Mawley, testily, “I can’t say I ever did; and I don’t think it likely I ever will.”

“Well, I dare say you are quite right, Frank,” said the kindly voice of my usual ally little Miss Pimpernell, interposing just at the right time—as she always did, indeed—to throw oil on the troubled waters. “But, still, I like Dickens the best. Do you know, children,” she went on, looking round, as we all sat watching her dear old wrinkled face beaming cheerily on us through her spectacles, “do you know, children, I’ve no doubt you’ll laugh at me for telling you, but, when I first read ‘David Copperfield’—and I was an old woman then—I cried my eyes out over the account of the death of poor Dora’s little dog Gyp. Dear little fellow! Don’t you recollect how he crawled out of his tiny Chinese pagoda house, and licked his master’s hand and died? I think it’s the most affecting thing in fiction I ever read in my life.”

“And I, too, dear Miss Pimpernell,” said Min, in her soft, low voice, which had a slight tremor as she spoke, and there was a misty look in her clear grey eyes—silent witnesses of the emotion that stirred her heart. “I shed more tears over poor Gyp than I can bear to think of now—except when I cried over little Tiny Tim, in the ‘Christmas Carol,’ where, you remember, the spirit told Uncle Scrooge that the cripple boy would die. That affected me equally, I believe; and I could not read it dry-eyed now.”

“Nor I,” lisped Baby Blake, following suit, in order to keep up her reputation for sentimentality; “I would thob my eyth out!”

“See,” quoted the curate, grandiloquently, “how ‘one touch of nature makes the whole world kin!’”

“For my part,” exclaimed Miss Spight, who had taken no share in our conversation since we had dropped personalities, “I don’t see the use of people crying over the fabulous woes of a lot of fictitious persons that never existed, when there is such an amount of real grief and misery going on in the world.”

“That is not brought home to us,” said Min, courageously; “but the troubles and trials of the people in fiction are; and I believe that every kind thought which a writer makes throb through our hearts, better enables us to pity the sorrows of actual persons.”

“Bai-ey Je-ove!” exclaimed Horner, twisting his eye-glass round and making an observation for the first time—the discussion before had been apparently beyond his depth,—“Bai-ey Je-ove! Ju-ust what I was gaw-ing to say! Bai-ey Je-ove, yaas! But Miss 

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