Hitherto they had not thought of this. The four brothers had planted themselves there when all about had been a waste of sand, had since taken firm root, and there two of them still remained. But between such a squatting eight or nine years ago, and a sitting tight now that everything had gone up a hundredfold in value, was an immense difference. To this difference, moreover, was now added the evil repute in which Tommy Kerr lived. Ned, the alder-cutter, they would have accepted; they could live with Ned; but his brother, besides being in his unpleasant person a public nuisance, was beginning to appear a setter-back of the fingers of History's clock, a mongrel in their fine new manger, a thorn in the side of that lusty young Welsh Giantess whose figure was now one of the familiar sights on a thousand hoardings in the North. The invisible odour of stale beer-fumes in which he moved poisoned the air of the Promenade, and, though he certainly did his best to remedy this as far as the staleness was concerned (invariably beginning the day with pints and ending it with quarts), that did not improve matters in the long run. As long as Tommy Kerr was merely locked up once in a while for drunkenness, he himself paid no heed to the whispers that had begun to gather about him. He could sleep as heavily and happily in a cell as in his own Hafod. Nor were his eyes at once opened even when an inspector appeared at the Hafod and began to ask questions about its sanitation--which, by the way, was of a low order. But his brother Ned began to "study," as he called it, and the result of his studying was that he said one day to Tommy, "They'll be wanting to be shut o' you and me, Tommy." Tommy was in the act of wiping out a greasy frying-pan with a piece of old newspaper. He stopped suddenly. After a pause, "Eh?" he said.... "D'ye mean purr us out?" "We're a bit i' t' road to my way o' thinking," Ned replied, sinking back into his arm-chair again and closing his eyes. He had taken badly to heart the deaths of his brothers Harry and Sam; indeed he had not been the same man since. He frequently walked over to Sarn churchyard, sat on a flat tombstone near his brothers' grave, and smoked and spat; he was "studying" about a stone for them. Intermittently he talked about carving this with his own hands, but he delayed to do so. All the work he now did was to doze in a street-watch-man's hut, with a two-days-old newspaper on his knee and a firebasket in front of him set sideways on the wind. He was no longer the beer-drinker he had been. "Think ye?" said Tommy, after another silence. "But we donnot want to be purred out," he added resuming the wiping of the frying-pan, though more slowly. And as it seemed to be a condition of their remaining in their Hafod unmolested that they should make a show of satisfying the sanitary inspector's demands, they overhauled their drainage system and gave it the minimum of attention it demanded.