shrunken, slender-looking fingers, all combined to most strikingly
convey to the pained senses the fragile frame and pixey figure of some
pitiably afflicted child, unconscious altogether of the pathos of its
own deformity.

"Now, mark the kuss, Horatio!" gasped my friend.

At first the speaker's voice came very low, and somewhat piping, too,
and broken--an eerie sort of voice it was, of brittle and erratic
_timbre_ and undulant inflection. Yet it was beautiful. It had the
ring of childhood in it, though the ring was not pure golden, and at
times fell echoless. The _spirit_ of its utterance was always clear
and pure and crisp and cheery as the twitter of a bird, and yet
forever ran an undercadence through it like a low-pleading prayer.
Half garrulously, and like a shallow brook might brawl across a shelvy
bottom, the rhythmic little changeling thus began:

"I'm thist a little crippled boy, an' never goin' to grow
An' git a great big man at all!--'cause Aunty told me so.
When I was thist a baby one't I falled out of the bed
An' got 'The Curv'ture of the Spine'--'at's what the Doctor said.
I never had no Mother nen--far my Pa run away
An' dassn't come back here no more--'cause he was drunk one day
An' stobbed a man in thish-ere town, an' couldn't pay his fine!
An' nen my Ma she died--an' I got 'Curv'ture of the Spine!'"

A few titterings from the younger people in the audience marked the
opening stanza, while a certain restlessness, and a changing to more
attentive positions seemed the general tendency. The old Professor, in
the meantime, had sunk into one of the empty chairs. The speaker went