ions, but the next
day was sure to see them broken. He seemed no stronger when he
attempted to keep them than a poor little bird who is determined that he
will be free, and so goes driving against the wires of his cage!

When Tiny spoke with his friend, as he sometimes did, about the plan
with which he had come into the world, his friend always made him very
polite answers, and good promises--oh, yes, certainly he would do all
that _he_ could to help him on in such an excellent cause! But the fact
was, he did everything to prevent him. I wonder if anybody else has got
any such friend in his heart, or in his house, as our Tiny found in his
very first walk through that city street? If I knew of any one that
had, I should say, look out for him! Beware of him.

And so Tiny lived, and presently it happened just as you would expect;
his conscience troubled him no longer; he only sang such songs on feast
days, and holidays, and even in the church, as his companions liked; and
he became very well pleased with his employment! That was the very
worst of it.

I shall tell you in a very few words what happened next. Tiny suddenly
fell ill of a very curious disease, which caused all his rich friends to
forsake him, and he almost died of it.

In those days his only helper was a poor young beggar girl--one of those
persons whom he had relieved by his songs, and by the money he
distributed from the rich man's purse that happy day,--the little girl
who had wept so bitterly, and whose only word was, when he questioned
her,--"My mother!"

He recovered from his disease in time, but all his old acquaintances had
forsaken him; and he must have felt their loss exceedingly, for now he
had an attack of a desperate complaint, which I pray you may never
have!--called Despair--and Tiny crept away from the sight of all men,
into a garret, and thought that he would die there.

A garret at Home is a very different place from a garret in the World;
and so our poet thought, when he compared this miserable, dismal place
with the little attic far, far away in his own father's cottage, where
he was next-door neighbour to the swallows who slept in their little mud
cabins under the cottage eaves!

Never in his life was Tiny so lonely. He had come to help the World,
said he, talking to himself, and the World cared not half so much about
it as it would about the doings of a wonderful "learned pig," or the
extraordinary spectacle of a man cutti