"Tweet," sounded from the nest; "where can our mother be staying? It is
quite unaccountable. Can this be a trick of hers to show us that we are
now to take care of ourselves? She has left us the house as an
inheritance, but as it cannot belong to us all when we have families,
who is to have it?"

"It won't do for you all to stay with me when I increase my household
with a wife and children," remarked the youngest.

"I shall have more wives and children than you," said the second.

"But I am the eldest," cried a third.

Then they all became angry, beat each other with their wings, pecked
with their beaks, till one after another bounced out of the nest. There
they lay in a rage, holding their heads on one side and twinkling the
eye that looked upward. This was their way of looking sulky.

They could all fly a little, and by practice they soon learned to do so
much better. At length they agreed upon a sign by which they might be
able to recognize each other in case they should meet in the world after
they had separated. This sign was to be the cry of "tweet, tweet," and a
scratching on the ground three times with the left foot.

The youngster who was left behind in the nest spread himself out as
broad as ever he could; he was the householder now. But his glory did
not last long, for during that night red flames of fire burst through
the windows of the cottage, seized the thatched roof, and blazed up
frightfully. The whole house was burned, and the sparrow perished with
it, while the young couple fortunately escaped with their lives.

When the sun rose again, and all nature looked refreshed as after a
quiet sleep, nothing remained of the cottage but a few blackened,
charred beams leaning against the chimney, that now was the only master
of the place. Thick smoke still rose from the ruins, but outside on the
wall the rosebush remained unhurt, blooming and fresh as ever, while
each flower and each spray was mirrored in the clear water beneath.

"How beautifully the roses are blooming on the walls of that ruined
cottage," said a passer-by. "A more lovely picture could scarcely be
imagined. I must have it."

And the speaker took out of his pocket a little book full of white
leaves of paper (for he was an artist), and with a pencil he made a
sketch of the smoking ruins, the blackened rafters, and the chimney that
overhung them and which seemed more and more to totter; and quite in the
foreground stood the large, bloomi