Harding's luck. Nesbit Edith

down and take your 'ead off afore you know you're dead if you don't look alive. Adventures? I should think so!"

      "Ah!" said Dickie, and a full silence fell between them.

      "Tired?" asked Mr. Beale presently.

      "Just a tiddy bit, p'raps," said Dickie bravely, "but I can stick it."

      "We'll get summat with wheels for you to-morrow," said the man, "if it's only a sugar-box; an' I can tie that leg of yours up to make it look like as if it was cut off."

      "It's this 'ere nasty boot as makes me tired," said Dickie.

      "Hoff with it," said the man obligingly; "down you sets on them stones and hoff with it! T'other too if you like. You can keep to the grass."

      The dewy grass felt pleasantly cool and clean to Dickie's tired little foot, and when they crossed the road where a water-cart had dripped it was delicious to feel the cool mud squeeze up between your toes. That was charming; but it was pleasant, too, to wash the mud off on the wet grass. Dickie always remembered that moment. It was the first time in his life that he really enjoyed being clean. In the hospital you were almost too clean; and you didn't do it yourself. That made all the difference. Yet it was the memory of the hospital that made him say, "I wish I could 'ave a bath."

      "So you shall," said Mr. Beale; "a reg'ler wash all over – this very night. I always like a wash meself. Some blokes think it pays to be dirty. But it don't. If you're clean they say 'Honest Poverty,' an' if you're dirty they say 'Serve you right.' We'll get a pail or something this very night."

      "You are good," said Dickie. "I do like you."

      Mr. Beale looked at him through the deepening twilight – rather queerly, Dickie thought. Also he sighed heavily.

      "Oh, well – all's well as has no turning; and things don't always – What I mean to say, you be a good boy and I'll do the right thing by you."

      "I know you will," said Dickie, with enthusiasm. "I know 'ow good you are!"

      "Bless me!" said Mr. Beale uncomfortably. "Well, there. Step out, sonny, or we'll never get there this side Christmas."

      Now you see that Mr. Beale may be a cruel, wicked man who only wanted to get hold of Dickie so as to make money out of him; and he may be going to be very unkind indeed to Dickie when once he gets him away into the country, and is all alone with him – and his having that paper and envelope and pencil all ready looks odd, doesn't it? Or he may be a really benevolent person. Well, you'll know all about it presently.

      "And – here we are," said Mr. Beale, stopping in a side-street at an open door from which yellow light streamed welcomingly. "Now mind you don't contradict anything wot I say to people. And don't you forget you're my nipper, and you got to call me daddy."

      "I'll call you farver," said Dickie. "I got a daddy of my own, you know."

      "Why," said Mr. Beale, stopping suddenly, "you said he was dead."

      "So he is," said Dickie; "but 'e's my daddy all the same."

      "Oh, come on," said Mr. Beale impatiently. And they went in.

      CHAPTER II

      BURGLARS

      Dickie fell asleep between clean, coarse sheets in a hard, narrow bed, for which fourpence had been paid.

      "Put yer clobber under yer bolster, likewise yer boots," was the last instruction of his new friend and "father."

      There had been a bath – or something equally cleansing – in a pail near a fire where ragged but agreeable people were cooking herrings, sausages, and other delicacies on little gridirons or pans that they unrolled from the strange bundles that were their luggage. One man who had no gridiron cooked a piece of steak on the kitchen tongs. Dickie thought him very clever. A very fat woman asked Dickie to toast a herring for her on a bit of wood; and when he had done it she gave him two green apples.

      He laid in bed and heard jolly voices talking and singing in the kitchen below. And he thought how pleasant it was to be a tramp, and what jolly fellows the tramps were; for it seemed that all these nice people were "on the road," and this place where the kitchen was, and the good company and the clean bed for fourpence, was a Tramps' Hotel – one of many that are scattered over the country and called "Common Lodging-Houses."

      The singing and laughing went on long after he had fallen asleep, and if, later in the evening, there were loud-voiced arguments, or quarrels even, Dickie did not hear them.

      Next morning, quite early, they took the road. From some mysterious source Mr. Beale had obtained an old double perambulator, which must have been made, Dickie thought, for very fat twins, it was so broad and roomy. Artfully piled on the front part was all the furniture needed by travellers who mean to sleep every night at the Inn of the Silver Moon. (That is the inn where they have the beds with the green curtains.)

      "What's all that there?" Dickie asked, pointing to the odd knobbly bundles of all sorts and shapes tied on to the perambulator's front.

      "All our truck what we'll want on the road," said Beale.

      "And that pillowy bundle on the seat."

      "That's our clothes. I've bought you a little jacket to put on o' nights if it's cold or wet. An' when you want a lift – why, here's your carriage, and you can sit up 'ere and ride like the Lord Mayor, and I'll be yer horse; the bundles'll set on yer knee like a fat babby. Tell yer what, mate – looks to me as if I'd took a fancy to you."

      "I 'ave to you, I know that," said Dickie, settling his crutch firmly and putting his hand into Mr. Beale's. Mr. Beale looked down at the touch.

      "Swelp me!" he said helplessly. Then, "Does it hurt you – walking?"

      "Not like it did 'fore I went to the orspittle. They said I'd be able to walk to rights if I wore that there beastly boot. But that 'urts worsen anythink."

      "Well," said Mr. Beale, "you sing out when you get tired and I'll give yer a ride."

      "Oh, look," said Dickie – "the flowers!"

      "They're only weeds," said Beale. They were, in fact, convolvuluses, little pink ones with their tendrils and leaves laid flat to the dry earth by the wayside, and in a water-meadow below the road level big white ones twining among thick-growing osiers and willows.

      Dickie filled his hands with the pink ones, and Mr. Beale let him.

      "They'll die directly," he said.

      "But I shall have them while they're alive," said Dickie, as he had said to the pawnbroker about the moonflowers.

      It was a wonderful day. All the country sights and sounds, that you hardly notice because you have known them every year as long as you can remember, were wonderful magic to the little boy from Deptford. The green hedge, the cows looking over them; the tinkle of sheep-bells; the "baa" of the sheep; the black pigs in a sty close to the road, their breathless rooting and grunting and the shiny, blackleaded cylinders that were their bodies; the stubbly fields where barley stood in sheaves – real barley, like the people next door but three gave to their hens; the woodland shadows and the lights of sudden water; shoulders of brown upland pressed against the open sky; the shrill thrill of the skylark's song, "like canary birds got loose"; the splendor of distance – you never see distance in Deptford; the magpie that perched on a stump and cocked a bright eye at the travellers; the thing that rustled a long length through dead leaves in a beech coppice, and was, it appeared, a real live snake – all these made the journey a royal progress to Dickie of Deptford. He forgot that he was lame, forgot that he had run away – a fact that had cost him a twinge or two of fear or conscience earlier in the morning. He was happy as a prince is happy, new-come to his inheritance, and it was Mr. Beale, after all, who was the first to remember that there was a carriage in which a tired little boy might ride.

      "In you gets," he said suddenly; "you'll be fair knocked. You can look about you just as well a-sittin' down," he added, laying the crutch across the front of the perambulator. "Never see such a nipper for noticing, neither. Hi! there goes a rabbit. See 'im? Crost the road there? See him?"

      Dickie saw, and the crown was set on his happiness. A rabbit. Like the