Boys -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Slums -- Fiction
He was saved at his extremity, for he could never have reached the
street's end. The woman who had done it (probably she had boys of her
own on the crook) filled the entrance with her frowsy bulk, and the
chase straggled past. Dicky caught the stair-post for a moment's
support, and then staggered out at the back of the house. He gasped, he
panted, things danced blue before him, but still he clutched his jacket
hem and the music box lying within. The back door gave on a
cobble-paved court, with other doors, two coster's barrows, and a few
dusty fowls. Dicky sat on a step where a door was shut, and rested his
head against the frame.
The beating in his head grew slower and lighter, and presently he could
breathe with no fear of choking. He rose and moved off, still panting,
and feeble in the legs. The court ended in an arched passage, through
which he gained the street beyond. Here he had but to turn to the left,
and he was in Brick Lane, and thence all was clear to the Old Jago.
Regaining his breath and his confidence as he went, he bethought him of
the Jago Row retreat, where he might examine his prize at leisure,
embowered amid trucks and barrows. Thither he pushed his way, and soon,
in the shade of the upturned barrow, he brought out the music box.
Bright and shiny, it had taken no damage in the flight, though on his
hands he found scratches, and on his shins bruises, got he knew not how.
On the top of the box was the picture of a rosy little boy in crimson
presenting a scarlet nosegay to a rosy little girl in pink, while a red
brick mansion filled the distance and solidified the composition. The
brilliant hoop that made the sides (silver, Dicky was convinced) was
stamped in patterns, and the little brass handle was an irresistible
temptation. Dicky climbed a truck, and looked about him, peeping from
beside the loose fence-plank. Then, seeing nobody very near, he muffled
the box as well as he could in his jacket, and turned the handle.
This was indeed worth all the trouble. _Gently Does the Trick_ was the
tune, and Dicky, with his head aside and his ear on the bunch of jacket
that covered the box, listened: his lips parted, his eyes seeking
illimitable space. He played the tune through, and played it again, and
then growing reckless, played it with the box unmuffled, till he was
startled by a bang on the fence from without. It was but a passing boy
with a stick, but Dicky was sufficiently disturbed to abandon his
quarters and take his music elsewhere.
What he longed to do was to take it home and play it to Looey, but that
was out of the question: he remembered the watch. But there was Jerry's
Gullen's canary, and him Dicky sought and found. Canary blinked solemnly
when the resplendent box was flashed in his eyes, and set his ears back
and forward as, muffled again in Dicky's jacket, it tinkled out its
tune.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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