“Walk! yah! ye’ll walk better. We niver have no shoes,” said Dick.
“Don’t you, really?”
“Golly! no! Ye’ll walk ten times finer; ye won’t trip, nor stumble, nor nothin’, and ye’ll run as fast again.”
“Oh, no, I shall not,” murmured Bertie, and he was going to say that he would be ashamed to be seen without shoes, only he remembered that, as these boys had none, that would not be kind. A desperate misery came over him at the thought of being shoeless, but then he reasoned with himself, “To give was no charity if it cost you nothing: did not the saints strip themselves to the uttermost shred for the poor?”
He stooped and took off his shoes with the silver buckles on them, and placed them hastily on the floor.
“Take them, if they will get you bread,” he said, with the color mounting in his face.
Dick seized them with a yell of joy. “Tarnation that I can’t go mysel’. Here, Tam, run quick and sell ’em to old Nan; and get bread, and meat, and potatoes, and milk for baby, and Lord knows what; p’raps a gill of gin for mammy.”
“I don’t think we ought to rob little master, Dick,” murmured little Tam. His brother hurled a crutch at him, and Tam snatched up the pretty shoes and fled.
“My blazes, sir,” said Dick, with rather a shamefaced look, “if you’d a beast like a lot of fire gnawing at your belly all night long, yer wouldn’t stick at nowt to get bread.”