There grew up in the child a strange liking for this dismal quarter, or rather three-quarters of the town of Millsborough that lay around Platt’s Lane. Often, when his father called for him of an afternoon at Bruton Square he would plead for a walk in their direction before going home. He liked the moorland, too, with its bird life and its little creeping things in brake and cover that crouched so still while one passed by. There he would shout and scamper; and when he was tired his father would carry him on his shoulder. But in the long sad streets he was less talkative. One day, walking through them, Anthony told him how, long ago, before the mean streets came, there had been green fields and flowers with a little river winding its way among the rocks and through deep woods. “What made the streets come?” the child asked. Riches had been discovered under the earth, so Anthony explained to him. Before this great discovery the people of the valley had lived in little cottages--just peasants, tilling their small farms, tending their flocks. A few hundred pounds would have bought them all up. Now it was calculated that the winding Wyndbeck flowed through the richest valley in all England. “What are riches?” asked the child. “What do they do?” Riches, his father explained to him, were what made people well off and happy. “I see,” said John. But he evidently did not, as his next question proved conclusively. “Then are all the people happy who live here now?” he asked. They had passed about a score of them during the short time they had walked in silence. “Why don’t they look it?” It had to be further explained to John that the riches of the valley did not belong to the people who lived and died in the valley, who dug the coal and iron or otherwise handled it. To be quite frank, these sad-eyed men and women who now dwelt beside the foul black Wyndbeck were perhaps worse off than their forbears who had dwelt here when the Wyndbeck flowed through sunlit fields and shady woods, undreaming of the hidden wealth that lay beneath their careless feet. But to a few who lived in fine houses, more or less far away, in distant cities, in pleasant country places. It was these few who had been made well off and happy by the riches of the valley. The workers of the valley did not even know the names of these scattered masters of theirs. He had not meant to put it this way. But little John had continually chipped in with those direct questions that a child will persist in asking. And, after all, it was the truth. Besides, as he went on to explain still further to little John, they were not all unhappy, these dirty, grimy, dull-eyed men and women in their ugly clothes living in ugly houses in long ugly streets under a sky that rained soot. Some of them earned high wages--had, considering their needs, money to burn, as the saying was.