kly.

He got up in the dirty, comfortless room and dressed himself. But in
the evening he was undressed by kind, clean hands, and washed in a big
bath half-full of hot, silvery water, with soap that smelled like the
timber-yard at the end of the street. Because, going along to school,
with his silly little head full of Artistic Bird Seeds and flowers
rainbow-colored, he had let his crutch slip on a banana-skin and had
tumbled down, and a butcher's cart had gone over his poor lame foot. So
they took the hurt foot to the hospital, and of course he had to go with
it, and the hospital was much more like the heaven he read of in his
books than anything he had ever come across before.

He noticed that the nurses and the doctors spoke in the kind of words
that he had found in his books, and in a voice that he had not found
anywhere; so when on the second day a round-faced, smiling lady in a
white cap said, "Well, Tommy, and how are we to-day?" he replied--

"My name is far from being Tommy, and I am in Lux Ury and Af Fluence, I
thank you, gracious lady."

At which the lady laughed and pinched his cheek.

When she grew to know him better, and found out where he had learned to
talk like that, she produced more books. And from them he learned more
new words. They were very nice to him at the hospital, but when they
sent him home they put his lame foot into a thick boot with a horrid,
clumpy sole and iron things that went up his leg.

His aunt and her friends said, "How kind!" but Dickie hated it. The boys
at school made game of it--they had got used to the crutch--and that was
worse than being called "Old Dot-and-go-one," which was what Dickie had
got used to--so used that it seemed almost like a pet name.

And on that first night of his return he found that he had been robbed.
They had taken his Tinkler from the safe corner in his bed where the
ticking was broken, and there was a soft flock nest for a boy's best
friend.

He knew better than to ask what had become of it. Instead he searched
and searched the house in all its five rooms. But he never found
Tinkler.

Instead he found next day, when his aunt had gone out shopping, a little
square of cardboard at the back of the dresser drawer, among the dirty
dusters and clothes pegs and string and corks and novelettes.

It was a pawn-ticket--"Rattle. One shilling."

Dickie knew all about pawn-tickets. You, of course, don't. Well, ask
some grown-up person to explain; I h