he had formerly received from his master.  Many artists, after Freudenberger’s death, would gladly have taken poor Mind into their service, but, like his beloved cats, he was so attached to the house, to his corner and its appurtenances, that he constantly turned a deaf ear to such proposals; and, at last, when Madame Freudenberger began to notice that the people wished to buy away her Friedli from her, she would not let them come near him; and only at rare times, and by way of special favour, allowed a few acquaintances, whom she could depend on, to visit him in her presence.  She used, for the most part, to sit beside him herself, with her knitting implements, spurring him on to work.  When he had to copy any of his drawings, he usually sketched the outline of them against the glass of the window; and if, on these occasions, it chanced that some boy, cat, dog, or other street passenger he might think worth looking at, withdrew his eye for a moment from the work, his taskmistress failed not to squall forth—­“Gaping out again!  Not a bit of work done all day!  Sit down with thee!  Mind thy paper, and give over spying!” 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