Little Dick ran about till he was tired and it was growing dark.  And at last he sat himself down in a corner and fell asleep.  When morning came he was very cold and hungry, and though he asked every one he met to help him, only one or two gave him a halfpenny to buy some bread.  For two or three days he lived in the streets in this way, only just able to keep himself alive, when he managed to get some work to do in a hayfield, and that kept him for a short time longer, till the haymaking was over.

After this he was as badly off as ever, and did not know where to turn.  One day in his wanderings he lay down to rest in the doorway of the house of a rich merchant whose name was Fitzwarren.  But here he was soon seen by the cook-maid, who was an unkind, bad-tempered woman, and she cried out to him to be off.  “Lazy rogue,” she called him; and she said she’d precious quick throw some dirty dishwater over him, boiling hot, if he didn’t go.  However, just then Mr. Fitzwarren himself came home to dinner, and when he saw what was happening, he asked Dick why he was lying there.  “You’re old enough to be at work, my boy,” he said.  “I’m afraid you have a mind to be lazy.”

“Indeed, sir,” said Dick to him, “indeed that is not so”; and he told him how hard he had tried to get work to do, and how ill he was for want of food.  Dick, poor fellow, was now so weak that though he tried to stand he had to lie down again, for it was more than three days since he had had anything to eat at all.  The kind merchant gave orders for him to be taken into the house and gave him a good dinner, and then he said that he was to be kept, to do what work he could to help the cook.

And now Dick would have been happy enough in this good family if it had not been for the ill-natured cook, who did her best to make life a burden to him.  Night and morning she was for ever scolding him.  Nothing he did was good enough.  It was “Look sharp here” and “Hurry up there,” and there was no pleasing her.  And many’s the beating he had from the broomstick or the ladle, or whatever else she had in her hand.

At last it came to the ears of Miss Alice, Mr. Fitzwarren’s daughter, how badly the cook was treating poor Dick.  And she told the cook that she would quickly lose her place if she didn’t treat him more kindly, for Dick had become quite a favourite with the family.

After that the cook’s behaviour was a little better, but Dick still had another hardship that he bore with difficulty.  For he slept in a garret where were so many holes in the walls and the floor that every night as he lay in bed the room was overrun with rats and mice, and sometimes he could hardly sleep a wink.  One day when he had earned a penny for cleaning a gentleman’s shoes, he met a little girl with a cat in her arms, and asked whether she would not sell it to him.  “Yes, she would,” she said, though the cat was such a good mouser that she was sorry to part with her.  This just suited Dick, who kept pussy up in his garret, feeding her on scraps of his own dinner that he saved for her every day.  In a little while he had no more bother with the rats and mice.  Puss soon saw to that, and he slept sound every night.