The outskirts of Ecclesby, where the “quality” live in villas decorously withdrawn from the roadway, and screened from public view by the garden-trees, are as pleasant as those of any idle town given up to homing the Great Retired. The traveller by road might fancy he was entering a Midland Cheltenham or Leamington, so soothingly genteel are its approaches. But a few minutes’ walk, past smaller villas, then semidetached villas, then villas clustered together like reeds in a pan-pipe, then unpretending red-brick jerry-built cottages, would bring on a gradual disillusion, preparing him for the hopeless disenchantment of the town itself. A long black street, untidy with little shops and public-houses standing here and there amid a row of poor, dirty dwelling-houses, mounts in an undecided curve from the railway station, and suddenly, at the top of the hill, twists sharply round into the High Street, where brand-new hotels and brand-new shops try to look smugly unconscious of the world below the corner. But the shops have to supply that world’s wants, and all the bravery of window fronts cannot give the illusion of refined and luxurious patronage. There is not much pleasure to be got out of Ecclesby. Even its theatre is up a dingy side-street, and has a threepenny gallery and sixpenny pit. The fair follies and vain amenities of existence find no place there. It is given over to labour grim, absorbing, inevitable. At certain periods of the day the High Street, Market Square, and Union Street, which cuts laterally through its heart, at the top of the rise, are quite deserted. The great bells ring, and the gaunt countless-windowed factories situated all around in labyrinthine tangle of mean streets disgorge into the main thoroughfare the pale work-grimed population they had swallowed up. The town becomes a swarming hive. The shops are thronged. From the ever-swinging doors of public-houses comes the roar of voices, borne upon gusts of air saturated with alcohol and shag-tobacco. There is little diversity of type or costume. The town exists for one industry. The population drifts from the grim Board School inevitably, unquestioningly into the grim factory. If the next transition is not into the grimmer workhouse by the railway station, they account themselves happy. Each man acts, dresses, eats, hopes, thinks, and, at last, looks like his neighbour. And the girls and women work in the factories too. The streets are alive with them. They march along in knots of three or four, bareheaded, bare-armed, red-shawled, shrill, nonreticent of speech. The doorways of hundreds of dwellings in squalid by-streets are dissonant with the clamour and picturesque with the dirt-encrusted chubbiness of children.