hemselves whenever
occasion demanded it. To hear them talk, one would imagine that such
affairs as the recent exploit of Bill Bates and the Semi-drunk were
constantly taking place, instead of only occurring about once in a blue
moon.

Crass stood the final round of drinks, and as he evidently thought that
circumstance deserved to be signalized in some special manner, he
proposed the following toast, which was drunk with enthusiasm:

'To hell with the man,
May he never grow fat,
What carries two faces,
Under one 'at.'

Rushton & Co. did a lot of work that summer. They did not have many
big jobs, but there were a lot of little ones, and the boy Bert was
kept busy running from one to the other. He spent most of his time
dragging a handcart with loads of paint, or planks and steps, and
seldom went out to work with the men, for when he was not taking things
out to the various places where the philanthropists were working, he
was in the paintshop at the yard, scraping out dirty paint-pots or
helping Crass to mix up colours. Although scarcely anyone seemed to
notice it, the boy presented a truly pitiable spectacle. He was very
pale and thin. Dragging the handcart did not help him to put on flesh,
for the weather was very hot and the work made him sweat.

His home was right away on the other side of Windley. It took him more
than three-quarters of an hour to walk to the shop, and as he had to be
at work at six, that meant that he had to leave home at a few minutes
past five every morning, so that he always got up about half past four.

He was wearing a man's coat--or rather jacket--which gave the upper
part of his body a bulky appearance. The trousers were part of a suit
of his own, and were somewhat narrowly cut, as is the rule with boys'
cheap ready-made trousers. These thin legs appearing under the big
jacket gave him a rather grotesque appearance, which was heightened by
the fact that all his clothes, cap, coat, waistcoat, trousers and
boots, were smothered with paint and distemper of various colours, and
there were generally a few streaks of paint of some sort or other upon
his face, and of course his hands--especially round the
fingernails--were grimed with it. But the worst of all were the
dreadful hobnailed boots: the leather of the uppers of these was an
eighth of an inch thick, and very stiff. Across the fore part of the
boot this hard leather had warped into ridges an