Zachariah relapsed and was still. The next time he opened his eyes the woman had left him. It was true he was in the workhouse, and a workhouse then was not what it is now. Who can possibly describe what it was? Who can possibly convey to anybody who has not known what it was by actual imprisonment in it any adequate sense of its gloom; of the utter, callous, brutal indifference of the so-called nurses; of the neglect of the poor patients by those who were paid to attend to them; of the absence of even common decency; of the desperate persistent attempts made by everybody concerned to impress upon the wretched mortals who were brought there that they were chargeable to the parish and put there for form’s sake, prior to being shovelled into a hole in the adjoining churchyard? The infirmary nurses were taken from the other side of the building—sometimes for very strange reasons. The master appointed them, and was not bound to account to anybody for his preferences. One woman had given him much trouble. She was a stout, lazy brute, who had no business in the House, and who went in and out just as she liked. One day something displeased her, and she attacked him with such fury and suddenness that he would have been a dead man in a few minutes if she had not been pulled off. But he dared not report her. She knew too much about him, and she was moved a few days afterwards to look after the sick. She it was who spoke to Zachariah. She, however, was not by any means the worst. Worse than her were the old, degraded, sodden, gin-drinking hags, who had all their lives breathed pauper air and pauper contamination; women with not one single vestige of their Maker’s hand left upon them, and incapable, even under the greatest provocation, of any human emotion; who would see a dying mother call upon Christ, or cry for her husband and children, and would swear at her and try to smother her into silence. As for the doctor, he was hired at the lowest possible rate, and was allowed a certain sum for drugs. It was utterly insufficient to provide anything except the very commonest physic; and what could he do in the midst of such a system, even if he had been inclined to do anything? He accordingly did next to nothing; walked through the wards, and left his patients pretty much to Providence. They were robbed even of their food. They were not much to be pitied for being robbed of the stimulants, for every drop, including the “port wine,” was obtained by the directors from those of their number or from their friends who were in the trade, and it was mostly poisonous. Death is always terrible—terrible on the battlefield; terrible in a sinking ship; terrible to the exile—but the present writer, who has seen Death in the “House” of years gone by, cannot imagine that he can ever be so distinctively the King of Terrors as he was there. The thought that thousands and thousands of human beings, some of them tender-hearted,