Page:Hardings luck - nesbit.djvu/142

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106
"TO GET YOUR OWN LIVING"

on—a talent I call it. And now you want to throw it away. But you can't. We got to live."

"In the dream," said Dickie, "there didn't seem to be no unemployed. Every one was 'prenticed to a trade. I wish it was like that here."

"Well, it ain't," said Mr. Beale shortly. "I wasn't never 'prenticed to no trade, no more'n what you'll be."

"Worse luck," said Dickie. "But I started learning a lot of things—games mostly, in the dream, I did—and I started making a boat—a galleon they called it. All the names is different there. And I carved a little box—a fair treat it was—with my father's arms on it."

"Yer father's what?"

"Coat of arms. Gentlemen there all has different things—patterns like; they calls 'em coats of arms, and they put it on their silver and on their carriages and their furniture."

"Put what?" Beale asked again.

"The blazon. All gentlepeople have it."

"Don't you come the blazing toff over me," said Beale with sudden fierceness, "cause I won't 'ave it. See? It's them bloomin' Talbots put all this rot into your head."

"The Talbots? " said Dickie. "Oh! the Talbots ain't been gentry more than a couple of hundred years. Our family's as old as King Alfred."

"Stow it, I say!" said Beale, more fiercely still. "I see what you're after; you want us to part company, that's what you want. Well, go. Go back to yer old Talbots and be the nice lady's