"Yes, oh, yes," said Dickie, "and I carved boxes in my dream, and sold them, and I want to learn a lot more things, so that when I go back again—I mean when I dream that dream again—I shall be able to earn more money."
"'Tis shame that one of thy name should have to work for money," said the nurse.
"It isn't my name there," said Dickie; "and old Sebastian told me every one ought to do some duty to his country, or he wasn't worth his meat and ale. And you don't know how good it is having money that you've earned yourself."
"I ought to," she said; "I've earned mine long enough. Now haste and dress—and then breakfast and thy fencing lesson."
When the fencing lesson was over, Dickie hesitated. He wanted, of course, to hurry off to Sebastian and to go on learning how to make a galleon. But also he wanted to learn some trade that he could teach Beale at Deptford, and he knew, quite as surely as any master craftsman could have known it, that nothing which required delicate handling, such as wood-carving or the making of toy boats, could ever be mastered by Beale. But Beale was certainly fond of dogs. Dickie remembered how little True had cuddled up to him and nestled inside his coat when he lay down to sleep under the newspapers and the bits of sacking in Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane.
So Dickie went his way to the kennels to talk to the kennelman. He had been there before with Master Roger Fry, his fencing master, but he had never spoken to the kennelman. And when he got to the kennels he knocked on the door of the kennelman's house and called out, "What ho! within there!" just as people do in old plays. And the door was thrown open by a man in a complete suit of leather, and when Dickie looked in that man's face he saw that it was the face of the man who had lived next door in Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane—the man who dug up the garden for the parrot seed.
"Why," said Dickie, "it's you!"
"Who would it be but me, little master?" the man asked with a respectful salute, and Dickie perceived that though this man had the face of the Man Next Door, he had not the Man Next Door's memories.
"Do you live here?" he asked cautiously—"always, I mean."
"Where else should I live?" the man asked, "that have served my lord, your father, all my time, boy and man, and know every hair of every dog my lord owns."