was mistaken in thinking that he had seen the world. There were things here, close to the sweet fields of lovely England, not to be surpassed in the darkest corners of the earth. At the end of a new street hastily "run up cheap" and "scamped," they found a large black pool, once a pond in the meadow, now a slough of all imaginable filth, at whose precipitous edge the roadway stopped abruptly, without rail, fence, or wall. Little children playing hare and hounds, heedless of their steps, fell in, and came out gasping, almost choked with foul mud. Drunken men staggered in occasionally, and came out stiff, ghastly, with slime in the greedy mouths that had gorged at the Melting-Pot. Yet this horrible slough was on the very verge of beauty; it was the edge and outpost of the town. Across this dark pit were green meadows, hawthorn hedges, and trees. The sweet breeze played against the dead red brick; odours of clover were blown against the windows; rooks came over now and then with their noisy caw-cawing. Shamefully "scamped" was the row of six-roomed houses--doors that warped and would not shut, and so on. Upstairs, in one of these, they found a tall young fellow lying on his bed in the middle of the summer day. The sickly fetid smell of the close room told of long confinement. Poor fellow, he had been sore beset; unmarried, untended; no woman to potter about him, nursed anyhow, only the strength of his constitution carried him through; and now he lay there, weak and helpless, in spirit all but dead, as strong men are after tedious illness. A mass of iron had fallen on his leg in one of the factories some time before, as it was supposed through the carelessness of a fellow-workman not recovered from his weekly orgie of drink. The sturdy limb, though it had long ago united, was still feeble in the extreme. His dull eye lit up when he saw them. "You bean't from Millbourne, be you?" he said. "We know many there," said Felix. "I thaut perhaps uncle Jabez had found me out and sent ee. Do you knaw uncle Jabez, as works at Greene Ferne?" "I recollect the shepherd," said Geoffrey. "I wur under-shepherd thur till I took to factory work. Look at them lambs thur!" They looked out of the window. Beneath, the green fields came right up to the dead brick wall. Away, some fifty yards distant, stood an enormous pollard oak, its vast gnarled root coiled round just above the earth, forming a broad ledge about the trunk. Half a dozen lambs were chasing each other, frisking round and round the rim, glad in the summer sunshine. "Look at um," said the whilom shepherd, "an' I be choked for aair." "Why not open the window?" "He wunt open." They examined it; the sashes were shams, _not made to open_. Neither was there a fireplace; the man was poisoned with the exhalations from his own weak frame. "This is dreadful," said Geoffrey. "Is there no law--"