In his solitary hours he had been accustomed to recal his past life in its apparently insignificant, but to him important ramifications;--the red south wall is the world to the snail that has never known other resting-place;--and in these days of illness and languor he reverted more and more to his old means of passing the time. A dull retrospect--a weary going over and over again of solitude, depression, and pain. Thoughts long since forgotten recurred to him as in the silence of the night he passed in review the petty incidents of his uneventful career. He recollected the burning shame which had first possessed him at the knowledge of his own deformity; the half envy, half wonder, with which he had gazed at other lads of his own age; the hope that had dawned upon him that his parents and friends might feel for him something of the special love with which Tiny Tim was regarded in that heartfullest of all stories, _The Christmas Carol_; how that wondrous book had charmed him, when, a boy of ten or twelve years old, he had first read it; how, long before it had been seen by either his father or mother, he had studied and wept over it; how, prompted by a feeling which he could not analyse, he had induced Lord Beauport to read it, how he knew--intuitively, he was never told--that it had been shown to his mother; and how that Christmastide he had been treated with consideration and affection never before accorded to him--had been indeed preferred to Lionel, greatly to that young gentleman's astonishment and disgust. It did not last long, that halcyon time; the spells of the romancer held the practical father and the fashionable mother in no lengthened thrall; and when they were dissipated, there was merely a crippled, deformed, blighted lad as their eldest hope and the heir to their honours. Tiny Tim borne aloft on his capering father's shoulders; Tiny Tim in his grave,--these were images to wring the heart not unpleasantly, and to fill the eyes with tears of which one was rather proud, as proof of how easily the heart was wrung: but for a handsome couple--one known as a _beau garçon_, the other as a beauty--to have to face the stern fact that their eldest son was a cripple was any thing but agreeable.