Some three months slipped away--right dreary months for Lancelot, for the Lavingtons went to Baden-Baden for the summer. 'The waters were necessary for their health.' . . . How wonderful it is, by the bye, that those German Brunnen are never necessary for poor people's health! . . . and they did not return till the end of August. So Lancelot buried himself up to the eyes in the Condition-of-the-Poor question--that is, in blue books, red books, sanitary reports, mine reports, factory reports; and came to the conclusion, which is now pretty generally entertained, that something was the matter--but what, no man knew, or, if they knew, thought proper to declare. Hopeless and bewildered, he left the books, and wandered day after day from farm to hamlet, and from field to tramper's tent, in hopes of finding out the secret for himself. What he saw, of course I must not say; for if I did the reviewers would declare, as usual, one and all, that I copied out of the Morning Chronicle; and the fact that these pages, ninety-nine hundredths of them at least, were written two years before the Morning Chronicle began its invaluable investigations, would be contemptuously put aside as at once impossible and arrogant. I shall therefore only say, that he saw what every one else has seen, at least heard of, and got tired of hearing--though alas! they have not got tired of seeing it; and so proceed with my story, only mentioning therein certain particulars which folks seem, to me, somewhat strangely, to have generally overlooked. But whatever Lancelot saw, or thought he saw, I cannot say that it brought him any nearer to a solution of the question; and he at last ended by a sulky acquiescence in Sam Weller's memorable dictum: 'Who it is I can't say; but all I can say is that SOMEBODY ought to be wopped for this!' But one day, turning over, as hopelessly as he was beginning to turn over everything else, a new work of Mr. Carlyle's, he fell on some such words as these:-- 'The beginning and the end of what is the matter with us in these days is--that WE HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD.' Forgotten God? That was at least a defect of which blue books had taken no note. And it was one which, on the whole--granting, for the sake of argument, any real, living, or practical existence to That Being, might be a radical one--it brought him many hours of thought, that saying; and when they were over, he rose up and went to find--Tregarva. 'Yes, he is the man. He is the only man with whom I have ever met, of whom I could be sure, that independent of his own interest, without the allurements of respectability and decency, of habit and custom, he believes in God. And he too is a poor man; he has known the struggles, temptations, sorrows of the poor. I will go to him.'