Library Cart, and I went up alone. She was
drying her eyes.

"You have been crying, my dear."

"Yes, father."

"Why?"

"A head-ache."

"Not a heart-ache?"

"I said a head-ache, father."

"Doctor Marigold must prescribe for that
head-ache."

She took up the book of my Prescriptions,
and held it up with a forced smile; but seeing
me keep still and look earnest, she softly laid it
down again, and her eyes were very attentive.

"The Prescription is not there, Sophy."

"Where is it?"

"Here, my dear."

I brought her young husband in, and I put
her hand in his, and my only further words to
both of them were these: "Doctor Marigold's
last prescription. To be taken for life." After
which I bolted.

When the wedding come off, I mounted a coat
(blue, and bright buttons), for the first and last
time in all my days, and I give Sophy away with
my own hand. There were only us three and the
gentleman who had had charge of her for those
two years. I give the wedding dinner of four
in the Library Cart. Pigeon pie, a leg of pickled
pork, a pair of fowls, and suitable garden-stuff.
The best of drinks. I give them a speech, and
the gentlemen give us a speech, and all our jokes
told, and the whole went off like a sky-rocket.
In the course of the entertainment I explained
to Sophy that I should keep the Library Cart as
my living-cart when not upon the road, and that
I should keep all her books for her just as they
stood, till she come back to claim them. So she
went to China with her young husband, and it
was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I got the
boy I had another service, and so as of old when
my child and wife were gone, I went plodding
along alone, with my whip over my shoulder, at
the old horse's head.

Sophy wrote me many letters, and I wrote her
many letters. About the end of the first year
she sent me one in an unsteady hand: "Dearest
father, not a week ago I had a darling little
daughter, but I am so well that they let me write
these words to you. Dearest and best father, I
hope my child may not be deaf and dumb, but I
do not yet know." When I wrote back, I hinted
the question; but as Sophy never answered that
question, I felt it to be a sad one, and I never
repeated it. For a long time our letters were
regular, but then they got irregular through
Sophy's husband being moved to another station,
and through my being always on the move. But
we were in one another's thoughts, I was equally
sure, letters or no letters.

Five years, odd months, had gone since Sophy
went away. I was still the King of the Cheap
Jacks, and at a greater heighth of popularity
than ever. I had had a first-rate autumn of it,
and on the twenty-third of December, one thousand
eight hundred and sixty-four, I found myself
at Uxbridge, Middlesex, clean sold out. So
I jogged up to London with the old horse, light
and easy, to have my Christmas-Eve and Christmas
Day alone by the fire in the Library Cart,
and then to buy a regular new stock of goods
all round, to sell 'em again and get the money.

I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you
what I knocked up for my Christmas-Eve dinner
in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak
pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen
oysters, and a couple of mushrooms, thrown in.
It's a pudding to put a man in good humour with
everything, except the two bottom buttons of
his waistcoat. Having relished that pudding
and cleared away, I turned the lamp low, and
sat down by the light of the fire, watching it as
it shone upon the backs of Sophy's books.

Sophy's books so brought up Sophy's self, that
I saw her touching face quite plainly, before I
dropped off dozing by the fire. This may be a
reason why Sophy, with her deaf and dumb child
in her arms, seemed to stand silent by me all
through my nap. I was on the road, off the
road, in all sorts of places, North and South and
West and East, Winds liked best and winds
liked least, Here and there and gone astray, Over
the hills and far away, and still she stood silent
by me, with her silent child in her arms. Even
when I woke with a start, she seemed to vanish,
as if she had stood by me in that very place
only a single instant before.

I had started at a real sound, and the sound
was on the steps of the cart. It was the light
hurried tread of a child, coming clambering up.
That tread of a child had once been so familiar
to me, that for half a moment I believed I was a
going to see a little ghost.

But the touch of a real child was laid upon
the outer handle of the door, and the handle
turned and the door opened a little way, and a
real child peeped in. A bright little comely
girl with large dark eyes.

Looking full at me, the tiny creature took off
her mite of a straw hat, and a quantity of
dark curls fell all about her face. Then she
opened her lips, and said in a pretty voice:

"Grandfather!"

"Ah my God!" I cries out. "She can
speak!"

"Yes, dear grandfather. And I am to ask
you whether there was ever any one that I
remind you of?"

In a moment Sophy was round my neck as
well as the child, and her husband was a wringing
my hand with his face hid, and we all had to
shake ourselves together before we could get
over it. And when we did begin to get over it,
and I saw the pretty child a talking, pleased and
quick and eager and busy, to her mother, in the
signs that I had first taught her mother, the
happy and yet pitying tears fell rolling down my
face.