L. R. Brightwell

“ For the last five years my daily life has been brightened in manner following. We live next door to a railway station and a pastry-cook's. Every morning Mabel gives me a round hard thing she calls a penny, and very slippery to hold in one's mouth. ”

“ The clerk's a man with a very well-regulated mind. He gives me chocolate. Just then, however, he was out, but his three-year-old boy-puppy was there sitting on a table all covered with bits of cardboard and little piles of pennies, ordinary brown ones, big white ones and a few little yellow ones. Well, in less time than it takes to cock your ears, that baby was shovelling pennies through the slit in my box and chuckling with joy. I stood it as long as I could, and then, in the nick of time, snatched a big white penny out of his paw and bolted off to the confectioner's. ”

“ I carry the penny to the pastry-cook's. The girl takes it and gives me a currant biscuit in exchange. Sometimes there are people in the shop, and then I gaze upon them meltingly. If they are the right sort, they melt—according to their means; usually it's pastry. The rest of the day I spend loafing about the station and the pastry-cook's. Now all that is changed.
Last Thursday Mabel took me to a Committee, a place full of typewriters and ladies; and I was registered—so they said; Mabel being given a sheet of paper all over scribble, and a wooden box with "War Relief Fund" on it. ”