One Tuesday, towards the end of September, Taffy saw his father off by Joby’s van; and the Friday after, walked down with his mother to meet him on his return.  Almost at once the household began to pack.  The packing went on for a week, in the midst of which his father departed again, a waggon-load of books and furniture having been sent forward on the road that same morning.  Then followed a day or two during which Taffy and his mother took their meals at the window-seat, sitting on corded boxes; and an evening when he went out to the cannon in the square, and around the little back garden, saying good-bye to the fixtures and the few odds and ends which were to be left behind—­the tool-shed (Crusoe’s hut, Cave of Adullam, and Treasury of the Forty Thieves), the stunted sycamore-tree which he had climbed at different times as Zacchaeus, Ali Baba, and Man Friday with the bear behind him; the clothes’ prop, which, on the strength of its forked tail, had so often played Dragon to his St. George.  When he returned to the empty house, he found his mother in the passage.  She had been for a walk alone.  The candle was lit, and he saw she had been crying.  This told him where she had been; for, although he remembered nothing about it, he knew he had once possessed a small sister, who lived with him less than two months.  He had, as a rule, very definite notions of death and the grave; but he never thought of her as dead and buried, partly because his mother would never allow him to go with her to the cemetery, and partly because of a picture in a certain book of his, called Child’s Play.  It represented a little girl wading across a pool among water-lilies.  She wore a white nightdress, kilted above her knees, and a dark cloak, which dragged behind in the water.  She let it trail, while she held up a hand to cover one of her eyes.  Above her were trees and an owl, and a star shining under the topmost branch; and on the opposite page this verse: 

     “I have a little sister,
        They call her Peep-peep,
      She wades through the waters,
        Deep, deep, deep;
      She climbs up the mountains,
        High, high, high;
      This poor little creature
        She has but one eye.”

For years Taffy believed that this was his little sister, one-eyed, and always wandering; and that his mother went out in the dusk to persuade her to return; but she never would.

When he woke next morning his mother was in the room; and while he washed and dressed she folded his bed-clothes and carried them down to a waggon which stood by the door, with horses already harnessed.  It drove away soon after.  He found breakfast laid on the window-seat.  A neighbour had lent the crockery, and Taffy was greatly taken with the pattern on the cups and saucers.  He wanted to run round again and repeat his good-byes to the house, but there was no time.  By-and-by the door opened, and two men, neighbours of theirs, entered with an invalid’s litter; and, Humility directing, brought down old Mrs. Venning.  She wore the corner of a Paisley shawl over her white cap, and carried a nosegay of flowers in place of her lace-pillow; but otherwise looked much as usual.