flour-mill, the door of which was half-open, they caught sight of a
heap, whether floury dust or dusty flour, it would have been hard to
say, that seemed waiting only for them to help themselves from
it. Fain to still the craving of birds too early for any worm, they
swallowed a considerable portion of it, choking as it was, nor met
with rebuke. There was good food in it, and they might have fared
worse.

Another day's tramp was thus inaugurated. How it was to end no one in
the world knew less than the trampers.

Before it was over, a considerable change had passed upon Clare; for a
new era was begun in his history, and he started to grow more
rapidly. Hitherto, while with his father or mother, or with his little
sister, making life happy to her; even while at the farm, doing hard
work, he had lived with much the same feeling with which he read a
story: he was in the story, half dreaming, half acting it. The
difference between a thing that passed through his brain from the
pages of a book, or arose in it as he lay in bed either awake or
asleep, and the thing in which he shared the life and motion of the
day, was not much marked in his consciousness. He was a dreamer with
open eyes and ready hands, not clearly distinguishing thought and
action, fancy and fact. Even the cold and hunger he had felt at the
farm had not sufficed to wake him up; he had only had to wait and they
were removed. But now that he did not know whence his hunger was to be
satisfied, or where shelter was to be had; now also that there was a
hunger outside him, and a cold that was not his, which yet he had to
supply and to frustrate in the person of Tommy, life began to grow
real to him; and, which was far more, he began to grow real to
himself, as a power whose part it was to encounter the necessities