kfast, that some one might go out and scatter crumbs for the
robins. The cage-door happened to be open too. Unobserved, Prince darted
swiftly out, and perched amid the leafless boughs of one of the high
trees on the lawn.

He was free! but, oh, how cold it was! How wretched he was already
beginning to feel! He crouched shivering on a bough; and when the snow
began to fall again in large, wet flakes, he was more miserable than he
had ever been in all his petted life.

Paralysed with cold and fear, he clung to the tree, too unhappy even to
cry out and let people know where he was.

[Illustration: "Paralysed with fear, he clung to the bough."]

Poor Prince! he must soon have died if some one had not noticed the
empty cage. The alarm was given at once, but it was some time before the
bird was seen on his lofty perch.

When they did see him, and everybody called and coaxed 'Poor Prince!
dear Prince!' to come down, he was too stupefied with cold and misery to
do as he was told.

At last Tom, the page-boy, volunteered to climb the tree and try to
reach Prince. It was rather a dangerous task, as the bark was slippery
from the frost and snow; but Tom persevered, and, by dint of much
effort, got hold of the parrot.

Prince was restored to his cage, but he had caught a bad cold, and never
again held up his head as jauntily, or seemed as proud of himself, as he
had done in former days.

C. J. BLAKE.

A KINDLY VISIT.

Willie Mortimer was a cripple, but he did not often complain of his lot,
nor, as a rule, did he feel very unhappy about it. His love for drawing
and painting was such a resource to him, that when he could hobble on
his crutches down to the shore, he was never tired of watching the sea
and the boats, and of trying to make sketches which he could work up
into pictures at home, as he sat in the window of the little cottage.

But it was a year since the accident which had made the amputation of
his leg a necessity, and for the first time Willie's cheerfulness was
beginning to forsake him. He could not help noticing how worn and
anxious his mother looked, and he knew how hard it was for her to earn
enough money, by her plain sewing, to keep up the little house. Until
the previous summer she had let lodgings, but she could not manage it
when she was nursing Willie, and waiting on him after he left the
hospital, and this year no people had applied for her rooms yet.

One of her former lodgers had been a