the hamlet they sought rising among the river flats on the farther side.

'There,' said Robert, stopping, 'we are at our journey's end. Now,
then--what sort of a place of human habitation do you call _that_?'

The bridge whereon they stood crossed the main channel of the river,
which just at that point, however, parted into several branches, and
came meandering slowly down through a little bottom or valley, filled
with osier beds, long since robbed of their year's growth of shoots. On
the other side of the river, on ground all but level with the osier beds
which interposed between them and the stream, rose a miserable group of
houses, huddled together as though their bulging walls and rotten roofs
could only maintain themselves at all by the help and support which each
wretched hovel gave to its neighbor. The mud walls were stained with
yellow patches of lichen, the palings round the little gardens were
broken and ruinous. Close beside them all was a sort of open drain or
water-course, stagnant and noisome, which dribbled into the river a
little above the bridge. Behind them rose a high gravel bank edged by
firs, and a line of oak trees against the sky. The houses stood in the
shadow of the bank looking north, and on this gray, lowering day, the
dreariness, the gloom, the squalor of the place were indescribable.

'Well, that is a God-forsaken hole!' said Langham, studying it, his
interest roused at last, rather perhaps by the Ruysdael-like melancholy
and picturesqueness of the scene than by its human suggestiveness. 'I
could hardly have imagined such a place existed in southern England. It
is more like a bit of Ireland.'

'If it were Ireland it might be to somebody's interest to ferret it
out,' said Robert bitterly. 'But these poor folks are out of the world.
They may be brutalized with impunity. Oh, such a case as I had here
last autumn! A young girl of sixteen or seventeen, who would have been
healthy and happy anywhere else, stricken by the damp and the poison of
the place, dying in six weeks, of complications due to nothing in the
world but preventable cruelty and neglect? It was a sight that
burnt into my mind, once for all, what is meant by a landlord's
responsibility. I tried, of course, to move her, but neither she nor her
parents--elderly folk--had energy enough for a change. They only prayed
to be let alone. I came over the last evening of her life to give her
the communion. "Ah, sir!" said the mother to m