aven't time. I want to get on with
the story.

[Illustration: "'IT _IS_ A MOONFLOWER, OF COURSE,' HE SAID"

[_Page 13_]

Until he had found that ticket he had not been able to think of anything
else. He had not even cared to think about his garden and wonder whether
the Artistic Bird Seeds had come up parrot-colored. He had been a very
long time in the hospital, and it was August now. And the nurses had
assured him that the seeds must be up long ago--he would find everything
flowering, you see if he didn't.

And now he went out to look. There was a tangle of green growth at the
end of the garden, and the next garden was full of weeds. For the Man
Next Door had gone off to look for work down Ashford way, where the
hop-gardens are, and the house was to let.

A few poor little pink and yellow flowers showed stunted among the green
where he had sowed the Artistic Bird Seed. And, towering high above
everything else--oh, three times as high as Dickie himself--there was a
flower--a great flower like a sunflower, only white.

"Why," said Dickie, "it's as big as a dinner-plate."

It was.

It stood up, beautiful and stately, and turned its cream-white face
towards the sun.

"The stalk's like a little tree," said Dickie; and so it was.

It had great drooping leaves, and a dozen smaller white flowers stood
out below it on long stalks, thinner than that needed to support the
moonflower itself.

"It _is_ a moonflower, of course," he said, "if the other kind's
sunflowers. I love it! I love it! I love it!"

He did not allow himself much time for loving it, however; for he had
business in hand. He had, somehow or other, to get a shilling. Because
without a shilling he could not exchange that square of cardboard with
"Rattle" on it for his one friend, Tinkler. And with the shilling he
could. (This is part of the dismal magic of pawn-tickets which some
grown-up will kindly explain to you.)

"I can't get money by the sweat of my brow," said Dickie to himself;
"nobody would let me run their errands when they could get a boy with
both legs to do them. Not likely. I wish I'd got something I could
sell."

He looked round the yard--dirtier and nastier than ever now in the parts
that the Man Next Door had not had time to dig. There was certainly
nothing there that any one would want to buy, especially now the
rabbit-hutch was gone. Except ... why, of course--the moonflowers!

He got the old worn-down knife out of the bowl on