'd carry twenty times her weight, and never know I'd got it. Tell me if
I go too quick for you. I'm very fast. I always was!" Trotty said this,
taking about six of his trotting paces to one stride of his fatigued
companion; and with his thin legs quivering again, beneath the load he
bore.

"Down the Mews here, Uncle Will, and step at the black door, with 'T.
Veck, Ticket Porter,' wrote upon a board; and here we are, and here we
go, and here we are indeed, my precious Meg, surprising you!"

With which words Trotty, in a breathless state, set the child down
before his daughter in the middle of the floor. The little visitor
looked once at Meg; and doubting nothing in that face, but trusting
everything she saw there; ran into her arms.

"Here we are, and here we go!" cried Trotty, running round the room and
choking audibly. "Here, Uncle Will, here's a fire you know! Why don't
you come to the fire? Oh here we are and here we go! Meg, my precious
darling, where's the kettle? Here it is and here it goes, and it'll bile
in no time!"

Trotty really had picked up the kettle somewhere or other in the course
of his wild career, and now put it on the fire; while Meg, seating the
child in a warm corner, knelt down on the ground before her, and pulled
off her shoes, and dried her wet feet on a cloth. Ay, and she laughed at
Trotty too--so pleasantly, so cheerfully, that Trotty could have blessed
her where she kneeled; for he had seen that, when they entered, she was
sitting by the fire in tears.

"Why, father!" said Meg. "You're crazy to-night, I think. I don't know
what the Bells would say to that."

Meg looked toward him and saw that he had elaborately stationed himself
behind the chair of their male visitor, where with many mysterious
gestures he was holding up the six-pence he had earned.

"I see, my dear," said Trotty, "as I was coming in, half an ounce of tea
lying somewhere on the stairs; and I'm pretty sure there was a bit of
bacon too. As I don't remember where it was exactly, I'll go myself and
try to find 'em."

With this inscrutable artifice, Toby withdrew to purchase the viands he
had spoken of, for ready money, at Mrs. Chickenstalker's; and presently
came back, pretending that he had not been able to find them, at first
in the dark.

"But here they are at last," said Trotty, setting out the tea things,
"all correct! I was pretty sure it was tea and a rasher. So it is. Meg
my pet, if you'll just make the tea, wh