“I want some candles—want ’em tremendously. Know where I could get some?”
Appealed to as a specialist, the urchin adopted a professional mien, and paused for consideration. Eventually he said:
“Dad got ours at Dawes’s, rahnd the street. She’s still got some, ’cos my mate, Joe, bought one for his bull’s-eye.”
“Round which street?”
“Over there.”
Wynne waited for no more, and broke into a run. By a kindly Providence Mrs. Dawes had not put up the shutters, being a lady who traded sweets to little voyagers whose parents were not over particular as to the hours they kept.
“I dessay I could lay my ’and on a few,” she replied to Wynne’s fervent appeal, “though it isn’t the season for them, you understand.”
With that she opened, or rattled, an incredible number of wrong boxes, taken from beneath the counter. The sweat had beaded Wynne’s forehead when at last she discovered what she had been seeking. She did not appear to be in any hurry, and conversed on technical subjects during the search.
“There isn’t the sale for coloured candles that there used to be. Of course you may say as it is more the peg-top season, and that might account for it; but it doesn’t—not altogether, that is. Putting the Christmas trade on one side, boys don’t go for bull’s-eye lanterns as once they did—no, nor Chinese neither. It’s all iron ’oops, or roller skates nowadays, as you may say. Why, I dessay I sell as much as ten or a dozen ’oops a week.”
“Do you indeed?”