e?" "Ah,
yes! good-bye!"

Then the end! The child having been laid down again with his arms
clasped round his sister's neck, telling her that the stream was lulling
him to rest, that now the boat was out at sea and that there was shore
before him, and--Who stood upon the bank! Putting his hands together "as
he had been used to do at his prayers "--not removing his arms to do it,
but folding them so behind his sister's neck--"Mamma is like you, Floy!"
he cried; "I know her by the face! But tell them that the picture on
the stairs at school is not Divine enough. The light about the head is
shining on me as I go!"

Then came two noble passages, nobly delivered.

First--when there were no eyes unmoistened among the listeners--

"The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred
in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our
first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its
course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old
fashion--Death!"

And lastly--with a tearful voice--

"Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet of
Immortality! And look upon us, Angels of young children, with regards
not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!"

Remembering which exquisite words as he himself delivered them, having
the very tones of his voice still ringing tenderly in our recollection,
the truth of that beautiful remark of Dean Stanley's comes back anew
as though it were now only for the first time realised, where, in
his funeral sermon of the 19th June, 1870, he said that it was the
inculcation of the lesson derived from precisely such a scene as this
which will always make the grave of Charles Dickens seem "as though it
were the very grave of those little innocents whom he created for our
companionship, for our instruction, for our delight and solace." The
little workhouse-boy, the little orphan girl, the little cripple,
who "not only blessed his father's needy home, but softened the rude
stranger's hardened conscience," were severally referred to by the
preacher when he gave this charming thought its affecting application.
But, foremost among these bewitching children of the Novelist's
imagination, might surely be placed the child-hero of a story closing
hardly so much with his death as with his apotheosis.

MR CHOPS, THE DWARF.

It remains still a matter of surprise how so much was made out of thi