So saying he led the way towards a row of decrepit cottages which, with their dingy walls and black thatch, looked like a group of fungi, rather than a row of habitations erected by the hand of man. At the crazy door of the first cottage they were confronted by a stout, red-faced woman with bare beefy arms, who, on seeing "Cobbler" Horn, dropped a curtsey, and suppressed the angry salutation which she had prepared for Mr. Gray. "A friend of mine, Mrs. Blobs," said the agent. "Glad to see you, sir," said the woman to "Cobbler" Horn. "Will you please to walk in, gentlemen." "Just cast your eye up there, Mr. Gray," she added when they were inside. "It's come through at last." Sure enough it had. Above their heads was a vast hole in the ceiling, and above that a huge gap in the thatch; and at their feet lay a heap of bricks, mortar, and fragments of rotten wood. "Why the chimney has come through!" exclaimed Mr. Gray. "Little doubt of that," said Mrs. Blobs. "Was anybody hurt?" "No, but they might ha' bin. It was this very morning. The master was at his work, and the children away at school; but, if I hadn't just stepped out to have a few words with a neighbour, I might ha' bin just under the very place. Isn't it disgraceful, sir," she added, turning to "Cobbler" Horn, "that human beings should be made to live in such tumbledown places? I believe Mr. Gray, here, would have put things right long ago; but he's been kept that tight by the old skin-flint what's just died. They do say as now the property have got into better hands; but----" "Well, well, Mrs. Blobs" interposed the agent; "we shall soon see a change now I hope." "Yes," assented "Cobbler" Horn, "we'll have----that is, I'm sure Mr. Gray will soon make you snug, ma'am." "We must call at every house, sir," said Mr. Gray, as they passed to the next door. "There isn't one of the lot but wants patching up almost every day." "Cheer up, Mr. Gray," said "the Golden Shoemaker." "There shall be no more patching after this." In each of the miserable cottages they met with a repetition of their experience in the first. If the reproaches of the living could bring back the dead, old Jacob Horn should have formed one of the group in those mouldy and rotting cottages, to listen to the reiteration of the shameful story of his criminal neglect. Here the windows were bursting from their setting, like the bulging eyes of suffocating men; and here the door-frame was in a state of collapse. In one cottage the ceiling was depositing itself, by frequent instalments, on the floor; and in another the floor itself was rotting away. In every case, Mr. Gray made bold to promise the speedy rectification of everything that was wrong; and "Cobbler" Horn confirmed his promises in a manner so authoritative that it would have been a wonder if his discontented tenants had not caught some glimmering of the truth as to who he was.