Over his breakfast the boy talked wisely on art, as is the wont of young singers, and afterwards he went on his way down the street.

“It’s a great pity,” said the baker; “he seems a decent young chap.”

“He has nice eyes,” said the baker’s wife.

As the boy passed down the street he frowned a little.

“What is the matter with them?” he wondered.  “They’re pleasant people enough, and yet they did not want to hear my songs.”

Presently he came to the tailor’s shop, and as the tailor had sharper eyes than the baker, he saw the pipe in the boy’s pocket.

“Hullo, piper!” he called.  “My legs are stiff.  Come and sing us a song!”

The boy looked up and saw the tailor sitting cross-legged in the open window of his shop.

“What sort of song would you like?” he asked.

“Oh! the latest,” replied the tailor.  “We don’t want any old songs here.”  So the boy sung his new song of the kingfisher in the water-meadow and the cuckoo who had overslept itself.

“And what do you call that?” asked the tailor angrily, when the boy had finished.

“It’s my new song, but I don’t think it’s one of my best.”  But in his heart the boy believed it was, because he had only just made it.

“I should hope it’s your worst,” the tailor said rudely.  “What sort of stuff is that to make a man happy?”

“To make a man happy!” echoed the boy, his heart sinking within him.

“If you have no news to give me, why should I pay for your songs!  I want to hear about my neighbours, about their lives, and their wives and their sins.  There’s the fat baker up the street—­they say he cheats the poor with light bread.  Make me a song of that, and I’ll give you some breakfast.  Or there’s the magistrate at the top of the hill who made the girl drown herself last week.  That’s a poetic subject.”

“What’s all this!” said the boy disdainfully.  “Can’t you make dirt enough for yourself!”

“You with your stuff about birds,” shouted the tailor; “you’re a rank impostor!  That’s what you are!”

“They say that you are the ninth part of a man, but I find that they have grossly exaggerated,” cried the boy, in retort; but he had a heavy heart as he made off along the street.

By noon he had interviewed the butcher, the cobbler, the milkman, and the maker of candlesticks, but they treated him no better than the tailor had done, and as he was feeling tired he went and sat down under a tree.

“I begin to think that the baker is the best of the lot of them,” he said to himself ruefully, as he rolled his empty wallet between his fingers.

Then, as the folly of singers provides them in some measure with a philosophy, he fell asleep.

III