He therefore got out of the Poorhouse easily, and joined Jerry a mile or two out of the city. He took with him his only treasure, the broken cairngorm, which some one had declared to him was a diamond, and worth a great deal of money. This opinion was not shared by Jerry, who failed to find a purchaser for the stone, and finally relegated it to a little box in the grinding machine, which they trundled before them wherever they went. Perhaps the parochial authorities were glad to get rid of Dickie, for he was not followed or taken back. The new life suited him—it was free and untrammelled; it had constant variety, and there was a certain spice of romance about it, which made sleeping in the open air, or getting drenched with rain, or lost and benighted, as they often were, mere trifles, to be forgotten with the first blaze of sunshine. Compared with his life in the Poorhouse Dickie found it heavenly, and very soon a new and altogether unexpected result began to arise from his changed condition. When Dickie had taken to the road it was sheer impatience of restraint that sent him thither, and he had many ideas of right and wrong which are tolerated only among my “bairns.” Now Jerry was an ignorant man, who did not know one letter from another, but there was one lesson he had learned—that a life of crime is the worst paying trade in the world. Halting by roadside hamlets, resting under shady hedges, or wandering along green lanes, Jerry laid down his ideas to Dickie in a homely fashion, which would have thrown a teacher of grammar into hysterics, but which nevertheless carried conviction to the heart of the boy. Not that Dickie had ever meant to wrong Jerry, but he had only taken to this life as a make-shift till his mother should be released from prison.