Transcribed from the 1899 Bernhard Tauchnitz edition by Les Bowler.

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TAUCHNITZ EDITION.

By the same Author,

TO LONDON TOWN

BY

ARTHUR MORRISON,
AUTHOR OF “A CHILD OF THE JAGO,” ETC. ETC.

COPYRIGHT EDITION.

LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1899.

TO
LADY DOROTHY NEVILL.

NOTE.

I designed this story, and, indeed, began to write it, between the publication of Tales of Mean Streets and that of A Child of the Jago, to be read together with those books: not that I pretend to figure in all three—much less in any one of them—a complete picture of life in the eastern parts of London, but because they are complementary, each to the two others.

A. M.

TO LONDON TOWN.
I.

The afternoon had slumbered in the sun, but now the August air freshened with an awakening breath, and Epping Thicks stirred and whispered through a myriad leaves. Far away beyond the heaving greenwoods distant clouds floated flat on the upper air, and a richer gold grew over the hills as the day went westward. This way and that, between and about trees and undergrowth, an indistinct path went straggling by easy grades to the lower ground by Wormleyton Pits; an errant path whose every bend gave choice of green passes toward banks of heather and bracken. It was by this way that an old man and a crippled child had reached the Pits. He was a small old man, white-haired, and a trifle bent; but he went his way with a sturdy tread, satchel at side and butterfly-net in hand. As for the child, she too went sturdily enough, but she hung from a crutch by the right shoulder, and she moved with a jog and a swing. The hand that gripped the crutch gripped also a little bunch of meadowsweet, and the other clasped tight against her pinafore a tattered old book that would else have fallen to pieces.

Once on the heathery slade, the old man lifted the strap over his head and put the satchel down by a tree clump at the wood’s edge.

“’Nother rest for you, Bess,” he said, as he knelt to open his bag. “I’m goin’ over the pits pretty close to-day.” He packed his pockets with pill-boxes, a poison bottle, and a battered, flat tin case; while the child, with a quick rejection of the crutch, sat and watched.

The old man stood, slapped one pocket after another, and then, with a playful sweep of the net-gauze across the child’s face, tramped off among the heather. “Good luck, gran’dad!” she cried after him, and settled on her elbow to read.

The book needed a careful separation, being open at back as at front; likewise great heed lest the leaves fell into confusion: for, since they were worn into a shape more oval than rectangular, the page numbers had gone, and in places corners of text had gone too. But the main body of the matter, thumbed and rubbed, stood good for many a score more readings; and the story was The Sicilian Romance.

Round about the pits and across the farther ground of Genesis Slade the old man pushed his chase. Now letting himself cautiously down the side of a pit; now stealing softly among bracken, with outstretched net; and again running his best through the wiry heather. Always working toward sun and wind, and often standing watchfully still, his eye alert for a fluttering spot amid the flood of colour about him.

Meantime the little cripple conned again the familiar periods of the old romance. Few, indeed, of its ragged leaves but might have been replaced, if lost, from pure memory; few, indeed, for that matter, of The Pilgrim’s Progress or of Susan Hopley, or of The Scottish Chiefs: worn volumes all, in her grandfather’s little shelf of a dozen or fifteen books. So that now, because of old acquaintance, the tale was best enjoyed with many pauses; pauses filled with the smell of the meadowsweet, and with the fantasy that abode in the woods. For the jangle of a herd-bell was the clank of a knight’s armour, the distant boom of a great gun at Waltham Abbey told of the downfall of enchanted castles, and in the sudden plaint of an errant cow she heard the growling of an ogre in the forest.

The western hillsides grew more glorious, and the sunlight, peeping under heavy boughs, flung along the sward, gilt the tree-boles whose shadows veined it, and lit nooks under bushes where the wake-robin raised its scarlet mace of berries. The old man had dropped his net, and for awhile had been searching the herbage. It was late in the day for butterflies, but fox-moth caterpillars were plenty among the heather; as well as others. Thus Bessy read and dreamed, and her grandfather rummaged the bushes till the sunlight was gathered up from the turf under the trees, and lifted from the tallest spire among the agrimony, as the sun went beyond the hill-tops. Then at last the old man returned to his satchel.

“The flies ain’t much,” he observed, as Bessy looked up, “but for trade it’s best not to miss anything: it’s always what you’re shortest of as sells; and the blues was out late to-day. But I’ve got luck with caterpillars. If they go all right I ought to have a box-full o’ Rosy Marbled out o’ these!”

“Rosy Marbled! It’s a late brood then. And so long since you had any!”

“Two year; and this is the only place for ’em.” The old man packed his bag and slung it across his back. “We’ll see about tea now,” he added, as the child rose on her crutch; “but we’ll keep open eyes as we go.”

Over the slade they took their way, where the purple carpet was patterned with round hollows, black with heather-ash and green with star-moss; by the edges of the old gravel-pits, overhung with bramble and bush; and so into more woods.

A jay flew up before them, scolding angrily. Now and again a gap among the trees let through red light from beyond Woodredon. Again and again the old man checked his walk, sometimes but to drop once more into his even tramp, sometimes to stop, and sometimes to beat the undergrowth and to shake branches. To any who saw there was always a vaguely familiar quality in old May’s walk; ever a patient plod, and, burdened or not, ever an odd suggestion of something carried over shoulder; matters made plain when it was learned that the old man had been forty years a postman.

Presently as they walked they heard shrieks, guffaws, and a discordant singing that half-smothered the whine of a concertina. The noise was the louder as they went, and when they came where the white of a dusty road backed the tree-stems, they heard it at its fullest. Across the way was an inn, and by its side a space of open ground whereon some threescore beanfeasters sported at large. Many were busy at kiss-in-the-ring, some waved branches torn from trees, others stood up empty bottles and flung more bottles at them; they stood, sat, ran, lay, and rolled, but each made noise of some sort, and most drank. Plainly donkey-riding had palled, for a man and a boy had gathered their half-dozen donkeys together, and were driving them off.

The people were Londoners, as Bessy knew, for she had often seen others. She had forgotten London herself—all of it but a large drab room with a row of little beds like her own, each bed with a board on it, for toys; and this, too, she would have forgotten (for she was very little indeed then) but that a large and terrible gentleman had come every day and hurt her bad leg. It was the Shadwell Hospital. But these were Londoners, and Bessy was a little afraid of them, and conceived London to be a very merry and noisy place, very badly broken, everywhere, by reason of the Londoners. Other people, also, came in waggonettes, and were a little quieter, and less gloriously bedecked. She had seen such a party earlier in the day. Probably they were not real Londoners, but folk from parts adjoining. But these—these were Londoners proper, wearing each other’s hats, with paper wreaths on them.

“Wayo, old ’un!” bawled one, as the old man, net in hand, crossed toward the wood opposite; “bin ketchin’ tiddlers?” And he turned to his companions with a burst of laughter and a jerk of the thumb. “D’year, Bill! ’Ere’s yer ole gran’father ketchin’ tiddlers! Why doncher keep ’im out o’ mischief?” And every flushed face, doubly reddened by the setting sun, turned and opened its mouth in a guffaw. “You’ll cop it for gittin’ yer trouseys wet!” screamed a woman. And somebody flung a lump of crust.

Bessy jogged the faster into the wood, and in its shadow her grandfather, smiling doubtfully, said, “They like their joke, some of ’em, don’t they? But it’s always ’tiddlers’!”

It grew dusk under the trees, and the sky was pale above. They came to where the ground fell away in a glen that was almost a trench, and a brook ran in the ultimate furrow. On the opposing hill a broad green ride stood like a wall before them, a deep moss of trees clinging at each side. Here they turned, and, where the glen widened, a cottage was to be seen on sloping ground, with a narrow roadway a little beyond it. A whitewashed cottage, so small that there seemed scarce a score of tiles on its roof; one of the few scattered habitations holding its place in the forest by right of ancient settlement. A little tumult of garden tumbled about the cottage—a jostle of cabbages, lavender, onions, wallflowers and hollyhock, confined, as with difficulty, by a precarious fence, patched with wood in every form of manufacture and in every stage of decay.

“I expect mother and Johnny finished tea long ago,” Bessy remarked, her eyes fixed on the cottage. “Why there’s a light!”

The path they went by grew barer of grass as it neared the cottage, and as they trod it, men’s voices could be heard from within, and a woman’s laughter.

“Sounds like visitors!” the old man exclaimed. “That’s odd. I wonder who . . . ”

“There you are then, father!” came a female voice from the door. “Here’s Uncle Isaac an’ a gentleman come to see us.” It was Bessy’s mother who spoke—a pleasant, fresh, active woman in a print dress, who stood in the doorway as the old man set back the gate.

The door opened into the living-room, where sat two men, while a boy of fourteen squeezed, abashed and a trifle sulky, in a corner. There was a smell of bad cigar, which had almost, but not quite, banished the wonted smell of the room; a smell in some degree due to camphor, though, perhaps, more to caterpillar; for the walls were hidden behind boxes and drawers of divers shapes and sizes, and before the window and in unexpected places on the floor stood other boxes, covered with muslin, nurseries for larvæ, pupæ, and doomed butterflies. And so many were these things that the room, itself a mere box, gave scant space to the three people and the little round table that were in it; wherefore Bessy’s mother remained in the doorway, and Uncle Isaac, when he rose, took a very tall hat from the floor and clapped it on his head for lack of other safe place; for the little table sustained a load of cups and saucers. Uncle Isaac was a small man, though with a large face; a face fringed about with grey wisps of whisker, and characterised by wide and glassy eyes and a great tract of shaven upper lip.

“Good evenin’, Mr. May, good evenin’!” said Uncle Isaac, shaking hands with the air of a man faithful to a friend in defiance of the world. “This is my friend Mr. Butson.”

Mr. Butson was a tall, rather handsome man of forty or thereabout, with curly hair and whiskers, and he greeted the old man with grum condescension.

“Mr. Butson,” Uncle Isaac continued, with a wave of the hand, “is a gentleman at present in connection with the steamboat profession, though above it by fam’ly and inclination. Mr. Butson an’ me ’as bin takin’ a day’s ’olludy with a seleck party by name of beanfeast, in brakes.”

“O yes,” responded old May, divesting himself of his bag; “we passed some of ’em by the Dun Cow, an’ very merry they was, too, with concertinas, an’ kiss-in-the-ring, an’ what not—very gay.”

“O damn, no,” growled the distinguished Butson. “Not that low lot. He means that coster crowd in vans,” he added, for Uncle Isaac’s enlightenment. “I ain’t fell as low as that. Lor, no.” He sucked savagely at the butt of his cigar, found it extinct, looked vainly for somewhere to fling it, and at last dropped it into a teacup.

“No, Mr. May, no; not them lot,” Uncle Isaac said, with a touch of grave reproof. “As a man of some little property meself, an’ in company of Mr. Butson, by nature genteel-disposed, I should be far from mixin’ with such. We come down with the shipwrights an’ engineers from Lawsonses. That was prob’ly Mr. May’s little joke, Mr. Butson. Mr. May is a man of property hisself, besides a man of science, as I think I told you. This ’ere land an’ residence bein’ in pint. If any man was to come an’ say to Mr. May, ‘Git out o’ that property, Mr. May,’ what would the lawr say to that man? Nullavoid. That’s what the lawr ’ud say. It ’ud say, ‘Git out yerself, your claim’s nullavoid.’” Uncle Isaac, checking a solemn thump at the table just in time to save the tea-cups, took his hat off instead, and put it on again.

Mr. Butson grunted “Ah!” and Mrs. May, taking the net, squeezed in, with Bessy behind her. “I’ll put a few o’ these boxes on the stairs, an’ make more room,” she said. “The kettle’s still boiling in the backhouse, an’ I’ll make some more tea.”

Bessy had a habit of shyness in presence of strangers, and Uncle Isaac ranked as one, for it was two years at least since he had been there before. Indeed, what she remembered of him then made her the shyer. For he had harangued her very loudly on the gratitude she owed her grandfather, calling her a cripple very often in course of his argument, and sometimes a burden. She knew that she was a cripple and a burden, but to be held tightly by the arm and told so, by a gentleman with such a loud voice and such large eyes as Uncle Isaac, somehow inclined her to cry. So now, as soon as might be, she joined her brother, and the two retreated into the shadowy corner between the stairfoot and the backhouse door.

The old butterfly-hunter, too, was shy in his more elderly way. Beyond his widowed daughter-in-law and her two children he had scarce an acquaintance, or at least none more familiar than the naturalists in London to whom he sold his specimens. So that now, in presence of this very genteel Mr. Butson, who, he feared, was already disgusted at the humble character of the establishment, he made but a hollow meal. A half-forgotten notion afflicted him, that it was proper to drink tea in only one of two possible ways; but whether from the cup or from the saucer he could not resolve himself. Mr. Butson had finished his tea, so that his example was lacking: though indeed the lees in his saucer seemed to offer a hint—a hint soon triumphantly confirmed by Uncle Isaac, who was nothing averse from a supplementary cup, and who emptied it straightway into his saucer and gulped ardently, glaring fearfully over the edge. Whereat his host drank from the saucer also, and took heed to remember for the future. Still he was uncomfortable, and a little later he almost blushed at detecting himself inhospitably grateful for signs that Mr. Butson began to tire of the visit. Meanwhile he modestly contributed little to the conversation.

“No,” said Mr. Butson gloomily after a long pause, and in reply to nothing in particular, “I ain’t a man of property. I wish I was. If people got what they was brought up to—but there!” He stuck his hands lower in his pockets and savagely regarded vacancy.

“Mr. Butson’s uncle,” said Uncle Isaac, “is a mayor. A mayor. An’ ’is other relations is of almost equal aristocracy. But ’e won’t ’ave nothin’ to say to ’em, not a word. It’s jist blood—pride o’ breedin’. But what I say is, it may be proper self-respeck, but it ain’t proper self-justice. It ain’t self-justice, in my way o’ puttin’ it. Why ’e won’t even name ’em! Won’t name ’em, Mr. May!”

“Won’t he?” the old man answered, rather tamely, “dear, dear!” Mr. Butson laid his head back, jerked his chin, and snorted scorn at the ceiling.

“No—won’t as much as name ’em, such is ’is lawfty contemp’. Otherwise, what ’ud be my path of dooty? My path of dooty on behalf of self-justice to Mr. Butson would be to see ’em an’ put a pint o’ argument. ’Ere, I puts it, is ’im, an’ ’ere is me. ’Ere is Mr. ’Enery Butson, your very dootiful relation of fash’nable instinks, an’ a engineer than which none better though much above it, an’ unsuitably enchained by worldly circumstances in the engine-room of a penny steamer.” (Here Mr. Butson snorted again.) “Likewise ’ere is me, a elderly man of some small property, an’ a shipwright of practical experience. Them circumstances bein’ the case, cons’kently, what more nachral an’ proper than a partnership—with capital. That’s ’ow I’d put the pint; a partnership with capital.”

“Jus’ so,” said old May. And seeing that the other still paused, he added “Of course.”

“But ’e’s proud—proud!” said Uncle Isaac, shaking his head plaintively.

“P’raps I am proud,” Mr. Butson admitted candidly, “I s’pose I got my faults. But I wouldn’t take a penny from ’em—not if they was to beg me on their knees. Why I’d sooner be be’olding to strangers!”

“Ah, that ’e would,” sighed Uncle Isaac. “But it ain’t self-justice. No, it ain’t self-justice!”

“It’s self-respect, any’ow,” said Mr. Butson sullenly. “If they like to treat me unnatural, let ’em.”

“Ah,” observed Uncle Isaac, “some fam’lies is unnachral an’ some is nachral, an’ there’s a deal o’ difference between ’em. Look at Mr. May now. ’E ain’t altogether in my family, though my niece’s father-in-law by marriage. But what nachralness! His son was a engineer in yer own trade, Mr. Butson,—fitter at Maidment’s. ’E left my niece a widder, cons’kence of a coat-tail in a cog wheel. What does Mr. May do? Why ’e shows ’is nachralness. ’E brings ’er an’ ’er children down ’ere on ’is own free’old residence, an’ cons’kently—’ere they are. Look at that!”

It was a principle with Uncle Isaac to neglect no opportunity of reciting at large the excellences of any person of the smallest importance with whom he might be acquainted; or the excellences which that person might be supposed to desire credit for: if in his actual presence, so much the better. Nothing could be cheaper, and on the whole it paid very well. At worst, it advertised an amiable character; and there remained off-chances of personal benefit. Moreover the practice solidified Uncle Isaac’s reputation among his acquaintances. For here, quoth each in his turn, was plainly a man of sagacious discernment. The old postman, however, was merely uneasy. To his mind it was nothing but a matter of course that when his son died, the widow and children should come under his own roof, and it was as a matter of course that he had brought them there. But Bessy’s mother said simply:—“Yes, gran’dad’s been a good one to us, always.” She, as well as the children, called him “gran’dad.”

“Yes,” proceeded Uncle Isaac, “an’ ’im with as much to think about as a man of edication too—wonderful. Why there’s nothink as ’e don’t know in astronomy an’—an’—an’ insectonomy. Nothink!”

“No, not astronomy,” interjected old May, a little startled by both counts of the imputation. “Not astronomy, Mr. Mundy.”

“I say yes,” answered Uncle Isaac, with an emphatic slap on the knee. “Modesty under a bushel’s all very well, Mr. May, all very well, but I know—I know! Astronomy, an’ medicamedica an’ all the other classics. I know! Ah, I’d give best part o’ my small property, sich as it is, for ’alf your edication, Mr. May!”

It was generally agreed in the family that Uncle Isaac was very “close” as to this small property of his. Nothing could induce him to speak of it with any particularity of detail, and opinions varied as to its character. Still, whatever it was, it sufficed to gain Uncle Isaac much deference and consideration—the more, probably, because of its mysterious character; a deference and a consideration which Uncle Isaac could stimulate from time to time by cloudy allusions to altering his will.

“Well,” observed Mr. Butson rising from his chair, “education never done me much good.”

“No, unforchnately!” commented Uncle Isaac.

“An’ I’d prefer property meself.” Mr. Butson made toward the door, and Uncle Isaac prepared to follow. At this moment a harsh female voice suddenly screamed from the darkness without. “Lor’! I almost fell over a blessed ’ouse!” it said, and there was a shrill laugh. “We’ll ask ’em the way back.”

Old May stepped over the threshold at the sound; but the magnificence was stricken from the face of Mr. Butson. His cheeks paled, his mouth and eyes opened together, and he shrank back, even toward the stairfoot. Nobody marked him, however, but the children, for attention was directed without.

“Djear! which way to the Dun Cow?”

“See the lane?” answered the old postman. “Follow that to the right an’ you’ll come to it. It’s a bit farther than through the wood, but ye can’t go wrong.”

“Right!” There were two women and a man. The screaming woman said something to the others in a quieter tone, in which, however, the word “tiddlers” was plain to hear, and there was a laugh. “Good-night, ole chap,” she bawled back. “Put ’em in a jam-pot with a bit o’ water-creese!”

“Full o’ their games!” remarked the old man with a tolerant smile, as he turned toward the door. “That was the person as said I’d catch it for gettin’ my clothes wet, as we came past the Dun Cow.”

The voices of the beanfeasters abated and ceased, and now Mr. Butson left no doubt of his readiness to depart. “Come,” he said, with chap-fallen briskness, “we’ll ’ave to git back to the others; they’ll be goin’.” He took leave with so much less dignity and so much more haste than accorded with his earlier manner that Mr. May was a trifle puzzled, though he soon forgot it.

“Good-night, Mr. May, I wish you good-night,” said Uncle Isaac, shaking hands impressively. “I’ve greatly enjoyed your flow of conversation, Mr. May.” He made after the impatient Butson, stopped half-way to the gate and called gently:—“Nan!”

“Yes, uncle,” Mrs. May replied, stepping out to him. “What is it?”

Uncle Isaac whispered gravely in her ear, and she returned and whispered to the old man. “Of course—certainly,” he said, looking mightily concerned, as he re-entered the cottage.

Mrs. May reached a cracked cup from a shelf, and, turning over a few coppers, elicited a half-crown. With this she returned to Uncle Isaac.

“I’ll make a note of it,” said Uncle Isaac as he pocketed the money, “and send a postal-order.”

“O, don’t trouble about that, Uncle Isaac!” For Uncle Isaac, with the small property, must not be offended in a matter of a half-crown.

“What? Trouble?” he ejaculated, deeply pained. “To pay my—”

“’Ere—come on!” growled Mr. Butson savagely from the outer gloom. “Come on!” And they went together, taking the lane in the direction opposite to that lately used by the noisy woman.

“Well,” old May observed, “we don’t often have visitors, an’ I was glad to see your Uncle Isaac, Nan. An’ Mr. Butson, too,” he added impartially.

“Yes,” returned Bessy’s mother innocently. “Such a gentleman, isn’t he?”

“There’s one thing I forgot,” the old man said suddenly. “I might ha’ asked ’em to take a drop o’ beer ’fore they went.”

“They had some while they was waitin’ for tea. An’—an’ I don’t think there’s much left.” She dragged a large tapped jar from under the breeding-box at the window, and it was empty.

“Ah!” was all the old man’s comment, as he surveyed the jar thoughtfully.

Presently he turned into the back-house and emerged with a tin pot and a brush. “I’m a goin’ treaclin’ a bit,” he said. “Come, Johnny?”

The boy pulled his cap from his pocket, fetched a lantern, and was straightway ready, while Bessy sat to her belated tea.

The last pale light lay in the west, and the evening offered up an oblation of sweet smells. All things that feed by night were out, and nests were silent save for once and again a sleepy twitter. Every moment another star peeped, and then one more. The boy and the old man walked up the slope among the trees, pausing now at one, now at another, to daub the bark with the mixture of rum and treacle that was in the pot.

“It’s always best to be careful where you treacle when there’s holiday folk about,” said Johnny’s grandfather. “They don’t understand it. Often I’ve treacled a log or a stump and found a couple sittin’ on it when I came back—with new dresses, and sich. It’s no good explainin’—they think it’s all done for practical jokin’. It’s best to go on an’ take no notice. I’ve heard ’em say:—’Don’t the country smell lovely?’—meanin’ the smell o’ the rum an’ treacle they was a-sittin’ on. But when they find it—lor, the language I have heard! Awful! . . . ”

The boy was quiet almost all the round. Presently he said, “Gran’dad, do you really like that likeness I made of mother?”

“Like it, my boy? Why o’ course. It’s a nobby picture!”

“Uncle Isaac said it was bad.”

“O!” There was a thoughtful pause while they tramped toward the next tree. “That’s only Uncle Isaac’s little game, Johnny. You mustn’t mind that. It’s a nobby picture.”

“I don’t believe Uncle Isaac knows anything about it,” said the boy vehemently. “I think he’s ignorant.”

“Here, Johnny, Johnny!” cried his grandfather. “That won’t do, you know. Not at all. You mustn’t say things like that.”

“Well, that’s what I think, gran’dad. An’ I know he says things wrong. When he came before he said that ship I drew was bad—an’ I—I very near cried.” (He did cry, but that was in secret, and not to be confessed.) “But now,” Johnny went on, “I’m fourteen, an’ I know better. I don’t believe Uncle Isaac knows a bit about things.”

They had come again to the tree first treacled, and, leaving the pot and brush at its foot, the old man, by help of the lantern, took certain of the moths that had been attracted. From this he carried the lantern to the next tree in the round and then to the next, filling the intervals between his moth-captures with successive chapters of a mild and rather vague lecture on respect for elders.

It was dark night now, and the sky all a-dust with stars. The old man and the boy took their way more by use than by sight amid the spectral presences of the trees, whose infinite whispering filled the sharpening air. They emerged on high ground, whence could be seen, here the lights of Loughton and there the lights of Woodford, and others more distant in the flatter country. Here the night wind swept up lustily from all Essex, and away from far on the Robin Hood Road came a rumble and a murmur, and presently the glare of hand-lights red and green, the sign and token of homing beanfeasters.

II.

For some while a problem had confronted the inmates of the cottage, and now it was ever with them: the choice of a trade for Johnny. The situation of the cottage itself made the main difficulty. There was a walk of two miles to the nearest railway station, and then London was twelve miles off. It was in London that trades were learnt; but to get there? Here the family must stay, for here was the cottage, which cost no rent, for the old man had bought it with his little savings. Moreover, here also were the butterflies and the moths, which meant butter to the dry bread of the little pension; and here was the garden. To part with Johnny altogether was more than his mother could face, and, indeed, what was to pay for his lodging and keep?

The moths and butterflies could be no living for Johnny. To begin with, though he was always ready to help in the hatching, killing, setting, and what not, he was no born insect-hunter, like his grandfather; and then the old man had long realised that the forest was growing a poorer and poorer hunting-ground each year, and must some day (after he was dead, he hoped) be no longer worth working. People were hard on the hawks, so that insect-eating birds multiplied apace, and butterflies were fewer. And there was something else, or so it seemed—some subtle influence from the great smoky province that lay to the south-west. For London grew and grew, and washed nearer and still nearer its scummy edge of barren brickbats and clinkers. It had passed Stratford long since, and had nearly reached Leyton. And though Leyton was eight miles off, still the advancing town sent something before it—an odour, a subtle principle—that drove off the butterflies. The old man had once taken the Emperor Moth at Stratford, in a place long covered with a row of grimy little houses; now the Emperor was none too easy to find in the thickest of the woodland. And, indeed, when the wind came from the south-west the air seemed less clear, in the old man’s eyes, than was its wont a dozen years back. True, many amateurs came with nets—boys from boarding-schools thereabout, chiefly—and did not complain. But he, who by trade had noted day by day for many years the forest’s produce in egg, larva, pupa, and imago, saw and knew the change. So that butterflies being beyond possibility as Johnny’s trade, his grandfather naturally bethought him of the one other he himself was familiar with, and spoke of the post-office. He knew the postmaster at Loughton, and the postmasters at other of the villages about the forest. By making a little interest Johnny might take the next vacancy as messenger. But the prospect did not tempt the boy. He protested, and it was almost his sole contribution to the daily discussion, that he wanted to make something; and there was little doubt, if one might judge from the unpleasing ships and figures in coloured chalks wherewith he defaced whatever offered a fair surface, that he would most like to make pictures. He never urged the choice in plain terms, for that were hopeless: but both his mother and his grandfather condemned it in all respects as though he did.

“There’s a deal more caterpillar than butterfly in this life for the likes of us, my boy,” the old man would say, as he laboured at his setting. “Makin’ pictures an’ such is all very well, but we can’t always choose our own line. I’ve bin a lucky man in my time, thank God. The insects was my hobby long ’fore I made any money of ’em. Your poor gran’mother that you never saw, ‘A lot o’ good them moths an’ grubs’ll be to you,’ she used to say. ‘Why not bees, as you can make somethin’ out of?’ An’ Haskins, that took the next round to mine, he kep’ bees. But I began sellin’ a few specimens to gentlemen here an’ there, an’ then more, an’ after that I took ’em to London reg’lar, same as now. It ain’t as good as it was, an’ it’s goin’ to be worse, but I’m in hopes it’ll last my time out. It was because I was carryin’ letters here that I had the chance o’ doin’ it at all. If you was to carry ’em yourself, you’d be able to do something else too—bees p’raps. A good few mends boots, but we’re a bit off the villages here. Here’s the house—yours an’ your mother’s when I’m gone, an’ I’m sixty-nine; an’ it’s healthier an’ cleaner than London. You could put up a little bit o’ glass in the garden an’ grow tomatoes an’ cucumbers. Them—an’ fowls—you could keep fowls—would sell very well to the gentlefolk, an’ they all know the postman. Wages ain’t high, but you live cheap here, with no rent, and there’s a pension, p’raps. That’s your line, depend on it, Johnny.”

“But I should like a trade where I could make something,” the boy would answer wistfully. “I really should, gran’dad.”

“Ah”—with a shake of the head—“make what? I doubt but you’re meanin’ pictures. You must get that notion out of your head, Johnny. Some of them as make ’em may do well, but most’s awful. I see ’em in London often, drorin’ on the pavement; reg’lar clever ones, too, doin’ mackerel an’ bits o’ salmon splendid, and likenesses o’ the Queen, an’ sunsets, with the sky shaded beautiful. Beggin’! Reg’lar beggin’, with a cap out for coppers, an’ ‘Help gifted poverty’ wrote in chalk. That won’t do, ye know, Johnny.”

The boy’s mother felt for him an indefinite ambition not to be realised by a life of letter-carrying, though picture-making she favoured as little as did the old man. But there was the situation of the cottage—a hindrance they could see no way to overcome. This being so, they left it for the time, and betook themselves to smaller difficulties. Putting the letter-carrying aside for the moment, and forgetting distance as an obstacle, what trades were there to choose from? Truly a good many: and that none should be missed, Johnny’s grandfather took paper and a pencil and walked to Woodford, where he begged use of a London Directory and read through all the trades, from Absorbent Cotton Wool Manufacturers to Zincographic Printers, making a laborious list as he went, omitting (with some reluctance) such items as Bankers, Brokers—Stock and Share—Merchants, Patentees, and Physicians, and hesitating a little over such as Aëronauts and Shive Turners. The task filled a large part of three days of uncommonly hard work, and old David May finished his list in mental bedevilment. What was a Shive Turner? Indeed, for that matter, what was an Ammeter?

The list did but multiply confusion and divide counsel. Nan May sang less at her house-work now, thinking of what she could remember of the trades that began with Absorbent Cotton Wool Manufacture and ended with Zincographic Printing. Little Bess neglected the bookshelf, and pored over the crabbed catalogue with earnest incomprehension. It afflicted Johnny himself with a feeling akin to terror, for which he found it hard to account. The arena of the struggle for bread was so vast, and he so small a combatant to choose a way into the scrimmage! More, it seemed all so unattractive. There could be little to envy in the daily life of a Seed Crusher or a Court Plaster Maker. But the old man would pin a sheet of the list to the wall and study it while he worked within doors: full of patience and simple courage.

“Bakin’ Powder Maker,” he would call aloud to whomsoever it might reach. “How’s that? That’s makin’ something. . . . ”

Sometimes Bob Smallpiece, the forest keeper, would look in on his way by the cottage and be consulted. Bob was an immense being in much leather and velveteen, with a face like a long-kept pippin. When he first came to the forest, years back, his amiable peeps into the house may have been prompted by professional considerations, for it was his habit to keep an eye on solitary cottages in his walk: cottages wherein it had once or twice been his luck to spy by surprise some furry little heap that a poke of his ash stick had separated into dead rabbits. Indeed, had old May’s tastes lain that way, nothing would have been easier for him than to set a snare or two at night as he hunted his moths. But soon the keeper found that this one, at least, of the cottagers thereabouts was no poacher, and then his greetings were as friendly as they seemed. As to Johnny’s trade, he had few ideas beyond one that butchers did very well in London: his sister having married one. And what a Shive Turner or an Ammeter might be he knew no more than his stick. But he knew well enough what a poacher was (as also, perhaps, did the stick, if contact could teach it); and he counselled that the boy be kept away from certain “lots”—as the “Blandy lot,” the “Honeywell lot,” and the “Hayes lot”—who would do him no good. The old butterfly-hunter knew these “lots” very well on his own account; and his perpetual gropings about banks and undergrowth made him no friends among them. They would scarce believe, even after long experience, that grubs alone accounted for his activity; and truly, a man with a government pension, who affected scientific tastes, who lived a clean life, who was called “Mr. May” by keepers, and who, moreover, had such uncommon opportunities of witnessing what passed in the woods, might well be an object of suspicion. In simple truth, the village loafers had small conception of the old man’s knowledge of their behaviour among the rabbit burrows. He knew the woods as they knew the inwards of a quart pot, and his eyes, aged as they might be, were trained by years of search for things well-nigh invisible amid grass, leaves, and undergrowths. He could have found their wires blindfold, and he knew Joe Blandy’s wires from Amos Honeywell’s better than Joe and Amos themselves. But of all this he said nothing, holding himself a strict neutral, and judging it best never to seem too knowing. Still it was the fact that when the “lots” were periodically weeded of members caught with disjoinable guns, wire nooses, or dead things furred or feathered, those left behind were apt to link circumstances together, and to regard the old man with doubt and ill-favour. Once, indeed, he hung in doubt for days, much tempted to carry a hint to Bob Smallpiece of a peculiarly foul and barbarous manner of deer-stealing, wherein figured a tied fawn, an anxious doe, a heavy stone, a broken leg, and a cut throat. But it chanced that the keeper was otherwise aware, and old May’s doubt was determined by news that the thief, waled and gory (for he had made a fight for it), had been brought to the police-cells, with a dripping doe on a truck behind him. Even now as Bob Smallpiece grinned in at the cottage door one saw the gap where two teeth had gone in that “up-and-downer.”

“No,” said the keeper, “it won’t do the boy no good to let him knock about with nothing to do. ’Bout here, specially. Boys that knocks about this part mostly gets in wi’ them lots as we bin speakin’ of, or something about as bad. Ain’t there no gentleman hereabout ’ud give him a job?”

“I’d like him to learn a trade,” the old man said anxiously, “but I don’t see how. It’s always somethin’ to stand by, is a trade, an’ it’s what he wants. Wants to make somethin’—that’s the way he puts it. Else I’d say post-office, same as me.”

“His father was in the engineerin’,” remarked Mrs. May, who had arrived at the door with certain sticks of rhubarb from the garden. “I’d like him to go to that, I think; but he can’t, from here.”

Bob Smallpiece knew nothing of engineering, and little more of any other of the several trades read out from the list pinned to the window-frame near which the old man worked at a setting-stick. And presently he departed on his walk. Bessy at the casement above saw him swing away toward the glen, lifting his stick in recognition of Johnny, who bore a bundle of dead sticks homeward.

Johnny’s mother peeled and cut the rhubarb, revolving impossible expedients for bridging the space between them and London: the space that looked so small on the map, but was so great an obstacle to their purposes, and so wide a division between the two modes of life she knew. Johnny’s grandfather pinned and strapped deftly, deep in thought. Presently, looking up, “It beats me,” he said, fearful of ignoring some good thing in trades, “to guess what a Shive Turner is!”

III.

So life went at the cottage. For a little while they looked for another visit from Uncle Isaac; since, as he sent no postal order, it was felt that he must defer the return of the half-crown merely because he contemplated an early payment in person. But weeks passed and nothing was heard of him, nor seen. Meantime the problem of Johnny’s trade met no solution. He had left school nearly three months now, and, the thing seeming desperate, he had well-nigh resolved to give in to the post-office. At the thought London seemed a far and wondrous place whereto he could never attain; and awe of the terrible list his grandfather had compiled from the London Directory, became longing for the least inviting trade in the collection. He had his memories of London, too, and they were more numerous and more pleasant than Bessy’s. There he could see, from his bedroom window, the masts of many ships, quite close. In the strong winds (and in his remembered London the weather was ever cold, brisk, dry, and windy) the masts bent and rocked gravely, the ropes bellied, and the blocks whistled aloud. At nights he lay and heard the yards groan and the cordage creak and rattle. Just by the corner, ships sometimes thrust prying jib-booms clean over the dock wall, as if to see what a town was like; and often he had stood in the street to watch men climbing the rigging and hanging bent over spars, like earwigs. He had gone shopping, too, gripping tight at his mother’s skirts, in flaring market-streets, where everybody shouted at once, and there were mountains of bulls’-eyes and peppermint on barrows. There was a street with shops on one side and a blank wall on the other; and over and behind this wall, lifted high in the air, was the monstrous skeleton of a great ship. Men swarmed like ants about the skeleton, and all day hammers went with a mighty clangour, and great lights flared at night. There were big blank walls at all the places where they made ships, and he could remember a little door in one such wall, a door beyond which he greatly desired to see. But it was rarely opened, and then but a little way, by an ill-natured old man, who squeezed through and closed it very quickly. So that Johnny believed he must issue thus to prevent the escape of some small and active animal, imprisoned within. All that Johnny remembered of his father was that he wiped his oily hands on cotton waste: a curious stuff—like a great deal of soft sewing-thread in a hopeless tangle—that he had never seen since. That and the funeral: when he rode in a carriage with a crape bow pinned to his new jacket, and his mother held his hand very tight at the grave-side. Most of his memories were of the streets, and some revived after long oblivion: as when the smell of roasted chestnuts brought a vision of a glowing coke fire by the corner of the ship-yard wall, with a pock-marked man behind it whom he would know anywhere now. And he was not to return to this place of wistful memory after all, nor to learn to make a ship nor an engine—let alone a picture.

The weeks went, and berries hung where flowers had been. Johnny and Bessy made their yearly harvest of blackberries, some for puddings and jam at home, some to sell at such kitchen doors as might receive them. Until an afternoon in early October: when, with an order from a lady at Theydon, they betook themselves in search of sloes.

Warm colours touched the woods to a new harmony, and seen from high ground, they lay like flower-beds in green and red, yellow and brown. The honeysuckle bloomed its second time, and toadstools stood in crimson companies in the shade of the trees. Sloes were rare this year near home, so the children searched their way through the Wake Valley to Honey Lane Quarters, and there they found their sloes, though few.

It was a long and scratchy task; and, when it was finished, they were well up in St. Thomas’s Quarters, and the sun was setting. They made the best of their way back as far as the road near the Dun Cow, and there parted. For Bessy was tired and hungry, and though Johnny was little better, he resolved to carry his sloes fresh to Theydon and get the money, since he was already a little on the way. So Bessy turned up the lane that led to the cottage, and Johnny took to the woods again for Theydon, by way to right of Wormleyton Pits.

Dusk was growing to dark, but the boy stepped fearlessly, well knowing his path. The last throstle sang his last evensong for the year, and was still. The shadowy trees, so living and so silent about him: the wrestling trunks of beeches, the reaching arms of oak and hornbeam, all struck at gaze as though pausing in their everlasting struggle to watch and whisper as he passed: and the black depths between them might well have oppressed the imagination of such a boy from other parts; but Johnny tramped along among them little heeding, thinking of the great ship-haunted London he longed for, and forecasting nothing of the blow that should fall but in that hour and send him the journey sorrowing.

Presently he was aware of a light ahead. It moved a foot or two from the ground, and Johnny knew its swing. Then it stopped, resting by a tree root. “You, gran’dad?” called Johnny, and “Hullo!” came the old man’s voice in answer.

The old man had cut a leaf, with a caterpillar on it, from a shrub, and was packing it in a pill-box. “Out for a few night-feeders,” he explained, as the boy stopped beside him. “But you ain’t been home to tea,” he added. “Takin’ home the sloes? Might ha’ left ’em till the morning, John, easy,—now you’ve got ’em.”

“Oh, I come up from over there”—Johnny made a vague toss of the arm—“an’ I thought I might as well cut across to Theydon first. Bess went up the lane. I’ll be home ’fore ye now, gran’dad, ’nless you ’re goin’ back straight.”

“I won’t be long behind ye; I’m just goin’ to the Pits. I can’t make nothin’ o’ them I took last night, under the brambles an’ heather,—never saw the like before quite; so I’m goin’ to see if there’s more, an’ get all I can.”

They walked together a few yards, till the trees thinned. “You’ll go ’cross the Slade,” said the old man. “Step it, or you’ll be beat!”

“I’ll step it,” the boy answered. “I want my tea.”

He was trotting home by the lane from Theydon, with his empty basket on his arm, and his hands (and the sixpence) in his trousers pockets, when he checked at a sound, as of a cry from the wood. But he heard no more, and trotted on. Probably the deer were fighting somewhere; rare fighters were the bucks in October.

IV.

Johnny had finished his tea, and was lying at his ease in the old easy-chair, whistling, rattling his heels on the hearth, and studying a crack in the ceiling that suggested an angry face. Mrs. May had put the sixpence the sloes had brought into the cracked teacup that still awaited the return of Uncle Isaac’s half-crown, had washed the tea-things, and was now mending the worn collar of gran’dad’s great-coat, in readiness for the winter. Bessy had fallen asleep over her book, had been wakened, had fallen asleep again, and in the end had drowsily climbed the stairs to early bed: but still the old man did not return.

“I wonder gran’dad ain’t back yet,” Johnny’s mother said for the third time. “He said he’d be quick, so’s to finish that case to-night.” This was a glass-topped mahogany box, in course of setting with specimens of all the Sphinges: a special private order.

“’Spect he can’t find them caterpillars he went for,” Johnny conjectured; “that’s what it is. He’s forgot all about racin’ me home.”

Mrs. May finished the collar, lifted the coat by the loop, and turned it about in search of rents. Finding none, she put it down and stood at the door, listening.

“Think you’re too tired to go an’ look for him, Johnny?” she asked presently.

Johnny thought he was. “It’s them caterpillars, safe enough,” he said. “He never saw any before, an’ it was just a chance last night. To-night he can’t find ’em, and he’s keepin’ on searchin’ all over the Pits and the Slade; that’s about it.”

There was another pause, till Mrs. May remembered something. “The bit o’ candle he had in the lantern wouldn’t last an hour,” she said. “He’d ha’ had to come back for more. Johnny, I’m gettin’ nervous.”

“Why, what for?” asked Johnny, though the circumstance of the short candle startled his confidence. “He might get a light from somewhere else, ’stead o’ comin’ all the way back.”

“But where?” asked Mrs. May. “There’s only the Dun Cow, an’ he might almost as well come home—besides, he wouldn’t ask ’em.”

Johnny left the chair, and joined his mother at the door. As they listened a more regular sound made itself plain, amid the low hum of the trees; footsteps. “Here he comes,” said Johnny.

But the sound neared and the steps were long and the tread was heavy. In a few moments Bob Smallpiece’s voice came from the gloom, wishing them good-night.

Mrs. May called to him. “Have you seen gran’dad anywhere, Mr. Smallpiece?”

The keeper checked his strides, and came to the garden gate, piebald with the light from the cottage door. “No,” he said, “I ain’t run across him, nor seen his light anywheres. Know which way he went?”

“He was just going to Wormleyton Pits an’ back, that’s all.”

“Well, I’ve just come straight across the Pits, an’ as straight here as ever I could go, past the Dun Cow; an’ ain’t seen ne’er a sign of him. Want him particular?”

“I’m gettin’ nervous about him, Mr. Smallpiece—somehow I’m frightened to-night. He went out about six, an’ now it don’t want much to nine, an’ he only had a bit o’ candle that wouldn’t burn an hour. And he never meant stopping long, I know, ’cause of a case he’s got to set. I thought p’raps you might ha’ seen—”

“No, I see nothin’ of him. But I’ll go back to the Pits now, if you like, an’ welcome.”

“I’d be sorry to bother you, but I would like someone to go. Here, Johnny, go along, there’s a good boy.”

“All right, all right,” the keeper exclaimed cheerfully. “We’ll go together. I expect he’s invented some new speeches o’ moth, an’ he’s forgot all about his light, thinkin’ out the improvements. It ain’t the first time he’s been out o’ night about here, anyhow. Not likely to lose himself, is Mr. May.”

Johnny had his cap and was at the gate; and in a moment the keeper and he were mounting the slope.

“Mother’s worryin’ herself over nothing to-night,” Johnny grumbled. “Gran’dad’s been later ’n this many’s a time, an’ she never said a word. Why, when he gets after caterpillars an’ things he forgets everything.”

They walked on among the trees. Presently, “How long is it since your father died?” Bob Smallpiece asked abruptly.

“Nine years, now, and more.”

“Mother might ha’ married agen, I s’pose?”

“I dunno. Very likely. Never heard her say nothing.”

Bob Smallpiece walked on with no more reply than a grunt. Soon a light from the Dun Cow twinkled through the bordering coppice, and in a few paces they were up at the wood’s edge.

“No light along the road,” the keeper said, glancing to left and right, and making across the hard gravel.

“There’s somebody,” Johnny exclaimed, pointing up the pale road.

“Drunk,” objected the other. And truly the indistinct figure staggered and floundered. “An’ goin’ the wrong way. Chap just out o’ the Dun Cow. Come on.”

But Johnny’s gaze did not shift. “It’s gran’dad!” he cried suddenly, and started running.

Bob Smallpiece sprang after him, and in twenty paces they were running abreast. As they neared the old man they could hear him talking rapidly, in a monotonous, high-pitched voice; he was hatless, and though they called he took no heed, but stumbled on as one seeing and hearing nothing; till, as the keeper reached to seize his arm, he trod in a gulley and fell forward.

The shock interrupted his talk, and he breathed heavily, staring still before him, as he regained his uncertain foothold, and reeled a step farther. Then Bob Smallpiece grasped him above the elbow, and shouted his name.

“What’s the matter, gran’dad?” Johnny demanded. “Ill?”

The old man glared fixedly, and made as though to resume his course.

“Why, what’s this?” said Bob Smallpiece, retaining the arm, and lifting a hand gently to the old man’s hair. It was blood, dotted and trickling. “Lord! he’s had a bad wipe over the head,” said Bob, and with that lifted old May in his arms, as a nurse lifts a child. “Theydon’s nearest; run, Johnny boy—run like blazes an’ fetch the doctor tantivy!”

“Take him into the Dun Cow?”

“No—home’s best, an’ save shiftin’ him twice. Run it!”

“Purple Emperors an’ Small Coppers,” began the old man again in his shrill chatter. “Small Coppers an’ Marsh Ringlets everywhere, and my bag full o’ letters at the beginning of the round, but I finished my round and now they’re all gone; all gone because o’ London comin’, an’ I give in my empty bag—” and so he tailed off into indistinguishable gabble, while Bob Smallpiece carried him into the wood.

To Johnny, scudding madly toward Theydon, it imparted a grotesque horror, as of some absurd nightmare, this baby-babble of his white-haired grandfather, carried baby-fashion. He blinked as he ran, and felt his head for his cap, half believing that he ran in a dream in very truth.

V.

Mrs. May still stood at the cottage door, and the keeper, warned by the light, called from a little distance. “Here we are, Mrs. May,” he said, as cheerfully as might be. “He’s all right—just had a little accident, that’s all. So I’m carryin’ him. Don’t be frightened; get a little water—I think he’s got a bit of a cut on the head. But it’s nothing to fluster about.” . . . And so assuring and protesting, Bob brought the old man in.

The woman saw the staring grey face and the blood. “O-o-o—my God!” she quavered, stricken sick and pale. “He’s—he’s—”

“No, no. No, no! Keep steady and help. Shift the table, an’ I’ll put him down on the rug.”

She mastered herself, and said no more. The old man, whose babble had sunk to an indistinct mutter, was no sooner laid on the floor than he made a vague effort to rise, as though to continue on his way. But he was feebler than before, and Bob Smallpiece pressed him gently back upon the new-mended coat, doubled to make a pillow.

Nan May, tense and white, curbed her agitation, ministering and suffering in silence. Years before a man had been carried home to her thus, but then all was over, and after the first numbness grief could take its vent. Once she asked Bob Smallpiece, in a whisper, how it had happened. He told how little he knew, and save for passing the words to Bessy, wakened by unwonted sounds, Mrs. May said nothing. Bessy, in her nightgown, sat on the stairs, hugging her crutch, and sobbing with what quietness she could compel of herself.

There was a little brandy in a quartern bottle, and the keeper thought it well to force the spirit between the old man’s teeth, while Mrs. May bathed the head and washed away the clotted blood. As they did so the wheels of the doctor’s dog-cart were heard in the lane, and soon the doctor came in at the door, pulling off his gloves.

Johnny stood, pale, helpless, and still almost breathless, behind the group, while the doctor knelt at his grandfather’s side. There was a contused wound at the top of the head, the doctor could see, a little back, not serious. But blood still dripped from the ears, and the doctor shook his head. “Fracture of the base,” he said, as to himself.

Reviving a little, because of the brandy and the bathing, the old man once more made a motion as if to rise, his eyes grew brighter, though fixed still, and his voice rose distinctly as ever.

“—took the bag in, yes. London’s comin’ fast, London’s comin’ an’ a-frightenin’ out the butterflies. London’s a-drivin’ the butterflies out o’ my round, out o’ my round, an’ butterflies can’t live near it. London’s out o’ my round an’ I’ve done my round an’ now I’ll give in the empty bag. Take the bag: an’ look for the pension. That’s the ’vantage o’ the Pos’-Office, John. Some gets pensions but some don’, but the butterflies’ll last my time I hope: an’ Haskins he kep’ bees, but I’m hopin’ to finish my roun’—” and so on and so on till the voice fell again and the muttering was fainter than before.

Bob Smallpiece stood awkwardly by, unwilling to remain a useless intruder, but just as reluctant to desert friends in trouble. Presently he bethought himself that work was still to do in inquiry how the old man’s hurt had befallen, whether by accident or attack; perhaps, indeed, to inform the police, and that in good time. So he asked, turning his hat about in his hands, if there was anything else he could do.

“Nothing more, Smallpiece, thanks,” the doctor said, with an unmistakable lift of the brows and a glance at the door.

“God bless you for helpin’ us, Mr. Smallpiece,” Mrs. May said as she let him out. “I’ll let you know how he is in the mornin’ if you can’t call.” And when the door was shut, “Go to bed, Johnny, my boy, and take a rest.” But Johnny went no farther than the stairs, and sat there with his sister.

The old man’s muttering ceased wholly, and he breathed heavily, stertorously. The doctor rose to his feet and turned to Mrs. May.

“Won’t you tell me, sir,” she said. “Is it—is it—”

“It is very serious,” the doctor said gravely; and added with impressive slowness, “very serious indeed.”

The woman took a grip of the table, and caught three quick breaths.

“You must keep yourself calm, and you must bear up. You must prepare yourself—in case of something very bad indeed.”

Twice she tried to speak, but was mute; and then, “No hope?” she said, more to sight than to hearing.

He put his hand kindly on her shoulder. “It would be wrong of me to encourage it,” he said. “As for what I can do, it is all over. . . . But you must bear up,” he went on firmly, as, guided to a chair, she bent forward and covered her face. “Drink this—” He took a small bottle from his bag, poured something into a cup and added water. “Drink it—drink it up; all of it. . . . I must go. . . . You’ve your children to think of, remember. Come to your mother, my boy. . . . ”

He was gone, and the children stood with their arms about their mother. The old man’s breathing, which had grown heavier and louder still, presently eased again, and his eyes closed drowsily. At this the woman looked up with an impossible hope in her heart. Truly, the breath was soft and natural, and the drawn lines had gone from the face: he must be sleeping. Why had she not thought to ask Bob Smallpiece to carry him up to bed? And why had the doctor not ordered it? Softly she turned the wet cloth that lay over the wound.

The breath grew lighter and still lighter, and more peaceful the face, till one might almost trace a smile. Quieter and quieter, and still more peaceful: till all was peace indeed.

VI.

Bob Smallpiece and a police-inspector busied themselves that night at Wormleyton Pits. The pits were none of them deep—six feet at most. At the bottom of the deepest they found old May’s lantern, with the glass broken and the candle overrun and extinguished; and the gravel was spotted with marks which, in the clearer light of the morning, were seen to be marks of blood. It was useless to look for foot-prints. The ground was dry, and, except in the pits themselves, it was covered with heather, whereon no such traces were possible. And this was all the police had to say at the inquest, whereat the jury gave a verdict of Accidental Death. For the old man had died, as was medically certified after post-mortem examination, of brain-laceration produced by fracture of the base of the skull; and the fracture was caused by percussion from a blow on the upper part of the head—a blow probably suffered by falling backward into the pit and striking the head against a large stone embedded at the bottom. Everything suggested such an explanation. Above the steepest wall of the pit, over which the fall must have chanced, a narrow ledge of ground ran between the brink and a close clump of bramble and bush; and this ledge was grown thick with tough heather, as apt, almost, as a tangle of wire, to catch the foot and cause a stumble. It was plain that, stooping to his occupation on this ledge, and perhaps forgetting his situation in the interest of his search, he had fallen backward into the pit with the lantern. He had probably lain there insensible for some while, and then, developing a crazed half-consciousness, he had crawled out by the easy slope at the farther end, and staggered off whithersoever his disjointed faculties might carry him. Nobody had seen him but his grandson and the keeper; so that the verdict was a matter of course, and the dismal inquiry was soon done with. And indeed the jury knew all there was to know, unless it were a trivial matter, of some professional interest to Bob Smallpiece, about which the police preferred to have nothing said; since it could not help the jury, though it might chance, later, to be of some use to themselves. It was simply the fact that several very fresh peg-holes were observed about the pits, hinting a tearing away of rabbit-snares with no care to hide the marks.

The days were bad dreams to Johnny. He found himself continually repeating in his mind that gran’dad was dead, gran’dad was dead; as though he were forcing himself to learn a lesson that persistently slipped his memory. Well enough he knew it, and it puzzled him that he should find it so hard to believe, and, mostly, so easy a grief. As he woke in the morning the thought struck down his spirits, and then, with an instant revulsion, he doubted it was but the aftertaste of a dream. But there lay the empty half of the bed they were wont to share, and the lesson began again. He went about the house. Here was a sheet of gran’dad’s list of trades, pinned to the wall, there the unfinished case of moths for which the customer was waiting. These, and the shelves, and the breeding-boxes—all were as parts of the old man, impossible to consider apart from his active, white-headed figure. In some odd, hopeless way they seemed to suggest that it was all right, and that gran’dad was simply in the garden, or upstairs, or in the backhouse, and presently would come in as usual and put them all to their daily uses. And it was only by dint of stern concentration of thought that Johnny forced on himself the assurance that the old man would come among his cases no more, nor ever again discuss with him the list of London trades. Then the full conviction struck him sorely, like a blow behind the neck: the heavy stroke of bereavement and the sick fear of the world for his mother and sister, together. But there—he was merely torturing himself. He took refuge in a curious callousness, that he could call back very easily when he would. So the days went, but with each new day the intermissions of full realisation grew longer: till plain grief persisted in a leaden ache, rarely broken by a spell of apathy.

His mother and his sister went about household duties silently, not often apart. They were comforted in companionship, it seemed, but solitude brought tears and heartbreak. Nan May’s London upbringing caused her some thought of what her acquaintances there would have called a “proper” funeral. But here the machinery of such funerals must be brought from a distance, thus becoming doubly expensive; and this being the case, cottagers made very little emulation at such times, and a walking funeral—perhaps at best a cab from the rank at Loughton station—satisfied most. Moreover, the old man himself had many a time preached strong disapproval of money wasted on funerals; had, indeed, prophesied that if any costliness were wasted on him, he would rise from his coffin and kick a mute. So now that the time had come, a Theydon carpenter made the coffin, and a cab from Loughton was the whole show. The old man’s relations were not, and of Nan May’s most still alive were forgotten; for in the forest cottage the little family had been secluded from such connections, as by sundering seas. At first they had seemed too near for correspondence, and then they had been found too far for visiting. Uncle Isaac came to the funeral, however; and though in the beginning he seemed prepared for solemn declamation, something in the sober grief at the cottage made him unwontedly quiet.

It was a short coffin, accommodated under the cabman’s seat with no great protrusion at the ends; what there was being covered decently with a black cloth. And the cab held the mourners easily: Johnny and Bessy in their Sunday clothes, their mother in hers (they had always been black since she was first a widow) and Uncle Isaac in a creasy suit of lustrous black, oddly bunched and wrinkled at the seams: the conventional Sunday suit of his generation of artisans, folded carefully and long preserved, and designed to be available alike for church and for such funerals as might come to pass.

A brisk wind stirred the trees, and flung showers of fallen leaves after the shabby old four-wheeler as it climbed the lanes that led up to the little churchyard; where the sexton and his odd man waited with planks and ropes by the new-dug grave. It was a bright afternoon, but a fresh chill in the wind hinted the coming of winter. A belated Red Admiral seemed to chase the cab, fluttering this way or that, now by one window, now by the other, and again away over the hedge-top. Nothing was said. Now and again Johnny took his eyes from the open window to look at his companions. His mother, opposite, sat, pale and worn, with her hands in her lap, and gazed blankly over his head at the front window of the cab. She was commonly a woman of healthy skin and colour, but now the skin seemed coarser, and there was no colour but the pink about her red eyelids. Uncle Isaac, next her, sat forward, and rubbed his chin over and round the knob of his walking stick, a bamboo topped with a “Turk’s head” of tarred cord. As for Bessy, sitting at the far end of his own seat, Johnny saw nothing of her face for her handkerchief and the crutch-handle. But she was very quiet, and he scarcely thought she was crying. For himself, he was sad enough, in a heavy way, but in no danger of tears; and he turned again, and looked out of the window.

At last the cab stopped at the lych gate. Here Bob Smallpiece unexpectedly appeared, to lend a hand with the coffin. So that with the sexton, and the carpenter who was the undertaker, Uncle Isaac, and the keeper, the cabman’s help was not wanted. The cabman lingered a moment, to shift cloths and aprons, and to throw a glance or two after the little company as it followed the clergyman, and then he hastened to climb to his seat and drive after a young couple that he spied walking in the main road; for they were strangers, and looked a likely fare back to the station.

Johnny found church much as it was on Sunday, except that to-day they sat near the front, and that he was conscious of a faint sense of family importance by reason of the special service, and the coffin so conspicuously displayed. A few neighbours—women mostly—were there, too; and when the coffin was carried out to the grave, they grouped themselves a little way off in the background, with Bob Smallpiece farther back still.

From the grave’s edge one looked down over the country-side, green and hilly, and marked out in meadows by rows of elms, with hedges at foot. The wind came up briskly and set the dead leaves going again and again, chasing them among the tombs and casting them into the new red grave. Bessy was quiet no longer, but sobbed aloud, and Nan May took no more care to dry her eyes. Johnny made an effort that brought him near to choking, and then another; and then he fixed his attention on the cows in a meadow below, counted them with brimming eyes, and named them (for he knew them well) as accurately as the distance would let him. He would scarce trust himself to take a last look, with the others, at the coffin below and its bright tin plate, but fell straightway to watching a man mending thatch on a barn, and wondering that he wore neither coat nor waistcoat in such a fresh wind. And so, except for a stray tear or two, which nobody saw overflow from the brimming eyes, he faced it out, and walked away with the others under the curious gaze of the neighbours, who lined up by the path. And Smallpiece went off in the opposite direction with the carpenter, who carried back the pall folded over his arm, like a cloak.

The four mourners walked back by the lanes, in silence. Uncle Isaac bore the restraint with difficulty, and glanced uneasily at Nan May’s face from time to time, as though he were watching an opportunity to expound his sentiments at length. But Johnny saw nothing of this, for affliction was upon him. Now that gran’dad was passed away indeed—was buried, and the clods were rising quickly over him—now that even the coffin was gone from the cottage, and would never be seen again—it seemed that he had never understood before, and he awoke to the full bitterness of things. More, his effort at restraint was spent, and in the revulsion he found he could hold in no longer. He peeped into the thickets by the lane-side as he went, questing for an excuse to drop behind. Seeing no other, he stooped and feigned to tie his bootlace; calling, in a voice that quavered absurdly in trying to seem indifferent, “Go on, mother, I’m comin’ presently!”

He dashed among the bushes, flung himself on the grass, and burst into a blind fury of tears, writhing as though under a shower of stinging blows. He had meant to cry quietly, but all was past control, and any might hear that chanced by. He scarce knew whether the fit had endured for seconds, minutes, or hours, when he was aware of his mother, sitting beside him and pressing his bursting head to her breast. Bessy was there too, and his mother’s arms were round both alike.

With that he grew quieter and quieter still. “We mustn’t break down, Johnny boy—there’s hard struggles before us,” his mother said, smoothing back his hair. “An’ you must be very good to me, Johnny, you’re the man now!”

He kissed her, and brushed the last of his tears away. “Yes, mother, I will,” he said. He rose, calmer, awake to new responsibilities, and felt a man indeed. Nothing remained of his outbreak but a chance-coming shudder in the breath, and, as he helped Bessy to her feet, he saw, five yards off, among the bushes, Uncle Isaac, under his very tall hat, gazing blankly at the group, and gently rubbing the Turk’s head on his stick among the loose grey whiskers that bordered his large face.

VII.

Nan May rose another woman in the morning; for there was work before her. The children marvelled to see her so calm and so busy, so full of thought for the business in hand, so little occupied with sorrowful remembrance. The old man, prudent ever, had arranged years since for what had now befallen. There was a simple little will on a sheet of notepaper. There was a great and complicated list, on odd scraps of paper, thickly beset with additions, alterations, and crossings-out, of the “specimens” hoarded in the cottage; with pencil notes of values, each revised a dozen times, as the market changed. There was a Post-Office Savings Bank deposit book, with entries amounting to eight pounds ten, and a nomination form whereby Nan May might withdraw the money. There was no life-insurance, for the old man had surrendered it years ago, to secure the few pounds he needed to make up the full price of the cottage.

The will gave Nan May all there might be to take, and left her to execute. Uncle Isaac, on the return to the cottage the day before, had at length broken into speech, and by devious approaches, cunningly disguised and ostentatiously casual, had reached the will. But he got little by his motion, for though his niece told him the will’s purport, she protested that till to-morrow she should do nothing with it, nor did she even offer to produce it. Of course, he had scarcely expected a legacy himself; but still, he was Uncle Isaac, profound in experience, learned in the law, and an oracle in the family. It seemed, to say the least, a little scandalous that he should not have had the handling of this property, the selling, the control, the doling out, with such consideration the exertion might earn, and the accidents of arithmetic detach.

“It’s an important thing, is a will,” said Uncle Isaac sagely. “A thing as ought to be seen to by a experienced person. You might jist look an’ see ’ow it’s wrote. If any’s wrote in pencil it’s nullavoid.”

“No,” replied Mrs. May, without moving. “It’s all in ink.”

Then, after a long pause: “Lawyers comes very expensive with wills,” Uncle Isaac observed. “They come expensive alwis, an’ mostly they rob the property accordin’ to form o’ lawr. It’s best to get a man of experience, as you can trust, to go straight to Somerset ’ouse in form o’ porpus . . . It’s the cheapest way, an’ safe. ’E takes the will, jist as it might be me, an’ ’e goes to the ’thorities, an’ ’e talks to ’em, knowin’ an’ confidential. ’Ere I am, ses ’e, as it might be me, on be’alf o’ the last will an’ ’oly testament as it might be o’ Mr. May. An’ I’ve come in form o’ porpus, ’avin’ objections to lawyers. In form o’ porpus,” Uncle Isaac repeated impressively, tapping a forefinger on the table: as was his way of blazoning an erudite phrase that else might pass unregarded.

“Poor gran’dad told me what to do about goin’ to Somerset House, an’ all that,” answered Nan May, “in case anything happened. But I’d take it very kind if you’d come with me, Uncle Isaac, me not understandin’ such things. But I can’t think about it to-day.” And with so much of his finger in the pie Uncle Isaac was fain to be content. And soon he left, declining to stay for the night—to Johnny’s great relief—because his cheap return-ticket was available for the day and no more.

And now Johnny, having brought sheets of foolscap paper from Loughton, was set to work to make a fair copy of the amazing list of specimens; a work at great length accomplished in an unstable round hand, but on the whole with not so many blots. And Nan May’s series of visits to Somerset House was begun, saddening her with a cost of one and ninepence each visit for fares in train and omnibus. The first, indeed, cost more, for Uncle Isaac’s fare from Millwall was also to be paid. But he came no more, for in truth his failure as a man of business was instant and ignoble.

To begin with, the shadow of the awful building fell on him as he neared it, extinguishing his confidence and stopping his tongue. In the quadrangle the very tall hat distinguished an Uncle Isaac of hushed speech and meek docility, and along the corridors it followed Nan May deferentially, in unresting pursuit of room No. 37. The room was reached at last, and here Uncle Isaac found himself constrained to open the business. For Nan May herself held back now, and the young man in gold-rimmed glasses fixed him with his eye. So, taking off his hat with both hands, Uncle Isaac, in a humble murmur, began:—“We’ve—good mornin’, sir—we’ve come as it might be in form o’ porpus—”

“What?”

“As regards to a will,” Uncle Isaac explained desperately, dropping his technicality like a hot rivet. “As regards to a will an’ dyin’ testament which the late deceased did—did write out.”

“Very well. Are you the executor?”

“Well, sir, not as it might be executor. No. But as uncle to Mr. May’s daughter-in-law by marriage—”

“Are you?” The gentleman turned abruptly to Nan May, who gave him the will. Whereupon Uncle Isaac, in a hopeful way of recovering nerve and eloquence, was thrust out of the business, and told that Nan May alone would be dealt with. And he retired once more into shadow, with a little relief to leaven a great deal of injured dignity.

So that for the rest Nan May relied on herself alone, and hardened her face to the world. When the specimens came to be sold, a smart young man came from the London firm of naturalists, to make an offer. He examined the trays and cases as hastily and carelessly as was consistent with a privily sharp eye to all they held, and with the air of contempt proper for a professional buyer. For in such a matter of business the widow and the orphan needing money are the weak party, humble and timid, watching small signs with sinking hearts, and easy to beat: and a man of business worth the name of one, takes advantage of the fact for every penny it will bring. So the smart young man, looking more contemptuous than ever, and dusting his fingers with his pocket-handkerchief, flung Nan May an offer of five pounds for the lot.

“No, thank-you, sir,” the woman answered with simple decision. “I’m sorry you’ve had the trouble. Good-morning.” Which was not the reply the young man had looked for, and indeed, not a reply easy of rejoinder. So he was constrained to some unbending of manner, and a hint that his firm might increase the offer if she would name a sum. And the whole thing ended with a letter carrying a cheque for forty pounds. Which was very handsome indeed, for the young man’s firm would scarce have paid more than eighty pounds for the collection In the ordinary way of trade.

And so the old man’s little affairs were gathered up, and the Inland Revenue took its bite out of the estate, and there were no more journeys to Somerset House. But nobody would buy the cottage.

VIII.

Just such a day as Johnny’s London memories always brought, cold and dry and brisk, found him perched on the cart that was to take him to London again. Besides himself, the cart held his mother and his sister, and the household furniture from the cottage; while Banks, the carrier, sat on the shaft. Bessy was made comfortable in the armchair; her mother sat on a bundle of bedding, whence it was convenient to descend when steep hills were encountered; and Johnny sat on the tail-board, and jumped off and on as the humour took him.

All through long Loughton village there was something of a triumphal progress, for people knew them, and turned to look. Bessy alone remained in the cart for the long pull up Buckhurst Hill, while Johnny, tramping beside and making many excursions into the thicket, flung up into her lap sprigs of holly with berries. Already they had plenty, packed close in a box, but it is better to have too much than too little, so any promising head was added to the store. For it was December, and Christmas would come in three weeks or so. And ere that Nan May was to open shop in London. It was to be a chandler’s shop, with aspirations toward grocery and butter: chandlery, grocery, and butter being things of the buying and selling whereof Nan May knew as little as anybody in the world, beyond the usual retail prices at the forest villages. But something must be done, and everything has a beginning somewhere. So Nan May resolutely set face to the work, to play the world with all the rigour of the game; and her figure, as she tramped sturdily up the hill beside the cart, was visible symbol of her courage. Always a healthy, clear-skinned, almost a handsome woman, active and shapely, she walked the hill with something of steadfast fierceness, as one joying in trampling an obstacle: her eyes fixed before her, and taking no heed of the view that opened to Bessy’s gaze as she looked back from under the tilt of the cart; but busy with thought of the fight she was beginning, a little fearful, but by so much the gamer. Meanwhile, it was a good piece of business to decorate a shop with holly at Christmas, and here Johnny found holly ready for the work; it would cost money in London.

The cart crowned the hill-top, and still Nan May regarded not the show that lay behind, whereof Bessy took her fill for the moments still left. There Loughton tumbled about its green hills, beset with dusky trees, like a spilt boxful of toys, with the sad-coloured forest making the horizon line behind it. Away to the left, seen between the boughs of the near pines, High Beach steeple lifted from the velvety edge, and as far to the right, on its own hill, rose the square church tower that stood by gran’dad’s grave. And where the bold curve of Staples Hill lost itself among the woods, some tall brown trees uprose above the rest and gave good-bye. For invisible beyond them lay the empty cottage in its patch of garden, grown dank and waste. Then roadside trees shut all out, and the cart stopped on the level to take up Nan May.

And now the old mare jogged faster along to Woodford Wells and through the Green, fringed with a wonder of big houses, and many broad miles of country seen between them; then, farther, down the easy slope of Rising Sun Road, with thick woods at the way’s edge on each side, their winter austerity softened by the sunlight among the brown twigs. And so on and on, till they emerged in bushy Leyton Flats, and turned off for Leytonstone.

And now they were nearing London indeed. Once past the Green Man, they were on a tram-lined road, and there were shops and houses with scarce a break. Where there was one bricklayers on scaffoldings were building shopfronts. The new shops had a raw, disagreeable look, and some of these a little older were just old enough to be dirty without being a whit less disagreeable and raw. Some were prosperous, brilliant with gilt and plate-glass; others, which had started even with them, stood confessed failures, poor and mean, with a pathetic air—almost an expression—of disappointment in every window. Older buildings—some very old—stood about Harrow Green, but already the wreckers had begun to pull a cottage down to make room for something else. And then the new shops began again, and lined the road without a check, till they were new no longer, but of the uncertain age of commonplace London brick and mortar; and Maryland Point Railway Station was passed; and it was town indeed, with clatter and smoke and mud.

Stratford Broadway lay wide and busy, wth the church and the town-hall imposing and large. But soon the road narrowed and grew fouler, and the mouths of unclean alleys dribbled slush and dirty children across the pavement. Then there were factories, and the road passed over narrow canals of curiously iridescent sludge, too thick, to the casual eye, for the passage of any craft, but interesting to the casual nose. And there was a great, low, misty waste of the dullest possible rubbish, where grass would not grow; a more hopelessly desolate and dispiriting wilderness than Johnny had ever dreamed of or Bessy ever read; with a chemical manure-works in a far corner, having a smell of great volume and range.

They topped Bow Bridge, and turned sharply to the left. Now it was London itself, London by Act of Parliament. There was a narrow way with a few wharf gates, and then an open space, with houses centuries old, fallen on leaner years, but still grubbily picturesque. Hence the old mare trotted through a long and winding street that led by dirty entries, by shops, by big distilleries, by clean, dull houses where managers lived, by wooden inns swinging ancient signs, over canal bridges: to a place of many streets lying regularly at right angles, all of small houses, all clean, every one a counterpart of every other. And then—the docks and the ships. At least, the great dock-gates, with the giant pepper-box and the clock above them, and the high walls, with here and there a mast. And at intervals, as the houses permitted, the high walls and the masts were visible again and again in the short way yet to go, pass Blackwall Cross, till at last the cart stopped before a little shut-up shop, badly in want of paint; in a street where one gained the house-doors down areas maybe, or up steps, or on the level, from a pavement a little more than two feet wide; while the doors themselves, and the wooden rails that guarded all the steps, were painted in divers unaccustomed and original colours, and had nothing in common but a subtle flavour of ship’s stores. Over the way was the wall of a ship-yard. And wheresoever there might be a view of houses from the back, there were small flagstaffs rigged as masts, with gaffs complete.

The door of the little shop opened, after a short struggle with the rusty lock, and Nan May and her children were at home in London.

IX.

The shop in Harbour Lane had been a greengrocer’s, a barber’s, a fried-fishmonger’s, and a tripe-seller’s. But chiefly it had been shut up, as it was now. Nobody had ever come into it with much money, it is true, but all had gone out of it with less than they brought. It was said, indeed, that the greengrocer had gone out with nothing but the clothes he wore; but as he went no farther than the end of the street, where he drowned himself from a swing bridge, he needed no more, nor even so much. Mr. Dunkin, the landlord, had bought the place at a low price, as was his way in buying things; but he got very little out of his investment, which was not his way at all. It was a novelty that surprised and irritated Mr. Dunkin. He was a substantial tradesman, who had long relinquished counter work, for there were a dozen assistants in the two departments of his chief shop, eight for grocery and butter, and four for oil and saucepans, paint and mousetraps; and there were half a dozen branches, some in the one trade and some in the other, scattered about in as many neighbouring parishes. He was a large man, of vast sympathy. The tone of his voice, the grasp of his wide, pulpy hand, told of infinite tenderness toward the sorrows and sins of the world. Even in the early days when he had but one shop (a little one) and no shopman, he would weigh out a pound of treacle with so melting a benignity that the treacle seemed balm of Gilead, and a bounteous gift at the price. He would drive a bargain in a voice of yearning beneficence that left the other party ashamed of his own self-seeking, as well as something the poorer by the deal. It was a voice wherein a purr had a large part—a purr that was hoarse yet soothing, and eloquent of compassion; so that no man was so happy but a talk with Mr. Dunkin would persuade him that the lot was hard indeed, that entitled him to such a wealth of sympathy. It was a wealth that Mr. Dunkin squandered with no restraint but this, that it carried no other sort of wealth with it.

On the whole, Nan May had counted herself fortunate in falling in with Mr. Dunkin. For when, in his fatherly solicitude, he discovered that she had a little money in hand, he undertook to supply her with stock, and to give her certain hints in the mystery of chandlery. He, also, felt no cause for complaint: for he had hoped for a tenant merely, and here was tenant and customer in one. More, she was a widow, knowing nothing of trade, so that it might be possible to sell her what others would not buy, at a little extra profit. As to rent, moreover, he was doing well. For on the day the deposit was paid, Mrs. May had found little choice among vacant shops, and this was in a situation to suit her plans as to Johnny and his trade; and as she was tired and nervous, full of plain anxiety, sympathetic Mr. Dunkin saw his chance of trying for an extra shilling a week, and got it. And Nan May was left to pay for what painting and cleaning the place might need. It needed a good deal, as Mr. Dunkin had ruefully observed two days before, in expectation of a decorator’s bill if ever a tenant came.

And now Nan May addressed herself to the work. First, the house must be cleaned; the paint could be considered after. She had swept one room into a habitable state on her last day in town, and here her little store of furniture was stacked. Then, her sleeves and her skirt turned back, and a duster over her head, she assailed walls and ceilings with a broom, and after these the floors. So far Johnny helped, but when scrubbing began he hindered. So it was that for a day or so, until it was time for him to help with the windows, he had leisure wherein to make himself acquainted with the neighbourhood.

It was a neighbourhood with a flavour distinct from that of the districts about it. There the flat rows of six-roomed cottages, characterless all, stretched everywhere, rank behind rank, in masses unbroken except by the busier thoroughfares of shops. Here each little house asserted its individuality by diversity of paint as much as by diversity of shape. It was, indeed, the last stronghold of the shipwrights and mast-makers, fallen from their high estate since the invasion of iron ships and northern competition. In fact, Shipwrights’ Row was the name of a short rank of cottages close by, with gardens in front, each with its mast and flag complete. In other places, where the back-yards were very small, the flagstaff and stays were apt to take to their use the whole space: the pole rising from the exact centre, and a stay taking its purchase from each extreme corner, so that anybody essaying a circuit must perform it with many sudden obeisances. The little streets had an air of cleanliness all their own, largely due to the fresh paint that embellished whatsoever there was an excuse for painting. Many front-doors were reached by two stone steps, always well whitened; and whether there were steps or not, the flagstones before each threshold were distinguished by a whited semicircle five feet in diameter. Noting this curious fact as he tramped along one such street, Johnny was startled by an angry voice close at his elbow, a voice so very sudden and irate that he jumped aside ere he looked for the source. A red-faced woman knelt within a door.

“Idle young faggit!” she said. “Stompin’ yer muddy boots all over my clean step!” And she made so vigorous a grasp at a broom that Johnny went five yards at a gallop.

Now truly there was no step of any sort to the house. And Johnny had but crossed the semicircle because he conceived the footpath to be public property, and because it was narrow. But he learnt, afterwards, that the semicircle was a sacred institution of the place, in as high regard among the women as its fellow-fetish, the flagstaff, was among the men; also that none but grown people—and those of low habits or in drink—dared trespass on it; and that it was always called “the step.” He learnt much, too, in the matter of paint. Every male inhabitant of Harbour Lane, Shipwrights’ Row, and the neighbouring streets, carried, in his leisure moments, a pipe, a pot of paint, and a brush. He puffed comfortably at the pipe, and stumped about his back (or front) garden with the paint-pot in one hand and the brush in the other, “touching-up” whatever paint would stick to. Rails, posts, water-butts, dustbins, clothes-posts, all were treated, not because they needed it (for they were scarce dry from the last coat), but because there was the paint, and there was the brush, and there was the leisure; and this was the only way to use all three. So that most things about the gardens took an interesting variety of tints in the run of the year, since it was rarely the case that the same colour was used twice in succession. When all wooden surfaces were covered, it was customary to take a turn at window-sills, rain-water pipes, and the stones or oyster-shells that bordered the little flower-beds; and when nothing else was left, then the paint-pot and the brush and the pipe were conveyed to the front, and the front-door, which had been green, became royal blue, or flaming salmon; as did the railings, if there were any, and the window-frames. Two things alone were not subject to such changes of complexion: the flagstaff and the brick pavings. For it was a law immutable that the flagstaffs should be speckless white, and the bricks a cheerful vermilion; this last a colour frequently renewed, because of nailed boots, but done in good oil paint, because of wet weather. Everything else took the range of the rainbow, and something beyond; so that it was possible, in those houses where two families lived, to tell at a glance whether the upstairs family were on terms of intimacy or merely of distant civility with the downstairs, by the colours, uniform or diverse, of the sills and the model fences that guarded the flower-pots on them. For the token and sign of friendship in Harbour Lane was the loan or the exchange of paint. It was the proper method of breaking the ice between new acquaintances, and was recognised as such by general sanction. The greeting, “Bit o’ blue paint any use to ye?” and the offer of the pot across the back fence, were the Harbour Lane equivalents of a call and cards; and the newcomer made early haste with an offer of yellow or green paint in return. Indeed, it was in this way that the paint arrived which afterwards made Nan May’s little shop a bedazzlement to the wayfarer, and furnished Johnny with the first painting job he ever grew tired of. But newcomers were rare in the neighbourhood, for it was a colony apart, with independent manners and habits of thought. True, it had its own divisions and differences: as, for instance, on the question whether or not the association of the paint-pot and brush with the Sunday paper were sinful; but these divisions were purely internal, and nothing was heard of them beyond the boundaries.

But paint was something more than a recreation and an instrument of social amenity. It furnished the colony with an equivalent of high finance, wherein all the operations proper to Money and Credit (as spelt with capital initials) were reflected in Paint. For it was a permanent condition of life in Harbour Lane and thereabouts, that everybody owed everybody else some amount of Paint, and was owed Paint, in his turn, by others. So that a complicated system of exchange prevailed, in which verbal bills and cheques were drawn. As thus, to make a simple case:

“’Ullo, Bill, what about that pot o’ paint?”

“Well, I was goin’ to bring it round to-night.”

“All right. But don’t bring it to me—take it to George. Ye see, I owe Jim a bit o’ paint, an’ ’e owes Joe a bit, an’ Joe owes George a bit. So that’ll make it right all round. Don’t forget!”

With many such arrangements synchronising, crossing and mixing with each other, and made intricate by differing degrees and manners of debit and credit between Bill and George and Jim and Joe, the unlikely subject of Paint became involved in a mathematical web of exceeding interest, a small image of the Money Market, a sort of chaos by double entry wherein few operators were able to strike a balance at a moment, and most were vaguely uncertain whether their accounts inclined toward an affluence of Paint or toward sheer bankruptcy. An exciting result attained without the aid of capital, and with no serious hurt to anybody.

But these were things that Johnny learned in the succeeding weeks. In his walks while his mother scrubbed floors at home, he observed one or two matters. As to costume, he perceived that the men wore blue dungaree jackets with large bone buttons, and outside these, now that it was winter, short pilot coats of dark blue stuff, thick and stiff, like a board. The trousers were moleskins, perhaps once white, all stained with very shiny black patches, and all of one cut, which placed the seat (very baggy) a few inches above the bend of the knee; and there was a peaked cap, of the same shiny black all over that distinguished parts of the trousers. He also saw that whereas yesterday the backyards were brisk with fluttering linen, to-day they held scarce any. For yesterday was Monday, and it was matter of pride among the energetic housewives of the place to get washing done at the beginning of the week. For a woman fell in her neighbours’ respect the later in the week her washing day came.

So Johnny explored the streets with wide eyes and a full heart. For here was London, where they made great things—ships and engines. There were places he fancied he recognised—great blank walls with masts behind them. But now the masts seemed fewer and shorter than in the old days: as in truth they were, for now more of the ships were steamships, filling greater space for half the show of mast. Then in other places he came on basins filled with none but sailing-ships, and here the masts were as tall and fine as ever, stayed with much cordage, and had their yards slung at a gallant slope, like the sword on Sir Walter Raleigh’s hip. And at Blackwall Stairs, looking across the river, stood an old, old house that Johnny stared at for minutes together: a month or two later he heard the tradition that Sir Walter Raleigh himself had lived there. It was first of a row of old waterside buildings, the newest of which had looked across, and almost fallen into, the river, when King George’s ships had anchored off Blackwall—and King Charles’s for that matter. There, too, stood the Artichoke Tavern, clean and white and wooden, a heap of gables and windows all out of perpendicular: a house widest and biggest everywhere at the top, and smallest at the ground floor; a house that seemed ready to topple into the river at a push, so far did its walls and galleries overhang the water, and so slender were the piles that supported them. Here, in the square space on the quay, brown men in blue jerseys sold bloaters by the score, stringing them through the gills with tarry yarn; and half the brown men wore earrings. Below, on the foreshore, lay many boats, and children ran among them, or raked for river-mussels among the stones.

In another place he came on just such market-streets as he remembered to have trotted along, at his mother’s side, in the old London life; though now, indeed, they seemed something dirtier and meaner, and the people seemed less cheerful. But this was a place away from Harbour Lane—a neighbourhood of dull and dingy rows of little houses, range on range. And still farther he found another street of shops, or rather half a street, for one side was a blank wall. But no great skeleton ship lifted its ribs above the bricks, and no hammers clanged behind them; for it was a ship-yard abandoned, and a painted board, thick with grime, offered the place for sale or hire. Some of the shops opposite were abandoned too, and the others were poor and dull. Johnny walked a few steps backward, looking at the shops, and when he turned about at a corner, he almost scorched himself at a coke fire where chestnuts were roasting; and there behind the fire stood the pockmarked man himself, not a whit altered! There he stood, with his hands deep in his pockets, and tapped the kerb with his clogged boots, just as he had stood when the great ship was making, and the lights flared round it, and the shops were all open and busy: perhaps the pitted face was a trifle paler, but that was all.

But Harbour Lane and thereabout were the most interesting parts, and the pleasantest for Johnny. Just beyond the Stairs, and the old houses, and the Artichoke Tavern, was a dock-inlet, with an extraordinary bridge that halved in the middle, and swung back to each of two quays, to let ships through. Men worked it quite easily, with a winch, and Johnny could have watched for an hour. But just here he caught sight of an acquaintance. For down on the quay below the bridge-end, sitting on a mooring-post, was Mr. Butson. A trifle seedy and fallen in condition, Johnny fancied, and grumly ill-used as ever. As Johnny looked, Mr. Butson took a pipe from his pocket, and a screw of paper. The paper yielded nothing. Mr. Butson raked through both jacket-pockets, and scowled at his empty hands. In the end, after a gloomy inspection of the pipe, he put it away and returned to savage meditation. And Johnny went home.

X.

It was at Maidment and Hurst’s, engineers, that Johnny’s father had met his death; and it was to Maidment and Hurst that Nan had resolved to take the boy, and beg an apprenticeship for him. True, the firm had at the time done more than might have been expected of it, for the accident had been largely a matter of heedlessness on the victim’s part, and the victim was no old hand, but had taken his job only a few months before. It had seen that nothing was lacking for the widow’s immediate needs, nor for a decent funeral; and it had offered to find places in an orphanage for the children. But Nan May could not bring herself to part with them: Bessie, indeed, was barely out of the hospital at the time. And then the lonely old butterfly-hunter had cut matters short by carrying them off all three.

So that now, if Johnny were to learn a trade, Maidment and Hurst’s was his best chance, for it was just possible that the firm would take him apprentice without premium, when it was reminded of his father. In this thing Nan May wasted no time. The house once clean within, and something done toward stocking the shop, Johnny was made ready, in the best of his clothes, for inspection. It was a muddy morning, and Mrs. May had fears for the polish on Johnny’s boots. Gladly would she have carried him across the miry streets, as she had done in the London of years ago, though she knew better than to hint at such an outrage on his dignity. So they walked warily, dodging puddles with mutual warnings, and fleeing the splashes of passing vans. Truly London was changed, even more in Nan May’s eyes than in Johnny’s. The people seemed greyer, more anxious, worse fed, than when she lived among them before, a young wife in a smiling world, with the best part of thirty-eight shillings to spend every week. The shops were worse stocked, and many that she remembered well were shut. True, some flourished signs of prosperity, but to her it seemed prosperity of a different and a paltrier sort—vulgar and trumpery. Once out of the Harbour Lane district, the little houses lacked the snug, geranium-decked, wire-blinded, rep-curtained comfort of aspect she remembered so well—the air that suggested a red fire within, a shining copper kettle, a high fender, and muffins on a trivet. Things were cheap, and cold, and grubby. Above all, the silent ship-yards oppressed her fancies. Truly, this looked an ill place for new trade! In her hunt for the vacant shop she had encountered no old friends, and now, though she walked through familiar streets, she had little but fancied recognition, now and again, of some face at a shop door.

Presently they turned a corner and came upon a joyful crowd of boys. They ran, they yelled, they flung, and in their midst cursed and floundered a rusty rag of a woman, drunk and infuriate, harried, battered and bedeviled. Her clothes were of decent black, but dusty and neglected, and one side of her skirt dripped with fresh mud. Her hair was draggled about her shoulders, and her bonnet hung in it, a bunch of mangled crape, while she staggered hither and thither, making futile swipes at the nimble rascals about her. She struck out feebly with a little parcel of bacon-rashers rolled in a paper, and already a rasher had escaped, to be flung at her head, and flung again by the hand that could first snatch it from the gutter.

“Yah! Old Mother Born-drunk!” shouted the young savages, and two swooped again with the stretched skipping-rope that had already tripped their victim twice. But she clasped a post with both arms, and cursed at large, hoarse and impotent.

Nan May started and stood, and then hurried on. For she had recognised a face at last, grimed and bloated though it had grown. “Law!” she said, “it’s Emma Pacey! To think—to think of it!”

Indeed the shock was great, and the change amazing. It was a change that would have baffled recognition by an eye that had less closely noted the Emma Pacey of seventeen years ago. But Emma Pacey was a smart girl then (though fast and forward, Nan May had always said), and had caused some little disturbance in a course of true love which led, nevertheless, to Nan’s wedding after all. In such circumstances a woman views her rival’s face, as she views her clothes, with a searching eye, and remembers well. “And to come to that!” mused Nan May, perplexed at a shade of emotion that seemed ill-turned to the occasion, wherein the simple soul saw nothing of womanish triumph.

But the changes seemed not all for the worse. There were busy factories, and some that had been small were now large. Coffee-stalls, too, were set up in two or three places, where no such accommodation was in the old time: always a sign of increasing trade. But on the whole the walk did nothing to raise Nan’s spirits.

Johnny saw little. The excursion was to decide whether he should learn to make steam-engines or not, though what manner of adventure he was to encounter he figured but vaguely. He was to come into presence of some gentlemen, presumably—gentlemen who would settle his whole destiny off-hand, on a cursory examination of his appearance and manner. He must be alert to show his best behaviour, though what things the gentlemen might do or say, and what unforeseen problems of conduct might present themselves, were past guessing; though he guessed and guessed, oblivious of present circumstance. Only once before had he felt quite that quality of trepidation, and that was three years back, when he trudged along the road to Woodford to get a tooth drawn.

But he came off very well, though the preliminaries were solemn—rather more portentous, he thought, than anything in the dentist’s waiting-room. There was a sort of counter, with bright brass rails, and a ground-glass box with an office-boy inside it. The unprecedented and unbusinesslike apparition of Mrs. May, with a timid request to see Mr. Maidment or Mr. Hurst (one was dead, and the other never came near the place), wholly demoralised the office-boy, who retired upon his supports in the depths of the office. Thence there presently emerged a junior clerk, who, after certain questions, undertook to see if the acting partner were in. Then came a time of stealthy and distrustful inspection on the part of the office-boy, who, having regained his box, and gathered up his wits, began to suspect Johnny of designs on his situation. But at last Johnny and his mother were shown into an inner room, furnished with expensive austerity, where a gentleman of thirty or thirty-five (himself expensively austere of mien) sat at a writing-table. The gentleman asked Mrs. May one or two rather abrupt questions about her dead husband—dates, and so forth—and referred to certain notes on his table after each answer. Then Nan offered him one of three papers which she had been fiddling in her hand since first she passed the street door—her marriage “lines.”

“O, ah, yes—yes—of course,” said the gentleman with some change of manner. “Of course. Quite right. Best to make sure—can’t remember everybody. Sit down, Mrs. May. Come here, my boy. So you want to be an engineer, eh?”

“Yes, sir, if you please.” He never thought it would be quite so hard to get it out.

“Ah. Plenty of hard work, you know. Not afraid of that, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen next month, sir.”

“Get on all right at school? What standard?”

“Passed seventh, sir.”

Mrs. May handed over her other two papers: a “character” from the schoolmaster and another from the rector.

When the gentleman had read them, “Yes, yes, very good—very good, indeed,” he said. “But you’ve not finished learning yet, you know, my boy, if you’re to be an engineer. Fond of drawing?”

“Yes, sir.”

And Nan May chimed in: “O, yes, sir, very fond.”

“Well, if you stick well at your drawing in the evenings, and learn the theory, you’ll be a foreman some day—perhaps a manager. It all depends on yourself. You shall have a chance to show us what you’re made of. That’s all we can do—the rest is for yourself, as I’ve said.”

“Yes, sir, thank-you, sir—I’ll try.” And Mrs. May was audibly thankful too, and confident of Johnny.

“Very well, it’s settled.” The gentleman rang a bell, and bade the junior clerk “Just send for Cottam.”

“I have sent for the foreman,” he went on, “whose shop you will be in. He’ll look after you as long as you behave well and keep up to your work. You won’t see me very often, but I shall know all about you, remember.” And he turned to his table, and wrote.

Presently there was a sudden thump at the door, which opened slowly and admitted the foremost part—it was the abdomen—of Cottam the foreman. He was of middle height, though he seemed short by reason of his corpulence; deliberate in all his movements, yet hard, muscular, and active. He turned, as it were on his own axis, at the edge of the door, shut it with one hand, while he dangled a marine peaked cap in the other; and looked, with serene composure, from over his scrub of grey beard, first at Mrs. May, then at Johnny, and last at his employer.

“Oh, Cottam,” the gentleman said, writing one more word, and letting drop his pen, “this lad’s name is John May. I expect you’ll remember his father. Bad accident, I believe, in the heavy turning shop; died, in fact.” This with a slight glance at Nan May.

The foreman turned—turned his whole person, for his head was set on his vast shoulders with no visible neck between—bent a trifle, and inspected Johnny as he would have inspected some wholly novel and revolutionary piece of machinery. “Y-u-u-us,” he said, with a slowly rising inflection, expressive of cautious toleration, as of one reserving a definite opinion. “Y-u-u-us!”

“Well, he’s to come on as apprentice, and I’d like him to come into your shop. There’ll be no difficulty about that, will there?”

“N-o-o-o!” with the same deliberate inflection, similarly expressive.

“Then you’d better take him down, and tell the timekeeper. He may as well begin on Monday, I suppose.”

“Y-u-u-us!” tuned once more in an ascending scale. And with that the acting partner bade Mrs. May good-morning, turned to his writing, and the business was over.

Cottam the foreman put his cap on his head and led the way through the outer office, along a corridor, down the stairs and across the yard, with no indecent haste. It was a good distance to go, and Johnny was vaguely reminded of a circus procession that had once passed through Loughton, and that he had followed up for nearly three miles, behind the elephant.

Half-way across the yard the foreman stopped, and made a half turn, so as to face Nan May as she came up. He raised an immense leathery fist, and jerked a commensurate thumb over his shoulder. “That’s the young guv’nor,” he said in a hoarse whisper, with a confidential twitch of one cheek that was almost a wink. “That’s the young guv’nor, that is. Smart young chap. Knowed ’im so ’igh.” He brought down his hand to the level of his lowest waistcoat button, twitched his cheek again, nodded, and walked on.

The timekeeper inhabited a little wooden cabin just within the gates, and looked out of a pigeon-hole at all comers. Mr. Cottam put his head into this hole—a close fit—and when he withdrew it, the timekeeper, a grey man, came out of his side door and stared hard at Johnny. Then he growled “All right,” and went in again.

“Six o’clock o’ Monday mornin’,” Mr. Cottam pronounced conclusively, addressing Mrs. May. “Six o’clock o’ Monday mornin’. ’Ere,” with a downward jerk of his thumb to make it plain that somewhere else would not do. Then, without a glance at Johnny, whom he had disregarded since they left the office, he turned and walked off. Johnny and his mother were opening the small door that was cut in the great gate, when Mr. Cottam stopped and turned. “Mornin’!” he roared, and went on.

Mother and boy went their way joyously. Here was one of Nan May’s troubles dissolved in air, and as for Johnny, a world of wonders was before him. Now he would understand how steam made engines go, and all day he would see them going—he would make engines himself, in fact. And for this delightful pursuit he would be paid. Six shillings a week was what apprentices got in their first year—a shilling for every day of work. Next year he would get eight shillings, and then ten, and so on. And at twenty-one he would be a man indeed, an engineer like his father before him. More, he was to draw. The gentleman had told him to draw in his spare time. The clang of hammers was as a merry peal from the works that lined their way, and the hoots of steamships on the river made them a moving music.

Nan May wondered to see such merry faces about the streets on the way home. Truly the place was changed; but, perhaps, after all, it was no such bad place, even now. The street was quiet where they had seen the drunken woman, though two very small boys were still kicking a filthy slice of bacon about the gutter. But three streets beyond they saw her for a moment. For the blackguard boys had contrived to topple Mother Born-drunk into a hand-barrow, which they were now trundling along at such a pace that the bedraggled sufferer could do no more than lie and cling to the rails, a gasping, uncleanly heap. Truly Emma Pacey’s punishment was upon her.

Bessy brightened wonderfully at the news of Johnny’s success. For she was thoughtful and “old-fashioned” even among the prematurely sage girl-children of her class, and she had been fretting silently. Now she hopped about with something of her old activity. She reported that the next-door neighbour on the left had been persistently peeping over the wall, and that just before their arrival the peep had been accompanied by a very artificial cough, meant to attract attention. So Mrs. May went into the back-yard.

“Mornin’, mum,” said the next-door neighbour, a very red-faced man in a dungaree jacket. “Weather’s cleared up a bit. I’ve bin ’avin’ ’alf a day auf, touchin’ up things.” He sank with a bob behind the wall, and rose again with a paint-pot in his lifted hand. “Bit o’ red paint any use to ye?”

XI.

The red paint-pot, and a blue one from the same quarter, together with a yellow one from the neighbours on the other side, a white one from an old lighterman in the house behind, and a suitable collection of brushes subscribed by all three, were Johnny’s constant companions till the end of that weary week. The shop-shutters grew to be red, with a blue border. The window-frames were yellow, the wall beneath was white, so was the cornice above; and the door and the door-posts were red altogether, because the red paint went farthest, and the red pot had been fullest to begin with. Not only did the length of the job work off Johnny’s first enthusiasm, but its publicity embarrassed him. Perched conspicuously on a step-ladder, painting a shop in such stirring colours as these, he was the cynosure of all wayfaring folk, the target of whatever jibes their wits might compass. Three out of four warned him that the paint was laid on wrong side out. Some, in unkindly allusion to certain chance splashes, reminded him that he hadn’t half painted the window-panes; and facetious boys, in piteous pantomime, affected to be reduced to instant blindness by sudden knowledge of Johnny’s brilliant performance. But he was most discomforted by those who merely stood and stared, invisible behind him. If only he could have seen them it would not have been so bad; the oppressive consciousness that some contemptuous grown man behind and below—possibly a painter by trade—was narrowly observing every stroke of the brush, shook his nerve and enfeebled his execution. Most of these earnest spectators seemed to have no pressing business of their own, and their inspections were prolonged. One critic found speech to remark, as he turned to go his way: “Well, you are makin’ a bloomin’ mess up there!” But most, as if at a loss for words by mere amazement, sheered off with: “Well, blimy!” It was discouraging to find that all these people could have done it so much better, and, long before the job was finished, Johnny was sore depressed and very humble, as well as tired. Only one of all his witnesses offered help, and he was a surprising person: very tall, very thin, and very sooty from work; with splay feet, sloping shoulders, a long face of exceeding diffidence, and long arms, which seemed to swing and flap irresponsibly with the skirts of his long overcoat, and to be a subject of mute apology. He saw Johnny tip-toeing at the very top of the steps, making a bad shift to reach the cornice. He stopped, looked about him, and then went on a step or two; stopped again, and came back, with a timorous glance at the shop window; and when Johnny turned and looked, he said, in a voice scarce above a whisper: “Can’tcher reach it?”

“Not very well.”

“Let’s come.” And when Johnny descended, the long man, with one more glance about the street, went up three steps at a time and laid the paint on rapidly, many feet at a sweep. He came down and shifted the steps very easily with one hand—and they were heavy steps—went up again, and in three minutes carried the paint to the very end of the cornice. Then he came down, with a sheepish smile at Johnny’s thanks, and shambled as far as next door, where he let himself in with a latch-key. And on Friday, at dinner-time, perceiving Johnny’s progress from his window on the upper floor—he was a lodger, it seemed—he came stealthily down and gave the cornice another coat.

On Saturday morning the shop was opened in form, though Johnny’s painting was not finished till dusk. Very little happened. A few children stopped on their way, and stared in at the door. The first customer was a boy from among these, who came in to beg a piece of string; and infested Harbour Lane for the rest of the day, swinging a dead rat on the end of it. Hours passed, and Nan May’s spirits fell steadily. A few pounds, a very few—they could scarce be made to last three weeks—was all her reserve, and most of her scanty stock was perishable. If it spoiled it could never be replaced, and unless people bought it, spoil it must. What more could she do? Industry, determination, and all the rest were well enough, but when all was said and done, nothing could make people come and buy.

Near noon the second customer came—a little girl this time. She wanted a bottle of ink for a halfpenny. There were half-a dozen little bottles of ink in a row in the window; but the price was a penny, so the little girl went away. It was a dull dinner that day. Bessy invented ingenious conjectures to account for the lack of trade, and prophesied a change in the afternoon, or the evening, or perhaps next week, or at latest the week after. Her mother could not understand. Customers came to other shops; why not to this one?

She had seen nothing of Uncle Isaac since she had come to Harbour Lane, though he knew where to find her. She had hoped he would lend a hand with the painting, or with the display of the stock; but no doubt he had been too busy. True, Johnny thought he had seen him once from the steps, some way down the street, but that must have been a mistake; for Uncle Isaac would not have come so near them without calling, nor would he have bolted instantly round the nearest corner at sight of the boy and his work, as Johnny had fancied he had.

The afternoon began no better than the morning. Nobody came but a child, who asked for sixpenn’orth of coppers, till about four. Then a hurried woman demanded a penn’orth of mixed pickles in a saucer, and grumbled at the quantity. She wouldn’t come into the shop again, at anyrate; a threat so discomposing (for was not the woman the first paying customer?) that for hours Nan May could not forgive herself for her illiberality; though indeed she gained but a weak fraction of a farthing by the transaction.

Half an hour more went, and then there came a truly noble customer. He looked like a bricklayer, and he was far from sober: so far, indeed, that Johnny, on the steps, spying the mazy sinuosity of his approach, got a step lower and made ready to jump, in case of accidents. But the bricklayer, conscious of the presence of many ladders, steered wide into the roadway, and there stopped, fascinated by the brilliancy before him. Some swaying moments of consideration resolved him that this was a shop: and after many steps up the curb, and as many back in the gutter, he picked a labyrinthine path among the myriad ladders, narrowly missing the real one as he went, shouldered against the wet door-post, and stumbled toward the counter. Here he regarded a bladder of lard with thoughtful severity, till Nan May timorously asked what he wanted.

“Shumm for kidsh,” he replied sternly, to the lard. “Shummforkidsh.” For some moments his scowl deepened; then he raised his hand and pointed. “W—wha’sha’?” he demanded.

“Lard.”

“Tharr’ll do.” He plunged his hand into his trousers pocket. “Tharr’ll do. ’Ow mush?”

“Sevenpence halfpenny a pound.”

“Orrigh’? Gi’s ’oldovit.” He reached an unsteady hand, imperilling bottles; but Nan May was quicker, and took the bladder of lard from its perch.

“How much?” she asked.

“’Ow much? Thash wha’ I wan’ know. You give it ’ere, go on.” His voice rose disputatively, and he fell on the bladder of lard with both hands. “’Ow mush?”

Nan reflected that it weighed more than three pounds, and that she had paid Mr. Dunkin eighteenpence for it. “Two shillings,” she said.