es; and
however you may shut people up between bars of yellow and mud color, and
however hard you may make them work, and however little wage you may pay
them for working, there will always be found among those people some men
who are willing to work a little longer, and for no wages at all, so
that they may have green things growing near them.

But there were no green things growing in the garden at the back of the
house where Dickie lived with his aunt. There were stones and bones, and
bits of brick, and dirty old dish-cloths matted together with grease and
mud, worn-out broom-heads and broken shovels, a bottomless pail, and the
mouldy remains of a hutch where once rabbits had lived. But that was a
very long time ago, and Dickie had never seen the rabbits. A boy had
brought a brown rabbit to school once, buttoned up inside his jacket,
and he had let Dickie hold it in his hands for several minutes before
the teacher detected its presence and shut it up in a locker till school
should be over. So Dickie knew what rabbits were like. And he was fond
of the hutch for the sake of what had once lived there.

And when his aunt sold the poor remains of the hutch to a man with a
barrow who was ready to buy anything, and who took also the pails and
the shovels, giving threepence for the lot, Dickie was almost as unhappy
as though the hutch had really held a furry friend. And he hated the man
who took the hutch away, all the more because there were empty
rabbit-skins hanging sadly from the back of the barrow.

It is really with the going of that rabbit-hutch that this story begins.
Because it was then that Dickie, having called his aunt a Beast, and hit
at her with his little dirty fist, was well slapped and put out into the
bereaved yard to "come to himself," as his aunt said. He threw himself
down on the ground and cried and wriggled with misery and pain, and
wished--ah, many things.

"Wot's the bloomin' row now?" the Man Next Door suddenly asked; "been
hittin' of you?"

"They've took away the 'utch," said Dickie.

"Well, there warn't nothin' in it."

"I diden want it took away," wailed Dickie.

"Leaves more room," said the Man Next Door, leaning on his spade. It was
Saturday afternoon and the next-door garden was one of the green ones.
There were small grubby daffodils in it, and dirty-faced little
primroses, and an arbor beside the water-butt, bare at this time of the
year, but still a real arbor. And an elder-tree th