wled and yapped and scrapped and grunted round him
as he worked. No squirrels or birds came that day to lighten Dickie's
solitude, but True was more to him than many birds or squirrels. A woman
they had overtaken on the road had given him a bit of blue ribbon for
the puppy's neck, in return for the lift which Mr. Beale had given her
basket on the perambulator. She was selling ribbons and cottons and
needles from door to door, and made a poor thing of it, she told them.
"An' my grandfather 'e farmed 'is own land in Sussex," she told them,
looking with bleared eyes across the fields.

Dickie only made a box and a part of a box that day. And while he sat
making it, far away in London a respectable-looking man was walking up
and down Regent Street among the shoppers and the motors and carriages,
with a fluffy little white dog under each arm. And he sold both the
dogs.

"One was a lady in a carriage," he told Dickie later on. "Arst 'er two
thick 'uns, I did. Never turned a hair, no more I didn't. She didn't
care what its price was, bless you. Said it was a dinky darling and she
wanted it. Gent said he'd get her plenty better. No--she wanted that.
An' she got it too. A fool and his money's soon parted's what I say. And
t'other one I let 'im go cheap, for fourteen bob, to a black
clergyman--black as your hat he was, from foreign parts. So now we're
bloomin' toffs, an' I'll get a pair of reach-me-downs this very bloomin'
night. And what price that there room you was talkin' about?"

It was the beginning of a new life. Dickie wrote out their accounts on a
large flagstone near the horse trough by the "Chequers," with a bit of
billiard chalk that a man gave him.

It was like this:--

Got Box 4
Box 4
Box 4
Box 4
Dog 40
Dog 14
----
70

Spent Dogs 4
Grub 19
Tram 4
Leg 2
----
29

and he made out before he rubbed the chalk off the stone that the
difference between twenty-nine shillings and seventy was about two
pounds--and that was more than Dickie had ever had, or Beale either, for
many a long year.

Then Beale came, wiping his mouth, and they walked idly up the road.
Lodgings. Or rather _a_ lodging. A room. But when you have had what is
called the key of the st