to go. He pulled at my rope, and we began to walk along a
road with no people in it at all. We walked on and on, but it was all
so new to me that I forgot how tired I was. I could feel my mind
broadening with every step I took.

Every now and then we would pass a very big house, which looked as if
it was empty, but I knew that there was a caretaker inside, because of
Fred's father. These big houses belong to very rich people, but they
don't want to live in them till the summer, so they put in caretakers,
and the caretakers have a dog to keep off burglars. I wondered if that
was what I had been brought here for.

'Are you going to be a caretaker?' I asked the man.

'Shut up,' he said.

So I shut up.

After we had been walking a long time, we came to a cottage. A man came
out. My man seemed to know him, for he called him Bill. I was quite
surprised to see the man was not at all shy with Bill. They seemed very
friendly.

'Is that him?' said Bill, looking at me.

'Bought him this afternoon,' said the man.

'Well,' said Bill, 'he's ugly enough. He looks fierce. If you want a
dog, he's the sort of dog you want. But what do you want one for? It
seems to me it's a lot of trouble to take, when there's no need of any
trouble at all. Why not do what I've always wanted to do? What's wrong
with just fixing the dog, same as it's always done, and walking in and
helping yourself?'

'I'll tell you what's wrong,' said the man. 'To start with, you can't
get at the dog to fix him except by day, when they let him out. At
night he's shut up inside the house. And suppose you do fix him during
the day what happens then? Either the bloke gets another before night,
or else he sits up all night with a gun. It isn't like as if these
blokes was ordinary blokes. They're down here to look after the house.
That's their job, and they don't take any chances.'

It was the longest speech I had ever heard the man make, and it seemed
to impress Bill. He was quite humble.

'I didn't think of that,' he said. 'We'd best start in to train this
tyke at once.'

Mother often used to say, when I went on about wanting to go out into
the world and see life, 'You'll be sorry when you do. The world isn't
all bones and liver.' And I hadn't been living with the man and Bill in
their cottage long before I found out how right she was.

It was the man's shyness that made all the trouble. It seemed as if he
hated to be taken notice of.

It started on my ve