somebody--_who_, I
wonder, and which way did _she_ go when she died?--hummed the
evening hymn, and I cried on the pillow--either with the remorseful
consciousness of having kicked somebody else, or because still
somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day".

For the second number of _Household Words_, when he "felt an uneasy
sense of there being a want of something tender, which would apply to
some universal household knowledge", he composed a little paper about "a
child's dream of a star". It was the story of a brother and sister,
constant child companions, who used to make friends of a star, watching
it together until they knew when and where it would rise, and always
bidding it good-night, so that when the sister dies, the lonely brother
still connects her with the star, which he then sees opening as a sea
of light, and its rays making a shining pathway from earth to heaven. It
was his sister Fanny, who had often wandered with him at night in St.
Mary's Churchyard, near their home at Chatham, looking up at the stars,
and her death, shortly before the paper was written, had revived the
fancy of childhood. In _The Uncommercial Traveller_ he revisits
"Dullborough", and the first discovery he makes is that the station has
swallowed up the playing field of the school to which he went during his
last two years at Chatham.

[Illustration: SHORNE CHURCH]

"It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the
turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the
stoniest of jolting roads; while, beyond the station, an ugly dark
monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them
and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried
me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid [it was
really called the 'Commodore'], and belonged to Timpson, at the
coach office up street; the locomotive engine that had brought me
back was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was
spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.... Here, in
the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of
Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the
victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had
been recognized with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who
had come all the way from England (second house in the ter