“You’ll hear it all in good time, my lad,” he said. “‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ ‘Do unto others as you would they should do unto you.’ ‘Sell all thou hast and give it to the poor.’ That’s what their God tells them. Do you see them doing it?” The little man laughed a merry, good-tempered laugh. “Why, old Simon has got more sense than they have.” He stooped and patted the shaggy head resting upon his knee. “He knows it wouldn’t be any good, just looking at me as though he loved me, and then not doing what I told him.” He refilled his pipe and lighted it. “I’ll believe,” he added, “when I see them believing.” Anthony John liked visiting the tumble-down cottage in Moor End Lane. His mother was nervous of the consequences. But Mrs. Plumberry’s view was that those who talked the loudest are not always the most dangerous. “The little man’s got plenty of horse sense,” so Mrs. Plumberry argued, “and what Emma Newt don’t know about heaven and how to get there, isn’t worth trying to find out, so far as I can judge. Between the two of them he isn’t likely to get any harm even if he doesn’t get much good. Anyhow, he gets a square meal.” The dogs were the chief attraction to Anthony John. He had never been let to play in the street with the other children of the neighbourhood. It was in the dismantled railway carriage at the bottom of his uncle’s garden that he first tasted play. His uncle had taken him in and introduced him. There was first and foremost old Simon, the bob-tailed sheep-dog. The others came and went, but old Simon was not for sale. The next oldest inhabitant of the railway carriage was a smooth-coated retriever bitch. She had constituted herself old Simon’s chief assistant, always prepared to help him on the many occasions when riot had to be suppressed. It was wonderful how both dogs knew the exact moment when fighting in play turned to fighting in anger. Then not a moment was to be lost. Bess would stand ready, but she never interfered unless Simon gave a peculiar low bark that meant he wanted her. He had been instructed not to call her in if he could possibly do without her. “Never invite a woman to take part in a row you can manage by yourself,” his master had confided to him. “Once in, they never know when to stop.”