tead to sweep a crossing or play a barrel-organ, or stand at
a street corner with outstretched hat (though this last would only have
done for a summer engagement, as Peter didn't like the winds that play
round street corners in winter). But Thomas was very much there, and had
to be provided for; so Peter copied letters and addressed envelopes and
earned twenty shillings weekly, and out of it paid for Thomas's drink and
Thomas's Girl and his own food, and beds and a sitting-room and fires
and laundry for both, and occasional luxuries in the way of wooden
animals for Thomas to play with. So they were not extremely poor; they
were respectably well-to-do. For Thomas's sake, Peter supposed it was
worth while not to be extremely poor, even though it meant addressing
envelopes and living in a great grey prison-house of a city, where one
only surmised the first early pushings of the spring beyond the
encompassing gloom.

Peter used to tell Thomas about that, in order that he might know
something of the joyous world beyond the walls. He told Thomas in March,
taking time by the forelock, about the early violets that were going some
time to open blue eyes in the ditches by the roads where the spring winds
walk; about the blackthorn that would suddenly make a white glory of the
woods; about the green, sticky budding of the larches, and the keen sweet
smell of them, and the damp fragrance of the roaming wind that would blow
over river-flooded fields, smelling of bonfires and wet earth. He took
him through the seasons, telling him of the blown golden armies of the
daffodils that marched out for Easter, and the fragrant white glory of
the may; and the pale pink stars of the hedge-roses, and the yellow joy
of buttercup fields wherein cows stand knee-deep and munch, in order to
give Thomas sweet white milk.

"Ugh," said Thomas, making a face, and Peter answered, "Yes, I know;
sometimes they come upon an onion-flower and eat that, and that's not
nice, of course. But mostly it's grass and buttercups and clover." Then
he told him of hot July roads, where the soft white dust lies, while the
horses and the cows stand up to their middles in cool streams beneath the
willows and switch their tails, and the earth dreams through the year's
hot noon; and of August, the world's welfare and the earth's warming-pan,
and how, in the fayre rivers, swimming is a sweet exercise. "And my
birthday comes then. Oh, 'tis the merry time, wherein honest neighbo