ong way,' decided him, and he stepped in.

Inside the hovel was miserable indeed. It belonged to that old and evil
type which the efforts of the last twenty years have done so much all
over England to sweep away: four mud walls, enclosing an oblong space
about eight yards long, divided into two unequal portions by a lath and
plaster partition, with no upper storey, a thatched roof, now entirely
out of repair, and letting in the rain in several places, and a paved
floor little better than the earth itself, so large and cavernous were
the gaps between the stones. The dismal place had no small
adornings--none of those little superfluities which, however ugly and
trivial, are still so precious in the dwellings of the poor, as showing
the existence of some instinct or passion which is not the creation of
the sheerest physical need; and Langham, as he sat down, caught the
sickening marsh smell which the Oxford man, accustomed to the odours of
damp meadows in times of ebbing flood and festering sun, knows so well.
As old Milsom began to talk to him in his weak tremulous voice, the
visitor's attention was irresistibly held by the details about him.
Fresh as he was from all the delicate sights, the harmonious colours and
delightful forms of the squire's house, they made an unusually sharp
impression on his fastidious senses. What does human life become lived
on reeking floors and under stifling roofs like these? What strange
abnormal deteriorations, physical and spiritual, must it not inevitably
undergo? Langham felt a sudden inward movement of disgust and repulsion.
'For heaven's sake, keep your superstitions!' he could have cried to the
whole human race, 'or any other narcotic that a grinding fate has left
you. What does _anything_ matter to the mass of mankind but a little
ease, a little lightening of pressure on this side or on that?'

Meanwhile the old man went maundering on, talking of the weather, and of
his sick child, and 'Mr. Elsmere,' with a kind of listless incoherence
which hardly demanded an answer, though Langham threw in a word or two
here and there.

Among other things, he began to ask a question or two about Robert's
predecessor, a certain Mr. Preston, who had left behind him a memory of
amiable evangelical indolence.

'Did you see much of him?' he asked.

'Oh law, no, sir!' replied the man, surprised into something like
energy. 'Never seed 'im more 'n once a year, and sometimes not that!'

'Was he liked