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by John OiDEhl
N the reign of the glorious warrior, King Edward III, there was a little boy called Dick Whittington, whose father and mother died when lie was very young, so that he remembered nothing at all about them, and was left a ragged little fellow, running about a country village. As poor Dick was not old enough to work at a trade, he was very badly off, getting but little for his dinner, and for breakfast more often nothing at all ; for the village people were very poor, indeed, and could spare him not much more than the potato-peels and a hard crust of bread.
For all that, Dick Whittington, or, as some called him, Whitington, was a very sharp boy, and was always listening to what the gossips talked about. On Sundays he was sure to get near the farmers as they sat talking on the tombstones in the kirkyard; and on market days you might see little Dick leaning against the sign-post of the village alehouse, where people stopped to drink and bandy words as they came from the next town.
In this manner Dick overheard a great many very strange things about the great city called London; for the foolish country people of those times thought that folks in London were all
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fine gentlemen and ladies, and that there was singing and music there all day long, and that the streets were really paved with gold.
It was the harvesting-time when Dick heard all this, and he was gleaning in the wheat-fields for a farmer, and sleeping on a pallet in his barn at night. And, in the short evenings, by the chimneyside, the old farmer, seeing how anxious Dick was to learn things, took a delight in filling his head with fanciful yarns about London City's wondrous sights.
One day a covered wagon with four horses, all with bells on their heads, passed down the road while Dick raked in the fields. He thought that this wagon must be going to the fine town of London; so he took courage and asked the wagoner to let him walk by his side. As soon as the man heard that poor Dick had no father nor mother, and saw, by his ragged clothes, that he could not come to a more wretched pass, he told Dick that he might go along, and so they set off on the journey together.
Dick never remembered afterwards how he contrived to get meat and drink on the road, nor how he could have walked so far, nor what he did at night to rest his aching body. Per