Juliet had not been long with them before she found the garments she had in her fancy made for them, did not fit them, and she had to devise, afresh.  They were not gnomes, kobolds, goblins, or dwarfs, but a prince and princess of sweet nobility, who had loved each other in beauty and strength, and knew that they were each crushed in the shell of a cruel and mendacious enchantment.  How they served each other!  The uncle would just as readily help the niece with her saucepans, as the niece would help the uncle to find a passage in Shakespeare or a stanza in George Herbert.  And to hear them talk!

For some time Juliet did not understand them, and did not try.  She had not an idea what they were talking about.  Then she began to imagine they must be weak in the brain—­a thing not unlikely with such spines as theirs—­and had silly secrets with each other, like children, which they enjoyed talking about chiefly because none could understand but themselves.  Then she came to fancy it was herself and her affairs they were talking about, deliberating upon—­in some mental if not lingual gibberish of their own.  By and by it began to disclose itself to her, that the wretched creatures, to mask their misery from themselves, were actually playing at the kingdom of Heaven, speaking and judging and concluding of things of this world by quite other laws, other scales, other weights and measures than those in use in it.  Every thing was turned topsy-turvy in this their game of make-believe.  Their religion was their chief end and interest, and their work their play, as lightly followed as diligently.  What she counted their fancies, they seemed to count their business; their fancies ran over upon their labor, and made every day look and feel like a harvest-home, or the eve of a long-desired journey, for which every preparation but the last and lightest was over.  Things in which she saw no significance made them look very grave, and what she would have counted of some importance to such as they, drew a mere smile from them.  She saw all with bewildered eyes, much as his neighbors looked upon the strange carriage of Lazarus, as represented by Robert Browning in the wonderful letter of the Arab physician.  But after she had begun to take note of their sufferings, and come to mark their calm, their peace, their lighted eyes, their ready smiles, the patience of their very moans, she began to doubt whether somehow they might not be touched to finer issues than she.  It was not, however, until after having, with no little reluctance and recoil, ministered to them upon an occasion in which both were disabled for some hours, that she began to feel they had a hold upon something unseen, the firmness of which hold made it hard to believe it closed upon an unreality.  If there was nothing there, then these dwarfs, in the exercise of their foolish, diseased, distorted fancies, came nearer to the act of creation than any grandest of poets; for these their inventions did more than rectify