for the fairies.
The lights along the Embankment had ceased to remind her of those in
the Small People's Gardens; nor did the noise bursting from
music-hall doors as she passed, recall the old sounds; and as for the
scents, there were plenty in London, but none resembling that of the
garden which you might smell a mile out at sea.

I told you that her needlework had been a marvel when she lived down
at the village. Curiously enough, this was the one gift of the
fairies that stayed by her, and it remained as wonderful as ever.
Her most frequent employer was a flat-footed Jew with a large, fleshy
face; and because she had a name for honesty, she was not seldom
entrusted with costly pieces of stuff, and allowed to carry them home
to turn into ball-dresses under the roof through the gaps of which,
as she stitched, she could see the night pass from purple to black,
and from black to the lilac of daybreak. There, with a hundred
pounds' worth of silk and lace on her knee, she would sit and work a
dozen hours to earn as many pence. With fingers weary and--But you
know Hood's song, and no doubt have taken it to heart a dozen times.

It came to this, however, that one evening, when she had not eaten
for forty hours, her employer gave her a piece of embroidery to work
against time. The fact is, my dear lady, that you are very
particular about having your commissions executed to the hour, and
your dressmakers are anxious to oblige, knowing that you never
squabble over the price. To be sure, you have never heard of the
flat-footed Jew man--how should you? And we may believe that your
dressmakers knew just as little of the poor woman who had used to be
the friend of the Small People. But the truth remains that, in the
press of your many pleasures, you were pardonably twenty-four hours
late in ordering the gown in which you were to appear an angel.

Ah, madam! will it comfort you to hear that _you_ were the one to
reconcile the Small People with that poor sister of yours who had
left them, twenty years before, and wanted them so sorely?
The hospital doctor gave her complaint a long name, and I gather that
it has a place by itself in books of pathology. But the woman's tale
was that, after she had been stitching through the long night, the
dawn came through the roof and found her with four marguerites still
left to be embroidered in gold on the pieces of satin that lay in her
lap. She threaded her needle afresh, rubbed her