How meanly
he was kept in regard to clothing--how he had to sleep, for his life
long, in a child's bed, far too short for him, for want of a straw
mattress--and how, under such continual toil and miserable constraint,
he at last sank, and died of water in the chest, it is now needless to
say or to lament. We turn, rather, to the more pleasing contemplation of
what Mind, in this most unfavourable situation, nevertheless succeeded
in performing, and rendering himself as an artist.

Mind's special talent for representing cats was discovered and awakened
by chance.[4] It was not till after Freudenberger's death that Mind
fully developed his peculiar talent for the objects to which,
subsequently, through his whole life, he applied himself with such
special affection, and which, accordingly, he succeeded in representing
with such fidelity and truth. The condition of peasant children, their
sorrows and joys, their sports and bickerings--the coarse insolence of
the richer, the timid dispiritment of the needy, all stood in lively
remembrance before his fancy, which liked to go back into that first and
only period of his freedom, though, perhaps, also of his beggarhood.
In Freudenberger's school he had learned a natural, easy, and
comprehensible arrangement of little groups, and a neat, dainty manner,
in which wise it was no difficult task for him to represent such scenes
with truth and grace. Thus we find these pictures of his, which, for
the most part, are painted on small sheets, his sports, banterings,
quarrellings, sledge-parties of children, with their half-frozen but
still merry faces, in their puffy yet not unpicturesque costume; his
beggar-boys, with their rag-ware on their backs, are almost always
genial and pleasing. In the course of his narrow, in-doors life, he
had worked himself into a friendly, nay, as it were, almost paternal
relation with domestic and fire-side animals, especially with cats.
While he sat painting, a cat might generally be seen sitting on his back
or on his shoulder; and many times he kept, for hours, the most awkward
postures, that he might not disturb it. Frequently there was a second
cat sitting by him on the table, watching how the work went on;
sometimes a kitten or two lay in his lap under the table. Frogs (in
bottle) floated beside his easel; and with all these creatures he kept
up a most playful, loving style of conversation; though, often enough,
any human beings about him, or such even