that smelled like
stables and had deep dusty bins where he would have liked to play. Above
the bins were delightful little square-fronted drawers, labelled Rape,
Hemp, Canary, Millet, Mustard, and so on; and above the drawers pictures
of the kind of animals that were fed on the kind of things that the shop
sold. Fat, oblong cows that had eaten Burley's Cattle Food, stout
pillows of wool that Ovis's Sheep Spice had fed, and, brightest and best
of all, an incredibly smooth-plumaged parrot, rainbow-colored, cocking a
black eye bright with the intoxicating qualities of Perrokett's Artistic
Bird Seed.

"Gimme," said Dickie, leaning against the counter and pointing a grimy
thumb at the wonder--"gimme a penn'orth o' that there!"

"Got the penny?" the shopman asked carefully.

Dickie displayed it, parted with it, and came home nursing a paper bag
full of rustling promises.

"Why," said the Man Next Door, "that ain't seeds. It's parrot food, that
is."

"It said the Ar-something Bird Seed," said Dickie, downcast; "I thought
it 'ud come into flowers like birds--same colors as wot the poll parrot
was, dontcherknow?"

"And so it will like as not," said the Man Next Door comfortably. "I'll
set it along this end soon's I've got it turned over. I lay it'll come
up something pretty."

So the seed was sown. And the Man Next Door promised two more pennies
later for _real_ seed. Also he transplanted two of the primroses whose
faces wanted washing.

It was a grand day for Dickie. He told the whole story of it that night
when he went to bed to his only confidant, from whom he hid nothing. The
confidant made no reply, but Dickie was sure this was not because the
confidant didn't care about the story. The confidant was a blackened
stick about five inches long, with little blackened bells to it like the
bells on dogs' collars. Also a rather crooked bit of something whitish
and very hard, good to suck, or to stroke with your fingers, or to dig
holes in the soap with. Dickie had no idea what it was. His father had
given it to him in the hospital where Dickie was taken to say good-bye
to him. Good-bye had to be said because of father having fallen off the
scaffolding where he was at work and not getting better. "You stick to
that," father had said, looking dreadfully clean in the strange bed
among all those other clean beds; "it's yourn, your very own. My dad
give it to me, and it belonged to his dad. Don't you let any one take
it away.