ful chi-ild! Equal to the general run of children at five months
o-old! Takes notice in a way quite won-der-ful! May seem impossible to
you, but feels his feet al-ready!" Directly afterwards, Caleb
Plummer appeared upon the scene, little imagining that in the
Mysterious-Stranger would be discovered, later on, under the disguise
of that nearly stone-deaf old gentleman, his (Caleb's) own dear boy,
Edward, supposed to have died in the golden South Americas. Little
Caleb's inquiry of Mrs. Peerybingle,--"You couldn't have the goodness to
let me pinch Boxer's tail, Mum, for half a moment, could you?" was
one of the welcome whimsicalities of the Reading. "Why, Caleb! what a
question!" naturally enough was Dot's instant exclamation. "Oh, never
mind, Mum!" said the little toy-maker, apologetically, "He mightn't like
it perhaps"--adding, by way of explanation--"There's a small order just
come in, for barking dogs; and I should wish to go as close to Natur' as
I could, for sixpence!" Caleb's employer, Tackleton, in his large
green cape and bull-headed looking mahogany tops, was then described as
entering pretty much in the manner of what one might suppose to be that
of an ogrish toy-merchant. His character came out best perhaps--meaning,
in another sense, that is, at its worst--when the fairy spirit of
John's house, the Cricket, was heard chirping; and Tackleton asked,
grumpily,--"Why don't you kill that cricket? I would! I always do!
I hate their noise!" John exclaiming, in amazement,--"You kill your
crickets, eh?" "Scrunch 'em, sir!" quoth Tackleton. One of the most
wistfully curious thoughts uttered in the whole of the Reading was the
allusion to the original founder of the toy-shop of Gruff and Tackleton,
where it was remarked (such a quaint epitome of human life!) that under
that same crazy roof, beneath which Caleb Plummer and Bertha, his blind
daughter, found shelter as their humble home,--"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_." Another wonderfully comic minor character was introduced
later on in the eminently ridiculous person of old Mrs. Fielding--in
regard to in-door gloves, a foreshadowing of Mrs. Wilfer--in the matter
of her imaginary losses through the indigo trade, a spectral precursor,
or dim prototype, as one might say, of Mrs. Pipchin and the Peruvian
mines. Throughout the chief