ed to
get in at Maggie's lodgings, but, though they knocked twice, the people
were asleep. As Amy did not wish to disturb them, they wandered about
all night, sometimes sitting at the gate of the prison, Maggie shivering
and whimpering.

"It will soon be over, dear," said patient Amy.

"Oh, it's all very well for you, mother," said Maggie, "but I'm a poor
thing, only ten years old."

Thanks to Mr. Clennam, a great change took place in the fortunes of the
family, and not long after this wretched night it was discovered that
Mr. Dorrit was owner of a large property, and they became very rich.

But Little Dorrit never forgot, as, sad to say, the rest of the family
did, the friends who had been kind to them in their poverty; and when,
in his turn, Mr. Clennam became a prisoner in the Marshalsea, Little
Dorrit came to comfort and console him, and after many changes of
fortune she became his wife, and they lived happy ever after.

V.

THE TOY-MAKER AND HIS BLIND DAUGHTER.

CALEB PLUMMER and his blind daughter lived alone in a little cracked
nutshell of a house. They were toy-makers, and their house, which was so
small that it might have been knocked to pieces with a hammer, and
carried away in a cart, was stuck like a toadstool on to the premises of
Messrs. Gruff & Tackleton, the toy merchants for whom they worked--the
latter of whom was himself both Gruff and Tackleton in one.

I am saying that Caleb and his blind daughter lived here. I should say
Caleb did, while his daughter lived in an enchanted palace, which her
father's love had created for her. She did not know that the ceilings
were cracked, the plaster tumbling down, and the woodwork rotten; that
everything was old and ugly and poverty-stricken about her, and that her
father was a gray-haired, stooping old man, and the master for whom they
worked a hard and brutal taskmaster; oh, dear no, she fancied a pretty,
cosy, compact little home full of tokens of a kind master's care, a
smart, brisk, gallant-looking father, and a handsome and noble-looking
toy merchant who was an angel of goodness.

This was all Caleb's doing. When his blind daughter was a baby he had
determined, in his great love and pity for her, that her loss of sight
should be turned into a blessing, and her life as happy as he could make
it. And she was happy; everything about her she saw with her father's
eyes, in the rainbow-colored light with which it was his care and
pleasure to inv