expects I shall get the sack afore long."

"Nonsense, Bill! you will like it when you once get accustomed to it,
and it's a thousand times better having to draw your pay regularly at
the end of the week than to get up in the morning not knowing whether
you are going to have breakfast or not. Won't mother be pleased when I
write and tell her I have got a place! Last time she wrote she said
that she was a great deal better, and the doctor thought she would be
out in the spring, and then I hope she will be coming up here, and
that will be jolly."

"Yes, that's just it," Bill said; "that's whear it is; you and I will
get on fust-rate, but it aint likely as your mother would put up with
a chap like me."

"My mother knows that you have been a good friend to me, Bill, and
that will be quite enough for her. You wait till you see her."

"My eye, what a lot of little houses there is about here!" Bill said,
"just all the same pattern; and how wide the streets is to what they
is up Drury Lane!"

"Yes, we ought to have no difficulty in getting a room here, Bill, now
that we shall have money to pay for it; only think, we shall have
sixteen shillings a week between us!"

"It's a lot of money," Bill said vaguely. "Sixteen bob! My eye, there
aint no saying what it will buy! I wish I looked a little bit more
respectable," he said, with a new feeling as to the deficiencies of
his attire. "It didn't matter in the Garden; but to go to work with a
lot of other chaps, these togs aint what you may call spicy."

"They certainly are not, Bill," George said with a laugh. "We must see
what we can manage."

George's own clothes were worn and old, but they looked respectable
indeed by the side of those of his companion. Bill's elbows were both
out, the jacket was torn and ragged, he had no waistcoat, and his
trousers were far too large for him, and were kept up by a single
brace, and were patched in a dozen places.

When George first met him he was shoeless, but soon after they had set
up housekeeping together George had bought from a cobbler's stall a
pair of boots for two shillings, and these, although now almost
falling to pieces, were still the best part of Bill's outfit.

CHAPTER III.

WORK.

The next morning George went out with the bundle containing his Sunday
clothes, which had been untouched since his arrival in town, and going
to an old-clothes shop he exchanged them for a suit of working clothes
in fair condition