As we went home, to have a good wash, and change our coats, I learned all the meaning of this strong measure, and felt no more pity for the tenant evicted. He had occupied this cottage for some seven years now, and although he lived so close to us and on our land, scarcely any one had exchanged ten words with him. He was of a morose and silent nature, living all alone, though he had some money, and never going out of doors when he could help it. His name was Ben Harker, and throughout the village his nickname was “Old Arkerate;” for when anything was said to him that he could pick a hole in, if it were only a remark about the weather, he would always say—“No. That isn’t arkerate.” It was said that he had lost a considerable fortune, before he came to Sunbury, by some inaccuracy in a will, or title-deeds, and thence he had taken to challenge the correctness of even the most trivial statement. My uncle had been longing for months to recover possession of his own premises; but old Harker took advantage of the obstacles richly provided by English law in such a case, and swore he would never go out without a law-suit. But he had never spent a halfpenny on repairs, though he had it so cheap through his promises; and by his own default he was thus smoked out, and the key was in the landlord’s pocket. Mrs. Selsey Bill, mother of seventeen living children, was very fat and stumpy—as behoves a giant’s wife—and was blest with a cold in her head just now, which redeemed all her system from prejudice. The greatest philosophers assure us that all things—if there be anything—are good or bad, simply as we colour them in our own minds—that is to say, if we have minds—and to Mrs. Bill Tompkins the stench of that house was as sweet as the perfumes of Araby. She flung up the windows, from the force of habit, and not from “æsthetic preference,” and she scrubbed away with soda, and fuller’s earth, and soft soap, and bristle, and cocoa-fibre. And the next day, as soon as we had finished dinner (which we never left for nightfall, as if it were a burglary), my uncle said, “let us go and see how that place looks, after Old Arkerate has had to cut and run.” When we got there, fat little Mrs. Tompkins was scrubbing almost as hard as ever. It is quite wrong to talk as if fat people cannot work. Many of them can, and can even carry on, by drawing on their own resources, when a lean person having hollow places down her begins to pant, and has no stuff to fill them out. She drew her breath a little, as she got up from the bucket; but neither of her hands went to her waist, because there was no such place to go to. She had three of the young ones strapped down on the floor of the room she had not yet grappled with; for her husband was of an ingenious mind, and necessity had taught him invention. Mrs. Selsey Bill stood up and faced us; she thought that we were come to say she had not done enough.