will of your smart and ostentatious guide, through a
half-open door, and see another sight--a room, dark and foul, mildewed
and ruinous; and, swept carelessly into a corner, a heap of dirt, rags,
bones, waifs and strays of every kind, decaying all together.

You ask, with astonishment and disgust, how comes that there? and are
told, to your fresh astonishment and disgust, that that is only where the
servants sweep the litter. But crouching behind the litter, in the
darkest corner, something moves. You go up to it, in spite of the
entreaties of your guide, and find an aged idiot gibbering in her rags.

Who is she? Oh, an old servant--or a child, or possibly a grand-child,
of some old servant--your guide does not remember which. She is better
out of the way there in the corner. At all events she can find plenty to
eat among the dirt-heap; and as for her soul, if she has one, the
clergyman is said to come and see her now and then, so probably it will
be saved.

Would you not turn away from that palace with the contemptuous thought--
Civilized? Refined? These people's civilization is but skin-deep.
Their refinement is but an outside show. Look into the first back room,
and you find that they are foul barbarians still.

And yet such, literally such and no better, is the refinement of modern
England; such, and no better, is the civilization of our great towns.
Such I fear from what I am told, is the civilization of Southsea, beside
the barbarism to be found in Portsea close at hand. Dirt and squalor,
brutality and ignorance close beside such luxury as the world has not
seen, it may be, since the bad days of Heathen Rome.

But more, if you turned away, you would say to yourselves, if you were
thoughtful persons--not only what barbarism, but what folly. The owner
and his household are in daily danger. The idiot in discontent, or even
in mere folly, may seize a lighted candle, burn petroleum, as she did in
Paris of late, and set the whole palace on fire. And more, the very dirt
is in itself inflammable, and capable, as it festers, of spontaneous
combustion. How many a stately house has been burnt down ere now, simply
by the heating of greasy rags, thrust away in some neglected closet. Let
the owner of the house beware. He is living, voluntarily, over a volcano
of his own making.

But more--what if you were told that the fault lay not so much in the
negligence of servants as in