o see a little deformed child sitting apart from
other children, who are active and merry, watching the games he is
denied the power to share in. He made my heart ache very often.'

'It is a good heart,' said Nicholas, 'that disentangles itself from the
close avocations of every day, to heed such things. You were saying--'

'That the flowers belonged to this poor boy,' said Tim; 'that's all.
When it is fine weather, and he can crawl out of bed, he draws a chair
close to the window, and sits there, looking at them and arranging
them, all day long. He used to nod, at first, and then we came to speak.
Formerly, when I called to him of a morning, and asked him how he was,
he would smile, and say, "Better!" but now he shakes his head, and only
bends more closely over his old plants. It must be dull to watch the
dark housetops and the flying clouds, for so many months; but he is very
patient.'

'Is there nobody in the house to cheer or help him?' asked Nicholas.

'His father lives there, I believe,' replied Tim, 'and other people too;
but no one seems to care much for the poor sickly cripple. I have asked
him, very often, if I can do nothing for him; his answer is always the
same. "Nothing." His voice is growing weak of late, but I can SEE that
he makes the old reply. He can't leave his bed now, so they have moved
it close beside the window, and there he lies, all day: now looking at
the sky, and now at his flowers, which he still makes shift to trim and
water, with his own thin hands. At night, when he sees my candle, he
draws back his curtain, and leaves it so, till I am in bed. It seems
such company to him to know that I am there, that I often sit at my
window for an hour or more, that he may see I am still awake; and
sometimes I get up in the night to look at the dull melancholy light in
his little room, and wonder whether he is awake or sleeping.

'The night will not be long coming,' said Tim, 'when he will sleep, and
never wake again on earth. We have never so much as shaken hands in all
our lives; and yet I shall miss him like an old friend. Are there any
country flowers that could interest me like these, do you think? Or
do you suppose that the withering of a hundred kinds of the choicest
flowers that blow, called by the hardest Latin names that were ever
invented, would give me one fraction of the pain that I shall feel when
these old jugs and bottles are swept away as lumber? Country!' cried
Tim, with a contempt