shops to uncountable atoms. It was the grandest
shop for its size (and that was of the most
diminutive) that could be pictured. I met a
waggon before the door one day, and two large
porters carried in a bale of dry goods, circled
with iron bands, and, I have no doubt, packed
by hydraulic pressure. Imagine a couple of
hundred-weight of dolls' clothes, and a
solemn invoice being made out for those airy
futilities! Futilities? I retract. They couldn't
be futile, they couldn't be puerile, for the Caliph
—a fat Frenchman, in a huge beard, a stamped
velvet cap with a long tassel, and always shod
with carpet slippers—handled and set out the
dry little goods with an impenetrable gravity,
morning after morning, and the Caliphina, the
Caliph's wife, who was a smart little matron,
with a wasp waist and a laced fichu tied under
her chin, à la Mrs. Siddons, who wore a gold
watch at her little stomacher, and the tightest
of fitting kid gloves, winter and summer, was
always at her desk, immersed in the most abstruse
calculations relative to these Lilliputian dry
goods. The two handsome demoiselles of the
counter, Eulalie and Aménaïde—I am sure those
were their names—one, dark, stately, tall, and
Dudu-eyed: the second, fair, florid, and freckled
—never hazarded so much as a smile as they
turned over the dolls' wardrobes. To them these
microscopic fal-lals were a serious business,
the business of their lives. In our country
exists there not a laborious class who earn
painful bread by fashioning dolls' eyes? Avert,
kind Fate, a strike, a lock-out, and a "document,"
from the dolls'-eye trade!

So, on the counters and in the windows, there
were skilfully displayed all the ingredients and
accessories of this mighty matter of a doll's
trousseau. Let me strive to remember. There
were dresses, and mantles, and robes, and tunics,
and flounced skirts, and jackets for adult dolls.
There were frocks, pelisses, and spencers for
young dolls; pinafores for them to wear whilst
they ate their bread and jam; morning wrappers
for them to don while M. Anatole, the coiffeur,
"did" their back hair. There were long
clothes and short coats, capes, hoods, and
mantelettes, for infantine dolls, not yet out of the
nursery; combs and brushes, tweezers and
nail-scissors, all on the doll scale; muffs, and boas,
and victorines, and furred capes for wintry
weather; nightgowns, nightcaps, and jackets;
grandes toilettes of gauze, ribbon, and other
flummery for the receptions of Dollius Caesar
and Lucius Dolabella, and the puppet-balls
of the Hôtel de Ville. In the event of dolls
going on their travels, there were trunks,
bandboxes, portmanteaus, carpet-bags, medicine-
chests, and couriers' pouches for them. I
dare say, in the back shop, a marionette clerk
stamped and viséd passports for Madame de la
Poupée, travelling à l'étranger. There were
dolls' dressing-cases, reticules, and pocket-
books. Upon my word, there was a dolls' prayer-
book: a fat little volume, with embossed gilt
edges, and a large red cross on the covers, and
a mite of a golden clasp! The display of dolls'
chaussures, from the white satin ball-shoe to the
bronzed kid walking-boot, was complete.
Concerning the supply of dolls' under-linen I am
somewhat chary of speaking—it looked so
absurdly real; but I may delicately hint that the
collerettes, chemisettes, sleeves, and cuffs, were
all of the finest linen and the rarest lace, and
that with respect to those sub-skirt appendages,
whose use Mrs. Amelia Bloomer vainly
endeavoured to supersede by the introduction of baggy
garments of divers hues, of the fashion formerly
worn in the hareem of the good Caliph, and
called, I am given to understand, trousers, I
may in strict confidence remark that three tucks
round the extremities were generally worn, and
that the preponderance of fashion wavered
between embroidered vandyking, scroll application
work, and an edging of the finest point
de Malte.

Dolls' fans, scent-bottles, ivory tablets, and
châtelaines, had not been forgotten by the good Caliph.
He had been, somehow, remiss in the matter of
opera-glasses, but he came out strongly in
pocket-mirrors. Dolls' jewellery he did not touch at
all, and there were no diamond splinters or ruby
sparks set in specks of gold for bracelets or for
brooches. Probably bijouterie was not the
Caliph's branch, and the precious stone department
was carried on by MM. Mustardseed and
Peasblossom, successors to Messrs. Hunt and
Roskell, under a glass-case, somewhere in the
Palais Royal. But the Caliph was fertile in
dolls' toys, joujoux for the young dolls not out
of the nursery, playthings in playthings, atomic
rattles, corals, hoops, skipping-ropes and
humming-tops, and baby or doll-dolls for the dolls
themselves to dandle, and small perambulators for
the weakly dolls to be trundled in. Bless us all,
what a mine of ingenuity there was in this World
seen through the small end of a race-glass! The
most wondrous thing to me in the Caliph's
establishment, and one displaying the soundest policy
in fostering the fantastic and the unreal real,
was, that, with the exception of the baby-dolls,
there were no Dolls proper in the Caliph's
wardrobe-shop. There were none of those inane,
flaxen-haired, blue stony-eyed, flaxen tow-haired,
simpering abnormalities with the creasy waxen
limbs, puffed out raiment, preposterous sashes
and blue kid shoes that stare and grin at you in
London shop windows; or, worse still, those limp
enormities of dolldom with their pink wooden
legs and painted shoes, their leathern arms and
hands, the fingers all turned the wrong way in
the Guy Fauxian style, and shamefully
exposing their bran-stuffed torsos. The ingenious
Caliph dexterously conveyed to you the idea
that the dolls for whom this wardrobe was laid
out, were alive; that they were dolls in good
society; dolls occupying elevated positions;
dolls marriageable or married, and who would
come presently in carriages of their own to
choose their trousseaux and their ball toilettes.
With such a naïve skill was this idea insinuated,
implied, and made substantial, that when I found,
one morning, an ample display of dolls' crinoline
petticoats in the window, I acquiesced in the