stick to me, and I find myself liking things, and wanting things, quite
out of keeping with my cap and time of life. For instance. Anything in
the shape of a toy-shop (from a London bazaar to a village window, with
Dutch dolls, leather balls, and wooden battledores) quite unnerves me,
so to speak. When I see one of those boxes containing a jar, a churn, a
kettle, a pan, a coffee-pot, a cauldron on three legs, and sundry
dishes, all of the smoothest wood, and with the immemorial red flower
on one side of each vessel, I fairly long for an excuse for playing
with them, and for trying (positively for the last time) if the lids
_do_ come off, and whether the kettle will (literally, as well as
metaphorically) hold water. Then if, by good or ill luck, there is a
child flattening its little nose against the window with longing eyes,
my purse is soon empty; and as it toddles off with a square parcel
under one arm, and a lovely being in black ringlets and white tissue
paper in the other, I wish that I were worthy of being asked to join
the ensuing play. Don't suppose there is any generosity in this. I have
only done what we are all glad to do. I have found an excuse for
indulging a pet weakness. As I said, it is not merely the new and
expensive toys that attract me; I think my weakest corner is where the
penny boxes lie, the wooden tea-things (with the above-named flower in
miniature), the soldiers on their lazy tongs, the nine-pins, and the
tiny farm.

"I need hardly say that the toy booth in a village fair tries me very
hard. It tried me in childhood, when I was often short of pence, and
when 'the Feast' came once a year. It never tried me more than on one
occasion, lately, when I was re-visiting my old home.

"It was deep Midsummer, and the Feast. I had children with me of course
(I find children, somehow, wherever I go), and when we got into the