during which Taffy and his mother took their meals at the
window-seat, sitting on corded boxes; and an evening when he went out
to the cannon in the square, and around the little back garden,
saying good-bye to the fixtures and the few odds and ends which were
to be left behind--the tool-shed (Crusoe's hut, Cave of Adullam, and
Treasury of the Forty Thieves), the stunted sycamore-tree which he
had climbed at different times as Zacchaeus, Ali Baba, and Man Friday
with the bear behind him; the clothes' prop, which, on the strength
of its forked tail, had so often played Dragon to his St. George.
When he returned to the empty house, he found his mother in the
passage. She had been for a walk alone. The candle was lit, and he
saw she had been crying. This told him where she had been; for,
although he remembered nothing about it, he knew he had once
possessed a small sister, who lived with him less than two months.
He had, as a rule, very definite notions of death and the grave; but
he never thought of her as dead and buried, partly because his mother
would never allow him to go with her to the cemetery, and partly
because of a picture in a certain book of his, called _Child's Play_.
It represented a little girl wading across a pool among water-lilies.
She wore a white nightdress, kilted above her knees, and a dark
cloak, which dragged behind in the water. She let it trail, while
she held up a hand to cover one of her eyes. Above her were trees
and an owl, and a star shining under the topmost branch; and on the
opposite page this verse:

"I have a little sister,
They call her Peep-peep,
She wades through the waters,
Deep, deep, deep;
She climbs up the mountains,