e--not bitterly--that
is the strange thing, they have so little bitterness! "If Mr. 'Enslowe
would just 'a mended that bit o' roof of ours last winter, Bessie
needn't have laid in the wet so many nights as she did, and she coughin'
fit to break your heart, for all the things yer could put over'er."'

Robert paused, his strong young face, so vehemently angry a few minutes
before, tremulous with feeling, 'Ah, well,' he said at last with a long
breath, moving away from the parapet of the bridge on which he had been
leaning, 'better be oppressed than oppressor any day! Now, then, I must
deliver my stores. There's a child here Catherine and I have been doing
our best to pull through typhoid.'

They crossed the bridge and turned down the track leading to the
hamlet. Some planks carried them across the ditch, the main sewer of the
community, as Robert pointed out, and they made their way through the
filth surrounding one of the nearest cottages.

A feeble, elderly man, whose shaking limbs and sallow, bloodless skin
made him look much older than he actually was, opened the door and
invited them to come in. Robert passed on into an inner room, conducted
thither by a woman who had been sitting working over the fire. Langham
stood irresolute, but the old man's quavering 'Kindly take a chair Sir;
you've come a long way,' decided him, and he stepped in.

Inside, the hovel was miserable indeed. It belonged to that old and evil
type which the efforts of the last twenty years have done so much all
over England to sweep away: four mud walls, enclosing an oblong space
about eight yards long, divided into two unequal portions by a lath and
plaster partition, with no upper story, a thatched roof, now entirely
out of repair, and letting in the rain in several places, and a paved
floor little better than the earth itself, so large and cavernous
were the gaps between the stones. The dismal place had no small
adornings--none of those little superfluities which, however ugly and
trivial, are still so precious in the dwellings of the poor, as showing
the existence of some instinct or passion which is not the creation
of the sheerest physical need; and Langham, as he sat down, caught the
sickening marsh smell which the Oxford man, accustomed to the odors of
damp meadows in times of ebbing flood and festering sun, knows so well.
As old Milsom began to talk to him in his weak, tremulous voice, the
visitor's attention was irresistibly held by the