not wish to have the trouble of watching over all his little
daughter's movements, seated her upon a pincushion in which there
were no pins, and putting the dictionary as a sort of rampart before
her, he gave her a stick of barley sugar to entertain herself with,
and after the usual admonition, left her to her dreams. Leaving the
sugar to slip down by her side, she remained lost in melancholy
reflections from which she was drawn by a light murmur, such as one
hears sometimes in the silence of the night when persons are
speaking in a low voice in a distant part of the house. Piccolissima
listened with deep attention for some time. Usually she disliked the
sound of conversation; it struck harshly on her organs, and seemed a
sort of mimic thunder; but these sounds had nothing discordant,
nothing disagreeable in them, to her ear. As Piccolissima had been
forced to observe rather than to act, her faculties took a new
direction, and a development of which she was unconscious herself
took place, and her joy and her surprise were great when she found
that, in what had at first appeared to her a confused murmur, she
distinguished, as she listened attentively, intelligible words.

"It was hardly worth while," said a small, sharp voice, "it was
hardly worth the trouble it cost me to leave my cradle. I have come
into the world where all is dead around me. Ah! if I had only known
that this world was so cold and dull, I should not have made efforts
which almost destroyed me, to break the roof and leave my narrow
house."

"Patience," replied another voice, a little quieter, but much like
the other; "I have lived longer than thou, who art only a few
seconds old. I have learned that one minute does not resemble
another; that cold is near to heat, that light is near to darkness,