slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed" (chapter 71).
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And above all, there are the angels: these pervade
The Old Curiosity Shop.
Nell dreams of the "little scholar" who dies in chapter 25 "not coffined and covered up, but mingling with angels and smiling happily." Kit explains to Barbara that he has been used to talk and think of Nell almost as if she was an angel. And a child comes to Nell in tears (inevitably, in the churchyard) and clasps "his little arms passionately about her neck":
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 | | "She is not one yet!" cried the boy, embracing her still more closely. "No, no. Not yet."
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| | She looked at him wonderingly, and putting his hair back from his face, and kissing him, asked what he meant.
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| | "You must not be one, dear Nell," cried the boy. "We can't see them. They never come to play with us, or talk to us. Be what you are. You are better so."
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| | "I do not understand you," said the child. "Tell me what you mean."
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| | "Why, they say," replied the boy, looking up into her face, "that you will be an Angel, before the birds sing again. But you won't be, will you? Don't leave us, Nell, though the sky is bright. Do not leave us." (Chapter 55).
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Mrs. Tait, who also thought of the deaths of her children as their becoming angels, was reading to the dying Catty, from a book that the child herself chose, until
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| | I could hardly read it; it was some story about a little child telling of the death of his brother, and it said "God wanted another angel to be in heaven, and so he called my brother, and I have had to play alone since then." I soon stopped, saying, "Darling, it is not good for you to have so much reading at a time."
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