ays, and I give Sophy away with my
own hand. There were only us three and the gentleman who had had charge
of her for those two years. I give the wedding dinner of four in the
Library Cart. Pigeon-pie, a leg of pickled pork, a pair of fowls, and
suitable garden stuff. The best of drinks. I give them a speech, and
the gentleman give us a speech, and all our jokes told, and the whole
went off like a sky-rocket. In the course of the entertainment I
explained to Sophy that I should keep the Library Cart as my living-cart
when not upon the road, and that I should keep all her books for her just
as they stood, till she come back to claim them. So she went to China
with her young husband, and it was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I
got the boy I had another service; and so as of old, when my child and
wife were gone, I went plodding along alone, with my whip over my
shoulder, at the old horse's head.

Sophy wrote me many letters, and I wrote her many letters. About the end
of the first year she sent me one in an unsteady hand: "Dearest father,
not a week ago I had a darling little daughter, but I am so well that
they let me write these words to you. Dearest and best father, I hope my
child may not be deaf and dumb, but I do not yet know." When I wrote
back, I hinted the question; but as Sophy never answered that question, I
felt it to be a sad one, and I never repeated it. For a long time our
letters were regular, but then they got irregular, through Sophy's
husband being moved to another station, and through my being always on
the move. But we were in one another's thoughts, I was equally sure,
letters or no letters.

Five years, odd months, had gone since Sophy went away. I was still the
King of the Cheap Jacks, and at a greater height of popularity than ever.
I had had a first-rate autumn of it, and on the twenty-third of December,
one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four, I found myself at Uxbridge,
Middlesex, clean sold out. So I jogged up to London with the old horse,
light and easy, to have my Christmas-eve and Christmas-day alone by the
fire in the Library Cart, and then to buy a regular new stock of goods
all round, to sell 'em again and get the money.

I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you what I knocked up for my
Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a
beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a
couple of mushrooms thrown in. It's a pudding to