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Updated: May 25, 2025
Gruff and Tackleton was also there, doing the agreeable, with the evident sensation of being as perfectly at home, and as unquestionably in his own element, as a fresh young salmon on the top of the Great Pyramid. "May! My dear old friend!" cried Dot, running up to meet her. "What a happiness to see you!"
But his adversary being a rigid disciplinarian, and subject to an occasional weakness in respect of pegging more than she was entitled to, required such vigilance on his part, as left him neither eyes nor ears to spare. Thus, his whole attention gradually became absorbed upon the cards; and he thought of nothing else, until a hand upon his shoulder restored him to a consciousness of Tackleton.
She never looked at Tackleton, but fixed her eyes upon her husband. But she kept away from him, setting as wide a space as possible between them; and, though she spoke with most impassioned earnestness, she went no nearer to him even then. How different in this from her old self!
"Look at my sober, plodding husband there," returned Dot. "He adds twenty years to my age at least. Don't you, John?" "Forty," John replied. "How many you'll add to Mary's, I am sure I don't know," said Dot, laughing. "But she can't be much less than a hundred years of age on her next birthday." "Ha, ha!" laughed Tackleton. Hollow as a drum that laugh, though.
He certainly had no intention in his mind of linking anything that Tackleton had said with the unusual conduct of his wife, but the two subjects of reflection came into his mind together, and he could not keep them asunder. The bed was soon made ready; and the visitor, declining all refreshment but a cup of tea, retired.
He scouted, from his heart, the insinuations of the Toy-merchant, and yet they filled him with a vague, indefinite uneasiness. For, Tackleton was quick and sly; and he had that painful sense, himself, of being of slow perception, that a broken hint was always worrying to him.
The Carrier had some faint idea of adding, "dote upon you." But, happening to meet the half-closed eye, as it twinkled upon him over the turned-up collar of the cape, which was within an ace of poking it out, he felt it such an unlikely part and parcel of anything to be doted on, that he substituted, "that she don't believe it?" "Ah, you dog! You're joking," said Tackleton.
"What about the owl that can't sing, and oughtn't to sing, and will sing; is there anything that he should be made to do?" "The extent to which he's winking at this moment!" whispered Caleb to his daughter. "Oh, my gracious!" "Always merry and light-hearted with us!" cried the smiling Bertha. "Oh! you're there, are you?" answered Tackleton. "Poor Idiot!"
In the faint light and silence, the imperturbably calm dolls, the agitated rocking-horses with distended eyes and nostrils, the old gentlemen at the street-doors, standing half doubled up upon their failing knees and ankles, the wry-faced nut-crackers, the very Beasts upon their way into the Ark, in twos, like a Boarding School out walking, might have been imagined to be stricken motionless with fantastic wonder, at Dot being false, or Tackleton beloved, under any combination of circumstances.
Handsomer every day! Better too, if possible! And younger, mused the speaker, in a low voice; 'that's the Devil of it! 'I should be astonished at your paying compliments, Mr. Tackleton, said Dot, not with the best grace in the world; 'but for your condition. 'You know all about it then? 'I have got myself to believe it, somehow, said Dot. 'After a hard struggle, I suppose? 'Very.
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