ish fancy to feel as if it were a little
hard in them to close the shutter and blacken the flame. So with the
lighted shops, and speculations whether their masters and mistresses
taking tea in a perspective of back-parlour--not so far within but that
the flavour of tea and toast came out, mingled with the glow of light,
into the street--ate or drank or wore what they sold, with the greater
relish because they dealt in it. So with the churchyard on a branch of
the solitary way to the night's sleeping-place. 'Ah me! The dead and
I seem to have it pretty much to ourselves in the dark and in this
weather! But so much the better for all who are warmly housed at home.'
The poor soul envied no one in bitterness, and grudged no one anything.

But, the old abhorrence grew stronger on her as she grew weaker, and
it found more sustaining food than she did in her wanderings. Now, she
would light upon the shameful spectacle of some desolate creature--or
some wretched ragged groups of either sex, or of both sexes, with
children among them, huddled together like the smaller vermin for
a little warmth--lingering and lingering on a doorstep, while the
appointed evader of the public trust did his dirty office of trying to
weary them out and so get rid of them. Now, she would light upon some
poor decent person, like herself, going afoot on a pilgrimage of
many weary miles to see some worn-out relative or friend who had been
charitably clutched off to a great blank barren Union House, as far from
old home as the County Jail (the remoteness of which is always its worst
punishment for small rural offenders), and in its dietary, and in
its lodging, and in its tending of the sick, a much more penal
establishment. Sometimes she would hear a newspaper read out, and would
learn how the Registrar General cast up the units that had within the
last week died of want and of exposure to the weather: for which that
Recording Angel seemed to have a regular fixed place in his sum, as if
they were its halfpence. All such things she would hear discussed, as
we, my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, in our unapproachable
magnificence never hear them, and from all such things she would fly
with the wings of raging Despair.

This is not to be received as a figure of speech. Old Betty Higden
however tired, however footsore, would start up and be driven away
by her awakened horror of falling into the hands of Charity. It is a
remarkable Christian impro