So the hours passed into pleasant days and into happier weeks. Willie thought of Joe very often but he didn't feel too lonely because he was interested in what went on behind those walls - behind the walls of the well-built house and behind the walls of the slum house.
      He enjoyed listening to Henrietta and Humphrey when they talked to each other. They were so pleasant. He enjoyed it when their son Richard came to visit, because he knew that made them very happy. He liked the Pickerings very much for what they were, and also because their kitchen was always well stocked. He also like the regular way they took their walks which made it a simple matter for him to get his food.

      Once or twice he thought it might be nice to introduce himself, but that experience with the man with the iron bar had made him extremely sensitive about meeting new people, even if they were as pleasant as the Pickerings. He knew, too, of course, that the old woman, Henries, had a strange habit of stuffing twenty crisp pieces of paper into the hole in the wall once every week. It piled up higher and higher, week after week, into a huge mountain. Sometimes Willie rolled around in it, but most of the time he paid it no attention. He reckoned that the hole must be Mrs. Pickering's own private disposal centre for her crisp pieces of paper. They were handy as window-shades, but beyond that he saw no use for them.

      He also got to know the miserable people who lived in the slum house. The man with the red face who had tried to kill him with the iron bar was called John Smith. His wife's name was Mary. The oldest child, Lucille, was fourteen, and the youngest was a boy named Malcolm, about one and a half years old. The children were always dirty. There nosed were always running.

All of them sniffed and coughed and kept catching colds. Their mother was about forty years old, but she looked nearer sixty. She was as sloppy as children. She never said a pleasant word to them. No one said a pleasant word to anyone in that family.

When the father wasn't beating his wife he was beating the children and when he wasn't doing that he was snoring.

He was drunk most of the time and he hardly ever worked. His wife took in washing to earn a few pennies for food, and was always complaining about her aching back. There wasn't even quiet in this house during the night because the children had nightmares and kept screaming in their sleep. The family was as mean and miserable and unhappy a group of people as ever lived, from little Malcolm, who was always crying, up to the parents, who were always shouting and fighting.
     "Very unfortunate people," thought Willie who, by this time, had begun to pity them a little.