the side nearest
to "the great house," have earned some local celebrity as exhibiting
the prettiest suburb of the kind to be found in East Norfolk. Here the
villas and gardens are for the most part built and laid out in excellent
taste, the trees are in the prime of their growth, and the healthy
common beyond the houses rises and falls in picturesque and delightful
variety of broken ground. The rank, fashion, and beauty of the town make
this place their evening promenade; and when a stranger goes out for a
drive, if he leaves it to the coachman, the coachman starts by way of
the common as a matter of course.

On the opposite side, that is to say, on the side furthest from "the
great house," the suburbs (in the year 1851) were universally regarded
as a sore subject by all persons zealous for the reputation of the town.

Here nature was uninviting, man was poor, and social progress, as
exhibited under the form of building, halted miserably. The streets
dwindled feebly, as they receded from the center of the town, into
smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the barren open ground into
an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders hereabouts appeared to have
universally abandoned their work in the first stage of its creation.
Land-holders set up poles on lost patches of ground, and, plaintively
advertising that they were to let for building, raised sickly little
crops meanwhile, in despair of finding a purchaser to deal with them.
All the waste paper of the town seemed to float congenially to this
neglected spot; and all the fretful children came and cried here, in
charge of all the slatternly nurses who disgraced the place. If there
was any intention in Thorpe Ambrose of sending a worn-out horse to the
knacker's, that horse was sure to be found waiting his doom in a field
on this side of the town. No growth flourished in these desert regions
but the arid growth of rubbish; and no creatures rejoiced but the
creatures of the night--the vermin here and there in the beds, and the
cats everywhere on the tiles.

The sun had set, and the summer twilight was darkening. The fretful
children were crying in their cradles; the horse destined for the
knacker dozed forlorn in the field of his imprisonment; the cats waited
stealthily in corners for the coming night. But one living figure
appeared in the lonely suburb--the figure of Mr. Bashwood. But one faint
sound disturbed the dreadful silence--the sound of Mr. Bashwood's softly