The Toymaker Who Stayed Late

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The story

The governess tells of a toy shop in a fog-bound London street where the old toymaker worked past midnight every Christmas Eve on painted wooden soldiers. She once crept in to see the work, and watched a doll lift its hand and mouth a warning.

How it begins

I was a governess in the winter of eighteen seventy-two, in a narrow house off Clerkenwell Road, and I have never been able to pass a toyshop window since without glancing at the corners. The shop belonged to a Mr. Ambrose Tull. It stood at the bottom of a lane so crooked that the gas lamps seemed to lean in to listen. Its sign was painted with a gilt rocking horse, and the paint had flaked away from the horse's nose, so that it appeared to be sniffing at passers-by. On the morning of Christmas Eve, when the snow had settled thick and grey along the sills, the children of…