And so it was, but Nan had done what she could for it, and the look of gratitude in Dummy’s eyes showed that he properly appreciated her kindness. From that night Dummy and Nan were friends, and there were occasions when he would even leave me to go to her.
For some time before this adventure I had noticed Nan and Nick walking together of an evening, when I was sitting at my window smoking my pipe, but I had not paid much attention to them.
Now, however, they had become objects of interest to me, and I wondered how it was, that I had been blind to little ways of theirs which were different from the ways of other boys and girls.
They would walk along the streets talking and smiling—Nick doing most of the talking and Nan most of the smiling—as earnestly as if they were the only people in the world. Sometimes he would have an open book or a paper in his hand, from which he would be reading to her, and she would be listening with all her might, and her eyes would shine as mine used to shine, when I was deep in a fascinating story.
I discovered afterwards that he was farther advanced than I was at his age, and that though they were both fond of Dickens and Bulwer and Ainsworth, they often read books of adventure (which were scarcer then, than they are now) and even dipped into poetry and imaginative stories of a superior kind. When we were better acquainted Nick introduced me to favorite books of his—“Undine,” “The Lady of the Lake,” and other of Sir Walter Scott’s poems, and “Marco Polo.”
It was a curious mixture, and how it was, he came to pick the best books out of the baskets on the second-hand bookstalls, is more than I can say; it was a kind of instinct that was born in him, I suppose, and it went towards the making, in the end, of a man out of the common run.
What brought me into closer connection with him, was his coming to me one night, and saying,
“You call people up early in the morning; I wish you would call me up.”
“I will, my lad,” I said. “What time?”
“Five o’clock,” he replied. “I can wake myself, as a rule, by fixing it well in my mind, the night before, and saying, ‘Five o’clock, five o’clock, five o’clock, I must get up, I must get up, I must get up at five o’clock,’ and keeping on saying it, till I fall asleep; but I might miss it now and then, and I don’t want to miss it once.”