er task.

'We shall be very slow to-day, dear,' she said, as they toiled
painfully through the streets; 'my feet are sore, and I have pains in
all my limbs from the wet of yesterday. I saw that he looked at us and
thought of that, when he said how long we should be upon the road.'

'It was a dreary way he told us of,' returned her grandfather,
piteously. 'Is there no other road? Will you not let me go some other
way than this?'

'Places lie beyond these,' said the child, firmly, 'where we may live
in peace, and be tempted to do no harm. We will take the road that
promises to have that end, and we would not turn out of it, if it were
a hundred times worse than our fears lead us to expect. We would not,
dear, would we?'

'No,' replied the old man, wavering in his voice, no less than in his
manner. 'No. Let us go on. I am ready. I am quite ready, Nell.'

The child walked with more difficulty than she had led her companion to
expect, for the pains that racked her joints were of no common
severity, and every exertion increased them. But they wrung from her
no complaint, or look of suffering; and, though the two travellers
proceeded very slowly, they did proceed. Clearing the town in course
of time, they began to feel that they were fairly on their way.

A long suburb of red brick houses--some with patches of garden-ground,
where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and
coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and
sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its
presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town
itself--a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came, by slow
degrees, upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen
to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring, where
nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools,
which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black road-side.

Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its
dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them
with a dismal gloom. On every side, and far as the eye could see into
the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and
presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which
is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke,
obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of
ashes by the ways