HARDING'S LUCK

Contents


CHAPTER PAGE
I. TINKLER AND THE MOONFLOWER 1
II. BURGLARS 31
III. THE ESCAPE 58
IV. WHICH WAS THE DREAM? 82
V. "TO GET YOUR OWN LIVING" 115
VI. BURIED TREASURE 144
VII. DICKIE LEARNS MANY THINGS 178
VIII. GOING HOME 208
IX. KIDNAPPED 228
X. THE NOBLE DEED 250
XI. LORD ARDEN 275
XII. THE END 300



Harding's Luck




CHAPTER I

TINKLER AND THE MOONFLOWER


DICKIE lived at New Cross. At least the address was New Cross, but
really the house where he lived was one of a row of horrid little houses
built on the slope where once green fields ran down the hill to the
river, and the old houses of the Deptford merchants stood stately in
their pleasant gardens and fruitful orchards. All those good fields and
happy gardens are built over now. It is as though some wicked giant had
taken a big brush full of yellow ochre paint, and another full of mud
color, and had painted out the green in streaks of dull yellow and
filthy brown; and the brown is the roads and the yellow is the houses.
Miles and miles and miles of them, and not a green thing to be seen
except the cabbages in the greengrocers' shops, and here and there some
poor trails of creeping-jenny drooping from a dirty window-sill. There
is a little yard at the back of each house; this is called "the garden,"
and some of these show green--but they only show it to the houses' back
windows. You cannot see it from the street. These gardens are green,
because green is the color that most pleases and soothes men's eyes; and
however you may shut people up between bars of yellow and mud color, and
however hard you may make them work, and however little wage you may pay
them for working, there will always be found among those people some men
who are willing to work a little longer, and for no wages at all, so
that they may have green things growing near them.

But there were no green things growing in the garden at the back of the
house where Dickie lived with his aunt. There were stones and bones, and
bits of brick, and dirty old dish-cloths matted together with grease and
mud, worn-out broom-heads and broken shovels, a bottomless pail, and the
mouldy remains of a hutch where once rabbits had lived. But that was a
very long time ago, and Dickie had never seen the rabbits. A boy had
brought a brown rabbit to school once, buttoned up inside his jacket,
and he had let Dickie hold it in his hands for several minutes before
the teacher detected its presence and shut it up in a locker till school
should be over. So Dickie knew what rabbits were like. And he was fond
of the hutch for the sake of what had once lived there.