CHAPTER II
BURGLARS
Dickie fell asleep between clean, coarse sheets in a hard, narrow bed, for which fourpence had been paid.
"Put yer clobber under yer bolster, likewise yer boots," was the last instruction of his new friend and "father."
There had been a bath—or something equally cleansing—in a pail near a fire where ragged but agreeable people were cooking herrings, sausages, and other delicacies on little girdirons or pans that they unrolled from the strange bundles that were their luggage. One man who had no girdiron cooked a piece of steak on the kitchen tongs. Dickie thought him very clever. A very fat woman asked Dickie to toast a herring for her on a bit of wood; and when he had done it she gave him two green apples.
He laid in bed and heard jolly voices talking and singing in the kitchen below. And he thought how pleasant it was to be a tramp, and what jolly fellows the tramps were; for it seemed that all these nice people were "on the road," and this place where the kitchen was, and
