front of the gable--the twilight, here, was still as much akin to
night as morning. Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a
moment's pause on the threshold, peering towards the window with
her near-sighted scowl, as if frowning down some bitter enemy, she
suddenly projected herself into the shop. The haste, and, as it were,
the galvanic impulse of the movement, were really quite startling.

Nervously--in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say--she began to
busy herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other
little wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect
of this dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a
deeply tragic character that contrasted irreconcilably with the
ludicrous pettiness of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly,
that so gaunt and dismal a personage should take a toy in hand;
a miracle, that the toy did not vanish in her grasp; a miserably
absurd idea, that she should go on perplexing her stiff and sombre
intellect with the question how to tempt little boys into her premises!
Yet such is undoubtedly her object. Now she places a gingerbread
elephant against the window, but with so tremulous a touch that it
tumbles upon the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its
trunk; it has ceased to be an elephant, and has become a few bits of
musty gingerbread. There, again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles,
all of which roll different ways, and each individual marble,
devil-directed, into the most difficult obscurity that it can find.
Heaven help our poor old Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous
view of her position! As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its
hands and knees, in quest of the absconding marbles, we positively
feel so much the more inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the
very fact that we must needs turn aside and laugh at her. For
here,--and if we fail to impress it suitably upon the reader, it