en?"

"He did talk to me, and very kindlike too."

His father laughed again.

"Why, child, you're just counting everybody you know. That don't make
'em friends."

"Don't it? I thought it did. Well, but they shall be my friends. I shall
make 'em."

"How will you do that?"

"They can't help themselves then, if they would. If I choose to be their
friend, you know, they can't prevent me. Then there's that girl at the
crossing."

"A fine set of friends you do have, to be sure, Diamond!"

"Surely she's a friend anyhow, father. If it hadn't been for her, you
would never have got Mrs. Coleman and Miss Coleman to carry home."

His father was silent, for he saw that Diamond was right, and was
ashamed to find himself more ungrateful than he had thought.

"Then there's the new gentleman," Diamond went on.

"If he do as he say," interposed his father.

"And why shouldn't he? I daresay sixpence ain't too much for him to
spare. But I don't quite understand, father: is nobody your friend but
the one that does something for you?"

"No, I won't say that, my boy. You would have to leave out baby then."

"Oh no, I shouldn't. Baby can laugh in your face, and crow in your ears,
and make you feel so happy. Call you that nothing, father?"

The father's heart was fairly touched now. He made no answer to this
last appeal, and Diamond ended off with saying:

"And there's the best of mine to come yet--and that's you, daddy--except
it be mother, you know. You're my friend, daddy, ain't you? And I'm your
friend, ain't I?"

"And God for us all," said his father, and then they were both silent
for that was very solemn.

CHAPTER XX. DIAMOND LEARNS TO READ

THE question of the tall gentleman as to whether Diamond could read or
not set his father thinking it was high time he could; and as soon as
old Diamond was suppered and bedded, he began the task that very night.
But it was not much of a task to Diamond, for his father took for his
lesson-book those very rhymes his mother had picked up on the sea-shore;
and as Diamond was not beginning too soon, he learned very fast indeed.
Within a month he was able to spell out most of the verses for himself.

But he had never come upon the poem he thought he had heard his mother
read from it that day. He had looked through and through the book
several times after he knew the letters and a few words, fancying he
could tell the look of it, but had always failed to find one more like