f two-story bricks drabbled with
soot-stains. It was two years since she had been in the town.
Remembering this, and the reason why she had shunned it, she quickened
her pace, her face growing stiller than before. One might have fancied
her a slave putting on a mask, fearing to meet her master. The town,
being unfamiliar to her, struck her newly. She saw the expression on its
face better. It was a large trading city, compactly built, shut in by
hills. It had an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator concluding a
keen bargain; the very dwelling-houses smelt of trade, having shops in
the lower stories; in the outskirts, where there are cottages in other
cities, there were mills here; the trees, which some deluded dreamer had
planted on the flat pavements, had all grown up into abrupt Lombardy
poplars, knowing their best policy was to keep out of the way; the boys,
playing marbles under them, played sharply "for keeps"; the bony old
dray-horses, plodding through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes,
that measured their oats at night with a "you-don't-cheat-me" look. Even
the churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder in
the hills, where the few field-people--Arians, Calvinists, Churchmen--
gathered every Sunday, and air and sunshine and God's charity made the
day holy. These churches lifted their hard stone faces insolently,
registering their yearly alms in the morning journals. To be sure, the
back-seats were free for the poor; but the emblazoned crimson of the
windows, the carving of the arches, the very purity of the preacher's
style, said plainly that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye
of a needle than for a man in a red _warm-us_ to enter the kingdom of
heaven through that gate.

Nature itself had turned her back on the town: the river turned aside,
and but half a river crept reluctant by; the hills were but bare banks
of yellow clay. There was a cinder-road leading through these. Margaret
climbed it slowly. The low town-hills, as I said, were bare, covered at
their bases with dingy stubble-fields. In the sides bordering the road
gaped the black mouths of the coal-pits that burrowed under the hills,
under the town. Trade everywhere,--on the earth and under it. No wonder
the girl called it a hard, scraping world. But when the road had crept
through these hills, it suddenly shook off the cinders, and turned into
the brown mould of the meadows,--turned its back on trade and the smoky