"Gran’sir don’t know I haven’t got another shift," whined Little Mew. "Got to get these wet things off, anyhow."
He removed them and then crept into bed. It was dark when granny returned.
From the window at the head of his bed Bartie watched the sun go down, and then he saw the white stars come into the sky.
About that time the evening breeze began to breathe heavily; and was that the reason why the stars, blossom-like, opened their fair, delicate petals, even as they say the wind-flowers of spring open when the wind begins to blow?
"They don’t seem to amount to much--just like me," thought Bartie; and having thus come into harmony with the world’s opinion of himself, he closed his eyes, like an anemone shutting its petals, and went to sleep.
Don’t stars amount to much? They would be missed if, some night, people looking up should learn that they had gone for ever.
And granny coming home, having learned elsewhere the full story of Little Mew’s exposure to an awful peril, went upstairs, and, candle in hand, looked down on the motherless child in bed fast asleep.
"Poor little boy!" she murmured. "I should miss him if he was gone. Yes, I should terribly."
She wiped her eyes, and then tucked up Bartie for the night.
Dave Fletcher and Dick Pray were boys who had grown up in the same town, but from the same soil had come two very different productions. They were unlike in their personal appearance. Dick Pray would come down the street throwing his head to right and left, scattering sharp, eager glances from his restless black eyes, and swinging his hands.
"Somebody is coming," people would be very likely to say.
Dave Fletcher had a quiet, unobtrusive, straight-forward way of walking. Dick was quite a handsome youth; but the person that Dave Fletcher saw in the glass was ordinary in feature, with pleasant, honest eyes of blue, and hair--was it brown or black?
Dave sometimes wished it were browner or blacker, and not "a go-between," as he had told his mother.
Dave and Dick were not as yet trying to make their own way; but they were between fifteen and sixteen, and knew that they must soon be stirring for themselves.
They had already begun to intimate how they would stir in after life.