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, on 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 thorough-bred 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; 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 w