Part 9 (2/2)
”If I lived in the city, you might come every evening to me, and I would teach you.”
”Would you take so much trouble about me?” asked d.i.c.k, earnestly.
”Certainly; I should like to see you getting on. There isn't much chance of that if you don't know how to read and write.”
”You're a good feller,” said d.i.c.k, gratefully. ”I wish you did live in New York. I'd like to know somethin'. Whereabouts do you live?”
”About fifty miles off, in a town on the left bank of the Hudson.
I wish you'd come up and see me sometime. I would like to have you come and stop two or three days.”
”Honor bright?”
”I don't understand.”
”Do you mean it?” asked d.i.c.k, incredulously.
”Of course I do. Why shouldn't I?”
”What would your folks say if they knowed you asked a boot-black to visit you?”
”You are none the worse for being a boot-black, d.i.c.k.”
”I aint used to genteel society,” said d.i.c.k. ”I shouldn't know how to behave.”
”Then I could show you. You won't be a boot-black all your life, you know.”
”No,” said d.i.c.k; ”I'm goin' to knock off when I get to be ninety.”
”Before that, I hope,” said Frank, smiling.
”I really wish I could get somethin' else to do,” said d.i.c.k, soberly. ”I'd like to be a office boy, and learn business, and grow up 'spectable.”
”Why don't you try, and see if you can't get a place, d.i.c.k?”
”Who'd take Ragged d.i.c.k?”
”But you aint ragged now, d.i.c.k.”
”No,” said d.i.c.k; ”I look a little better than I did in my Was.h.i.+ngton coat and Louis Napoleon pants. But if I got in a office, they wouldn't give me more'n three dollars a week, and I couldn't live 'spectable on that.”
”No, I suppose not,” said Frank, thoughtfully. ”But you would get more at the end of the first year.”
”Yes,” said d.i.c.k; ”but by that time I'd be nothin' but skin and bones.”
Frank laughed. ”That reminds me,” he said, ”of the story of an Irishman, who, out of economy, thought he would teach his horse to feed on shavings. So he provided the horse with a pair of green spectacles which made the shavings look eatable. But unfortunately, just as the horse got learned, he up and died.”
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