I was wrong, it seems, in surmising that dread of losing his employment made him so anxious to quit the infirmary. "Was it so?" was a question put to him this morning, point blank. He denied it. "No," he said; "I was afraid I should die. That's what made me so eager to get away. I felt I should die if I bid there another week." So many died, he said, while he was there--several in one day, I understood, one being the man in the bed next to Bettesworth's. This man "made up his mind" and was gone, in twenty minutes--one Freeland, from Moorways. There also died there a certain old Taff Skinner, an old neighbour whom Bettesworth, in his own convalescence, tried to get upstairs to see. A nurse turned him back, he protesting that he "didn't know as he was doin' wrong," and she explaining that he might only visit another room or ward on visiting day. "Or else," he told me, "Old Taff's wife an' daughter was there, and ast me if I wouldn't go an' see 'n to cheer 'n up." Having got home and shifted a few things to Jack's, Bettesworth's great joy was in his "nice soft bed." He has been used to feathers, and found the mattress hard at the infirmary. He said with gusto, "That was a treat to me, to get into that bed and roll myself over. And my poor old back seemed almost well the next morning." Across the loins and down the back of his thighs he is tender, and his elbows were beginning to get sore from hoisting himself up on the mattress. To ease the loins Jack has been rubbing in "some o' that strong liniment." On the whole Jack seems to be treating the old man very well. That he will continue to do so is devoutly to be hoped. For there are not many refuges open to Bettesworth now, nor can the infirmary any more be looked to as one of them. According to his last version of it, when the doctor asked him if it was really his wish to leave, he answered, "Once I gets away I'll never come here no more, not if there's a ditch at home I can die in." _March 12._--I find there is a steady set of public opinion--that is to say, the opinion of his own class--against Bettesworth, which has grown very marked since he came out of the infirmary, although probably it is not quite a new thing. One of the first indications of it, besides old Nanny's animosity already mentioned, appeared while he was still away, when Bill Crawte spoke to me in the town, alleging that the old man had been misbehaving of late in his evenings. I received an impression of drinking bouts and disorder, which was conveyed in innuendo rather than directly. "He spends too much money at the public-house; and he can't take much without its going to his head"--such was Crawte's expression, intended, it seemed, to warn me that I was deceived in my protégé.