The boys were not long in learning that there was nothing now to fear from Warrender. No one was sent staggering from a box on the ear. No hair was ever pulled; nor was any boy ever shaken in his jacket. Instead of doing such things, Warrender made companions of his young assistants, taught them to do well whatever they put their hands to, and made them willing and happy. While two or three thus waited on him, others carried home the clean linen that his daughter and a neighbour or two were frequently ready to send out: and they daily changed the water in the tubs where the foul linen was deposited. Others, again, swept and washed down the long steep street, making it look almost as clean as if it belonged to a Dutch village. After the autumn pig-killing, there were few or no more pigs. The poor sufferers could not attend to them; could not afford, indeed, to buy them; and had scarcely any food to give them. Though this was a token of poverty, it was hardly to be lamented in itself, under the circumstances; for there is no foulness whatever, no nastiness that is to be found among the abodes of men, so dangerous to health as that of pig-styes. There is mismanagement in this. People take for granted that the pig is a dirty animal, and give him no chance of being clean; whereas, if they would try the experiment of keeping his house swept, and putting his food always in one place, and washing him with soap and water once a week, they would find that he knows how to keep his pavement clean, and that he runs grunting to meet his washing with a satisfaction not to be mistaken. Such was the conclusion of the boys who undertook the purification of the two or three pigs that remained in Bleaburn. As for the empty styes, they were cleaner than many of the cottages. After a conversation with Mr. Kirby, Farmer Neale bought all the dirt-heaps for manure; and in a few days they were all trundled away in barrows—even to the stable-manure from the Plough and Harrow—and heaped together at the farm, and well shut down with a casing of earth, beat firm with spades. Boys really like such work as this, when they are put upon it in the right way. They were less dirty than they would have been with tumbling about and quarrelling and cuffing in the filthy street; in a finer glow of exercise; with a more wholesome appetite; and far more satisfaction in eating, because they had earned their food. Moreover, they began to feel themselves little friends of the grown people—of Mr. and Mrs. Kirby, and the Doctor, and the Warrenders—instead of a sort of reptiles, or other plague; and Mr. Kirby astonished them so by a bit of amusement now and then, when he had time, that they would have called him a conjuror, if he had not been a clergyman. He made a star—any star they pleased—as large as the comet, just by making them look at it through a tube; and he showed them how he took a drop of foul water from a stinking pool, and put it between