Things come about so strangely." "So very strangely," she rejoined in a low voice: scarcely audible. "However, he’s a good-natured old gentleman," said John, "and pays as a gentleman, and I think his word is to be relied upon, like a gentleman’s. I had quite a long talk with him this morning: he can hear me better already, he says, as he gets more used to my voice. He told me a great deal about himself, and I told him a great deal about myself, and a rare lot of questions he asked me. I gave him information about my having two beats, you know, in my business; one day to the right from our house and back again; another day to the left from our house and back again (for he’s a stranger and don’t know the names of places about here); and he seemed quite pleased. 'Why, then I shall be returning home to-night your way,' he says, 'when I thought you’d be coming in an exactly opposite direction. That’s capital! I may trouble you for another lift perhaps, but I’ll engage not to fall so sound asleep again.' He was sound asleep, sure-ly!—Dot! what are you thinking of?" "Thinking of, John? I—I was listening to you." "Oh! That’s all right!" said the honest Carrier. "I was afraid, from the look of your face, that I had gone rambling on so long, as to set you thinking about something else. I was very near it, I’ll be bound." Dot making no reply, they jogged on, for some little time, in silence. But, it was not easy to remain silent very long in John Peerybingle’s cart, for everybody on the road had something to say. Though it might only be "How are you!" and indeed it was very often nothing else, still, to give that back again in the right spirit of cordiality, required, not merely a nod and a smile, but as wholesome an action of the lungs withal, as a long-winded Parliamentary speech. Sometimes, passengers on foot, or horseback, plodded on a little way beside the cart, for the express purpose of having a chat; and then there was a great deal to be said, on both sides. Then, Boxer gave occasion to more good-natured recognitions of and by the Carrier, than half a dozen Christians could have done! Everybody knew him, all along the road, especially the fowls and pigs, who when they saw him approaching, with his body all on one side, and his ears pricked up inquisitively, and that knob of a tail making the most of itself in the air, immediately withdrew into remote back settlements, without waiting for the honour of a nearer acquaintance. He had business everywhere; going down all the turnings, looking into all the wells, bolting in and out of all the cottages, dashing into the midst of all the Dame-Schools, fluttering all the pigeons, magnifying the tails of all the cats, and trotting into the public-houses like a regular customer. Wherever he went, somebody or other might have been heard to cry, "Halloa! Here’s Boxer!" and out came that somebody forthwith, accompanied by at least two or three other somebodies, to give John Peerybingle and his pretty wife, Good Day. The packages and parcels for the errand cart, were numerous; and there were many stoppages to take them in and give them out; which were not by any means the worst parts of the journey. Some people were so full of expectation about their parcels, and other people were so full of wonder about their parcels, and other people were so full of inexhaustible directions about their parcels, and John had such a lively interest in all the parcels, that it was as good as a play. Likewise, there were articles to carry, which required to be considered and discussed, and in reference to the adjustment and disposition of which, councils had to be holden by the Carrier and the senders: at which Boxer usually assisted, in short fits of the closest attention, and long fits of tearing round and round the assembled sages and barking himself hoarse. Of all these little incidents, Dot was the amused and open-eyed spectatress from her chair in the cart; and as she sat there, looking on: a charming little portrait framed to admiration by the tilt: there was no lack of nudgings and glancings and whisperings and envyings among the younger men, I promise you. And this delighted John the Carrier, beyond measure; for he was proud to have his little wife admired, knowing that she didn’t mind it—that, if anything, she rather liked it perhaps. The trip was a little foggy, to be sure, in the January weather; and was raw and cold. But who cared for such trifles? Not Dot, decidedly. Not Tilly Slowboy, for she deemed sitting in a cart, on any terms, to be the highest point of human joys; the crowning circumstance of earthly hopes. Not the Baby, I’ll be sworn; for it’s not in Baby nature to be warmer or more sound asleep, though its capacity is great in both respects, than that blessed young Peerybingle was, all the way. You couldn’t see very far in the fog, of course; but you could see a great deal, oh a great deal! It’s astonishing how much you may see, in a thicker fog than that, if you will only take the trouble to look for it. Why, even to sit watching for the Fairy-rings in the fields, and for the patches of hoar-frost still lingering in the shade, near hedges and by trees, was a pleasant occupation: to make no mention of the unexpected shapes in which the trees themselves came starting out of the mist, and glided into it again. The hedges were tangled and bare, and waved a multitude of blighted garlands in the wind; but there was no discouragement in this. It was agreeable to contemplate; for it made the fireside warmer in possession, and the summer greener in expectancy. The river looked chilly; but it was in motion, and moving at a good pace; which was a great point. The canal was rather slow and torpid; that must be admitted. Never mind. It would freeze the sooner when the frost set fairly in, and then there would be skating, and sliding; and the heavy old barges, frozen up somewhere, near a wharf, would smoke their rusty iron chimney-pipes all day, and have a lazy time of it. In one place, there was a great mound of weeds or stubble burning; and they watched the fire, so white in the day time, flaring through the fog, with only here and there a dash of red in it, until, in consequence as she observed, of the smoke "getting up her nose," Miss Slowboy choked—she could do anything of that sort, on the smallest provocation—and woke the Baby, who wouldn’t go to sleep again. But Boxer, who was in advance some quarter of a mile or so, had already passed the outposts of the town, and gained the corner of the street where Caleb and his daughter lived; and long before they had reached the door, he and the Blind Girl were on the pavement waiting to receive them. Boxer, by the way, made certain delicate distinctions of his own, in his communication with Bertha, which persuade me fully that he knew her to be blind. He never sought to attract her attention by looking at her, as he often did with other people, but touched her, invariably. What experience he could ever have had of blind people or blind dogs, I don’t know. He had never lived with a blind master; nor had Mr. Boxer the elder, nor Mrs. Boxer, nor any of his respectable family on either side, ever been visited with blindness, that I am aware of. He may have found it out for himself, perhaps, but he had got hold of it somehow; and therefore he had hold of Bertha too, by the skirt, and kept hold, until Mrs. Peerybingle and the Baby, and Miss Slowboy, and the basket, were all got safely within doors. May Fielding was already come; and so was her mother—a little querulous chip of an old lady with a peevish face, who, in right of having preserved a waist like a bedpost, was supposed to be a most transcendent figure; and who, in consequence of having once been better off, or of labouring under an impression that she might have been, if something had happened which never did happen, and seemed to have never been particularly likely to come to pass—but it’s all the same—was very genteel and patronising indeed. Gruff and Tackleton was also there, doing the agreeable; with the evident sensation of being as perfectly at home, and as unquestionably in his own element, as a fresh young salmon on the top of the Great Pyramid. "May! My dear old friend!" cried Dot, running up to meet her. "What a happiness to see you." Her old friend was, to the full, as hearty and as glad as she; and it really was, if you’ll believe me, quite a pleasant sight to see them embrace. Tackleton was a man of taste, beyond all question. May was very pretty. You know sometimes, when you are used to a pretty face, how, when it comes into contact and comparison with another pretty face, it seems for the moment to be homely and faded, and hardly to deserve the high opinion you have had of it. Now, this was not at all the case, either with Dot or May; for May’s face set off Dot’s, and Dot’s face set off May’s, so naturally and agreeably, that, as John Peerybingle was very near saying when he came into the room, they ought to have been born sisters: which was the only improvement you could have suggested. Tackleton had brought his leg of mutton, and, wonderful to relate, a tart besides—but we don’t mind a little dissipation when our brides are in the case; we don’t get married every day—and in addition to these dainties, there were the Veal and Ham-Pie, and "things," as Mrs. Peerybingle called them; which were chiefly nuts and oranges, and cakes, and such small deer. When the repast was set forth on the board, flanked by Caleb’s contribution, which was a great wooden bowl of smoking potatoes (he was prohibited, by solemn compact, from producing any other viands), Tackleton led his intended mother-in-law to the post of honour. For the better gracing of this place at the high Festival, the majestic old Soul had adorned herself with a cap, calculated to inspire the thoughtless with sentiments of awe. She also wore her gloves. But let us be genteel, or die! Caleb sat next his daughter; Dot and her old schoolfellow were side by side; the good Carrier took care of the bottom of the table. Miss Slowboy was isolated, for the time being, from every article of furniture but the chair she sat on, that she might have nothing else to knock the Baby’s head against. As Tilly stared about her at the Dolls and Toys, they stared at her and at the company. The venerable old gentlemen at the street doors (who were all in full action) showed especial interest in the party: pausing occasionally before leaping, as if they were listening to the conversation: and then plunging wildly over and over, a great many times, without halting for breath—as in a frantic state of delight with the whole proceedings. Certainly, if these old gentlemen were inclined to have a fiendish joy in the contemplation of Tackleton’s discomfiture, they had good reason to be satisfied. Tackleton couldn’t get on at all; and the more cheerful his intended Bride became in Dot’s society, the less he liked it, though he had brought them together for that purpose. For he was a regular Dog in the Manger, was Tackleton; and when they laughed, and he couldn’t, he took it into his head, immediately, that they must be laughing at him. "Ah, May!" said Dot. "Dear dear, what changes! To talk of those merry school-days makes one young again." "Why, you an’t particularly old, at any time; are you?" said Tackleton. "Look at my sober plodding husband there," returned Dot. "He adds Twenty years to my age at least. Don’t you John?" "Forty," John replied. "How many you’ll add to May’s, I am sure I don’t know," said Dot, laughing. "But she can’t be much less than a hundred years of age on her next birthday." "Ha ha!" laughed Tackleton. Hollow as a drum, that laugh though. And he looked as if he could have twisted Dot’s neck: comfortably. "Dear dear!" said Dot. "Only to remember how we used to talk, at school, about the husbands we would choose. I don’t know how young, and how handsome, and how gay, and how lively, mine was not to be! and as to May’s!—Ah dear! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, when I think what silly girls we were." May seemed to know which to do; for the colour flushed into her face, and tears stood in her eyes. "Even the very persons themselves—real live young men—were fixed on sometimes," said Dot. "We little thought how things would come about. I never fixed on John I’m sure; I never so much as thought of him. And if I had told you, you were ever to be married to Mr. Tackleton, why you’d have slapped me. Wouldn’t you, May?" Though May didn’t say yes, she certainly didn’t say no, or express no, by any means. Tackleton laughed—quite shouted, he laughed so loud. John Peerybingle laughed too, in his ordinary good-natured and contented manner; but his was a mere whisper of a laugh, to Tackleton’s. "You couldn’t help yourselves, for all that. You couldn’t resist us, you see," said Tackleton. "Here we are! Here we are!" "Where are your gay young bridegrooms now!" "Some of them are dead," said Dot; "and some of them forgotten. Some of them, if they could stand among us at this moment, would not believe we were the same creatures; would not believe that what they saw and heard was real, and we could forget them so. No! they would not believe one word of it!" "Why, Dot!" exclaimed the Carrier. "Little woman!" She had spoken with such earnestness and fire, that she stood in need of some recalling to herself, without doubt. Her husband’s check was very gentle, for he merely interfered, as he supposed, to shield old Tackleton; but it proved effectual, for she stopped, and said no more. There was an uncommon agitation, even in her silence, which the wary Tackleton, who had brought his half-shut eye to bear upon her, noted closely; and remembered to some purpose too, as you will see. May uttered no word, good or bad, but sat quite still, with her eyes cast down; and made no sign of interest in what had passed. The good lady her mother now interposed: observing, in the first instance, that girls were girls, and byegones byegones, and that so long as young people were young and thoughtless, they would probably conduct themselves like young and thoughtless persons: with two or three other positions of a no less sound and incontrovertible character. She then remarked, in a devout spirit, that she thanked Heaven she had always found in her daughter May, a dutiful and obedient child; for which she took no credit to herself, though she had every reason to believe it was entirely owing to herself. With regard to Mr. Tackleton she said, That he was in a moral point of view an undeniable individual; and That he was in an eligible point of view a son-in-law to be desired, no one in their senses could doubt. (She was very emphatic here). With regard to the family into which he was so soon about, after some solicitation, to be admitted, she believed Mr. Tackleton knew that, although reduced in purse, it had some pretensions to gentility; and if certain circumstances, not wholly unconnected, she would go so far as to say, with the Indigo Trade, but to which she would not more particularly refer, had happened differently, it might perhaps have been in possession of Wealth. She then remarked that she would not allude to the past, and would not mention that her daughter had for some time rejected the suit of Mr. Tackleton; and that she would not say a great many other things which she did say, at great length. Finally, she delivered it as the general result of her observation and experience, that those marriages in which there was least of what was romantically and sillily called love, were always the happiest; and that she anticipated the greatest possible amount of bliss—not rapturous bliss; but the solid, steady-going article—from the approaching nuptials. She concluded by informing the company that to-morrow was the day she had lived for, expressly; and that when it was over, she would desire nothing better than to be packed up and disposed of, in any genteel place of burial. As these remarks were quite unanswerable: which is the happy property of all remarks that are sufficiently wide of the purpose: they changed the current of the conversation, and diverted the general attention to the Veal and Ham-Pie, the cold mutton, the potatoes, and the tart. In order that the bottled beer might not be slighted, John Peerybingle proposed To-morrow: the Wedding-Day: and called upon them to drink a bumper to it, before he proceeded on his journey. For you ought to know that he only rested there, and gave the old horse a bait. He had to go some four or five miles farther on; and when he returned in the evening, he called for Dot, and took another rest on his way home. This was the order of the day on all the Pic-Nic occasions, had been, ever since their institution. There were two persons present, besides the bride and bridegroom elect, who did but indifferent honour to the toast. One of these was Dot, too flushed and discomposed to adapt herself to any small occurrence of the moment; the other Bertha, who rose up hurriedly, before the rest, and left the table. "Good bye!" said stout John Peerybingle, pulling on his dreadnought coat. "I shall be back at the old time. Good bye all!" "Good bye John," returned Caleb. He seemed to say it by rote, and to wave his hand in the same unconscious manner; for he stood observing Bertha with an anxious wondering face, that never altered its expression. "Good bye young shaver!" said the jolly Carrier, bending down to kiss the child; which Tilly Slowboy, now intent upon her knife and fork, had deposited asleep (and strange to say, without damage) in a little cot of Bertha’s furnishing; "good bye! Time will come, I suppose, when you’ll turn out into the cold, my little friend, and leave your old father to enjoy his pipe and his rheumatics in the chimney-corner; eh? Where’s Dot?" "I’m here, John!" she said, starting. "Come, come!’ returned the Carrier, clapping his sounding hands. "Where’s the pipe?" "I quite forgot the pipe, John." Forgot the pipe! Was such a wonder ever heard of! She! Forgot the pipe! "I’ll—I’ll fill it directly. It’s soon done." But it was not so soon done, either. It lay in the usual place; the Carrier’s dreadnought pocket; with the little pouch, her own work, from which she was used to fill it, but her hand shook so, that she entangled it (and yet her hand was small enough to have come out easily, I am sure), and bungled terribly. The filling of the pipe and lighting it; those little offices in which I have commended her discretion, if you recollect; were vilely done, from first to last. During the whole process, Tackleton stood looking on maliciously with the half-closed eye; which, whenever it met her's—or caught it, for it can hardly be said to have ever met another eye: rather being a kind of trap to snatch it up—augmented her confusion in a most remarkable degree. "Why, what a clumsy Dot you are, this afternoon!" said John. "I could have done it better myself, I verily believe!" With these good-natured words, he strode away; and presently was heard, in company with Boxer, and the old horse, and the cart, making lively music down the road. What time the dreamy Caleb still stood, watching his Blind Daughter, with the same expression on his face. "Bertha!" said Caleb, softly. "What has happened? How changed you are, my Darling, in a few hours—since this morning. You silent and dull all day! What is it? Tell me!" "Oh father, father!" cried the Blind Girl, bursting into tears. "Oh my hard, hard Fate!" Caleb drew his hand across his eyes before he answered her. "But think how cheerful and how happy you have been, Bertha! How good, and how much loved, by many people." "That strikes me to the heart, dear father! Always so mindful of me! Always so kind to me!" Caleb was very much perplexed to understand her. "To be—to be blind, Bertha, my poor dear," he faultered, "is a great affliction; but—" "I have never felt it!" cried the Blind Girl. "I have never felt it, in its fulness. Never! I have sometimes wished that I could see you, or could see him; only once, dear father; only for one little minute; that I might know what it is I treasure up," she laid her hands upon her breast, "and hold here! That I might be sure and have it right! And sometimes (but then I was a child) I have wept in my prayers at night, to think that when your images ascended from my heart to Heaven, they might not be the true resemblance of yourselves. But I have never had these feelings long. They have passed away and left me tranquil and contented." "And they will again," said Caleb. "But, father! Oh my good, gentle father, bear with me, if I am wicked!" said the Blind Girl. "This is not the sorrow that so weighs me down!" Her father could not choose but let his moist eyes overflow; she was so earnest and pathetic, but he did not understand her, yet. "Bring her to me," said Bertha. "I cannot hold it closed and shut within myself. Bring her to me, father!" She knew he hesitated, and said, "May. Bring May!" May heard the mention of her name, and coming quietly towards her, touched her on the arm. The Blind Girl turned immediately, and held her by both hands. "Look into my face, Dear heart, Sweet heart!" said Bertha. "Read it with your beautiful eyes, and tell me if the truth is written on it." "Dear Bertha, Yes!" The Blind Girl still, upturning the blank sightless face, down which the tears were coursing fast, addressed her in these words: "There is not, in my Soul, a wish or thought that is not for your good, bright May! There is not, in my Soul, a grateful recollection stronger than the deep remembrance which is stored there, of the many many times when, in the full pride of Sight and Beauty, you have had consideration for Blind Bertha, even when we two were children, or when Bertha was as much a child as ever blindness can be! Every blessing on your head! Light upon your happy course! Not the less, my dear May;" and she drew towards her, in a closer grasp; "not the less, my Bird, because, to-day, the knowledge that you are to be His wife has wrung my heart almost to breaking! Father, May, Mary! oh forgive me that it is so, for the sake of all he has done to relieve the weariness of my dark life: and for the sake of the belief you have in me, when I call Heaven to witness that I could not wish him married to a wife more worthy of his Goodness!" While speaking, she had released May Fielding’s hands, and clasped her garments in an attitude of mingled supplication and love. Sinking lower and lower down, as she proceeded in her strange confession, she dropped at last at the feet of her friend, and hid her blind face in the folds of her dress. "Great Power!" exclaimed her father, smitten at one blow with the truth, "have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart at last!" It was well for all of them that Dot, that beaming, useful, busy little Dot—for such she was, whatever faults she had; and however you may learn to hate her, in good time—it was well for all of them, I say, that she was there: or where this would have ended, it were hard to tell. But Dot, recovering her self-possession, interposed, before May could reply, or Caleb say another word. "Come, come, dear Bertha! come away with me! Give her your arm, May. So! How composed she is, you see, already; and how good it is of her to mind us," said the cheery little woman, kissing her upon the forehead. "Come away, dear Bertha. Come! and here’s her good father will come with her; won’t you, Caleb? To—be—sure!" Well, well! she was a noble little Dot in such things, and it must have been an obdurate nature that could have withstood her influence. When she had got poor Caleb and his Bertha away, that they might comfort and console each other, as she knew they only could, she presently came bouncing back,—the saying is, as fresh as any daisy; I say fresher—to mount guard over that bridling little piece of consequence in the cap and gloves, and prevent the dear old creature from making discoveries. "So bring me the precious Baby, Tilly," said she, drawing a chair to the fire; "and while I have it in my lap, here’s Mrs. Fielding, Tilly, will tell me all about the management of Babies, and put me right in twenty points where I’m as wrong as can be. Won’t you, Mrs. Fielding?" Not even the Welsh Giant, who, according to the popular expression, was so "slow" as to perform a fatal surgical operation upon himself, in emulation of a juggling-trick achieved by his arch-enemy at breakfast-time; not even he fell half so readily into the Snare prepared for him, as the old lady did into this artful Pitfall. The fact of Tackleton having walked out; and furthermore, of two or three people having been talking together at a distance, for two minutes, leaving her to her own resources; was quite enough to have put her on her dignity, and the bewailment of that mysterious convulsion in the Indigo trade, for four-and-twenty hours. But this becoming deference to her experience, on the part of the young mother, was so irresistible, that after a short affectation of humility, she began to enlighten her with the best grace in the world; and sitting bolt upright before the wicked Dot, she did, in half an hour, deliver more infallible domestic recipes and precepts, than would (if acted on) have utterly destroyed and done up that Young Peerybingle, though he had been an Infant Samson. To change the theme, Dot did a little needlework—she carried the contents of a whole workbox in her pocket; how ever she contrived it, I don’t know—then did a little nursing; then a little more needlework; then had a little whispering chat with May, while the old lady dozed; and so in little bits of bustle, which was quite her manner always, found it a very short afternoon. Then, as it grew dark, and as it was a solemn part of this Institution of the Pic-Nic that she should perform all Bertha’s household tasks, she trimmed the fire, and swept the hearth, and set the tea-board out, and drew the curtain, and lighted a candle. Then she played an air or two on a rude kind of harp, which Caleb had contrived for Bertha, and played them very well; for Nature had made her delicate little ear as choice a one for music as it would have been for jewels, if she had had any to wear. By this time it was the established hour for having tea; and Tackleton came back again, to share the meal, and spend the evening. Caleb and Bertha had returned some time before, and Caleb had sat down to his afternoon’s work. But he couldn’t settle to it, poor fellow, being anxious and remorseful for his daughter. It was touching to see him sitting idle on his working-stool, regarding her so wistfully; and always saying in his face, "have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart!" When it was night, and tea was done, and Dot had nothing more to do in washing up the cups and saucers; in a word—for I must come to it, and there is no use in putting it off—when the time drew nigh for expecting the Carrier’s return in every sound of distant wheels; her manner changed again; her colour came and went, and she was very restless. Not as good wives are, when listening for their husbands. No, no, no. It was another sort of restlessness from that. Wheels heard. A horse’s feet. The barking of a dog. The gradual approach of all the sounds. The scratching paw of Boxer at the door! "Whose step is that!" cried Bertha, starting up. "Whose step?" returned the Carrier, standing in the portal, with his brown face ruddy as a winter berry from the keen night air. "Why, mine." "The other step," said Bertha. "The man’s tread behind you!" "She is not to be deceived," observed the Carrier, laughing. "Come along, Sir. You’ll be welcome, never fear!" He spoke in a loud tone; and as he spoke, the deaf old gentleman entered. "He’s not so much a stranger, that you haven’t seen him once, Caleb," said the Carrier. "You’ll give him house-room till we go?" "Oh surely, John; and take it as an honour." "He’s the best company on earth, to talk secrets in," said John. "I have reasonable good lungs, but he tries ’em, I can tell you. Sit down, Sir. All friends here, and glad to see you!" When he had imparted this assurance, in a voice that amply corroborated what he had said about his lungs, he added in his natural tone, "A chair in the chimney-corner, and leave to sit quite silent and look pleasantly about him, is all he cares for. He’s easily pleased." Bertha had been listening intently. She called Caleb to her side, when he had set the chair, and asked him, in a low voice, to describe their visitor. When he had done so (truly now; with scrupulous fidelity), she moved, for the first time since he had come in; and sighed; and seemed to have no further interest concerning him. The Carrier was in high spirits, good fellow that he was; and fonder of his little wife than ever. "A clumsy Dot she was, this afternoon!" he said, encircling her with his rough arm, as she stood, removed from the rest; "and yet I like her somehow. See yonder, Dot!" He pointed to the old man. She looked down. I think she trembled. "He’s—ha ha ha!—he’s full of admiration for you!" said the Carrier. "Talked of nothing else, the whole way here. Why, he’s a brave old boy. I like him for it!" "I wish he had had a better subject, John;" she said, with an uneasy glance about the room. At Tackleton especially. "A better subject!" cried the jovial John. "There’s no such thing. Come, off with the great-coat, off with the thick shawl, off with the heavy wrappers! and a cosy half-hour by the fire! My humble service, Mistress. A game at cribbage, you and I? That’s hearty. The cards and board, Dot. And a glass of beer here, if there’s any left, small wife!" His challenge was addressed to the old lady, who accepting it with gracious readiness, they were soon engaged upon the game. At first, the Carrier looked about him sometimes, with a smile, or now and then called Dot to peep over his shoulder at his hand, and advise him on some knotty point. But his adversary being a rigid disciplinarian, and subject to an occasional weakness in respect of pegging more than she was entitled to, required such vigilance on his part, as left him neither eyes nor ears to spare. Thus, his whole attention gradually became absorbed upon the cards; and he thought of nothing else, until a hand upon his shoulder restored him to a consciousness of Tackleton. "I am sorry to disturb you—but a word, directly." "I’m going to deal," returned the Carrier. "It’s a crisis." "It is," said Tackleton. "Come here, man!" There was that in his pale face which made the other rise immediately, and ask him, in a hurry, what the matter was. "Hush! John Peerybingle," said Tackleton. "I am sorry for this. I am indeed. I have been afraid of it. I have suspected it from the first." "What is it?" asked the Carrier, with a frightened aspect. "Hush! I’ll show you, if you’ll come with me." The Carrier accompanied him, without another word. They went across a yard, where the stars were shining; and by a little side-door, into Tackleton’s own counting-house, where there was a glass window, commanding the ware-room: which was closed for the night. There was no light in the counting-house itself, but there were lamps in the long narrow ware-room; and consequently the window was bright. "A moment!" said Tackleton. "Can you bear to look through that window, do you think?" "Why not?" returned the Carrier. "A moment more," said Tackleton. "Don’t commit any violence. It’s of no use. It’s dangerous too. You’re a strong-made man; and you might do Murder before you know it." The Carrier looked him in the face, and recoiled a step as if he had been struck. In one stride he was at the window, and he saw— Oh Shadow on the Hearth! Oh truthful Cricket! Oh perfidious Wife! He saw her, with the old man; old no longer, but erect and gallant: bearing in his hand the false white hair that had won his way into their desolate and miserable home. He saw her listening to him, as he bent his head to whisper in her ear; and suffering him to clasp her round the waist, as they moved slowly down the dim wooden gallery towards the door by which they had entered it. He saw them stop, and saw her turn—to have the face, the face he loved so, so presented to his view!—and saw her, with her own hands, adjust the Lie upon his head, laughing, as she did it, at his unsuspicious nature! He clenched his strong right hand at first, as if it would have beaten down a lion. But opening it immediately again, he spread it out before the eyes of Tackleton (for he was tender of her, even then), and so, as they passed out, fell down upon a desk, and was as weak as any infant. He was wrapped up to the chin, and busy with his horse and parcels, when she came into the room, prepared for going home. "Now, John, dear! Good night, May! Good night, Bertha!" Could she kiss them? Could she be blithe and cheerful in her parting? Could she venture to reveal her face to them without a blush? Yes. Tackleton observed her closely, and she did all this. Tilly was hushing the Baby; and she crossed and re-crossed Tackleton, a dozen times, repeating drowsily: "Did the knowledge that it was to be its wifes, then, wring its hearts almost to breaking; and did its fathers deceive it from its cradles but to break its hearts at last!" "Now, Tilly, give me the Baby! Good night, Mr. Tackleton. Where’s John, for Goodness’ sake?" "He’s going to walk beside the horse’s head," said Tackleton; who helped her to her seat. "My dear John. Walk? To-night?" The muffled figure of her husband made a hasty sign in the affirmative; and the false Stranger and the little nurse being in their places, the old horse moved off. Boxer, the unconscious Boxer, running on before, running back, running round and round the cart, and barking as triumphantly and merrily as ever. When Tackleton had gone off likewise, escorting May and her mother home, poor Caleb sat down by the fire beside his daughter; anxious and remorseful at the core; and still saying in his wistful contemplation of her, "have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart at last!" The toys that had been set in motion for the Baby, had all stopped, and run down, long ago. In the faint light and silence, the imperturbably calm dolls; the agitated rocking-horses with distended eyes and nostrils; the old gentlemen at the street-doors, standing half doubled up upon their failing knees and ankles; the wry-faced nut-crackers; the very Beasts upon their way into the Ark, in twos, like a Boarding School out walking; might have been imagined to be stricken motionless with fantastic wonder, at Dot being false, or Tackleton beloved, under any combination of circumstances. Chirp the Third The Dutch clock in the corner struck Ten, when the Carrier sat down by his fireside. So troubled and grief-worn, that he seemed to scare the Cuckoo, who, having cut his ten melodious announcements as short as possible, plunged back into the Moorish Palace again, and clapped his little door behind him, as if the unwonted spectacle were too much for his feelings. If the little Haymaker had been armed with the sharpest of scythes, and had cut at every stroke into the Carrier’s heart, he never could have gashed and wounded it, as Dot had done. It was a heart so full of love for her; so bound up and held together by innumerable threads of winning remembrance, spun from the daily working of her many qualities of endearment; it was a heart in which she had enshrined herself so gently and so closely; a heart so single and so earnest in its Truth: so strong in right, so weak in wrong: that it could cherish neither passion nor revenge at first, and had only room to hold the broken image of its Idol. But, slowly, slowly; as the Carrier sat brooding on his hearth, now cold and dark; other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him, as an angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his outraged roof. Three steps would take him to his chamber door. One blow would beat it in. "You might do Murder before you know it," Tackleton had said. How could it be Murder, if he gave the Villain time to grapple with him hand to hand! He was the younger man. It was an ill-timed thought, bad for the dark mood of his mind. It was an angry thought, goading him to some avenging act, that should change the cheerful house into a haunted place which lonely travellers would dread to pass by night; and where the timid would see shadows struggling in the ruined windows when the moon was dim, and hear wild noises in the stormy weather. He was the younger man! Yes, yes; some lover who had won the heart that he had never touched. Some lover of her early choice: of whom she had thought and dreamed: for whom she had pined and pined: when he had fancied her so happy by his side. Oh agony to think of it! She had been above-stairs with the Baby, getting it to bed. As he sat brooding on the hearth, she came close beside him, without his knowledge—in the turning of the rack of his great misery, he lost all other sounds—and put her little stool at his feet. He only knew it, when he felt her hand upon his own, and saw her looking up into his face. With wonder? No. It was his first impression, and he was fain to look at her again, to set it right. No, not with wonder. With an eager and enquiring look; but not with wonder. At first it was alarmed and serious; then, it changed into a strange, wild, dreadful smile of recognition of his thoughts; then, there was nothing but her clasped hands on her brow, and her bent head, and falling hair. Though the power of Omnipotence had been his to wield at that moment, he had too much of its Diviner property of Mercy in his breast, to have turned one feather’s weight of it against her. But he could not bear to see her crouching down upon the little seat where he had often looked on her, with love and pride, so innocent and gay; and, when she rose and left him, sobbing as she went, he felt it a relief to have the vacant place beside him rather than her so long-cherished presence. This in itself was anguish keener than all: reminding him how desolate he was become, and how the great bond of his life was rent asunder. The more he felt this, and the more he knew he could have better borne to see her lying prematurely dead before him with their little child upon her breast, the higher and the stronger rose his wrath against his enemy. He looked about him for a weapon. There was a Gun, hanging on the wall. He took it down, and moved a pace or two towards the door of the perfidious Stranger’s room. He knew the Gun was loaded. Some shadowy idea that it was just to shoot this man like a Wild Beast, seized him; and dilated in his mind until it grew into a monstrous demon in complete possession of him, casting out all milder thoughts and setting up its undivided empire. That phrase is wrong. Not casting out his milder thoughts, but artfully transforming them. Changing them into scourges to drive him on. Turning water into blood, Love into hate, Gentleness into blind ferocity. Her image, sorrowing, humbled, but still pleading to his tenderness and mercy with resistless power, never left his mind; but staying there, it urged him to the door; raised the weapon to his shoulder; fitted and nerved his finger to the trigger; and cried "Kill him! In his Bed!" He reversed the Gun to beat the stock upon the door; he already held it lifted in the air; some indistinct design was in his thoughts of calling out to him to fly, for God’s sake, by the window— When, suddenly, the struggling fire illumined the whole chimney with a glow of light; and the Cricket on the Hearth began to chirp! No sound he could have heard; no human voice, not even her's; could so have moved and softened him. The artless words in which she had told him of her love for this same Cricket, were once more freshly spoken; her trembling, earnest manner at the moment, was again before him; her pleasant voice—oh what a voice it was, for making household music at the fireside of an honest man!—thrilled through and through his better nature, and awoke it into life and action. He recoiled from the door, like a man walking in his sleep, awakened from a frightful dream; and put the Gun aside. Clasping his hands before his face, he then sat down again beside the fire, and found relief in tears. The Cricket on the Hearth came out into the room, and stood in Fairy shape before him. "'I love it,'" said the Fairy Voice, repeating what he well remembered, "'for the many times I have heard it, and the many thoughts its harmless music has given me.'" "She said so!" cried the Carrier. "True!" "'This has been a happy Home, John; and I love the Cricket for its sake!'" "It has been, Heaven knows," returned the Carrier. "She made it happy, always,—until now." "So gracefully sweet-tempered; so domestic, joyful, busy, and light-hearted!" said the Voice. "Otherwise I never could have loved her as I did," returned the Carrier. The Voice, correcting him, said "do." The Carrier repeated "as I did." But not firmly. His faltering tongue resisted his controul, and would speak in its own way, for itself and him. The Figure, in an attitude of invocation, raised its hand and said: "Upon your own hearth"— "The hearth she has blighted," interposed the Carrier. "The hearth she has—how often!—blessed and brightened," said the Cricket: "the hearth which, but for her, were only a few stones and bricks and rusty bars, but which has been, through her, the Altar of your Home; on which you have nightly sacrificed some petty passion, selfishness, or care, and offered up the homage of a tranquil mind, a trusting nature, and an overflowing heart; so that the smoke from this poor chimney has gone upward with a better fragrance than the richest incense that is burnt before the richest shrines in all the gaudy Temples of this World!—Upon your own hearth; in its quiet sanctuary; surrounded by its gentle influences and associations; hear her! Hear me! Hear everything that speaks the language of your hearth and home!" "And pleads for her?" inquired the Carrier. "All things that speak the language of your hearth and home, must plead for her!" returned the Cricket. "For they speak the Truth." And while the Carrier, with his head upon his hands, continued to sit meditating in his chair, the Presence stood beside him; suggesting his reflections by its power, and presenting them before him, as in a Glass or Picture. It was not a solitary Presence. From the hearthstone, from the chimney; from the clock, the pipe, the kettle, and the cradle; from the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and the stairs; from the cart without, and the cupboard within, and the household implements; from every thing and every place with which she had ever been familiar, and with which she had ever entwined one recollection of herself in her unhappy husband’s mind; Fairies came trooping forth. Not to stand beside him as the Cricket did, but to busy and bestir themselves. To do all honor to her image. To pull him by the skirts, and point to it when it appeared. To cluster round it, and embrace it, and strew flowers for it to tread on. To try to crown its fair head with their tiny hands. To show that they were fond of it and loved it; and that there was not one ugly, wicked or accusatory creature to claim knowledge of it—none but their playful and approving selves. His thoughts were constant to her Image. It was always there. She sat plying her needle, before the fire, and singing to herself. Such a blithe, thriving, steady little Dot! The fairy figures turned upon him all at once, by one consent, with one prodigious concentrated stare; and seemed to say, "Is this the light wife you are mourning for!" There were sounds of gaiety outside: musical instruments, and noisy tongues, and laughter. A crowd of young merry-makers came pouring in; among whom were May Fielding and a score of pretty girls. Dot was the fairest of them all; as young as any of them too. They came to summon her to join their party. It was a dance. If ever little foot were made for dancing, hers was, surely. But she laughed, and shook her head, and pointed to her cookery on the fire, and her table ready spread: with an exulting defiance that rendered her more charming than she was before. And so she merrily dismissed them: nodding to her would-be partners, one by one, as they passed, but with a comical indifference, enough to make them go and drown themselves immediately if they were her admirers—and they must have been so, more or less; they couldn’t help it. And yet indifference was not her character. O no! For presently, there came a certain Carrier to the door; and bless her what a welcome she bestowed upon him! Again the staring figures turned upon him all at once, and seemed to say, "Is this the wife who has forsaken you!" A shadow fell upon the mirror or the picture: call it what you will. A great shadow of the Stranger, as he first stood underneath their roof; covering its surface, and blotting out all other objects. But the nimble Fairies worked like Bees to clear it off again; and Dot again was there. Still bright and beautiful. Rocking her little Baby in its cradle; singing to it softly; and resting her head upon a shoulder which had its counterpart in the musing figure by which the Fairy Cricket stood. The night—I mean the real night: not going by Fairy clocks—was wearing now; and in this stage of the Carrier’s thoughts, the moon burst out, and shone brightly in the sky. Perhaps some calm and quiet light had risen also, in his mind; and he could think more soberly of what had happened. Although the shadow of the Stranger fell at intervals upon the glass—always distinct, and big, and thoroughly defined—it never fell so darkly as at first. Whenever it appeared, the Fairies uttered a general cry of consternation, and plied their little arms and legs, with inconceivable activity, to rub it out. And whenever they got at Dot again, and showed her to him once more, bright and beautiful, they cheered in the most inspiring manner. They never showed her, otherwise than beautiful and bright, for they were Household Spirits to whom falsehood is annihilation; and being so, what Dot was there for them, but the one active, beaming, pleasant little creature who had been the light and sun of the Carrier’s Home! The Fairies were prodigiously excited when they showed her, with the Baby, gossiping among a knot of sage old matrons, and affecting to be wondrous old and matronly herself, and leaning in a staid, demure old way upon her husband’s arm, attempting—she! such a bud of a little woman—to convey the idea of having abjured the vanities of the world in general, and of being the sort of person to whom it was no novelty at all to be a mother; yet in the same breath, they showed her, laughing at the Carrier for being awkward, and pulling up his shirt-collar to make him smart, and mincing merrily about that very room to teach him how to dance! They turned, and stared immensely at him when they showed her with the Blind Girl; for, though she carried cheerfulness and animation with her wheresoever she went, she bore those influences into Caleb Plummer’s home, heaped up and running over. The Blind Girl’s love for her, and trust in her, and gratitude to her; her own good busy way of setting Bertha’s thanks aside; her dexterous little arts for filling up each moment of the visit in doing something useful to the house, and really working hard while feigning to make holiday; her bountiful provision of those standing delicacies, the Veal and Ham-Pie and the bottles of Beer; her radiant little face arriving at the door, and taking leave; the wonderful expression in her whole self, from her neat foot to the crown of her head, of being a part of the establishment—a something necessary to it, which it couldn’t be without; all this the Fairies revelled in, and loved her for. And once again they looked upon him all at once, appealingly; and seemed to say, while some among them nestled in her dress and fondled her, "Is this the Wife who has betrayed your confidence!" More than once, or twice, or thrice, in the long thoughtful night, they showed her to him sitting on her favourite seat, with her bent head, her hands clasped on her brow, her falling hair. As he had seen her last. And when they found her thus, they neither turned nor looked upon him, but gathered close round her, and comforted and kissed her: and pressed on one another to show sympathy and kindness to her: and forgot him altogether. Thus the night passed. The moon went down; the stars grew pale; the cold day broke; the sun rose. The Carrier still sat, musing, in the chimney corner. He had sat there, with his head upon his hands, all night. All night the faithful Cricket had been Chirp, Chirp, Chirping on the Hearth. All night he had listened to its voice. All night the household Fairies had been busy with him. All night she had been amiable and blameless in the Glass, except when that one shadow fell upon it. He rose up when it was broad day, and washed and dressed himself. He couldn’t go about his customary cheerful avocations; he wanted spirit for them; but it mattered the less, that it was Tackleton’s wedding-day, and he had arranged to make his rounds by proxy. He thought to have gone merrily to church with Dot. But such plans were at an end. It was their own wedding-day too. Ah! how little he had looked for such a close to such a year! The Carrier had expected that Tackleton would pay him an early visit; and he was right. He had not walked to and fro before his own door, many minutes, when he saw the Toy Merchant coming in his chaise along the road. As the chaise drew nearer, he perceived that Tackleton was dressed out sprucely for his marriage: and that he had decorated his horse’s head with flowers and favors. The horse looked much more like a Bridegroom than Tackleton, whose half-closed eye was more disagreeably expressive than ever. But the Carrier took little heed of this. His thoughts had other occupation. "John Peerybingle!" said Tackleton, with an air of condolence. "My good fellow, how do you find yourself this morning?" "I have had but a poor night, Master Tackleton," returned the Carrier, shaking his head: "for I have been a good deal disturbed in my mind. But it’s over now! Can you spare me half an hour or so, for some private talk?" "I came on purpose," returned Tackleton, alighting. "Never mind the horse. He’ll stand quiet enough, with the reins over this post, if you’ll give him a mouthful of hay." The Carrier having brought it from his stable and set it before him, they turned into the house. "You are not married before noon," he said, "I think?" "No," answered Tackleton. "Plenty of time. Plenty of time." When they entered the kitchen, Tilly Slowboy was rapping at the Stranger’s door; which was only removed from it by a few steps. One of her very red eyes (for Tilly had been crying all night long, because her mistress cried) was at the keyhole; and she was knocking very loud; and seemed frightened. "If you please I can’t make nobody hear," said Tilly, looking round. "I hope nobody an’t gone and been and died if you please!" This philanthropic wish, Miss Slowboy emphasised with various new raps and kicks at the door; which led to no result whatever. "Shall I go?" said Tackleton. "It’s curious." The Carrier who had turned his face from the door, signed to him to go if he would. So Tackleton went to Tilly Slowboy’s relief; and he too kicked and knocked; and he too failed to get the least reply. But he thought of trying the handle of the door; and as it opened easily, he peeped in, looked in, went in; and soon came running out again. "John Peerybingle," said Tackleton, in his ear. "I hope there has been nothing—nothing rash in the night?" The Carrier turned upon him quickly. "Because he’s gone!" said Tackleton; "and the window’s open. I don’t see any marks—to be sure it’s almost on a level with the garden: but I was afraid there might have been some—some scuffle. Eh?" He nearly shut up the expressive eye altogether; he looked at him so hard. And he gave his eye, and his face, and his whole person, a sharp twist. As if he would have screwed the truth out of him. "Make yourself easy," said the Carrier. "He went into that room last night, without harm in word or deed from me, and no one has entered it since. He is away of his own free will. I’d go out gladly at that door, and beg my bread from house to house, for life, if I could so change the past that he had never come. But he has come and gone. And I have done with him!" "Oh!—Well, I think he has got off pretty easy," said Tackleton, taking a chair. The sneer was lost upon the Carrier, who sat down too: and shaded his face with his hand, for some little time, before proceeding. "You showed me last night," he said at length, "my wife; my wife that I love; secretly—" "And tenderly," insinuated Tackleton. "Conniving at that man’s disguise, and giving him opportunities of meeting her alone. I think there’s no sight I wouldn’t have rather seen than that. I think there’s no man in the world I wouldn’t have rather had to show it me." "I confess to having had my suspicions always," said Tackleton. "And that has made me objectionable here, I know." "But as you did show it me," pursued the Carrier, not minding him; "and as you saw her; my wife; my wife that I love"—his voice, and eye, and hand, grew steadier and firmer as he repeated these words: evidently in pursuance of a stedfast purpose—"as you saw her at this disadvantage, it is right and just that you should also see with my eyes, and look into my breast, and know what my mind is, upon the subject. For it’s settled," said the Carrier, regarding him attentively. "And nothing can shake it now." Tackleton muttered a few general words of assent, about its being necessary to vindicate something or other; but he was overawed by the manner of his companion. Plain and unpolished as it was, it had a something dignified and noble in it, which nothing but the soul of generous Honor dwelling in the man could have imparted. "I am a plain, rough man," pursued the Carrier, "with very little to recommend me. I am not a clever man, as you very well know. I am not a young man. I loved my little Dot, because I had seen her grow up, from a child, in her father’s house; because I knew how precious she was; because she had been my Life, for years and years. There’s many men I can’t compare with, who never could have loved my little Dot like me, I think!" He paused, and softly beat the ground a short time with his foot, before resuming: "I often thought that though I wasn’t good enough for her, I should make her a kind husband, and perhaps know her value better than another; and in this way I reconciled it to myself, and came to think it might be possible that we should be married. And in the end it came about, and we were married." "Hah!" said Tackleton, with a significant shake of the head. "I had studied myself; I had had experience of myself; I knew how much I loved her, and how happy I should be," pursued the Carrier. "But I had not—I feel it now—sufficiently considered her." "To be sure," said Tackleton. "Giddiness, frivolity, fickleness, love of admiration! Not considered! All left out of sight! Hah!" "You had best not interrupt me," said the Carrier, with some sternness, "till you understand me; and you’re wide of doing so. If, yesterday, I’d have struck that man down at a blow, who dared to breathe a word against her, to-day I’d set my foot upon his face, if he was my brother!" The Toy Merchant gazed at him in astonishment. He went on in a softer tone: "Did I consider," said the Carrier, "that I took her; at her age, and with her beauty; from her young companions, and the many scenes of which she was the ornament; in which she was the brightest little star that ever shone; to shut her up from day to day in my dull house, and keep my tedious company? Did I consider how little suited I was to her sprightly humour, and how wearisome a plodding man like me must be, to one of her quick spirit? Did I consider that it was no merit in me, or claim in me, that I loved her, when everybody must, who knew her? Never. I took advantage of her hopeful nature and her cheerful disposition; and I married her. I wish I never had! For her sake; not for mine!" The Toy Merchant gazed at him, without winking. Even the half-shut eye was open now. "Heaven bless her!" said the Carrier, "for the cheerful constancy with which she tried to keep the knowledge of this from me! And Heaven help me, that, in my slow mind, I have not found it out before! Poor child! Poor Dot! I not to find it out, who have seen her eyes fill with tears, when such a marriage as our own was spoken of! I, who have seen the secret trembling on her lips a hundred times, and never suspected it till last night! Poor girl! That I could ever hope she would be fond of me! That I could ever believe she was!" "She made a show of it," said Tackleton. "She made such a show of it, that to tell you the truth it was the origin of my misgivings." And here he asserted the superiority of May Fielding, who certainly made no sort of show of being fond of him. "She has tried," said the poor Carrier, with greater emotion than he had exhibited yet; "I only now begin to know how hard she has tried, to be my dutiful and zealous wife. How good she has been; how much she has done; how brave and strong a heart she has; let the happiness I have known under this roof bear witness! It will be some help and comfort to me, when I am here alone." "Here alone?" said Tackleton. "Oh! Then you do mean to take some notice of this?" "I mean," returned the Carrier, "to do her the greatest kindness, and make her the best reparation, in my power. I can release her from the daily pain of an unequal marriage, and the struggle to conceal it. She shall be as free as I can render her." "Make her reparation!" exclaimed Tackleton, twisting and turning his great ears with his hands. "There must be something wrong here. You didn’t say that, of course." The Carrier set his grip upon the collar of the Toy Merchant, and shook him like a reed. "Listen to me!" he said. "And take care that you hear me right. Listen to me. Do I speak plainly?" "Very plainly indeed," answered Tackleton. "As if I meant it?" "Very much as if you meant it." "I sat upon that hearth, last night, all night," exclaimed the Carrier. "On the spot where she has often sat beside me, with her sweet face looking into mine. I called up her whole life, day by day; I had her dear self, in its every passage, in review before me. And upon my soul she is innocent, if there is One to judge the innocent and guilty!" Staunch Cricket on the Hearth! Loyal household Fairies! "Passion and distrust have left me!" said the Carrier; "and nothing but my grief remains. In an unhappy moment some old lover, better suited to her tastes and years than I; forsaken, perhaps, for me, against her will; returned. In an unhappy moment: taken by surprise, and wanting time to think of what she did: she made herself a party to his treachery, by concealing it. Last night she saw him, in the interview we witnessed. It was wrong. But otherwise than this, she is innocent if there is Truth on earth!" "If that is your opinion"—Tackleton began. "So, let her go!" pursued the Carrier. "Go, with my blessing for the many happy hours she has given me, and my forgiveness for any pang she has caused me. Let her go, and have the peace of mind I wish her! She’ll never hate me. She’ll learn to like me better, when I’m not a drag upon her, and she wears the chain I have rivetted, more lightly. This is the day on which I took her, with so little thought for her enjoyment, from her home. To-day she shall return to it; and I will trouble her no more. Her father and mother will be here to-day—we had made a little plan for keeping it together—and they shall take her home. I can trust her, there, or anywhere. She leaves me without blame, and she will live so I am sure. If I should die—I may perhaps while she is still young; I have lost some courage in a few hours—she’ll find that I remembered her, and loved her to the last! This is the end of what you showed me. Now, it’s over!" "Oh no, John, not over. Do not say it’s over yet! Not quite yet. I have heard your noble words. I could not steal away, pretending to be ignorant of what has affected me with such deep gratitude. Do not say it’s over, ‘till the clock has struck again!" She had entered shortly after Tackleton; and had remained there. She never looked at Tackleton, but fixed her eyes upon her husband. But she kept away from him, setting as wide a space as possible between them; and though she spoke with most impassioned earnestness, she went no nearer to him even then. How different in this from her old self! "No hand can make the clock which will strike again for me the hours that are gone," replied the Carrier, with a faint smile. "But let it be so, if you will, my dear. It will strike soon. It’s of little matter what we say. I’d try to please you in a harder case than that." "Well!" muttered Tackleton. "I must be off: for when the clock strikes again, it’ll be necessary for me to be upon my way to church. Good morning, John Peerybingle. I’m sorry to be deprived of the pleasure of your company. Sorry for the loss, and the occasion of it too!" "I have spoken plainly?" said the Carrier, accompanying him to the door. "Oh quite!" "And you’ll remember what I have said?" "Why, if you compel me to make the observation," said Tackleton; previously taking the precaution of getting into his chaise; "I must say that it was so very unexpected, that I’m far from being likely to forget it." "The better for us both," returned the Carrier. "Good bye. I give you joy!" "I wish I could give it to you," said Tackleton. "As I can’t; thank’ee. Between ourselves, (as I told you before, eh?) I don’t much think I shall have the less joy in my married life, because May hasn’t been too officious about me, and too demonstrative. Good bye! Take care of yourself." The Carrier stood looking after him until he was smaller in the distance than his horse’s flowers and favours near at hand; and then, with a deep sigh, went strolling like a restless, broken man, among some neighbouring elms; unwilling to return until the clock was on the eve of striking. His little wife, being left alone, sobbed piteously; but often dried her eyes and checked herself, to say how good he was, how excellent he was! and once or twice she laughed; so heartily, triumphantly, and incoherently (still crying all the time), that Tilly was quite horrified. "Ow if you please don’t!" said Tilly. "It’s enough to dead and bury the Baby, so it is if you please." "Will you bring him sometimes, to see his father, Tilly," inquired her mistress, drying her eyes; "when I can’t live here, and have gone to my old home?" "Ow if you please don’t!" cried Tilly, throwing back her head, and bursting out into a howl; she looked at the moment uncommonly like Boxer. "Ow if you please don’t! Ow, what has everybody gone and been and done with everybody, making everybody else so wretched! Ow-w-w-w!" The soft-hearted Slowboy trailed off at this juncture, into such a deplorable howl: the more tremendous from its long suppression: that she must infallibly have awakened the Baby, and frightened him into something serious (probably convulsions), if her eyes had not encountered Caleb Plummer, leading in his daughter. This spectacle restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few moments silent, with her mouth wide open: and then, posting off to the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a Weird, Saint Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes: apparently deriving much relief from those extraordinary operations. "Mary!" said Bertha. "Not at the marriage!" "I told her you would not be there Mum," whispered Caleb. "I heard as much last night. But bless you," said the little man, taking her tenderly by both hands, "I don’t care for what they say. I don’t believe them. There an’t much of me, but that little should be torn to pieces sooner than I’d trust a word against you!" He put his arms about her and hugged her, as a child might have hugged one of his own dolls. "Bertha couldn’t stay at home this morning," said Caleb. "She was afraid, I know, to hear the Bells ring: and couldn’t trust herself to be so near them on their wedding-day. So we started in good time, and came here. I have been thinking of what I have done," said Caleb, after a moment’s pause; "I have been blaming myself till I hardly knew what to do or where to turn, for the distress of mind I have caused her; and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d better, if you’ll stay with me, Mum, the while, tell her the truth. You’ll stay with me the while?" he enquired, trembling from head to foot. "I don’t know what effect it may have upon her; I don’t know what she’ll think of me; I don’t know that she’ll ever care for her poor father afterwards. But it’s best for her that she should be undeceived, and I must bear the consequences as I deserve!" "Mary," said Bertha, "where is your hand! Ah! Here it is here it is!" pressing it to her lips, with a smile, and drawing it through her arm. "I heard them speaking softly among themselves, last night, of some blame against you. They were wrong." The Carrier’s Wife was silent. Caleb answered for her. "They were wrong," he said. "I knew it!" cried Bertha, proudly. "I told them so. I scorned to hear a word! Blame her with justice!" she pressed the hand between her own, and the soft cheek against her face. "No! I am not so blind as that." Her father went on one side of her, while Dot remained upon the other: holding her hand. "I know you all," said Bertha, "better than you think. But none so well as her. Not even you, father. There is nothing half so real and so true about me, as she is. If I could be restored to sight this instant, and not a word were spoken, I could choose her from a crowd! My Sister!" "Bertha, my dear!" said Caleb, "I have something on my mind I want to tell you, while we three are alone. Hear me kindly! I have a confession to make to you, my Darling." "A confession, father?" "I have wandered from the Truth and lost myself, my child," said Caleb, with a pitiable expression in his bewildered face. "I have wandered from the truth, intending to be kind to you; and have been cruel." She turned her wonder-stricken face towards him, and repeated "Cruel!" "He accuses himself too strongly, Bertha," said Dot. "You’ll say so, presently. You’ll be the first to tell him so." "He cruel to me!" cried Bertha, with a smile of incredulity. "Not meaning it, my child," said Caleb. "But I have been; though I never suspected it, till yesterday. My dear Blind Daughter, hear me and forgive me! The world you live in, heart of mine, doesn’t exist as I have represented it. The eyes you have trusted in, have been false to you." She turned her wonder-stricken face towards him still; but drew back, and clung closer to her friend. "Your road in life was rough, my poor one," said Caleb, "and I meant to smooth it for you. I have altered objects, changed the characters of people, invented many things that never have been, to make you happier. I have had concealments from you, put deceptions on you, God forgive me! and surrounded you with fancies." "But living people are not fancies!" she said hurriedly, and turning very pale, and still retiring from him. "You can’t change them." "I have done so, Bertha," pleaded Caleb. "There is one person that you know, my Dove—" "Oh father! why do you say, I know?" she answered, in a term of keen reproach. "What and whom do I know! I who have no leader! I so miserably blind." In the anguish of her heart, she stretched out her hands, as if she were groping her way; then spread them, in a manner most forlorn and sad, upon her face. "The marriage that takes place to-day," said Caleb, "is with a stern, sordid, grinding man. A hard master to you and me, my dear, for many years. Ugly in his looks, and in his nature. Cold and callous always. Unlike what I have painted him to you in everything, my child. In everything." "Oh why," cried the Blind Girl, tortured, as it seemed, almost beyond endurance, "why did you ever do this! Why did you ever fill my heart so full, and then come in like Death, and tear away the objects of my love! O Heaven, how blind I am! How helpless and alone!" Her afflicted father hung his head, and offered no reply but in his penitence and sorrow. She had been but a short time in this passion of regret, when the Cricket on the Hearth, unheard by all but her, began to chirp. Not merrily, but in a low, faint, sorrowing way. It was so mournful that her tears began to flow; and when the Presence which had been beside the Carrier all night, appeared behind her, pointing to her father, they fell down like rain. She heard the Cricket-voice more plainly soon; and was conscious, through her blindness, of the Presence hovering about her father. "Mary," said the Blind Girl, "tell me what my Home is. What it truly is." "It is a poor place, Bertha; very poor and bare indeed. The house will scarcely keep out wind and rain another winter. It is as roughly shielded from the weather, Bertha," Dot continued in a low, clear voice, "as your poor father in his sackcloth coat." The Blind Girl, greatly agitated, rose, and led the Carrier’s little wife aside. "Those presents that I took such care of; that came almost at my wish, and were so dearly welcome to me"’ she said, trembling; "where did they come from? Did you send them?" "No." "Who then?" Dot saw she knew, already; and was silent. The Blind Girl spread her hands before her face again. But in quite another manner now. "Dear Mary, a moment. One moment! More this way. Speak softly to me. You are true, I know. You’d not deceive me now; would you?" "No, Bertha, indeed!" "No, I am sure you would not. You have too much pity for me. Mary, look across the room to where we were just now; to where my father is—my father, so compassionate and loving to me—and tell me what you see." "I see," said Dot, who understood her well, "an old man sitting in a chair, and leaning sorrowfully on the back, with his face resting on his hand. As if his child should comfort him, Bertha." "Yes, yes. She will. Go on." "He is an old man, worn with care and work. He is a spare, dejected, thoughtful, grey-haired man. I see him now, despondent and bowed down, and striving against nothing. But, Bertha, I have seen him many times before; and striving hard in many ways for one great sacred object. And I honor his grey head, and bless him!" The Blind Girl broke away from her; and throwing herself upon her knees before him, took the grey head to her breast. "It is my sight restored. It is my sight!" she cried. "I have been blind, and now my eyes are open. I never knew him! To think I might have died, and never truly seen the father who has been so loving to me!" There were no words for Caleb’s emotion. "There is not a gallant figure on this earth," exclaimed the Blind Girl, holding him in her embrace, "that I would love so dearly, and would cherish so devotedly, as this! The greyer, and more worn, the dearer, father! Never let them say I am blind again. There’s not a furrow in his face, there’s not a hair upon his head, that shall be forgotten in my prayers and thanks to Heaven!" Caleb managed to articulate "My Bertha!" "And in my Blindness, I believed him," said the girl, caressing him with tears of exquisite affection, "to be so different! And having him beside me, day by day, so mindful of me always, never dreamed of this!" "The fresh smart father in the blue coat, Bertha," said poor Caleb. "He’s gone!" "Nothing is gone," she answered. "Dearest father, no! Everything is here—in you. The father that I loved so well; the father that I never loved enough, and never knew; the Benefactor whom I first began to reverence and love, because he had such sympathy for me; All are here in you. Nothing is dead to me. The Soul of all that was most dear to me is here—here, with the worn face, and the grey head. And I am NOT blind, father, any longer!" Dot’s whole attention had been concentrated, during this discourse, upon the father and daughter; but looking, now, towards the little Haymaker in the Moorish meadow, she saw that the clock was within a few minutes of striking, and fell, immediately, into a nervous and excited state. "Father," said Bertha, hesitating. "Mary." "Yes, my dear," returned Caleb. "Here she is." "There is no change in her. You never told me anything of her that was not true?’ "I should have done it, my dear, I am afraid," returned Caleb, "if I could have made her better than she was. But I must have changed her for the worse, if I had changed her at all. Nothing could improve her, Bertha." Confident as the Blind Girl had been when she asked the question, her delight and pride in the reply, and her renewed embrace of Dot, were charming to behold. "More changes than you think for, may happen though, my dear," said Dot. "Changes for the better, I mean; changes for great joy to some of us. You mustn’t let them startle you too much, if any such should ever happen, and affect you? Are those wheels upon the road? You’ve a quick ear, Bertha. Are they wheels?" "Yes. Coming very fast." "I—I—I know you have a quick ear," said Dot, placing her hand upon her heart, and evidently talking on, as fast as she could, to hide its palpitating state, "because I have noticed it often, and because you were so quick to find out that strange step last night. Though why you should have said, as I very well recollect you did say, Bertha, 'whose step is that!' and why you should have taken any greater observation of it than of any other step, I don’t know. Though as I said just now, there are great changes in the world: great changes: and we can’t do better than prepare ourselves to be surprised at hardly anything." Caleb wondered what this meant; perceiving that she spoke to him, no less than to his daughter. He saw her, with astonishment, so fluttered and distressed that she could scarcely breathe; and holding to a chair, to save herself from falling. "They are wheels indeed!" she panted. "Coming nearer! Nearer! Very close! And now you hear them stopping at the garden gate! And now you hear a step outside the door—the same step, Bertha, is it not!—and now!"— She uttered a wild cry of uncontrollable delight; and running up to Caleb put her hands upon his eyes, as a young man rushed into the room, and flinging away his hat into the air, came sweeping down upon them. "Is it over?" cried Dot. "Yes!" "Happily over?" "Yes!" "Do you recollect the voice, dear Caleb? Did you ever hear the like of it before?" cried Dot. "If my boy in the Golden South Americas was alive"—said Caleb, trembling. "He is alive!" shrieked Dot, removing her hands from his eyes, and clapping them in ecstasy; "look at him! See where he stands before you, healthy and strong! Your own dear son! Your own dear living, loving brother, Bertha!" All honor to the little creature for her transports! All honor to her tears and laughter, when the three were locked in one another’s arms! All honour to the heartiness with which she met the sunburnt Sailor-fellow, with his dark streaming hair, half way, and never turned her rosy little mouth aside, but suffered him to kiss it, freely, and to press her to his bounding heart! And honour to the Cuckoo too—why not!—for bursting out of the trap-door in the Moorish Palace like a housebreaker, and hiccoughing twelve times on the assembled company, as if he had got drunk for joy! The Carrier, entering, started back: and well he might: to find himself in such good company. "Look, John!" said Caleb, exultingly, "look here! My own boy from the Golden South Americas! My own son! Him that you fitted out, and sent away yourself; Him that you were always such a friend to!" The Carrier advanced to seize him by the hand; but, recoiling, as some feature in his face awakened a remembrance of the Deaf Man in the Cart, said: "Edward! Was it you?" "Now tell him all!" cried Dot. "Tell him all, Edward; and don’t spare me, for nothing shall make me spare myself in his eyes, ever again." "I was the man," said Edward. "And could you steal, disguised, into the house of your old friend?" rejoined the Carrier. "There was a frank boy once—how many years is it, Caleb, since we heard that he was dead, and had it proved, we thought?—who never would have done that." "There was a generous friend of mine, once; more a father to me than a friend;" said Edward, "who never would have judged me, or any other man, unheard. You were he. So I am certain you will hear me now." The Carrier, with a troubled glance at Dot, who still kept far away from him, replied, "Well! that’s but fair. I will." "You must know that when I left here, a boy," said Edward, "I was in love, and my love was returned. She was a very young girl, who perhaps (you may tell me) didn’t know her own mind. But I knew mine, and I had a passion for her." "You had!" exclaimed the Carrier. "You!" "Indeed I had," returned the other. "And she returned it. I have ever since believed she did; and now I am sure she did." "Heaven help me!" said the Carrier. "This is worse than all." "Constant to her," said Edward, "and returning, full of hope, after many hardships and perils, to redeem my part of our old contract, I heard, twenty miles away, that she was false to me; that she had forgotten me; and had bestowed herself upon another and a richer man. I had no mind to reproach her; but I wished to see her, and to prove beyond dispute that this was true. I hoped she might have been forced into it, against her own desire and recollection. It would be small comfort, but it would be some, I thought: and on I came. That I might have the truth, the real truth; observing freely for myself, and judging for myself, without obstruction on the one hand, or presenting my own influence (if I had any) before her, on the other; I dressed myself unlike myself—you know how; and waited on the road—you know where. You had no suspicion of me; neither had—had she," pointing to Dot, "until I whispered in her ear at that fireside, and she so nearly betrayed me." "But when she knew that Edward was alive, and had come back," sobbed Dot, now speaking for herself, as she had burned to do, all through this narrative; "and when she knew his purpose, she advised him by all means to keep his secret close; for his old friend John Peerybingle was much too open in his nature, and too clumsy in all artifice—being a clumsy man in general," said Dot, half laughing and half crying—"to keep it for him. And when she—that’s me, John," sobbed the little woman—"told him all, and how his sweetheart had believed him to be dead; and how she had at last been over-persuaded by her mother into a marriage which the silly, dear old thing called advantageous; and when she—that’s me again, John—told him they were not yet married (though close upon it), and that it would be nothing but a sacrifice if it went on, for there was no love on her side; and when he went nearly mad with joy to hear it; then she—that’s me again—said she would go between them, as she had often done before in old times, John, and would sound his sweetheart and be sure that what she—me again, John—said and thought was right. And it WAS right, John! And they were brought together, John! And they were married, John, an hour ago! And here’s the Bride! And Gruff and Tackleton may die a bachelor! And I’m a happy little woman, May, God bless you!" She was an irresistible little woman, if that be anything to the purpose; and never so completely irresistible as in her present transports. There never were congratulations so endearing and delicious, as those she lavished on herself and on the Bride. Amid the tumult of emotions in his breast, the honest Carrier had stood, confounded. Flying, now, towards her, Dot stretched out her hand to stop him, and retreated as before. "No, John, no! Hear all! Don’t love me any more, John, 'till you’ve heard every word I have to say. It was wrong to have a secret from you, John. I’m very sorry. I didn’t think it any harm, till I came and sat down by you on the little stool last night. But when I knew by what was written in your face, that you had seen me walking in the gallery with Edward; and knew what you thought; I felt how giddy and how wrong it was. But oh, dear John, how could you, could you, think so!" Little woman, how she sobbed again! John Peerybingle would have caught her in his arms. But no; she wouldn’t let him. "Don’t love me yet, please, John! Not for a long time yet! When I was sad about this intended marriage, dear, it was because I remembered May and Edward such young lovers; and knew that her heart was far away from Tackleton. You believe that, now. Don’t you John?" John was going to make another rush at this appeal; but she stopped him again. "No; keep there, please, John! When I laugh at you, as I sometimes do, John; and call you clumsy, and a dear old goose, and names of that sort, it’s because I love you, John, so well; and take such pleasure in your ways, and wouldn’t see you altered in the least respect to have you made a King to-morrow." "Hooroar!" said Caleb with unusual vigour. "My opinion!" "And when I speak of people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it’s only because I’m such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and all that: and make believe." She saw that he was coming; and stopped him again. But she was very nearly too late. "No, don’t love me for another minute or two, if you please, John! What I want most to tell you, I have kept to the last. My dear, good, generous John; when we were talking the other night about the Cricket, I had it on my lips to say, that at first I did not love you quite so dearly as I do now; that when I first came home here, I was half afraid I mightn’t learn to love you every bit as well as I hoped and prayed I might—being so very young, John! But, dear John, every day and hour, I loved you more and more. And if I could have loved you better than I do, the noble words I heard you say this morning, would have made me. But I can’t. All the affection that I had (it was a great deal John) I gave you, as you well deserve, long, long ago, and I have no more left to give. Now, my dear Husband, take me to your heart again! That’s my home, John; and never, never think of sending me to any other!" You never will derive so much delight from seeing a glorious little woman in the arms of a third party, as you would have felt if you had seen Dot run into the Carrier’s embrace. It was the most complete, unmitigated, soul-fraught little piece of earnestness that ever you beheld in all your days. You may be sure the Carrier was in a state of perfect rapture; and you may be sure Dot was likewise; and you may be sure they all were, inclusive of Miss Slowboy, who cried copiously for joy, and, wishing to include her young charge in the general interchange of congratulations, handed round the Baby to everybody in succession, as if it were something to drink. But now the sound of wheels was heard again outside the door; and somebody exclaimed that Gruff and Tackleton was coming back. Speedily that worthy gentleman appeared: looking warm and flustered. "Why, what the Devil’s this, John Peerybingle!" said Tackleton. "There’s some mistake. I appointed Mrs. Tackleton to meet me at the church; and I’ll swear I passed her on the road, on her way here. Oh! here she is! I beg your pardon Sir; I haven’t the pleasure of knowing you; but if you can do me the favour to spare this young lady, she has rather a particular engagement this morning." "But I can’t spare her," returned Edward. "I couldn’t think of it." "What do you mean, you vagabond?" said Tackleton. "I mean, that as I can make allowance for your being vexed," returned the other, with a smile, "I am as deaf to harsh discourse this morning, as I was to all discourse last night." The look that Tackleton bestowed upon him, and the start he gave! "I am sorry Sir," said Edward, holding out May’s left hand, and especially the third finger; "that the young lady can’t accompany you to church; but as she has been there once, this morning, perhaps you’ll excuse her." Tackleton looked hard at the third finger: and took a little piece of silver-paper, apparently containing a ring, from his waistcoat-pocket. "Miss Slowboy," said Tackleton. "Will you have the kindness to throw that in the fire? Thank’ee." "It was a previous engagement; quite an old engagement: that prevented my wife from keeping her appointment with you, I assure you," said Edward. "Mr. Tackleton will do me the justice to acknowledge that I revealed it to him faithfully; and that I told him, many times, I never could forget it," said May, blushing. "Oh certainly!" said Tackleton. "Oh to be sure. Oh it’s all right. It’s quite correct. Mrs. Edward Plummer, I infer?" "That’s the name," returned the bridegroom. "Ah, I shouldn’t have known you Sir," said Tackleton, scrutinising his face narrowly, and making a low bow. "I give you joy Sir!" "Thank’ee." "Mrs. Peerybingle," said Tackleton, turning suddenly to where she stood with her husband; "I am sorry. You haven’t done me a very great kindness, but, upon my life I am sorry. You are better than I thought you. John Peerybingle, I am sorry. You understand me; that’s enough. It’s quite correct, ladies and gentlemen all, and perfectly satisfactory. Good morning!" With these words he carried it off, and carried himself off too: merely stopping at the door, to take the flowers and favours from his horse’s head, and to kick that animal once, in the ribs, as a means of informing him that there was a screw loose in his arrangements. Of course it became a serious duty now, to make such a day of it, as should mark these events for a high Feast and Festival in the Peerybingle Calendar for evermore. Accordingly, Dot went to work to produce such an entertainment, as should reflect undying honour on the house and on every one concerned; and in a very short space of time, she was up to her dimpled elbows in flour, and whitening the Carrier’s coat, every time he came near her, by stopping him to give him a kiss. That good fellow washed the greens, and peeled the turnips, and broke the plates, and upset iron pots full of cold water on the fire, and made himself useful in all sorts of ways: while a couple of professional assistants, hastily called in from somewhere in the neighbourhood, as on a point of life or death, ran against each other in all the doorways and round all the corners; and everybody tumbled over Tilly Slowboy and the Baby, everywhere. Tilly never came out in such force before. Her ubiquity was the theme of general admiration. She was a stumbling-block in the passage at five-and-twenty minutes past two; a man-trap in the kitchen at half-past two precisely; and a pitfall in the garret at five-and-twenty minutes to three. The Baby’s head was, as it were, a test and touchstone for every description of matter, animal, vegetable, and mineral. Nothing was in use that day that didn’t come, at some time or other, into close acquaintance with it. Then, there was a great Expedition set on foot to go and find out Mrs. Fielding; and to be dismally penitent to that excellent gentlewoman; and to bring her back, by force, if needful, to be happy and forgiving. And when the Expedition first discovered her, she would listen to no terms at all, but said, an unspeakable number of times, that ever she should have lived to see the day! and couldn’t be got to say anything else, except, "Now carry me to the grave;" which seemed absurd, on account of her not being dead, or anything at all like it. After a time, she lapsed into a state of dreadful calmness, and observed, that when that unfortunate train of circumstances had occurred in the Indigo Trade, she had foreseen that she would be exposed, during her whole life, to every species of insult and contumely; and that she was glad to find it was the case; and begged they wouldn’t trouble themselves about her,—for what was she? oh, dear! a nobody!—but would forget that such a being lived, and would take their course in life without her. From this bitterly sarcastic mood, she passed into an angry one, in which she gave vent to the remarkable expression that the worm would turn if trodden on; and, after that, she yielded to a soft regret, and said, if they had only given her their confidence, what might she not have had it in her power to suggest! Taking advantage of this crisis in her feelings, the Expedition embraced her; and she very soon had her gloves on, and was on her way to John Peerybingle’s in a state of unimpeachable gentility; with a paper parcel at her side containing a cap of state, almost as tall, and quite as stiff, as a Mitre. Then, there were Dot’s father and mother to come, in another little chaise; and they were behind their time; and fears were entertained; and there was much looking out for them down the road; and Mrs. Fielding always would look in the wrong and morally impossible direction; and being apprised thereof, hoped she might take the liberty of looking where she pleased. At last they came: a chubby little couple, jogging along in a snug and comfortable little way that quite belonged to the Dot family: and Dot and her mother, side by side, were wonderful to see. They were so like each other. Then, Dot’s mother had to renew her acquaintance with May’s mother; and May’s mother always stood on her gentility; and Dot’s mother never stood on anything but her active little feet. And old Dot—so to call Dot’s father; I forgot it wasn’t his right name, but never mind: took liberties, and shook hands at first sight, and seemed to think a cap but so much starch and muslin, and didn’t defer himself at all to the Indigo trade, but said there was no help for it now; and, in Mrs. Fielding’s summing up, was a good-natured kind of man—but coarse, my dear. I wouldn’t have missed Dot, doing the honors in her wedding-gown, my benison on her bright face! for any money. No! nor the good Carrier, so jovial and so ruddy, at the bottom of the table. Nor the brown, fresh sailor-fellow, and his handsome wife. Nor any one among them. To have missed the dinner would have been to miss as jolly and as stout a meal as man need eat; and to have missed the overflowing cups in which they drank The Wedding Day, would have been the greatest miss of all. After dinner, Caleb sang the song about the Sparkling Bowl! As I’m a living man: hoping to keep so, for a year or two, he sang it through. And, by-the-by, a most unlooked-for incident occurred, just as he finished the last verse. There was a tap at the door; and a man came staggering in, without saying with your leave, or by your leave, with something heavy on his head. Setting this down in the middle of the table, symmetrically in the centre of the nuts and apples, he said: "Mr. Tackleton’s compliments, and as he hasn’t got no use for the cake himself, p’raps you’ll eat it." And with those words, he walked off. There was some surprise among the company, as you may imagine. Mrs. Fielding, being a lady of infinite discernment, suggested that the cake was poisoned; and related a narrative of a cake, which, within her knowledge, had turned a seminary for young ladies, blue. But she was overruled by acclamation; and the cake was cut by May, with much ceremony and rejoicing. I don’t think any one had tasted it, when there came another tap at the door; and the same man appeared again, having under his arm a vast brown-paper parcel. "Mr. Tackleton’s compliments, and he’s sent a few toys for the Babby. They ain’t ugly." After the delivery of which expressions, he retired again. The whole party would have experienced great difficulty in finding words for their astonishment, even if they had had ample time to seek them. But they had none at all; for the messenger had scarcely shut the door behind him, when there came another tap, and Tackleton himself walked in. "Mrs. Peerybingle!" said the Toy-merchant, hat in hand. "I’m sorry. I’m more sorry than I was this morning. I have had time to think of it. John Peerybingle! I’m sour by disposition; but I can’t help being sweetened, more or less, by coming face to face with such a man as you. Caleb! This unconscious little nurse gave me a broken hint last night, of which I have found the thread. I blush to think how easily I might have bound you and your daughter to me; and what a miserable idiot I was, when I took her for one! Friends, one and all, my house is very lonely to-night. I have not so much as a Cricket on my Hearth. I have scared them all away. Be gracious to me; let me join this happy party!" He was at home in five minutes. You never saw such a fellow. What had he been doing with himself all his life, never to have known, before, his great capacity of being jovial! Or what had the Fairies been doing with him, to have effected such a change! "John! you won’t send me home this evening; will you?" whispered Dot. He had been very near it though! There wanted but one living creature to make the party complete; and, in the twinkling of an eye, there he was: very thirsty with hard running, and engaged in hopeless endeavours to squeeze his head into a narrow pitcher. He had gone with the cart to its journey’s-end, very much disgusted with the absence of his master, and stupendously rebellious to the Deputy. After lingering about the stable for some little time, vainly attempting to incite the old horse to the mutinous act of returning on his own account, he had walked into the tap-room and laid himself down before the fire. But suddenly yielding to the conviction that the Deputy was a humbug, and must be abandoned, he had got up again, turned tail and come home. There was a dance in the evening. With which general mention of that recreation, I should have left it alone, if I had not some reason to suppose that it was quite an original dance, and one of a most uncommon figure. It was formed in an odd way; in this way. Edward, that sailor-fellow—a good free dashing sort of a fellow he was—had been telling them various marvels concerning parrots, and mines, and Mexicans, and gold dust, when all at once he took it in his head to jump up from his seat and propose a dance; for Bertha’s harp was there, and she had such a hand upon it as you seldom hear. Dot (sly little piece of affectation when she chose) said her dancing days were over; I think because the Carrier was smoking his pipe, and she liked sitting by him, best. Mrs. Fielding had no choice, of course, but to say her dancing days were over, after that; and everybody said the same, except May; May was ready. So, May and Edward get up, amid great applause, to dance alone; and Bertha plays her liveliest tune. Well! if you’ll believe me, they have not been dancing five minutes, when suddenly the Carrier flings his pipe away, takes Dot round the waist, dashes out into the room, and starts off with her, toe and heel, quite wonderfully. Tackleton no sooner sees this, than he skims across to Mrs. Fielding, takes her round the waist, and follows suit. Old Dot no sooner sees this, than up he is, all alive, whisks off Mrs. Dot in the middle of the dance, and is the foremost there. Caleb no sooner sees this, than he clutches Tilly Slowboy by both hands and goes off at score; Miss Slowboy, firm in the belief that diving hotly in among the other couples, and effecting any number of concussions with them, is your only principle of footing it. Hark! how the Cricket joins the music with its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp; and how the kettle hums! * * * * * But what is this! Even as I listen to them, blithely, and turn towards Dot, for one last glimpse of a little figure very pleasant to me, she and the rest have vanished into air, and I am left alone. A Cricket sings upon the Hearth; a broken child’s-toy lies upon the ground; and nothing else remains.