He climbed up and said, "Hullo!"
To this remark the boy replied, "Hullo!"
Oswald now did not know what to say. The sorrier you are for people the harder it is to tell them so.
But at last he said—
"I've just heard about your father being where he is. It's beastly rough luck. I hope you don't mind my saying I'm jolly sorry for you."
The boy had a pale face and watery blue eyes. When Oswald said this his eyes got waterier than ever, and he climbed down to the ground before he said—
"I don't care so much, but it do upset mother something crool."
It is awfully difficult to console those in affliction. Oswald thought this, then he said—
"I say; never mind if those beastly kids won't play with you. It isn't your fault, you know."
"Nor it ain't father's neither," the boy said; "he broke his arm a-falling off of a rick, and he hadn't paid up his club money along of mother's new baby costing what it did when it come, so there warn't nothing—and what's a hare or two, or a partridge? It ain't as if it was pheasants as is as dear to rear as chicks."