CHAPTER 10
LORD TOTTENHAM

Oswald is a boy of firm and unswerving character, and he had never
wavered from his first idea. He felt quite certain that the books were
right, and that the best way to restore fallen fortunes was to rescue an
old gentleman in distress. Then he brings you up as his own son: but if
you preferred to go on being your own father's son I expect the old
gentleman would make it up to you some other way. In the books the
least thing does it--you put up the railway carriage window--or you pick
up his purse when he drops it--or you say a hymn when he suddenly asks
you to, and then your fortune is made.

The others, as I said, were very slack about it, and did not seem to
care much about trying the rescue. They said there wasn't any deadly
peril, and we should have to make one before we could rescue the old
gentleman from it, but Oswald didn't see that that mattered. However,
he thought he would try some of the easier ways first, by himself.

So he waited about the station, pulling up railway carriage windows for
old gentlemen who looked likely--but nothing happened, and at last the
porters said he was a nuisance. So that was no go. No one ever asked
him to say a hymn, though he had learned a nice short one, beginning
'New every morning'--and when an old gentleman did drop a two-shilling
piece just by Ellis's the hairdresser's, and Oswald picked it up, and
was just thinking what he should say when he returned it, the old
gentleman caught him by the collar and called him a young thief. It