ds 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 ey