Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/507

 Ideal Houses.

Wandering one morning into the Lowther Arcade, I found myself behind an old man and a little girl. The man was very feeble and tottering in his steps, and the child was very young. It was near the Christmas season, and many children, richly dressed, in the care of mothers, sisters, and nursery governesses, were loading themselves with all kinds of amusing and expensive toys. The vaulted roof re-echoed with the sounds of young voices, shrill whistles, wiry tinklings of musical gocarts, the rustling of paper, and the notes of cornopeans or pianos. It was the Exhibition of 1851 repeated, in miniature; the toys of manhood being exchanged for the toys of youth.

My old man and my little girl were not amongst the happy buyers, or the richly dressed, for they were evidently very poor. They had wandered into the bazaar to feast upon its sights, and it was difficult to say which was the more entranced of the two. The old man gazed about him, with a vacant, gratified smile upon his face, and the child was too young to know that any barrier existed to prevent her plucking the tempting fruit which she saw hanging in clusters on every side. This barrier—the old, thick, black, impassable barrier of poverty—though invisible to the child, was not invisible to me; and I blamed the old man for turning her steps into such a glittering enchanted cavern, whose walls were really lined, to her, with bitterness and despair.

"Why don't we live here, gran'da?" asked the child. The old man gave no other answer than a weak laugh.

"Why don't I have a house like that?" continued the child, pointing to a bright doll's-house displayed upon a stall, and trying to drag her guardian towards it.

The old man still only laughed feebly, as he shuffled past the attraction, and before the thought had struck me that I might have purchased a cheap pleasure by giving this house to the child, they were both lost in the pushing, laughing crowd.

This incident naturally set me thinking about toys, and their effect in increasing the amount of human happiness. I asked myself if I, , a respectable, middle-aged man of moderate means, was free from the influence of these powerful trifles. I was compelled, in all the cheap honesty of self-examination, to answer "No." I felt, upon reflection, that I was even weaker than the poor child I had just seen. The chief toy that I was seeking for was an ideal house that I had never been able to find. I was led away by a vague sentiment about the poetry of neighbourhoods—a secret consuming passion for red-brick—a something that could hardly be weighed or spanned; the echo of an old song; the mists of a picture; the shadow of a dream. She was led away by no such unsubstantial phantoms. Her eyes had suddenly rested, for a few