and earned twenty shillings weekly, and out of it paid for Thomas’s drink and Thomas’s Girl and his own food, and beds and a sitting-room and fires and laundry for both, and occasional luxuries in the way of wooden animals for Thomas to play with.  So they were not extremely poor; they were respectably well-to-do.  For Thomas’s sake, Peter supposed it was worth while not to be extremely poor, even though it meant addressing envelopes and living in a great grey prison-house of a city, where one only surmised the first early pushings of the spring beyond the encompassing gloom.

Peter used to tell Thomas about that, in order that he might know something of the joyous world beyond the walls.  He told Thomas in March, taking time by the forelock, about the early violets that were going some time to open blue eyes in the ditches by the roads where the spring winds walk; about the blackthorn that would suddenly make a white glory of the woods; about the green, sticky budding of the larches, and the keen sweet smell of them, and the damp fragrance of the roaming wind that would blow over river-flooded fields, smelling of bonfires and wet earth.  He took him through the seasons, telling him of the blown golden armies of the daffodils that marched out for Easter, and the fragrant white glory of the may; and the pale pink stars of the hedge-roses, and the yellow joy of buttercup fields wherein cows stand knee-deep and munch, in order to give Thomas sweet white milk.

“Ugh,” said Thomas, making a face, and Peter answered, “Yes, I know; sometimes they come upon an onion-flower and eat that, and that’s not nice, of course.  But mostly it’s grass and buttercups and clover.”  Then he told him of hot July roads, where the soft white dust lies, while the horses and the cows stand up to their middles in cool streams beneath the willows and switch their tails, and the earth dreams through the year’s hot noon; and of August, the world’s welfare and the earth’s warming-pan, and how, in the fayre rivers, swimming is a sweet exercise.  “And my birthday comes then.  Oh, ’tis the merry time, wherein honest neighbours make good cheer, and God is glorified in his blessings on the earth.  Then cometh September, Thomas”—­Peter was half talking, half reading out of a book he had got to amuse Thomas—­“then cometh September, and then he (that’s you, Thomas) doth freshly beginne to garnish his house and make provision of needfull things for to live in winter, which draweth very nere....  There are a few nice things in September; ripe plums and pears and nuts—­(no, nuts aren’t nice, because our teeth aren’t good, are they; at least mine aren’t, and you’ve only got one and a half); but anyhow, plums, and a certain amount of yellow sunshine, and Thomas’s birthday.  But on the whole it’s too near the end of things; and in briefe, I thus conclude of it, I hold it the Winter’s forewarning and the Summer’s farewell.  Adieu....  We won’t pursue the year further, my dear; the rest is silence and impenetrable gloom, anyhow in this corner of the world, and doesn’t bear thinking about.”