"Isn't it a poky place?" said Jim, pausing in the work of putting up his sister's bedstead.
"Well, you can't call it exactly a palace," replied Dick, "but it might be worse, you know. O my aunt!" And the Angel finished with a vigorous howl.
"What's the matter?"
"I nipped my hand under that iron bar." And he sucked the tips of his fingers as if they were sticks of sugar-candy. "Just see if you can twist this nut round; I can't move it."
The two friends worked away with a will, making up in zeal what they lacked in experience, and very soon had the room looking quite cozy and comfortable. Then they went downstairs; and before night, as Dick's mother, who had come over to help, put it, "things were beginning to look a bit straight."
Susie, of course, could do nothing herself; but she played the part of superintendent, and ordered the boys about, especially Dick, who good-humouredly obeyed all her commands. He looked on it all as great fun, and announced his intention of worrying his mother until they had a move on their own account.
Mrs. Hartland had faced her trouble bravely, but before long Jim recognized that things were much worse than he had guessed. Beyond his father's wages and the donation of a few pounds from the "Shipwrecked Mariners' Society," they had absolutely no money, and there seemed little prospect of his mother being able to earn sufficient to keep them. Already they had to deny themselves everything in the shape of luxury, and even Susie had to go without various little delicacies which they had been in the habit of providing for her.
"I ought to give up school and go to work," he said; but to this his mother was strongly opposed.
"If you leave school now you can only be an errand boy," she said; "and without education, you will have no chance of doing anything in the world."
Now I have no desire to put James Hartland forward as an uncommonly good boy, because, as you will find for yourselves, he was nothing of the sort; but in this particular case he certainly deserved some credit.