it more modern tastes and requirements. And then all around the
principal street are swarms of workmen's dwellings,--and, alas! public-
houses and beer-shops at every corner ready to entrap the wretched
victims of intemperance. Besides all these there are a Town Hall and a
Mechanics' Institute; and the streets and shops and dwelling-houses are
lighted with gas.

Crossbourne has, in fact, become a very hive of industry; but,
unhappily, too many of the cells of the hive are fuller of gall than of
honey, for money is made fast and squandered faster: and what wonder,
seeing that King Alcohol holds his court amongst the people day and
night! And, to make all complete, Crossbourne now boasts of a railway
running through it, and of a station of its own, from which issues many
a train of _goods_; and near the station a distillery, from which there
issues continually a long and lengthening train of _evils_.

Turning out of the principal street to the right, just opposite to where
the old dingy sign-board used to swing, a passer-by could not fail to
notice a detached house more lofty and imposing in its appearance than
the plain working-men's cottages on either side of it.

At the time our story opens this house was occupied by William Foster, a
skilled ironworker, who was earning his fifty shillings a week, when he
chose to do so; which was by no means his regular habit, as frequent
sprees and drinking-bouts with congenial companions made his services
little to be depended on. However, he was a first-rate hand, and his
employers, who could not do without him, were fain to put up with his
irregularities.

Foster was now in the prime of life, and had a young wife and one little
baby. He was professedly a sceptic, and gloried in his creed--if _he_
can be said to have any creed who believes in nothing but himself. Of
course the Bible to him was simply a whetstone on which to "sharpen his
tongue like a serpent, that he might shoot out his arrows, even bitter
words." As for conscience, he ridiculed the very idea of such an old-
fashioned guide and monitor. "No," he would say, "as a true musician
abhors discordant sounds, and as a skilled mechanic abhors bad work, and
therefore cannot turn it out without doing violence to his finer and
more cultivated sensibilities, so the best guide in morals to an
enlightened man is his own sense of moral fitness and propriety."

Nevertheless, he was by no means over-scrupulous as to the