“And you,” said Barbox Brothers, “what with your school, Phoebe, and what with your lace-making—­”

“But my school is a pleasure to me,” she interrupted, opening her brown eyes wider, as if surprised to find him so obtuse.  “I began it when I was but a child, because it brought me and other children into company, don’t you see? That was not work.  I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. That is not work.  I do it as love, not as work.  Then my lace-pillow;” her busy hands had stopped, as if her argument required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at the name; “it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my tunes when I hum any, and that’s not work.  Why, you yourself thought it was music, you know, sir.  And so it is to me.”

“Everything is!” cried Lamps radiantly.  “Everything is music to her, sir.”

“My father is, at any rate,” said Phoebe, exultingly pointing her thin forefinger at him.  “There is more music in my father than there is in a brass band.”

“I say!  My dear!  It’s very fillyillially done, you know; but you are flattering your father,” he protested, sparkling.

“No, I am not, sir, I assure you.  No, I am not.  If you could hear my father sing, you would know I am not.  But you never will hear him sing, because he never sings to any one but me.  However tired he is, he always sings to me when he comes home.  When I lay here long ago, quite a poor little broken doll, he used to sing to me.  More than that, he used to make songs, bringing in whatever little jokes we had between us.  More than that, he often does so to this day.  Oh!  I’ll tell of you, father, as the gentleman has asked about you.  He is a poet, sir.”

“I shouldn’t wish the gentleman, my dear,” observed Lamps, for the moment turning grave, “to carry away that opinion of your father, because it might look as if I was given to asking the stars in a molloncolly manner what they was up to.  Which I wouldn’t at once waste the time, and take the liberty, my dear.”

“My father,” resumed Phoebe, amending her text, “is always on the bright side, and the good side.  You told me, just now, I had a happy disposition.  How can I help it?”

“Well; but, my dear,” returned Lamps argumentatively, “how can I help it?  Put it to yourself sir.  Look at her.  Always as you see her now.  Always working—­and after all, sir, for but a very few shillings a week—­always contented, always lively, always interested in others, of all sorts.  I said, this moment, she was always as you see her now.  So she is, with a difference that comes to much the same.  For, when it is my Sunday off and the morning bells have done ringing, I hear the prayers and thanks read in the touchingest way, and I have the hymns sung to me—­so soft, sir, that you couldn’t hear ’em out of this room—­in notes that seem to me, I am sure, to come from Heaven and go back to it.”