"The beaks, they moves you on when they ketches you; but ef yer get under a cart or in among the baskets you generally dodges 'em." "And suppose you want to pay for a place to sleep, where do you go and how much do you pay?" "Tuppence," the boy said; "or if yer want a first-rate, fourpence. Does yer want to find a crib?" he asked doubtfully, examining his companion. "Well, yes," George said. "I want to find some quiet place where I can sleep, cheap, you know." "Out of work?" the boy inquired. "Yes. I haven't got anything to do at present. I am looking for a place, you know." "Don't know no one about?" "No; I have just come in from Croydon." The boy shook his head. "Don't know nothing as would suit," he said. "Why, yer'd get them clothes and any money yet had walked off with the wery fust night." "I should not get a room to myself, I suppose, even for fourpence?" George asked, making a rapid calculation that this would come to two and fourpence per week, as much as his mother had paid for a comparatively comfortable room in Croydon. The boy opened his eyes in astonishment at his companion requiring a room for himself. "Lor' bless yer, yer'd have a score of them with yer!" "I don't care about a bed," George said. "Just some place to sleep in. Just some straw in any quiet corner." This seemed more reasonable to the boy, and he thought the matter over. "Well," he said at last, "I knows of a place where they puts up the hosses of the market carts. I knows a hostler there. Sometimes when it's wery cold he lets me sleep up in the loft. Aint it warm and comfortable just! I helps him with the hosses sometimes, and that's why. I will ax him if yer likes." George assented at once. His ideas as to the possibility of sleeping in the open air had vanished when he saw the surroundings, and a bed in a quiet loft seemed to him vastly better than sleeping in a room with twenty others. "How do you live?" he asked the lad, "and what's your name?" "They calls me the Shadder," the boy said rather proudly; "but my real name's Bill." "Why do they call you the Shadow?" George asked. "'Cause the bobbies finds it so hard to lay hands on me," Bill replied. "But what do they want to lay hands on you for?" George asked. "Why, for bagging things, in course," Bill replied calmly. "Bagging things? Do you mean stealing?" George said, greatly shocked. "Well, not regular prigging," the Shadow replied; "not wipes, yer know, nor tickers, nor them kind of things. I aint never prigged nothing of that kind." "Well, what is it then you do--prig?" George asked, mystified. "Apples or cabbages, or a bunch of radishes, onions sometimes, or 'taters. That aint regular prigging, you know." "Well, it seems to me the same sort of thing," George said, after a pause. "I tell yer it aint the same sort of thing at all," the Shadow said angrily. "Everyone as aint a fool knows that taters aint wipes, and no one can't say as a apple and a ticker are the same."