urned
out there is nothing nearer than Murewell, and not a single cottage to
be found there. I don't say it is a landlord's duty to provide more
cottages than are wanted; but if the labour is wanted, the labourer
should be decently housed. He is worthy of his hire, and woe to the man
who neglects or ill-treats him!'

Langham could not help smiling, partly at the vehemence of the speech,
partly at the lack of adjustment between his friend's mood and his own.
He braced himself to take the matter more seriously, but meanwhile
Robert had caught the smile, and his angry eyes melted at once into
laughter.

'There I am, ranting as usual,' he said penitently. 'Took you for
Henslowe, I suppose! Ah, well, never mind. I hear the Provost has
another book on the stocks.'

So they diverged into other things, talking politics and new books,
public men and what not, till, at the end of a long and gradual descent
through wooded ground, some two miles to the north-west of the park,
they emerged from the trees beneath which they had been walking, and
found themselves on a bridge, a gray sluggish stream flowing beneath
them, and 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 neighbour. 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 indescribab