ruff and
Tackleton. The premises of Gruff and Tackleton were the great feature of
the street; but you might have knocked down Caleb Plummer's dwelling
with a hammer or two, and carried off the pieces in a cart.

If any one had done the dwelling-house of Caleb Plummer the honour to
miss it after such an inroad, it would have been, no doubt, to commend
its demolition as a vast improvement. It stuck to the premises of Gruff
and Tackleton like a barnacle to a ship's keel, or a snail to a door, or
a little bunch of toadstools to the stem of a tree. But it was the germ
from which the full-grown trunk of Gruff and Tackleton had sprung; and,
under its crazy roof, the Gruff before last had, in a small way, made
toys for a generation of old boys and girls, who had played with them,
and found them out, and broken them, and gone to sleep.

I have said that Caleb and his poor Blind Daughter lived here. I should
have said that Caleb lived here, and his poor Blind Daughter somewhere
else--in an enchanted home of Caleb's furnishing, where scarcity and
shabbiness were not, and trouble never entered. Caleb was no sorcerer;
but in the only magic art that still remains to us, the magic of
devoted, deathless love, Nature had been the mistress of his study;
and, from her teaching, all the wonder came.

The Blind Girl never knew that ceilings were discoloured, walls blotched
and bare of plaster here and there, high crevices unstopped and widening
every day, beams mouldering and tending downward. The Blind Girl never
knew that iron was rusting, wood rotting, paper peeling off; the size,
and shape, and true proportion of the dwelling, withering away. The
Blind Girl never knew that ugly shapes of delf and earthenware were on
the board; that sorrow and faint-heartedness were in the house; that
Caleb's scanty hairs were turning greyer and more grey before her
sightless face. The Blind Girl never knew they had a master, cold,
exacting, and uninterested--never knew that Tackleton was Tackleton, in
short; but lived in the belief of an eccentric humorist, who loved to
have his jest with them, and who, while he was the Guardian Angel of
their lives, disdained to hear one word of thankfulness.

And all was Caleb's doing; all the doing of her simple father! But he,
too, had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its music when
the motherless Blind Child was very young that Spirit had inspired him
with the thought that even her great deprivati