o in his mind; and he could think more soberly of what had
happened.

Although the shadow of the Stranger fell at intervals upon the
glass--always distinct, and big, and thoroughly defined--it never fell
so darkly as at first. Whenever it appeared, the Fairies uttered a
general cry of consternation, and plied their little arms and legs with
inconceivable activity to rub it out. And whenever they got at Dot
again, and showed her to him once more, bright and beautiful, they
cheered in the most inspiring manner.

They never showed her otherwise than beautiful and bright, for they were
Household Spirits to whom falsehood is an annihilation; and being so,
what Dot was there for them, but the one active, beaming, pleasant
little creature who had been the light and sun of the Carrier's Home?

The Fairies were prodigiously excited when they showed her, with the
Baby, gossipping among a knot of sage old matrons, and affecting to be
wondrous old and matronly herself, and leaning in a staid demure old way
upon her husband's arm, attempting--she! such a bud of a little
woman--to convey the idea of having abjured the vanities of the world in
general, and of being the sort of person to whom it was no novelty at
all to be a mother; yet, in the same breath, they showed her laughing at
the Carrier for being awkward, and pulling up his shirt collar to make
him smart, and mincing merrily about that very room to teach him how to
dance!

They turned, and stared immensely at him when they showed her with the
Blind Girl; for, though she carried cheerfulness and animation with her
wheresoever she went, she bore those influences into Caleb Plummer's
home, heaped up and running over. The Blind Girl's love for her, and
trust in her, and gratitude to her; her own good busy way of setting
Bertha's thanks aside; her dexterous little arts for filling up each
moment of the visit in doing something useful to the house, and really
working hard while feigning to make holiday; her bountiful provision of
those standing delicacies, the Veal and Ham Pie and the bottles of Beer;
her radiant little face arriving at the door, and taking leave; the
wonderful expression in her whole self, from her neat foot to the crown
of her head, of being a part of the establishment--a something necessary
to it, which it couldn't be without,--all this the Fairies revelled in,
and loved her for. And once again they looked upon him all at once,
appealingly, and seemed to say