st, and bread
and cheese for dinner, and bread for supper, with sometimes a rasher
as a great treat. At any rate we will try to live on six shillings a
week."

"Oh! we can do that fine," Bill said confidently; "and then two
shillings for rent, and that will leave us eight shillings a week to
put by."

"Mother said that the doctor didn't think she would be able to come
out 'til the spring. We are just at the beginning of November, so if
she comes out the first of April, that's five months, say twenty-two
weeks. Twenty-two weeks at eight shillings, let me see. That's eight
pounds in twenty weeks, eight pounds sixteen altogether, that would
furnish two rooms very well, I should think."

"My eye, I should think so!" Bill exclaimed, for to his mind eight
pound sixteen was an almost unheard-of sum, and the fact that his
companion had been able to calculate it increased if possible his
admiration for him.

It needed but two or three days to reconcile Mrs. Grimstone to her new
lodgers.

"I wouldn't have believed," she said at the end of the week to a
neighbor, "as two boys could have been that quiet. They comes in after
work as regular as the master. They rubs their feet on the mat, and
you can scarce hear 'em go upstairs, and I don't hear no more of 'em
till they goes out agin in the morning. They don't come back here to
breakfast or dinner. Eats it, I suppose, standing like."

"But what do they do with themselves all the evening, Mrs. Grimstone?"

"One of 'em reads to the other. I think I can hear a voice going
regular over the kitchen."

"And how's their room?"

"As clean and tidy as a new pin. They don't lock the door when they
goes out, and I looked in yesterday, expecting to find it like a
pigsty; but they had made the bed afore starting for work, and set
everything in its place, and laid the fire like for when they come
back."

Mrs. Grimstone was right. George had expended six pence in as many
old books at a bookstall. One of them was a spelling-book, and he had
at once set to work teaching Bill his letters. Bill had at first
protested. "He had done very well without reading, and didn't see much
good in it." However, as George insisted he gave way, as he would have
done to any proposition whatever upon which his friend had set his
mind. So for an hour every evening after they had finished tea Bill
worked at his letters and spelling, and then George read aloud to him
from one of the other books.

"You mus