!"

"I don't know," said my sister, timidly, "but he said something about
not affording it, and spending money, and about trade being bad, and
he was afraid there would be great distress in the town."

Oh, these illogical women! I was furious. "What on earth has that to
do with us?" I shouted at her. "Father's a doctor; trade won't hurt
him. But you are so silly, Minnie, I can't talk to you. I only know
it's very hard. Fancy staying a whole year boxed up in this beastly
town!" And I had so worked myself up that I fully believed in the
truth of the sentence with which I concluded--

"_There never_ WAS _anything so miserable!_"

Minnie said nothing, for my feelings just then were something like
those of the dogs who (Dr. Watts tells us)

"delight
To bark and bite;"

and perhaps she was afraid of being bitten. At any rate, she held her
tongue; and just then my father came into the room.

The door was open, and he must have heard my last speech as he came
along the passage; but he made no remark on it, and only said, "Would
any young man here like to go with me to see a patient?"

I went willingly, for I was both tired and half-ashamed of teasing
Minnie, and we were soon in the street. It was a broad and cheerful
one, as I said; but before long we left it for a narrower, and then
turned off from that into a side street, where the foot-path would
only allow us to walk in single file--a dirty, dark lane, where surely
the sun never did shine.

"What a horrid place!" I said. "I never was here before. Why don't
they pull such a street down?"

"What is to become of the people who live in it?" said my father.

"Let them live in one of the bigger streets," I said; "it would be
much more comfortable."

"Very likely," he said; "but they would have to pay much more for
their houses; and if they haven't the money to pay with, what's to be
done?"

I could not say, for, like older social reformers than myself, I felt
more sure that the reform was needed, than of how to accomplish it.
But before I could decide upon what to do with the dirty little
street, we had come to a place so very much worse that it put the
other quite out of my head. There is a mournful fatality about the
pretty names which are given, as if in mockery, to the most wretched
of the bye-streets in large towns. The street we had left was called
Rosemary Street, and this was Primrose Place.

Primrose Place was more like a yard than a stree