the pleasing prospect straight before me of
beginning my acquaintance with him by a fight over it. You will admit
that it is a little hard on a man who wants to live on good terms with
the possessor of the Murewell library to have to open relations with him
by a fierce attack on his drains and his pigsties.'

He turned to his companion with a half-rueful spark of laughter in his
gray eyes. Langham hardly caught what he said. He was far away in
meditations of his own.

'An attack,' he repeated vaguely; 'why an attack?'

Robert plunged again into the great topic of which his quick mind was
evidently full. Langham tried to listen, but was conscious that his
friend's social enthusiasms bored him a great deal. And side by side
with the consciousness there slid in a little stinging reflection that
four years ago no talk of Elsmere's could have bored him.

'What's the matter with this particular place?' he asked languidly, at
last, raising his eyes towards the group of houses now beginning to
emerge from the distance.

An angry red mounted in Robert's cheek.

'What isn't the matter with it? The houses, which were built on a swamp
originally, are falling into ruin; the roofs, the drains, the
accommodation per head, are all about equally scandalous. The place is
harried with illness; since I came there has been both fever and
diphtheria there. They are all crippled with rheumatism, but _that_ they
think nothing of; the English labourer takes rheumatism as quite in the
day's bargain! And as to _vice_--the vice that comes of mere endless
persecuting opportunity--I can tell you one's ideas of personal
responsibility get a good deal shaken up by a place like this! And I can
do nothing. I brought over Henslowe to see the place, and he behaved
like a brute. He scoffed at all my complaints, said that no landlord
would be such a fool as to build fresh cottages on such a site, that the
old ones must just be allowed to go to ruin; that the people might live
in them if they chose, or turn out of them if they chose. Nobody forced
them to do either; it was their own look-out.'

'That was true,' said Langham, 'wasn't it?'

Robert turned upon him fiercely.

'Ah! you think it so easy for those poor creatures to leave their homes,
their working places! Some of them have been there thirty years. They
are close to the two or three farms that employ them, close to the osier
beds which give them extra earnings in the spring. If they were t