Dickie went. He went slowly, because he was lame. And he was lame because his "aunt" had dropped him when he was a baby. She was not a nice woman, and I am glad to say that she goes out of this story almost at once. But she did keep Dickie when his father died, and she might have sent him to the work-house. For she was not really his aunt, but just the woman of the house where his father had lodged. It was good of her to keep Dickie, even if she wasn't very kind to him. And as that is all the good I can find to say about her, I will say no more. With his little crutch, made out of a worn-out broom cut down to his little height, he could manage quite well in spite of his lameness. [Illustration: "'GIMME,' SAID DICKIE--'GIMME A PENN'ORTH O' THAT THERE.'"] He found the corn-chandler's--a really charming shop that smelled like stables and had deep dusty bins where he would have liked to play. Above the bins were delightful little square-fronted drawers, labelled Rape, Hemp, Canary, Millet, Mustard, and so on; and above the drawers pictures of the kind of animals that were fed on the kind of things that the shop sold. Fat, oblong cows that had eaten Burley's Cattle Food, stout pillows of wool that Ovis's Sheep Spice had fed, and, brightest and best of all, an incredibly smooth-plumaged parrot, rainbow-colored, cocking a black eye bright with the intoxicating qualities of Perrokett's Artistic Bird Seed. "Gimme," said Dickie, leaning against the counter and pointing a grimy thumb at the wonder--"gimme a penn'orth o' that there!" "Got the penny?" the shopman asked carefully. Dickie displayed it, parted with it, and came home nursing a paper bag full of rustling promises. "Why," said the Man Next Door, "that ain't seeds. It's parrot food, that is." "It said the Ar-something Bird Seed," said Dickie, downcast; "I thought it 'ud come into flowers like birds--same colors as wot the poll parrot was, dontcherknow?" "And so it will like as not," said the Man Next Door comfortably. "I'll set it along this end soon's I've got it turned over. I lay it'll come up something pretty." So the seed was sown. And the Man Next Door promised two more pennies later for _real_ seed. Also he transplanted two of the primroses whose faces wanted washing.