the felicity of the situation.

With hunger-time came dusk, and afterward darkness, blacker than the
tall hat of Margaret's father. For at the last moment nature had thought
better of the fine weather which man had been enjoying for the past
month, and drawn a vast curtain of inkiness over the luminaries from
one horizon even unto the other, and sent a great puff of wet fog up the
valley of the river from the ocean, so that teeth chattered and the ends
of fingers became shriveled and bloodless. And had not vanity gone out
with the entrance of sin, Margaret would have noticed that her tight
little curls were looser and the once stately ostrich feather upon her
Sunday hat, the envy of little girls whom the green monster possessed,
as flabby as a long sermon.

Meanwhile the tide having turned, little sister boat made fine way of
it down the river, and, burrowing in the fog, holding her breath as it
were, and greatly assisted by the tide, slipped past the town unseen,
and put for open sea, where it is to be supposed she enjoyed herself
hugely and, finally, becoming a little skeleton of herself on unknown
shores, was gathered up by somebody who wanted a pretty fire with
green lights in it. The main point is that she went her selfish way
undetected, so that the wide-lanterned search which presently arose for
little Margaret tumbled and stumbled about clueless, and halted to take
drinks, and came back about morning and lay down all day, and said it
never did, which it certainly hadn't. All the to-do was over Margaret,
for Aladdin had not been missed, and, even if he had, nobody would have
looked for him. His father was at home bending over the model of the
wonderful lamp which was to make his fortune, and over which he had been
bending for fifteen rolling years. It had come to him, at about the time
that he fell in love with Aladdin's mother, that a certain worthless
biproduct of something would, if combined with something else and
steeped in water, generate a certain gas, which, though desperately
explosive, would burn with a flame as white as day. Over the perfection
of this invention, with a brief honeymoon for vacation, he had spent
fifteen years, a small fortune,--till he had nothing left,--the most
of his health, and indeed everything but his conviction that it was a
beautiful invention and sure of success. When Aladdin arrived, he was
red and wrinkled, after the everlasting fashion of the human babe, and
had no name,