During the ensuing days Nellie was indeed up to her eyes in work, carrying out vigorously her plan of cleaning and polishing the house from top to bottom. Baby Billy, who had hitherto considered himself a person of very great importance, found himself hustled hither and thither as he had never been in the whole of his existence, a period extending over about thirty months.
On one particular afternoon, when every washable article in the house was in Nellie’s tub, he was bidden to play out of doors, and finding the maternal eye less on the alert than usual, surreptitiously opened the garden gate and wandered to the forbidden precincts of the lane.
He trotted along for nearly a quarter of a mile, until he reached a particularly delectable corner graced by a large rubbish-heap, which he proceeded to investigate with huge satisfaction, carrying one treasure after another over the way, sitting down to examine it, and immediately rolling on to his legs again to procure some yet more coveted object.
At last, however, he secured two prizes, than which nothing more desirable could be imagined, and with a sigh of satisfaction toddled for the last time across the lane and sat down to enjoy them at his leisure. The broken jam-pot was immediately filled with sand, while the rusty knife, grasped by its fragmentary handle, could be used in a variety of ways—so Billy discovered—as a spade, as a saw, as a chopper.
He was engaged in mincing a dock leaf very small on a flat stone, his mouth opening and shutting in accompaniment to his labours, when he was suddenly hailed by somebody who had abruptly turned the corner of the lane, somebody who was probably on his way from the town.
“Hello!” cried this somebody.
“Hello!” responded Billy, pausing with his knife poised in mid-air and looking up with a pair of very big and very blue eyes. He had to tilt his head quite a long way back to do so, for the newcomer was tall. Billy was a little startled; to begin with the newcomer was a man, and he was not sure that he liked men—they cracked whips sometimes, and spoke loud and gruff, particularly when, as occasionally happened, Billy chanced to run across the road immediately in front of their horses; then he had funny brown clothes—nobody that Billy had ever seen wore clothes like that; and he had a brown face too, a face so very, very brown that it gave his blue eyes a strange look. Billy was secretly a good deal frightened, but being a soldier’s son he only clutched his knife the harder and said, “Hello!” again, as the stranger continued to look at him without speaking.
“I rather think I ought to know you, my lad,” said the man at last, in a queer quavering voice. “I’d swear by that little cocked nose. What’s your name, eh?”
“Billy,” responded the child promptly.
“Right you are!” cried the man, and he caught him up in his arms, knife and jam-pot and all. “Let’s hear the rest of it, though. Billy what?”