The lady hesitated for a moment, then taking her purse from her bag, handed Bindle a two-shilling piece.

Tippitt eyed it greedily.

With a final admonition not to forget, the lady drove off.

Bindle looked at the coin, spat on it, and put it in his pocket.

"Funny thing 'ow a woman'll give a couple o' bob, where a man'll make it 'alf a dollar," he remarked.

"Wot about me?" enquired Tippitt.

"Wot about you, Tippy?" repeated Bindle. "Well, least said soonest mended. You can't 'elp it."

"But I asked 'er," persisted Tippitt.[Pg 25]

[Pg 25]

"Ah! Tippy," remarked Bindle, "it ain't 'im wot asks; but 'im wot gets. 'Owever, you shall 'ave a stone-ginger at the next stoppin' place. Your ole pal ain't goin' back on you, Tippy."

Without a word, Tippitt climbed up into the driver's seat, whilst Bindle clambered on to the tail-board, where he proceeded to fill his pipe with the air of a man for whom time has no meaning.

"Good job they ain't all like me," he muttered. "I likes a day in the country, now and then; but always! Not me." He struck a match, lighted his pipe and, with a sigh of contentment, composed himself to bucolic meditation.

One of the advantages of the moving-profession in Bindle's eyes was that it gave him hours of leisured ease, whilst the goods were in transit. "You can slack it like a Cuthbert," he would say. "All you 'as to do is to sit on the tail of a van an' watch the world go by—some life that."

Bindle was awakened from his contemplation of the hedges and the white road that ribboned out before his eyes by a man coming out of a gate. At the sight of the pantechnicon he grinned and, with a jerk of his thumb, indicated the van as if it were the greatest joke in the world.

Bindle grinned back, although not quite understanding the cause of the man's amusement.

"'Ot little lot that, mate," remarked the man, stepping off the kerb and walking beside the 

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