THE THREE FRIENDS.
A child and a dog sat very close to the fast-expiring embers of a small fire in a shabby London attic.
The dog was very old, with palsied, shaking limbs, eyes half-blind, and an appearance about his whole person of almost disreputable ugliness and decrepitude, He was a large white-and-liver-colored dog, of no particular breed, and certainly of no particular beauty. Never, even in his best days, could this dog have been at all good-looking. The child who crouched close to him was small and thin. He was a pale child, with big, sorrowful eyes, and that shrunken appearance of the whole little frame which proclaims but too clearly that bread-and-milk have not sufficiently nourished it.
He sat very close to the old dog, half-supporting himself against him; his head was bent forward on his little chest—he was half-asleep.
A little apart from the dog and the sleepy child stood a very bright boy, a boy with rosy cheeks and sparkling eye. He poised himself for a moment on one leg, kicked off the snow from his ragged trousers with the other, then flinging his cap and an old broom into a corner of the attic, he sang out in a clear, ringing tone:
"Hillow! Pepper and Trusty, is that h'all the welcome yer 'ave to give to a feller?"
At the first sound of his voice the dog feebly wagged his tail and the little child started to his feet.
"Hillow!" he answered with a pitiful attempt at the elder boy's cheerfulness; "I 'opes as yer 'ave brought h'in some supper, Tom."
"See yere," said Tom, just turning back a morsel of his ragged jacket to show what really was still a pocket. This pocket bunched out now in a most suggestive manner, and Pepper, thrusting in his tiny hand, pulled from it the following heterogeneous mixture: an old bone—very bare of even the pretense of meat; an orange; some nuts; a piece of moldy bread, and a nice little crisp loaf; also twopence and a halfpenny.
"Ain't it prime, Pepper?" said the elder boy. "Yere's the bone for old Trusty, and the broken bread, and the pretty little loaf, and the nuts, and th' orange, for you and me."