At first I suppose Miss Stipp--Miss Emma Jane Stipp--who is polishing
the grate, to be _kneeling_ on the hearthstone; but when a bird-like
claw is stretched out to me, and the shrill, cracked voice says, "I'm
dirty, but hearty; sit down and enjoy yourself," I observe that the
little dwarf is actually _standing_ on the hearthstone, although her big
head does not come within several inches of the mantelpiece. Indeed,
with her twisted feet crossed over one another, so that the left foot
appears to be kicking and worrying the right foot, in order to take its
place, and the right foot, which turns upward, appears to be trying to
creep away from its enemy, as though it wanted to crawl up that enemy's
leg to laugh at it from the mocking vantage of its own knee--the little
old lady walks up and down on the hearthstone, her hand blacking and
polishing the grate as she goes, just as you may see another lady
walking up and down and taking the air on her doorstep.

* * * * *

The little dwarf is familiar to hundreds of Londoners. Always nursing
the wall, and using a miniature crooked stick exactly like a
question-mark, she hobbles through the streets like a half-human beetle,
until she reaches some such place as the approach to a railway station,
where she finds it profitable to stand as though in great pain, rolling
sheep's eyes at the hurrying crowd. And many of those tenderhearted
gentlemen and kind old ladies, and dear little overdressed children
returning from a visit to Old Drury or the Tower of London, who have
slipped a penny or a sixpenny-bit into the claw of the dwarf, must often
have asked themselves at the time what manner of woman she is, and
bothered themselves to imagine how on earth she lives. The old
creature--for she is over seventy--is counted in statistics among the
proud population of this Seat of Empire, and she is as much subject to
the cosmic laws and as much a member of the human family as the tallest
and most swaggering Lifeguards-man who ever had "Cook's Son!" shouted at
him by irreverent urchin.

How she views the universe from her altitude of a yard, or a yard and
three inches; what her attitude is to God and man, and how life goes
with the old veteran after seventy odd years of its buffeting--these
were some of the mysteries which I brought with me into her back room by
the riverside for their unveiling by Miss Emma Stipp herself.

* * * *