n those occasions, anybody who reminds me of that horrible
Trial throws me back again into the past, and causes me unutterable
nervous suffering. I am a very tender-hearted man. As the necessary
consequence (in such a world as this), I am a miserable wretch. Accept
my excuses. Come in, both of you. Come in and pity me."

A child would not have been frightened of him now. A child would have
gone in and pitied him.

The room was getting darker and darker. We could just see the crouching
figure of Miserrimus Dexter at the expiring fire--and that was all.

"Are we to have no light?" asked Mrs. Macallan. "And is this lady to see
you, when the light comes, out of your chair?"

He lifted something bright and metallic, hanging round his neck, and
blew on it a series of shrill, trilling, bird-like notes. After an
interval he was answered by a similar series of notes sounding faintly
in some distant region of the house.

"Ariel is coming," he said. "Compose yourself, Mamma Macallan; Ariel
with make me presentable to a lady's eyes."

He hopped away on his hands into the darkness at the end of the
room. "Wait a little," said Mrs. Macallan, "and you will have another
surprise--you will see the 'delicate Ariel.'"

We heard heavy footsteps in the circular room.

"Ariel!" sighed Miserrimus Dexter out of the darkness, in his softest
notes.

To my astonishment the coarse, masculine voice of the cousin in the
man's hat--the Caliban's, rather than the Ariel's voice--answered,
"Here!"

"My chair, Ariel!"

The person thus strangely misnamed drew aside the tapestry, so as to let
in more light; then entered the room, pushing the wheeled chair before
her. She stooped and lifted Miserrimus Dexter from the floor, like a
child. Before she could put him into the chair, he sprang out of her
arms with a little gleeful cry, and alighted on his seat, like a bird
alighting on its perch!

"The lamp," said Miserrimus Dexter, "and the looking-glass.--Pardon me,"
he added, addressing us, "for turning my back on you. You mustn't see
me until my hair is set to rights.--Ariel! the brush, the comb, and the
perfumes!"

Carrying the lamp in one hand, the looking-glass in the other, and the
brush (with the comb stuck in it) between her teeth, Ariel the Second,
otherwise Dexter's cousin, presented herself plainly before me for the
first time. I could now see the girl's round, fleshy, inexpressive
face, her rayless and colorless eyes, her coarse nos