u've got to get
to Sandham first. Go back into the road and keep to your left. When you
get to Sandham ask for Chesterham.'
'Thank you,' said Jimmy, and with the twopence held tightly in his hand
he walked along the lane until he reached the road.
It was a beautiful morning, but Jimmy could do nothing but gape; his
feet felt very heavy, and he wished that he had never put on the clown's
clothes and left his own behind. Still he made sure that he should be
able to reach Chesterham some day, and presently he passed a church and
an inn and several small houses and poor-looking shops. With the
twopence in his hand he looked in at the shop windows wondering what he
should buy for breakfast, and seeing a card in one of them which said
that lemonade was a penny a bottle, Jimmy determined to buy some of
that.
The woman who served him looked very much astonished, and she called
another woman to look at him too. But Jimmy stood drinking the cool,
sweet lemonade, and thought it was the nicest thing he had ever tasted.
As he stood drinking it his eyes fell on some cakes of chocolate cream.
'How much are those?' he asked.
'Two a penny,' said the woman.
'I'll have two, please,' said Jimmy, and he began to eat them as soon as
he left the shop. But he was glad to leave the village behind, because
everybody he met stared at him and he did not like it. Three boys and a
girl followed him some distance along the road, no doubt expecting that
he was really and truly a clown, and would do some tumbling and make
them laugh. But at last they grew tired of following him, and they
stopped and began to call him names, and one boy threw a stone at him,
but Jimmy felt far too miserable to throw one back. Chocolate creams and
lemonade are very nice things, but they don't make a very good
breakfast. The morning seemed very long, and presently Jimmy sat down by
a hedge and fell asleep. He awoke feeling more hungry than ever, and no
one was in sight but a man on a hay cart. But it happened that the cart
was going towards Sandham, and Jimmy waited until it came up, and then
he climbed up behind and hung with one leg over the tailboard and got a
long ride for nothing. He might have ridden all the way to Sandham, only
that the carter turned round in a rather bad temper and hit Jimmy with
his whip, so that he jumped down more quickly than he had climbed up.
He guessed that he was near the town, because there were houses by the
roadside, and
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