“Of course I will,” and Claude buys all her papers, straightway returning them to her. Then he walks down Elizabeth Street, and seeing two gruesome juveniles with large mouths and shock heads, who are howling out “Even’ Noose! Even’ Noose!” he gets them to come into a tea-shop and have a feed.
Seated at the clean, white-topped table, Claude is glad to recognize one of the boys as his little friend in need of the night before. The motherly dark-eyed mistress of the tea-shop, in reply to a question put to her, smiles kindly on the trio, and wagging her head slightly, with the air of knowing more than she cares to tell, says, “They know me well enough. Don’t you, boys?”
“Er yes, missus,” from both.
“Do they come here for their meals, then?” asks Claude with surprise.
“They’re always coming in, sir, and saying, ‘Missus, are yer got er stale bun?’ and sometimes they buy a cup of cocoa on a cold night.”
“Is that all they get to eat, d’you think?”
To the casual observer, the boys look as if food was a rarity rather than a regularly recurring feature in the day’s landscape.
“Well, sir, I sees a lot of them, and I don’t think they get more than breakfast at ’ome and a bun, or a stale roll during the afternoon, which they call supper, poor things. They lie long abed of a morning, I believe, and have their breakfast at half-past nine or ten,—they’re up so late, you know.”
The dark-eyed ministering female trots off, and Claude watches the dirty smudged faces of his little guests, as the rolls and sweet tea disappear. They eat but little, however, and that very slowly.
Of the two boys only one, Claude’s friend, possesses a hat, or rather the remnants of one. The happy possessor of this ghastly semblance of a chapeau has carefully removed it on coming into the shop; and our hero notes his well-formed head, and falls to musing over the probable future of the owner. Neither of the little craniums before him is that of a weak or poor intellect, and the faces would be beautiful if the shadows of sorrow, hunger, and neglect were but removed. The dirty, unkempt, elfin locks are growing vigorously around a brain clearly worth cultivating,—an active brain that will expend a vast amount of energy in the world, for weal or for woe, as its budding inclinations are directed. The boys answer Claude’s questions promptly, and to the point. They are little business-men with no time to waste. One tells how he sells three dozen papers a day “fur me bruther;” the other is working on his own account.