“Was he just like other people, Bim?”

“Yes, just.  With a beard, you know—­just like he always was.”

“Yes, but what sort of things did he wear?” “Oh, just ord’nary things, like you.”  There was no sense of excitement or wonder to be got out of him.  It was true that Mr. Jack hadn’t shown himself for quite a long time, but that, Bim felt, was natural enough.  “He’ll come less and seldomer and seldomer as you get big, you know.  It was just at first, when one was very little and didn’t know one’s way about—­just to help babies not to be frightened.  Timothy would tell you only he won’t.  Then he comes only a little—­just at special times like this was.”

Bim told you this with a slightly bored air, as though it were silly of you not to know, and really his air of certainty made an incredulous challenge a difficult thing.  On the present occasion Mr. Jack was just there, in the middle of the crowd, smiling and friendly.  He took Bim’s hand, and, “Of course,” Bim said, “there didn’t have to be any ’splaining. He knew what I wanted.”  True or not, I like to think of them, in the evening air, serenely safe and comfortable, and in any case, it was surely strange that if, as one’s common sense compels one to suppose, Bim were all alone in that crowd, no one wondered or stopped him nor asked him where his home was.  At any rate, I have no opinions on the subject.  Bim says that, at once, they found themselves out of the crowd in a quiet, little “dinky” street, as he called it, a street that, in his description of it, answered to nothing that I can remember in this part of the world.  His account of it seems to present a dark, rather narrow place, with overhanging roofs and swinging signs, and nobody, he says, at all about, but a church with a bell, and outside one shop a row of bright-coloured clothes hanging.  At any rate, here Bim found the place that he wanted.  There was a little shop with steps down into it and a tinkling bell which made a tremendous noise when you pushed the old oak door.  Inside there was every sort of thing.  Bim lost himself here in the ecstasy of his description, lacking also names for many of the things that he saw.  But there was a whole suit of shining armour, and there were jewels, and old brass trays, and carpets, and a crocodile, which Bim called a “crodocile.”  There was also a friendly old man with a white beard, and over everything a lovely smell, which Bim said was like “roast potatoes” and “the stuff mother has in a bottle in her bedwoom.”

Bim could, of course, have stayed there for ever, but Mr. Jack reminded him of a possibly anxious family.  “There, is that what you’re after?” he said, and, sure enough, there on a shelf, smiling and eager to be bought, was a mug exactly like the one that Bim had broken.

There was then the business of paying for it, the money-box was produced and opened by the old man with “a shining knife,” and Bim was gravely informed that the money found in the box was exactly the right amount.  Bim had been, for a moment, in an agony of agitation lest he should have too little, but as he told us, “There was all Uncle Alfred’s Christmas money, and what mother gave me for the tooth, and that silly lady with the green dress who would kiss me.”  So, you see, there must have been an awful amount.