Dickens's Christmas Books - complete online versions

The Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Cricket On the Hearth, Battle Of Life
& The Haunted Man & the Ghosts's Bargain with Illustrations.

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182
THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH.
shelter of your comfortable cart (may I never have a worse!) so acceptable, is still as bad as ever. Would you, in your kindness, suffer me to rent a bed here ?"
" Yes, yes," cried Dot. " Yes ! Certainly ! "
" Oh!" said the Carrier, surprised by the rapidity of this consent. " Well! I don't object; but still I'm not quite sure that------"
" Hush !" she interrupted. " Dear John ! "
" Why, he's stone deaf," urged John.
" I know he is, but—Yes Sir, certainly. Yes ! certainly ! I'll make him up a bed, directly, John."
As she hurried off to do it, the flutter of her spirits, and the agitation of her manner, were so strange, that the Carrier stood looking after her, quite confounded.
" Did its mothers make it up a Beds then !" cried Miss Slow-boy to the Baby; "and did its hair grow brown and curly, when its caps was lifted off, and frighten it, a precious Pets, a sitting by the fires !"
With that unaccountable attraction of the mind to trifles, which is often incidental to a state of doubt and confusion, the Carrier, as he walked slowly to and fro, found himself mentally repeating even these absurd words, many times. So many times that he got them by heart, and was still conning them over and over, like a lesson, when Tilly, after administering as much friction to the little bald head with her hand as she thought wholesome (accord­ing to the practice of nurses), had once more tied the Baby's cap on.
" And frighten it a precious Pets, a sitting by the fire. What frightened Dot, I wonder !" mused the Carrier, pacing to and fro.
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 a man of slow perception, that a broken hint was always worrying to him. 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. Then Dot: quite well again, she said : quite well again : arranged the great chair in the chimney-corner for her husband ; filled his pipe and gave it him ; and took her usual little stool beside him on the hearth.
She always would sit on that little stool; I think she must have had a kind of notion that it was a coaxing, wheedling, little -stool.
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