“I’ll not have it, no way.”
“But where’s Richard gone?” inquired the careless boy, after varying his exercise by walking on his hands, and kicking his feet in the air.
“I dun know,” replied the other; “it’s most like he’s gone home: that’s where he goes most times: he comes the gentleman over us because of his edication.”
“He has no spirit,” said Ned, contemptuously; “he never spends his money like—like me.”
“He got the ‘lucky penny,’ for all that,” answered Willy, “for I saw the hole in it myself.”
“Look at that, now!” exclaimed Ned; “it’s ever the way with him; see now, if that don’t turn up something before the year’s out. While we sleep under bridges, in tatur-baskets, and ‘darkies,’ he sleeps on a bed; and his mother stiches o’ nights, and days too. He’s as high up as a gentleman, and yet he’s as keen after a job as a cat after a sparra.”
The two boys lounged away, while the third—the only one of the three who had earned his penny, by holding a gentleman’s horse for a moment, while the others looked on—had passed rapidly to a small circulating library near Cranbourne Alley, and laying down his penny on the counter, looked in the bookseller’s face, and said—
“Please, sir, will you lend me the works of Benjamin Franklin—for a penny?”
The bookseller looked at the boy, and then at the penny, and inquired if he were the lad who had carried the parcels about for Thomas Brand, when he was ill.
The boy said he was.