“Ah, poor bird!” she thought to herself, “you have come out of fresh air, and away from kind friends, just as we did when we came to this dreadful London. Oh, why did I ever leave the village, and father and mother, and the orchards, and the meadows where we used to gather buttercups and tumble in the hay?” And she sat down on a broken chair by Jubilee’s box, and thought of the sweet air of the country, and wiped away a few slow tears with her apron. At last she got up, and took the box in her hands. “He’ll only starve here,” she thought, “and the rats will get at him. I’ve a great mind to let him go.” But then she thought how vexed the boys would be, and she gave up that idea. If she could only sell him they might all be the better for it. She would try and sell him for sixpence and they would buy a fourpenny loaf, and the boys should have a penny each to console them for the loss of their bird. She took him down the street in the box, turned down another street, and offered him at a shop where numbers of birds in cages were hanging in the window. “Will you give me sixpence for this bird?” she asked. A pang went through Jubilee; to be sold for a sixpence, and he a royal bird! The shopman, who was in his shirt (and very dirty it was), and had an evil face, and a short stubbly gray beard, looked with great contempt at Jubilee. “Sixpence,” he shouted; “why, it’s only a sparrow!” “Oh,” thought Jubilee, “if I could only tell him that I am a Jubilee sparrow, the only one in London, and worth a thousand times more than my weight in gold!” He had heard this so often from his father, that he at last had come to believe that if ever he really were to be sold they would weigh him and multiply the result by a thousand. “Sixpence!” cried the shopman. “Sparrows are dear at a penny!” The poor woman was sadly disappointed, and so indeed was Jubilee. She offered to sell the box as well, and after some bargaining, Jubilee and his box were handed over to the man for the sum of threepence, on which the starving family dined that day, and were thankful too. Jubilee had not been long in the shop when the evil-faced man opened the box cautiously and seized him before he could escape. Once more his legs were tied together, and he was taken into a little dingy back room and laid upon a table. Then the man shut the door, lit a gas-lamp, and took out some paints and washes; and setting a canary in a cage before him, began to paint Jubilee’s feathers to imitate it. “What a fat little brute you are,” he said, as he poked his dirty finger into the poor bird’s stomach. “But we’ll soon take that down; we’ll soon starve you into a nice slim canary. No more fat living for you, you little pig.”