Chapter 4

Fourth Quarter.

Some new remembrance of the ghostly figures in the Bells; some
faint impression of the ringing of the Chimes; some giddy
consciousness of having seen the swarm of phantoms reproduced and
reproduced until the recollection of them lost itself in the
confusion of their numbers; some hurried knowledge, how conveyed to
him he knew not, that more years had passed; and Trotty, with the
Spirit of the child attending him, stood looking on at mortal
company.

Fat company, rosy-cheeked company, comfortable company. They were
but two, but they were red enough for ten. They sat before a
bright fire, with a small low table between them; and unless the
fragrance of hot tea and muffins lingered longer in that room than
in most others, the table had seen service very lately. But all
the cups and saucers being clean, and in their proper places in the
corner-cupboard; and the brass toasting-fork hanging in its usual
nook and spreading its four idle fingers out as if it wanted to be
measured for a glove; there remained no other visible tokens of the
meal just finished, than such as purred and washed their whiskers
in the person of the basking cat, and glistened in the gracious,
not to say the greasy, faces of her patrons.

This cosy couple (married, evidently) had made a fair division of
the fire between them, and sat looking at the glowing sparks that
dropped into the grate; now nodding off into a doze; now waking up
again when some hot fragment, larger than the rest, came rattling
down, as if the fire were coming with it.

It was in no danger of sudden extinction, however; for it gleamed
not only in the little room, and on the panes of window-glass in
the door, and on the curtain half drawn across them, but in the
little shop beyond. A little shop, quite crammed and choked with
the abundance of its stock; a perfectly voracious little shop, with
a maw as accommodating and full as any shark's. Cheese, butter,
firewood, soap, pickles, matches, bacon, table-beer, peg-tops,
sweetmeats, boys' kites, bird-seed, cold ham, birch brooms, hearth-
stones, salt, vinegar, blacking, red-herrings, stationery, lard,
mushroom-ketchup, staylaces, loaves of bread, shuttlecocks, eggs,
and slate pencil; everything was fish that came to the net of this
greedy little shop, and all articles were in its net. How many
other kinds of petty merchandise were there, it would be difficult
to say; but balls of packthread, ropes of onions, pounds of
candles, cabbage-nets, and brushes, hung in bunches from the
ceiling, like extraordinary fruit; while various odd canisters
emitting aromatic smells, established the veracity of the
inscription over the outer door, which informed the public that the
keeper of