Dido and Pa Read Online Free PDF

dove; it's a sailors' tavern, not suited for your youthful innocence. I'll bring you out a mug of hot purl."
    Dido was about to protest that she had been in far wilder places during the course of her travels, but then it occurred
to her that she might, while Mr. Twite was in the public house, turn the time to good account. Accordingly, as soon as the two men had gone into the tavern, she stuck her head out of the carriage window, and said to the boy holding the horses:
    "Hey, cully! D'you want to earn a brown?"
    "I'd sooner a tanner," retorted the boy, eyeing her shrewdly. "Let's see the color of your blunt."
    He was a stocky, round-faced boy, wearing a pair of leather smalls, rather too large for him, and over them a smock frock which he had belted up with a dog collar. His blue eyes were somewhat crossed, which gave him a carefree appearance; one of them looked hard at Dido, the other one stared over her shoulder. He was very freckled. Dido noticed that his coffee stall looked neat and clean, and the brass urn was brightly polished.
    She had a little money with her and was able to pull a silver sixpence out of her pocket and hold it up.
    "Boil me! A real silver Simon. What d'ye want me to do?"
    "You know the way from here to Chelsea?"
    "Do I know my granma's patch box?" retorted the boy scornfully. "Well?"
    "Go to Chelsea, and ask for the dook o' Battersea's house."
    "
Now
who're you gammoning? Go to the dook's house? He'd turn me over to the traps, sure as you're born. Who'd do that, even for a Simon?"
    "No he wouldn't," said Dido earnestly. "He's a right decent cove, the dook—his name's Simon too—and he'll be
glad to get word of me. You give him—" she searched her person for something that she could send as a token, finally pulled off one of the brass buttons from her sheepskin coat. "You give him this here button," she said, "and tell him it's from Dido Twite; that I'm with my pa on an urgent errand; I'm here in—where is this?"
    "Wapping."
    "I'm here in Wapping, and I'll come to Chelsea as soon as I'm free. Got it?"
    "I go to the dook, I tell him Died o' Fright's with her pa, an'll come to him as soon as she kin."
    "Right."
    "Let's have the mish, then."
    Dido handed over the sixpence; the boy took it, bit it, nodded sagaciously, and stowed it away among the folds of his breeches.
    "Mind," he said, "I can't leave the coffee barrer long enough to git all the way to Chelsea—that's a fair step, that be—but someone'll get it there."
    "What's your name?" asked Dido, wondering doubtfully whether she could really trust him, and wishing she had paper and pencil so that she could write Simon a note. How long would this business with her father take? Was he speaking the truth about this mysterious sick person? Did her father ever speak the truth?
    Dido sighed.
    "Name's Wally Greenaway," the boy said, eyeing Dido with care, first out of one eye, then the other. "Everyone round here knows me—my dad has the apple stall yonder."
    He nodded to a barrow along the road, piled with russet apples. A tall, large-boned man stood behind it. Despite the cold wet morning he wore only a check waistcoat over shirt sleeves and drab breeches and a red belcher neckerchief. His hair was pale gray, almost white. Dido thought that he was blind.
    "Reckon I'll buy one of his apples," she said, and scrambled out of the carriage. "Pa's being mighty slow with that mug o' purl."
    A sign on the stall said 4 APPELS Id. On close inspection the apples looked rather wizened, but Dido was hungry and thirsty. Besides, if she bought the father's wares, the son might be more likely to do her business. Remembering a piece of advice that a sailor had once given her, she said to the boy:
    "When's your birthday? Mine's the first o' March."
    When you talk to a savage or a native,
Noah Gusset had said,
always tell him some secret about yourself—your birthday, your father's name, your favorite food; tell him your secret and ask him his. That's a token of