There was one house in Beers Cooperage, however, which differed strikingly from the rest. This was the hovel at the upper end, where the yard terminated in a high blank wall. There were no five-barred gates on the window-sills here; nothing but fragments, which hung rotting over the edge. Half the panes in the window were broken, and stuffed with dirty scraps of paper. The paling before the house was also fast disappearing, and the space in front was littered with broken tins and refuse not sufficiently noisome to attract the notice of the sanitary inspector. In the corner stood a kennel tenanted by a mongrel bulldog, the terror of the small children in the Cooperage. The door of this cottage generally stood half open, and through it came all day and night long sounds of angry scolding, or of oaths and drunken yells. The inside of the place matched with its outside. The floors and stairs looked as if they were never washed; the germs of a dozen fevers might have lurked in the dirt which was thickly piled everywhere. The miserable crockery and kitchen stuff was in as deplorable a condition as the windows. The bedding chiefly consisted of heaps of unwashed rags. This was the one house in Beers Cooperage into which the Duchess had never yet ventured to go. It was tenanted by an Irishman, who had threatened to wring the neck of any ---- Protestant who came meddling inside his doors. For the last fortnight the Cooperage had enjoyed a blessed spell of relief from the presence of this man, whose formidable strength, added to his choleric temper, rendered him the terror of his neighbours. He had been taken in the act of kicking an old man whom he had first knocked down. The magistrate before whom he was brought, who had just previously imposed a sentence of six months on a boy for the theft of a pair of boots, desirous, perhaps, to show that he could be merciful on occasion, sent the hooligan to prison for fourteen days, thereby releasing the rest of the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage for that exact length of time. On this morning, as soon as the Duchess came out from under the archway which formed the entrance to the Cooperage, she saw that something was amiss. Several of the cottages showed broken windows, and in one or two places even the cherished gates and rails had been damaged or destroyed. A broken birdcage lay on the ground in the far corner of the yard beside the dog’s kennel. All the doors of the houses were closed, except the Irishman’s, through which shrill screams were issuing. Lastly, the poor lame gardener was standing in his little plot disconsolately regarding the wreck of his cherished flowers, which looked as though they had been trampled over by a regiment. “Mike Finigan done it,” he explained, in answer to the Duchess’s sympathetic exclamation. “’E got outer prison yisterday, and ’e come in drunk lorst night with ’is crew, and played old ’Arry all over the place.”