This was, in fact, only the beginning of his career.  The lady with a sharp knife lifted his cap from his head; then she painted him all over a pale green.  After the paint was dry, she bored three holes in his sides.  My! how it hurt! but it was soon over, and she had fastened three slender chains through them, and hung the little Prince up in a sunny window.  “What next?” he wondered.  If he had got to hang here all his life, it wouldn’t be much better than the old trellis.  But that wasn’t the end, for his mistress filled him with nice black earth, and planted delicate little ferns and runaway-robins which climbed over and twined lovingly round his face.  They patted his cheeks with their soft little hands, and whispered pretty stories of the woods they had come from.

“Dear Cucu,” said they, “how much we love you, and how kind you are to hold us all so carefully!” When they said this, he felt so proud and happy that he could not contain himself any longer, and sang at the top of his voice; but the people in the house did not hear him, for mortal ears are not adapted to such music.  Only the Cat-bird flying past understood and stopped to congratulate him.

“Plenty to do, and plenty to love,” she sang; “that is the way to be happy.  I found it out last spring when it took me from morning till night to find food for my four hungry babies.  Good-bye!  I am going south with them to-day.  I haven’t a bit of time to lose,” and away she flew.

[Illustration:  CUCURBITA IN THE WINDOW.]

And the ferns and the runaway-robins clapped their hands and sang, “Yes, that is the secret.  Good-bye!  Good-bye!”

MRS. PRIMKINS’ SURPRISE.

BY OLIVE THORNE.

Our older readers will remember Nimpo, whose “Troubles” interested them in ST. NICHOLAS’S first year.  To our newer friends it is only necessary to say, that Nimpo and Rush were boarding with Mrs. Primkins during their mother’s absence, by Nimpo’s own desire, and were very unhappy under the care of that well-meaning—­but very peculiar—­person, who was so greatly surprised on the occasion of the Birthday Party.

One morning, Mrs. Primkins received a letter.  This was a very unusual occurrence, and she hastened to wipe her hands out of the dish-water, hunt up her “specs,” clean them carefully, and, at last, sit down in her chintz-covered “Boston rocker,” to enjoy at her leisure this very rare literary dissipation.

Nimpo, who was boarding with Mrs. Primkins while her mother was off on a journey, was engaged in finishing her breakfast, and did not notice anything.  Having found her scissors, and deliberately cut around the old-fashioned seal, Mrs. Primkins opened the sheet and glanced at the name at the bottom of the page, then turned her eyes hastily toward Nimpo, with a low, significant “Humph!”