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ordinary living-room as
well; and a strange place it was. There were houses in it,
finished and unfinished, for Dolls of all stations in life.
Suburban tenements for Dolls of moderate means; kitchens and single
apartments for Dolls of the lower classes; capital town residences
for Dolls of high estate. Some of these establishments were
already furnished according to estimate, with a view to the
convenience of Dolls of limited income; others could be fitted on
the most expensive scale, at a moment's notice, from whole shelves
of chairs and tables, sofas, bedsteads, and upholstery. The
nobility and gentry, and public in general, for whose accommodation
these tenements were designed, lay, here and there, in baskets,
staring straight up at the ceiling; but, in denoting their degrees
in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which
experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the
makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often
froward and perverse; for, they, not resting on such arbitrary
marks as satin, cotton-print, and bits of rag, had superadded
striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus,
the Doll-lady of distinction had wax limbs of perfect symmetry; but
only she and her compeers. The next grade in the social scale
being made of leather, and the next of coarse linen stuff. As to
the common-people, they had just so many matches out of tinder-
boxes, for their arms and legs, and there they were—established in
their sphere at once, beyond the possibility of getting out of it.
    There were various other samples of his handicraft, besides Dolls,
in Caleb Plummer's room. There were Noah's Arks, in which the
Birds and Beasts were an uncommonly tight fit, I assure you; though
they could be crammed in, anyhow, at the roof, and rattled and
shaken into the smallest compass. By a bold poetical licence, most
of these Noah's Arks had knockers on the doors; inconsistent
appendages, perhaps, as suggestive of morning callers and a
Postman, yet a pleasant finish to the outside of the building.
There were scores of melancholy little carts, which, when the
wheels went round, performed most doleful music. Many small
fiddles, drums, and other instruments of torture; no end of cannon,
shields, swords, spears, and guns. There were little tumblers in
red breeches, incessantly swarming up high obstacles of red-tape,
and coming down, head first, on the other side; and there were
innumerable old gentlemen of respectable, not to say venerable,
appearance, insanely flying over horizontal pegs, inserted, for the
purpose, in their own street doors. There were beasts of all
sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed, from the spotted
barrel on four pegs, with a small tippet for a mane, to the
thoroughbred rocker on his highest mettle. As it would have been
hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were
ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdities on the turning of a
handle, so it would have been no easy task to mention any human
folly, vice, or weakness, that had not its type, immediate or
remote, in Caleb Plummer's room. And not in an exaggerated form,
for very little handles will move men and women to as strange
performances, as any Toy was ever made to undertake.
    In the midst of all these objects, Caleb and his daughter sat at
work. The Blind Girl busy as a Doll's dressmaker; Caleb painting
and glazing the four-pair front of a desirable family mansion.
    The care imprinted in the lines of Caleb's face, and his absorbed
and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or
abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his
occupation, and the trivialities about him. But, trivial things,
invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of
fact; and, apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared
to say, myself, that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain, or a
Member of Parliament, or a lawyer, or even a great speculator,