I tried stone-breaking pretty often later in the course of my tramp, and found it a much less painful occupation. The handling of cricket-bat and sculls hardens the palm of the hand whilst it leaves the tips of the fingers unprotected. But though at the time of my excursion I was fresh from life on the river, it took me some time to get inured to this new occupation, and stone-breaking alone would, of course, unfit for his work any man who needed lightness and steadiness of hand. Work and accommodation varied very widely. In one or two places we got good bread at night, good broth in the morning, and a bed to sleep in which, as I suppose, the average tramp would find almost luxurious. The bedclothes were coarse, as they had a perfect right to be, but they were clean; and the food, though scanty and of the plainest, was wholesome and nourishing. In one place, I remember, the bread actually stank, and the hungriest of the hungry crowd left it uneaten. The broth served out next morning was nothing more or less than the water in which bacon had been boiled. The beds were kennels. A long wooden bench was divided into compartments by upright boards; a quantity of dirty straw which might, by the look of it, have served already in a stable was spread in each recess, and was covered with foul sacks which bore the name of a local miller. Several of these sacks, cut open and stitched together, served for a counterpane. 'I'd 'eard about this place,' said my neighbour when the able-bodied pauper who superintended us had trooped us into this abominable chamber, 'and I'd a dam good mind to smash a lamp or summat and get run in instead o' comin' here. If I'd ha' knowed the truth about it, I'd ha' done it.' This was the worst, and by far the worst, of the places I encountered. Indeed, I met nothing else comparable to it. I made a trifling error in my description of it at the time. By a slip of the pen I represented the shed in which the casual paupers were accommodated as being a lean-to against the body of the workhouse, whereas it was in fact a lean-to against the outer wall of the workhouse grounds. This was enough in the minds of the guardians to justify them in denouncing me, through their chairman, as a liar, and was held to be triumphant proof that I had never been there, though I proved 'David Vane, compositor,' upon their books and upon those of the two neighbouring workhouses.