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When Max had been awakened and had read the note, he quavered, “I’m not sure we can get along without Ginger. We don’t know about tramping and all that. Do you think we’d better go home now? We could take a taxi. ”

“Never!” said the valiant Terry. “Go home, where you have to wash all the time, and they won’t let you have any pink cakes, and there’s newspaper reporters asking you questions, and you have to act like you liked it when horrible old maids pat you on the head? When we could be pirates and sail the bounding main?”

But he didn’t sound very defiant, and feeble was Max’s “Well, perhaps. ”

“Come on, Mixy; come on, you, Josephibus!” caroled Terry, with false heartiness. It was suddenly disheartized by a cockney voice beside them.

“Come out of that, you! Wot d’yer think ye’re doing, sleeping there? Get out!”

It was a large man in a watchman’s uniform, and the criminals slunk most ingloriously out of the railroad yards. Josephus slunk after them. They found a mean and dirty tea shop.

Terry wanted the corn flakes, Max desired the porridge, at which they had scoffed twenty-four hours before. The waitress told them they could have fried eggs, boiled eggs, bloaters, or kippers.

They sighed, and had fried eggs.

“I wonder,” said Max, suddenly excited, “if we dare drink tea. I’ve always wanted to drink tea. But my mother and Professor Michelowsky never would let me. Do you suppose we dare?”

“Oh, let’s! No matter what our mothers say! A pirate can’t always be thinking about what his mother says!”

And daringly, taking the first step into lives of dissipation, they ordered tea.

Now it may be true, as envious foreigners assert, that the British Empire is founded on four things: tea, beer, calico, and diplomacy. But this uncheering cup at the den in Bermondsey was not the sort of tea on which empires are likely to be founded. It was bitter. It was lukewarm.

Max tasted it, and shook his head. “I don’t understand why people drink it,” he mused. “And I don’t understand why I have to study Latin. And I don’t understand why Mother is so cross with me when I tell her I want to be a farmer. Oh, dear, I’m”—his voice quavered—“I’m glad we’re going to be pirates! They don’t drink tea. They drink rum. And that must be nice!”

Very slightly cheered by breakfast, they started for Bristol.

Bristol, Ginger had said, was west. Very well, they would walk westward.

The waitress told them which direction was west, and they trudged for miles. They kept on gallantly—stopping only to keep Josephus out of a dog fight and keep the other dogs in it; to buy large and indigestible balls of hard candy; to watch a back-yard cricket game; to dally with a light mid-morning refreshment of toffee, sugar buns, cocoa, tongue, strawberry tart, and shortbread.

Toward noon they came out on a stretch of railroad tracks which barred their advance. While they were looking for a crossing, Terry started, and whimpered, “Look, Mixy! There’s where we slept last night! We’ve gone in a circle!”

“Oh, fiddle!” raged Max the Pirate.

They sat disconsolately on a box, Josephus abashed at their feet.

“I guess,” Terry suggested, after a gloomy pause, “we better take a taxi till we get out of London. Then we can follow a road west. Let’s see how much money we got left. Gimme that two shillings I lent you and we’ll count up. ”

They gravely spread all their notes, their silver and copper, between them on the box, and counted them. Of Terry’s fifty pounds, together with the fifteen-pence which had been Max’s pocket money, they now had left forty-seven pounds and a penny.

“Oh, we can do lots with that!” gloated Terry. “We could buy a lady dog, to go with Josephus. He must get lonely. ”

“But he might not like her. ”

“Oh, gee, that’seasy! Lookit. We’d go into a dog store, see, and I’d say to the clerk, ‘Look,’ I’d say, ‘I want to find a lady dog for my dog Josephus,’ I’d say, ‘and I want him to look around and see which lady dog he likes,’ I’d say, and then Josephus would look around at all the cages they got dogs in-”