“Not this, please, Mr. Dix. It will make me feel ever so much better, if you will let me pay what other people pay.”
I said to myself, “This boy is arguing out of a spirit of right and justice, and it will not be kind on my part to baulk him;” so I told him I would charge him a penny a week, and upon these terms we settled it.
He was never once late. Hail, rain, snow, or shine, there he was, trudging out every morning at seven o’clock, with a bright face and a willing heart singing softly to himself a favorite song of Nan’s as he went along. Often he was up and dressed before I went to wake him, and nineteen times out of the other twenty he would call,
“Thank you, Mr. Dix, I’m dressing myself. How glad you must be that the night’s over.”
And there he was at his books, every morning for an hour and a half at least, with a little bit of candle, if it was dark, as happy and hopeful as a prince—perhaps more so, because princes, having everything they want, must, in my opinion, have a precious dull time of it.
Why, a prince going to his private box at the opera can’t get a thousandth part of the pleasure, that Nick enjoyed as, with Nan with her sprightly step and pretty face at his side, he marched about once every three months to the sixpenny gallery at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, where Mr. Samuel Phelps was doing his best to amuse, in an intellectual way, the poor people in the north and east of London.
Mr. Phelps did a power of good in his day, and there are many well-to-do people living now, who have the best of all reasons to be grateful to him.
“She would go and meet him when his work was over.”
Often of a morning Nan would walk with Nick to the place he worked in and would leave him there, and more often she would go and meet him when his work was over. Being a bright, capable lad, Nick, you may depend, had many temptations from boys and girls of his age to join in pleasures which lead to no good; but he resisted them all with firmness and good temper, and as he never preached to them that it was wrong to do this or that—being, indeed, too busy to meddle with anyone’s business but his own or Nan’s—he did himself no harm by refusing.