games of a wet Sunday.  ’E ’ad one little game ’e loved best of all—­not marbles, it wasn’t, nor peg-tops—­but there, I won’t tell you what it was, for you’d laugh like the gal at the shop did when I spoke of it.  I don’t often get talkin’, but I’d ’ad a nip of brandy at the time.  Laugh fit to bust, she did—­’avin’ ’ad a nip of the same ‘erself—­an’ as’t if Elbert wasn’t blind as well, an’ if ’e wore any clothes besides wings....  The funny thing was thet Elbert did ’ave bad sight, it always seemed odd to me thet with ’is weak eyes ’e should choose to play the little game ’e did.  I use to take ’im to the ’Eath of a summer Sunday, an’ ’e use to stand on them little ridges below the Spaniards Road, with ‘is eyes shut against the sun, never botherin’ to take no aim.  I can see ’im now, a-pulling of the string of ’is bow—­it ’ad an ‘igh note, like the beginnin’ of a bit o’ music—­an’ then awf ’e’d go like a rebbit, to see where the arrer fell.  It was always a marvel to me ’e didn’t put somebody’s eye out, but I didn’t mind—­I ’ated everybody.  ’E didn’t live with me, ‘e just came in an’ out.  ’E never tol’ me ’is name was Elbert—­I just called ’im thet, the prettiest name I knew.  ‘E never tol’ me ’oo ’is people were; I shouldn’t think they could ’ave bin Brown Borough people, for Elbert seemed to ’ave bin about a lot, seen mountains an’ oceans an’ sichlike, an’ come acrost a lot of furriners—­even Germans.  ’E talked a lot about people—­as good as a novelette ’is stories was, but bloody ’igh-flavoured.  Children knows a lot in the Brown Borough.  ’Ow ’e’d noticed the things ’e ’ad with them blindish eyes of ’is, I don’t know.  I got to count on that boy no end.  Fair drunk with satisfaction, I use to feel.  Call me a fool if you like, cully, but it was three or four year before I got the idee that there was anythink funny about Elbert.  It was when it begun to look as if the War ‘ad come to stop, an’ one couldn’t look at any boy without countin’ up to see ’ow long ’e ’ad before the Army copped ‘im.  An’ then I calc’lated that Elbert should be rising fourteen now, an’ I saw then thet ’e ’adn’t grown an inch since I first see ’im, nor ’e hadn’t changed ’is ways, but still ‘e run about laughin’, playin’ ’is little kiddy-game, with ‘is face to the sun.  An’ then I remembered ’ow often ‘e’d tol’ me things thet seemed too ’istorical for sich as ’im to come by honest, tales about blokes in ’istory—­nanecdotes ’e’d use to pass acrost about Admiral Nelson, or Queen Bess—­she use to make ’im chuckle, she did—­an’ a chap called Shilly or Shally, ‘oo was drownded.  An’ I got struck all of an ’eap, to think ’e was some sort of an everlasting boy, an’ p’raps ‘e was a devil, I thought, an’ p’raps I’d sold me soul without knowin’ it.  I never took much stock of me soul, but I always ‘ad that debt o’ mine in me mind, an’ I wanted to pay it clean.  For them London mists agin the sky in the Spring, an’ for the moonlight, an’ for the sky just before a thunderstorm—­all