at in the hot weather
had flat, white flowers on it big as tea-plates. And a lilac-tree with
brown buds on it. Beautiful. "Say, matey, just you chuck it! Chuck it, I
say! How in thunder can I get on with my digging with you 'owlin' yer
'ead off?" inquired the Man Next Door. "You get up and peg along in an'
arst your aunt if she'd be agreeable for me to do up her garden a bit. I
could do it odd times. You'd like that."

"Not 'arf!" said Dickie, getting up.

"Come to yourself, eh?" sneered the aunt. "You mind, and let it be the
last time you come your games with me, my beauty. You and your
tantrums!"

Dickie said what it was necessary to say, and got back to the "garden."

"She says she ain't got no time to waste, an' if you 'ave she don't care
what you does with it."

"There's a dirty mug you've got on you," said the Man Next Door, leaning
over to give Dickie's face a rub with a handkerchief hardly cleaner.
"Now I'll come over and make a start." He threw his leg over the fence.
"You just peg about an' be busy pickin' up all them fancy articles, and
nex' time your aunt goes to Buckingham Palace for the day we'll have a
bonfire."

"Fifth o' November?" said Dickie, sitting down and beginning to draw to
himself the rubbish that covered the ground.

"Fifth of anything you like, so long as _she_ ain't about," said he,
driving in the spade. "'Ard as any old door-step it is. Never mind,
we'll turn it over, and we'll get some little seedses and some little
plantses and we shan't know ourselves."

"I got a 'apenny," said Dickie.

"Well, I'll put one to it, and you leg 'long and buy seedses. That's wot
you do."

Dickie went. He went slowly, because he was lame. And he was lame
because his "aunt" had dropped him when he was a baby. She was not a
nice woman, and I am glad to say that she goes out of this story almost
at once. But she did keep Dickie when his father died, and she might
have sent him to the work-house. For she was not really his aunt, but
just the woman of the house where his father had lodged. It was good of
her to keep Dickie, even if she wasn't very kind to him. And as that is
all the good I can find to say about her, I will say no more. With his
little crutch, made out of a worn-out broom cut down to his little
height, he could manage quite well in spite of his lameness.

[Illustration: "'GIMME,' SAID DICKIE--'GIMME A PENN'ORTH O' THAT
THERE.'"]

He found the corn-chandler's--a really charming shop