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A garret at Home is a very different place from a garret in the World; and so our poet thought, when he compared this miserable, dismal place with the little attic far, far away in his own father’s cottage, where he was next-door neighbour to the swallows who slept in their little mud cabins under the cottage eaves!

Never in his life was Tiny so lonely. He had come to help the World, said he, talking to himself, and the World cared not half so much about it as it would about the doings of a wonderful “learned pig,” or the extraordinary spectacle of a man cutting profiles with his toes in black paper!

“Have you been all the while helping the World, and is this all the pay you get?” said the girl, his poor friend, who remembered what he had done for her, when she was in her worst need.

“Yes,” said Tiny; but there was no truth in what he said. He did not intend to speak falsely, however,–which proves the sad pass he had arrived at; he did not even know when he was deceiving himself! And when Tiny said, that “yes,” what do you suppose he thought of? Not of all the precious time that he had wasted–not of the Pilgrim’s Harp–not of the promises he had made his father–nor of the great hope of the poor which he had no cruelly disappointed–but only of the evil fortune which had fallen on himself! This beggar girl to wait on him, instead of the most beautiful lady in the world for a crown bearer! This garret for a home, instead of a place at the king’s table. And more fiercely than ever raged that sickness called Despair.

But at length his strength began to return to him a little, and then for the first time poor Tiny discovered that he was blind. And all the days and weeks that came and went were like one long, dark night. In those dreadful days our singer had nothing to do but to think, and the little beggar girl had nothing to do but to beg; for Tiny’s charity and goodness of heart seemed to have all forsaken him, and one day in his anger he drove her out of his garret, and bade her return no more, for that the very thought of her was hateful to him. In doing this, Tiny brought a terrible calamity upon himself; he fell against his harp and broke it.

After that, while he sat pondering on the sad plight he was in, hungry and cold and blind, he suddenly started up. A new thought had come to him. “I will go home to my father’s house,” he said. “There is no other way for me. Oh, my mother!” and bitterly he wept as he pronounced that name, and thought how little like her tender and serene love was the love of the best of all the friends he had found in that great city of the world.

As he started up so quickly in a sort of frenzy, his foot struck against the broken harp, and instantly the instrument gave forth a wailing sound, that pierced the poet’s heart. He lifted up the harp: alas! it was so broken he could do nothing with it; from his hands it fell back upon the floor where it had lain neglected, forgotten, so long. But Tiny’s heart was now fairly awakened, and stooping to the floor, he raised the precious treasure again. “I will carry back the broken fragments,” said he; “they shall go back to my father with me. The harp is his; I can do nothing more with it for ever. I have ruined it; I have done nothing for the world, as I promised him. A fine thing it is for me to go back to him in this dreadful plight. But if he says to me, `Thou art no son of mine,’ I will say, `Father, I am no more worthy to be called thy son; make me thy hired servant–only pay me in love.'”