arried to the abode of the Figge's, although I
had been really destined as a gift to his only daughter, Araminta
Philippina, I was, by mistake in the hurry of returning, dropped in the
carriage, and although a vigorous search seemed to be made by the fine
footman, he did not succeed in finding me, and I remained hid in a far
back corner of the roomy equipage for some days. Had I fallen to the
share of Araminta Philippina, I should at least have retained the small
consolation of being incessantly pointed out as having been bought from
the Duchess herself, and a faint ray of my lost station would have still
glimmered about me.

"But, alas, on emerging from my obscurity, I found I had indeed fallen
in life, and from the highest to the lowest, for I was now located in
the Mews, where Mr. Figge's carriage was kept; and having been found
during its dusting and arrangement by the wife of the coachman, I was
handed over to her horrible tribe of uncouth, ill-behaved children.

"Oh, for the language that I heard round me now! It made my very
feathers quiver sometimes; and as for the flights I took now,--ugh--it
makes me shudder to recall them! I who had bathed in fair Rosamond's
crystal stream, was now doomed to be plunged in the inky rills that ran
in the gutters round the sooty roofs. My beautiful red leather cover was
soon dyed a dingy black; most of my feathers were violently pulled out
by some of the younger ones, and the rest became somewhat of the colour
of a London sparrow. At last, as a sort of release from worse miseries,
I was tossed up so high by the horrid little flat wooden bat, which now
became the means of my ascending, (and that in the hands of the
coachman's eldest son, was an instrument of indiscriminate torment to
everything animate and inanimate), that I fell on the ledge of a back
window in one of the houses in a square adjoining. The boy, I imagine,
did not dare to go round to the house to ask for me again, and was
therefore reduced to his original stock of playthings, consisting
chiefly of a mutilated ginger-beer bottle, some oyster shells, and a
brickbat.

"Meanwhile I dwelt for some time on the window ledge, exposed to the
wind and rain, but at any rate free from the vulgar annoyances to which
I had been subjected of late. And this I could endure more calmly, and I
had almost become resigned to my hard lot, when one day to my
astonishment the window was opened. A young woman leant out with a
hammer an