“It’s the News-boys’ Lodgin’ House, on Fulton Street,” said Dick, “up over the ‘Sun’ office. It’s a good place. I don’t know what us boys would do without it. They give you supper for six cents, and a bed for five cents more.”
“I suppose some boys don’t even have the five cents to pay,—do they?”
“They’ll trust the boys,” said Dick. “But I don’t like to get trusted. I’d be ashamed to get trusted for five cents, or ten either. One night I was comin’ down Chatham Street, with fifty cents in my pocket. I was goin’ to get a good oyster-stew, and then go to the lodgin’ house; but somehow it slipped through a hole in my trowses-pocket, and I hadn’t a cent left. If it had been summer I shouldn’t have cared, but it’s rather tough stayin’ out winter nights.”
Frank, who had always possessed a good home of his own, found it hard to realize that the boy who was walking at his side had actually walked the streets in the cold without a home, or money to procure the common comfort of a bed.
“What did you do?” he asked, his voice full of sympathy.
“I went to the ‘Times’ office. I knowed one of the pressmen, and he let me set down in a corner, where I was warm, and I soon got fast asleep.”
“Why don’t you get a room somewhere, and so always have a home to go to?”
“I dunno,” said Dick. “I never thought of it. P’rhaps I may hire a furnished house on Madison Square.”
“That’s where Flora McFlimsey lived.”
“I don’t know her,” said Dick, who had never read the popular poem of which she is the heroine.