LITTLE SON.

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses, and all the King's men,
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again."

After Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and all the King's horses and all
the King's men could not put him together again, Little Dumpty
lived with his Mother, who was called Widow Dumpty, and went to school
every day. He set off in good time every morning--even if it was
_pouring_ with rain. He had a great many friends at school, and the boys
liked him because he always had plenty of marbles, and used to carry
sticky labels in his pocket; he got them out of his Mother's shop, and
gave them as prizes for racing and jumping in play time.

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Little Dumpty was a little bit like a _nice_ goblin, it was therefore
very interesting to his school fellows to have him for a chum, and the
funny part about him was that he never took his hat off. Of course no
one said anything about it, but they just remembered that his Father
was an egg, and got cracked and broken, and they thought that had
something to do with it.

Well, I will tell you how Little Dumpty used to spend his time. In
summer he used to get up quite early, because he had to feed his pets
before breakfast. He had a lot of pets in the yard at the back of the
house. He had guinea-pigs, of course, then he had three rabbits and a
pair of dormice and a canary; and he had some pigeons. They were rather
a bother to him, because they had a nasty habit of flying down the
parlour chimney, where sometimes they stuck for two or three days, and
at last flew out all black and sooty into the room. Widow Dumpty
used to be rather angry and spoke crossly when this happened, and then
Little Dumpty used to get up and go out and feed his rabbits, which is
what he generally did when he wasn't very happy. Well, then he had a
tame hen and some silkworms. Once he had a baby chicken, but it ate some
blue chalk, which Dumpty had dropped on the ground, and died. He did
all he could to keep it alive but it was no good. He was very sorry
about it, because he had often longed for a little chicken of his own;
besides his Mother had told him that when it grew up it would be a
swimming chicken. It was a pity too he dropped the chalk, because it got
trodden on and spoilt, and it had been his favourite chalk.

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Well, as I was saying, firs