rd to answer, solemnly.

"Then it's those horrid children; they are always up to some mischief or
other--just let me catch them!"

"You'd better not," said somebody in a voice exactly like Gardener's,
though he himself declared he had not spoken a word. Indeed, he was fast
asleep.

"Well, it's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard of," the
Gardener's wife said, supposing she was talking to her husband all the
time; but soon she held her tongue, for she found here and there among
the clothes all sorts of queer marks--marks of fingers, and toes, and
heels, not in mud at all, but in coal-dust, as black as black could be.

Now, as the place where the big coal had tumbled out of the barrow was
fully fifty yards from the orchard, and, as the coal could not come to
the clothes, and the clothes could not go without hands, the only
conclusion she could arrive at was--well, no particular conclusion at
all!

It was too late that night to begin washing again; besides, she was
extremely tired, and her husband woke up rather worse than usual, so she
just bundled the clothes up anyhow in a corner, put the kitchen to
rights, and went mournfully to bed.

Next morning she got up long before it was light, washed her clothes
through all over again, and, it being impossible to dry them by the
fire, went out with them once more, and began spreading them out in
their usual corner, in a hopeless and melancholy manner. While she was
at it, the little folks came trooping around her. She didn't scold them
this time, she was too low-spirited.

"No! my old man isn't any better, and I don't fancy he ever will be,"
said she, in answer to their questions. "And every thing's going wrong
with us--just listen!" And she told the trick which had been played her
about the clothes.

The little people tried not to laugh, but it was so funny; and even now,
the minute she had done hanging them out, there was something so droll
in the way the clothes blew about, without any wind; the shirts hanging
with their necks downward, as if there was a man inside them; and the
drawers standing stiffly astride on the gooseberry-bushes, for all the
world as if they held a pair of legs still. As for Gardener's
night-caps--long, white cotton, with a tassel at the top--they were
alarming to look at; just like a head stuck on the top of a pole.

The whole thing was so peculiar, and the old woman so comical in her
despair, that the children, after trying hard to k