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!
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. 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.
