 any circumstances be delayed more than
a few years longer, and then the whole world would be burned, and we ourselves
be consigned to an eternity of torture, unless we mended our ways more than we
at present seemed at all likely to do. All this was so alarming that we fell to
screaming and made such a hullabaloo that the nurse was obliged for her own
peace to reassure us. Then we wept, but more composedly, as we remembered that
there would be no more tea and cakes for us now at old Mrs. Pontifex's.
    On the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement. Old Mr.
Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the village, according
to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of this century; the loaf was
called a dole. We had never heard of this custom before, besides though we had
often heard of penny loaves we had never before seen one; moreover they were
presents to us as inhabitants of the village, and we were treated as grown up
people, for our father and mother and the servants had each one loaf sent them,
but only one; we had never yet suspected that we were inhabitants at all;
finally, the little loaves were new, and we were passionately fond of new bread,
which we were seldom or never allowed to have, as it was supposed not to be good
for us. Our affection, therefore, for our old friend had to stand against the
combined attacks of archæological interest, the rights of citizenship and
property, the pleasantness to the eye and goodness for food of the little loaves
themselves, and the sense of importance which was given us by our having been
intimate with someone who had actually died. It seemed upon further enquiry that
there was little reason to anticipate an early death for any one of ourselves,
and this being so, we rather liked the idea of someone else's being put away
into the churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a short time from extreme
depression to a no less extreme exultation; a new heaven and a new earth had
been revealed to us in our perception of the possibility of benefiting by the
death of our friends, and I fear that for some time we took an interest in the
health of everyone in the village whose position rendered a repetition of the
dole in the least likely.
    Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we were
astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually living person; we
had thought such a great man could only have lived a very long
