Alice felt that she could see a new light come into the window, into the old home, into her soul; that a peace had come visibly into the shadowed mansion, now that Aleck and Ephraim and the negro constable were dead in the mud of the river; now that the Federal head had been removed by the battle-axe of the fearless judge. She began to hope again, perhaps to love again, who shall say? There was, it may be, a tiny sunbeam coquetting with the old shadows that had so long overlaid every approach to her young heart, and perhaps a little be-jewelled goldsmith was tinkering and hammering upon a tiny arrow pointed with a ruby, and feathered with tiny pinions of some diminutive bird, that nested among fragrant mangoes far away in the isles of the sea, with which he was to shoot down those unsightly idols that had long pre-empted her heart. The days were loitering, she thought, in their flight, and the little brownie who had been counting the numerals of time in their flight had fallen asleep, and the old clock in the great hall ticked languidly as if it were tired to death with its unvarying round of toil. In this awakening to the brighter possibilities whom should she clasp to her heart but her old friend, Charles Dickens? The Dickens of Dombey, of Bleakhouse, of David Copperfield. She remembered how this marvellous story-teller, so familiar to all young readers, who had so many children of his own, the offspring of an overflowing fancy, one bleak day had passed up and down Westminster Hall, clasping to his heart the magazine that contained his first effusions, with eyes dimmed with pride and joy, as he dropped stealthily, at twilight, a suspicious package into a dark letter box down a dark alley. How many times the narrative had woven golden filaments here and there through the warp of reconstruction! What a bright filagree into the shadows that were unceasingly coming and going! How many happy hours she had whiled away with Mr. Pickwick and his admiring friends! How delightfully she had been entertained by the wit of Samuel Weller, the eloquence of Sergeant Buzfuz, of Captain Bunsby! Many a hypochondriac had laughed immoderately at the ludicrous exercises of Crummles and the infant phenomenon! What a charming companion is Dick Swiveller, the inimitable! Dear old Dick; reeling now and then from excess of wine, but great hearted withal. Who does not even now occasionally inhale the fragrant odors of the delicious punches compounded by that blighted being, Mr. Wilkins Micawber, as he listens to Sairy Gamp and laughs at Mrs. Harriss? Where is the tender-hearted Christian who would shout for a policeman, while they are ducking Shepherd, or pommelling Squeers, or cudgelling Pecksniff, or inflicting divers and deserved assaults upon Uriah Heep? With what a motley crowd of living characters Dickens has peopled our literature? What children were ever like his children? What homes were ever like their homes?