Poor fool! Not by such credulous selfish natures as his can tricksters be tricked and dupers duped. They laugh in his face, and in the face of stronger than he. Have they not reason? They are stronger than the law, which is powerless to touch them. Yet it is a strange reflection that a cunning rogue is allowed to swindle, and a starving woman is not allowed to beg. But such is the law. CHAPTER XVI. THE CAPTAIN ARRIVES. If you were asked to come into Fairyland, you would expect to see wonders, and you would consider it the height of presumption to be conducted to a small room, nearly at the top of a house, in which a child lies sleeping and a woman sits working. The roses on the wall are sham ones; but there are two real roses in the centre of a bunch of buttercups and daisies, which stands in a jug with a broken handle near to the bed on which the child lies sleeping. It is eleven o'clock at night, and the woman is working by the light of one candle. If ever woman was happy, this woman is as she plies her needle and looks at her child, and hums a few bars of a song softly to herself. The roses on the child's face rival the real and artificial ones in the room. It is a beautiful face to gaze at, and the brown eyelashes, and the curly brown hair, and the lips deliciously parted, make a delightful picture, which, were I a painter, I should love to paint. As it is, I stoop in fancy and kiss the pure fresh lips of this innocent happy child. What work is the woman doing? If this be Fairyland, is she busy with the wings of grasshoppers making a cover for Queen Mab's chariot, or collars of the moonshine's watery beams for the teams of little atomies that gallop "athwart men's noses as they lie asleep?" No; she is busy on some things very different indeed from these. And she is doing good work--woman's work: darning stockings.