‘It’s well to be them,’ said the mother of many children, peering with longing eyes into the neatly kept parlour. ‘If I had no childer I might make my place tidy; but where there’s childer there’s muck.’ Emmanuel Joyce was a cobbler by trade. Now of all trades perhaps cobbling is about one of the most unpleasant with which to be brought into immediate contact, but Emmanuel, who paid his weekly rent punctually, and was in that respect a striking exception, had obtained leave to erect a small shed in the angle of the yard next his window. This shed was looked at with envious eyes by some of his fellow-lodgers, and talked of invidiously as an encroachment; but here Emmanuel squatted at his work in all weathers, and here he kept his tools, and those crippled boots and shoes upon which he exercised his healing art. In the parlour he had contrived to build a couple of enclosed beds on the Scotch principle, which, though wanting in airiness, were tidy and decent. At night a curtain divided the one small room into two, and by day this curtain drawn back and neatly looped up, made one of the decorations of the neat parlour. A tall stand of flower-pots, Emmanuel’s dearest care, screened the loathesomeness of the yard, and made the one window a bank of foliage and gay colour. The shabby odds and ends of furniture shone with the beeswax and labour which Mrs. Joyce bestowed upon them in the intervals of her plain sewing. There were cheap prints on the wall above the mantelpiece, and on each side of the fireplace there were three deal shelves, containing Emmanuel’s much-prized collection of books, all picked up at odd times from the rubbish-box of a second-hand bookseller, and rebound and furbished by Emmanuel’s own dexterous hands. ‘My son is a great reader,’ Mrs. Joyce said proudly, during Cyril’s first visit. ‘He keeps the money other young men spend on beer to buy books with.’ Cyril went over to the shelves and looked at the books. Their character told him more about Emmanuel Joyce’s way of thinking than the mother would have cared to tell. There was an odd volume of Shelley, another of Keats, a Milton, and a Shakespeare. So much for the poets. Then came Rousseau’s ‘Confessions,’ in English, Tom Payne’s ‘Age of Reason,’ and a dozen other books all more or less infidel in their tendency. ‘Your son goes to church, I hope?’ said Cyril, after he had examined the books. The widow hung her head, and began to fidget with the corner of her print apron.