“I come across Elbert first when I was about eight an’ twenty,” said Peony, when Sarah Brown, in rather a loud dressing-gown, had taken her seat on the stairs beside her.  “Elbert was the ideel kid, an’ me—­nothing to speak of.  Nothin’ more than a lump o’ mud, I use to say.  All my life, if you’ll believe me, cully, I’ve lived in mud—­an’ kep’ me eye on the moon, so to say.  I worked in a factory all day, makin’ mud, as it were, for muddy Jews, an’ every Saturday night I took ’ome twelve shillin’s-worth o’ mud to keep meself alive in a city o’ mud until the Saturday after.  But o’ nights there was the moon, or else the stars, or else the sunset, an’ anyway all the air between to look at.  I ’ad a back room, ‘igh up, and o’ nights I use to sit an’ breave there, an’ look at the sky.  Believe me, dearie, I was mad about breavin’—­it was me only recreation, so to say.  By Gawd, it’s a fair wonder ‘ow the sky an’ the air keeps on above the mud, and ‘ow we looks at it, an’ breaves it, an’ never pays no rent for it, when all’s said an’ done.  There ain’t never a penny put in the slot for the moonlight, when you come to think of it, yet still it all goes on.  Well, in those days, I never spoke to a soul, an’ ‘ated everybody, an’ I got very queer, queerer nor many as is locked up in Claybury this minute.  I got to thinkin’ as ’ow there was a debt ’anging over us all, some’ow the sky seemed like a sort of upper floor to all our ‘ouses, with the stars an’ the moon for windows, an’ it seemed like as if there did oughter be some rent to pay, though the Landlord was a reel gent and never pressed for it.  There might be people ‘oo lived among flowers in the sunlight, an’, so to say, rented the parlour floor, but not me.  I ‘ad the upper floor, an’ breaved the light o’ the moon.  As for flowers—­bless you, I’d never ’ardly seen a flower stuck proper to the ground until a year ago.  Well, dearie, I use to make believe as ’ow we’d all get a charnce, all to ourselves, to pay what we owed.  Some people, I thought, runs away from the debt, an’ some pays it in bad money, but, I ses to meself, if ever my charnce come, I’ll pay it the very best I can.  Lawd, ’ow I ’ated everybody in those days.  It seemed like people was all rotten, an’ as if all the churches an’ all the cherities was the rottenest of all the lot.  Well, then, dearie, Elbert blew in.  You know what kids is mostly like in the Brown Borough, but Elbert—­’e never was.  Straight legs ’e ‘ad, an’ never a chilblain nor a sore, an’ a small up-lookin’ face, an’ yallery ’air—­what you could see of it, for of course I always made ’im keep it nicely cropped to the pink.  You never see sich a clean boy, you never see ’im but what ’e seemed to ’ave sponged ‘is collar that minute, an’ the little seat to ‘is breeks always patched in the right colour, an’ all.  Yet ’e wasn’t one of them choir-boy kinds, ’e could ’ave ’is little game with the best of ’em, an’ often kicked up no end of a row when we was playin’ pretendin’