‘Ah! you think it so easy for these poor creatures to leave their homes their working places! Some of them have been there thirty years. They are close to the two or three farms that employ them, close to the osier beds which give them extra earnings in the spring. If they were turned out, there is nothing nearer than Murewell, and not a single cottage to be found there. I don’t say it is a landlord’s duty to provide more cottages than are wanted; but if the labor is wanted, the laborer should be decently housed. He is worthy of his hire, and woe to the man who neglects or ill-treats him!’ Langham could not help smiling, partly at the vehemence of the speech, partly at the lack of adjustment between his friend’s mood and his own. He braced himself to take the matter more seriously, but meanwhile Robert had caught the smile, and his angry eyes melted at once into laughter. ‘There I am, ranting as usual,’ he said penitently, ‘Took you for Henslowe, I suppose! Ah, well, never mind. I hear the Provost has another book on the stocks?’ So they diverged into other things, talking politics and new books, public men and what not, till at the end of a long and gradual descent through wooded ground, some two miles to the northwest of the park, they emerged from the trees beneath which they had been walking, and found themselves on a bridge, a gray sluggish stream flowing beneath them, and the hamlet they sought rising among the river flats on the farther side. ‘There,’ said Robert, stopping, ‘we are at our journey’s end. Now, then--what sort of a place of human habitation do you call _that_?’ The bridge whereon they stood crossed the main channel of the river, which just at that point, however, parted into several branches, and came meandering slowly down through a little bottom or valley, filled with osier beds, long since robbed of their year’s growth of shoots. On the other side of the river, on ground all but level with the osier beds which interposed between them and the stream, rose a miserable group of houses, huddled together as though their bulging walls and rotten roofs could only maintain themselves at all by the help and support which each wretched hovel gave to its neighbor. The mud walls were stained with yellow patches of lichen, the palings round the little gardens were broken and ruinous. Close beside them all was a sort of open drain or water-course, stagnant and noisome, which dribbled into the river a little above the bridge. Behind them rose a high gravel bank edged by firs, and a line of oak trees against the sky. The houses stood in the shadow of the bank looking north, and on this gray, lowering day, the dreariness, the gloom, the squalor of the place were indescribable.