Bunnycastles, and things in general, and soon
grew quite companionable with her. And then
the little matter of her outfit was put in hand.

Lily never spent a pleasanter two hours in her
life. It was a wonderful shop, and they seemed
to sell everything. They showed her cabins
complete with swinging cots, and lamps, and
delightful little shiny washing-stands, and miniature
chests of drawers, which they fitted up on
board ships bound for Australia. They showed
her great black sea-chests with "Captain Widgeon,
Madras," and "Lieutenant Rampelbuggins,
Cape of Good Hope," painted thereupon
in white letters. They showed her bales of
shirts, stacks of stockings, hives of straw hats,
bags, portmanteaus, writing-desks, dressing-cases,
sextants, chronometers, and cases of digestive
biscuits.

"We sell saddles," the stout assistant remarked,
with conscious pride. "We sell beer.
We sell anchors, likewise school-books, also
bonnets, and pickles, and parasols, and anchovy
paste. We are general shippers. If you require
preserved beef, there are five hundred cases of
it in the left-hand corner. Do you want any
curry powder? That's your sort. You've only to
ask for a chain cable, my dear, and you can have
it at per foot. We fit out everybody. A bride,
or an Admiral of the Blue, a midshipman or an
Indian rajah, a little school-girl, or the governor
of Cape Coast Castle; it's all one to us. When
you go to school, and they ask who fitted you
out at two hours' notice, just hand 'em the card
of Cutwig and Co., will you?"

He presented the child with a packet of
address cards on the spot. " We furnish
funerals, too," he went on chirpingly, " and
we've sent out wedding-breakfasts in hermetically
sealed tins; but we couldn't get the
lobster salad to keep in the Indian Ocean, so
that branch had to be given up. But if they
want any Devonshire clotted cream at Singapore,
or any canary-birds in New Zealand, they
send to Cutwig and Co. for 'em. We might
have done a powerful stroke of business in portable
theatres for the colonies, but the late
Mrs.Cutwig was pious, and wouldn't hear of it."

Meanwhile Miss Eldred, assisted by a slender,
pretty girl, whom she addressed as 'Melia, and
who was her niece, had been busied in trying
various articles of apparel on Lily, and asking
if she thought them pretty. And then the stout
assistant, whose name was Ranns, asked Lily for
her name, saying that he only knew her mamma
as a customer, and a very good customer she
was, but rather uppish. Lily said her name
was Floris, not knowing whether she would
escape censure from the strange lady for making
that revealment unlicensed; and then Mr.
Ranns whispered something down a pipe, and
in a quarter of an hour afterwards a man in
a fur cap suddenly popped up a trap in the floor,
in one corner, and heaved forward into view a
neat, trunk covered with black leather, and
inscribed with the name of MISS FLORIS in
capitals of white paint.

"Stencilled and varnished at once, by our
patent instantaneous process,"remarked Mr.
Ranns, rubbing his palms together in quiet
complacency at the expedition in all matters
observed by Cutwig and Co. "Lord bless you!
we'd knock all the names of the officers of a
seventy-four, with brass nails into their chests, in
forty minutes. Yours is rather an uncommon
name, my dear, else we generally keep the names
of everybody in the Post-office Directory ready
painted on portmanteaus, chests, and travelling
bags, in sets of two hundred and fifty apiece."

At this stage of the conversation Miss Eldred
suggested that the young lady must be hungry;
and Lily, nothing loth, accompanied her to a
back parlour of triangular shape, smelling rather
too strongly of new chests of drawers, fresh
feather beds, and oilskin hats, but still very
snug and comfortable. And there, Lily, and
Miss Eldred, and 'Melia, and Mr. Ranns, dined
off a roast leg of mutton, and vegetables, and a
very nice apple-pudding. Lily observed that
Miss Eldred dined in her thimble, and Mr.Ranns
in a hurry, with a pen behind his ear;
likewise that the front of 'Melia's dress was so
garnished with threaded needles, that it might
have done good service as a martial buckler.

"Half a glass of sherry, and a nice rosy-cheeked
apple—we export 'em, my dear, by
hogsheads—for Miss Floris," chirped Mr. Ranns,
"and then we must go to business. This is a
mill that never stops, my dear." And, indeed,
it never did. Business had been going on very
briskly all through dinner-time; and a dozen
times at least Mr. Ranns had popped up from
the table, and bustled into the shop to supply
intending shippers with flannel jerseys, or
barometers, or bird-cages, or something of an
equally miscellaneous description. The ad interim
charge of Cutwig and Co.'s establishment
was, however, left to a lanky youth of
vacant mien, whom Mr. Ranns described as
being rather soft in his head, and a poor salesman,
but a capital hand at accounts.

After dinner, Lily was taken into the
counting-house—a dark  little box with a raised floor, to
which you ascended by half a dozen steps, and
which was fenced all round by balustraded
panels, like a family pew. Here the vacant
youth kept the accounts of the house, in a series
of immense volumes, covered in rough calf and
bound in brass. He was a good-tempered lad
though imbecile, and permitted Lily to peep
into one of the big ledgers, where she saw a
great deal of writing in a neat, fat, round hand,
almost as beautiful as copies.

"We call 'em our week day Bibles," remarked
Mr. Ranns. facetiously." We ship to all the
world six days in the week, and go to church on
Sundays."

Lily thought the big ledgers very beautiful,
but wondered by what clairvoyance the vacant
youth could contrive to write in them in the dark.

"Are you fond of apples," the vacant clerk
whispered to her, with a friendly leer.

Lily modestly avowed a partiality for the fruit
in question.

"Then 'ere's another," pursued the clerk,