ad been brought down
by the rain on the south-west side. Just underneath the window was the
pigstye. Outside nothing had been done to the house for years. It was
not brick built, and here and there the laths and timber were bare, and
the thatch had almost gone. Houses were very scarce on the farms in that
part, and landlords would not build. The labourers consequently were
driven into Abchurch, and had to walk, many of them, a couple of miles
each way daily. Miss Diana Eaton, eldest daughter of the Honourable Mr.
Eaton, had made a little sketch in water-colour of the cottage. It hung
in the great drawing-room, and was considered most picturesque.

"Lovely! What a dear old place!" said the guests.

"It makes one quite enamoured of the country," exclaimed Lady Fanshawe,
one of the most determined diners-out in Mayfair. "I never look at a
scene like that without wishing I could give up London altogether. I am
sure I could be content. It would be so charming to get rid of
conventionality and be perfectly natural. You really ought to send that
drawing to the Academy, Miss Eaton."

That we should take pleasure in pictures of filthy, ruined hovels, in
which health and even virtue are impossible, is a strange sign of the
times. It is more than strange; it is an omen and a prophecy that people
will go into sham ecstasies over one of these pigstyes so long as it is
in a gilt frame; that they will give a thousand guineas for its light and
shade--light, forsooth!--or for its Prout-like quality, or for its
quality of this, that, and the other, while inside the real stye, at the
very moment when the auctioneer knocks down the drawing amidst applause,
lies the mother dying from dirt fever; the mother of six children
starving and sleeping there--starving, save for the parish allowance, for
the snow is on the ground and the father is out of work.

Crowhurst's wages were ten shillings a week, and the boy earned half a
crown, but in the winter there was nothing to do for weeks together. All
this, however, was accepted as the established order of things. It never
entered into the heads of the Crowhursts to revolt. They did not revolt
against the moon because she was sometimes full and lit everybody
comfortably, and at other times was new and compelled the use of
rushlights. It was so ordained.

Half a mile beyond the cottage was a chapel. It stood at a cross-road,
and no houses were near it. It had stood there for 15