l in its most
degrading forms; the thoroughfares thundering with high-laden waggons,
the pavements trodden by working folk of the coarsest type, the
corners and lurking-holes showing destitution at its ugliest. Walking
northwards, the explorer finds himself in freer air, amid broader ways,
in a district of dwelling-houses only; the roads seem abandoned to
milkmen, cat's-meat vendors, and costermongers. Here will be found
streets in which every window has its card advertising lodgings: others
claim a higher respectability, the houses retreating behind patches of
garden-ground, and occasionally showing plastered pillars and a balcony.
The change is from undisguised struggle for subsistence to mean and
spirit-broken leisure; hither retreat the better-paid of the great
slave-army when they are free to eat and sleep. To walk about a
neighbourhood such as this is the dreariest exercise to which man can
betake himself; the heart is crushed by uniformity of decent squalor;
one remembers that each of these dead-faced houses, often each separate
blind window, represents a 'home,' and the associations of the word
whisper blank despair.

Wilton Square is on the north side of the foss, on the edge of the
quieter district, and in one of its houses dwelt at the time of which
I write the family on whose behalf Fate was at work in a valley of
mid-England. Joseph Mutimer, nephew to the old man who had just died at
Wanley Manor, had himself been at rest for some five years; his widow
and three children still lived together in the home they had long
occupied. Joseph came of a family of mechanics; his existence was
that of the harmless necessary artisan. He earned a living by dint of
incessant labour, brought up his family in an orderly way, and departed
with a certain sense of satisfaction at having fulfilled obvious
duties--the only result of life for which he could reasonably look. With
his children we shall have to make closer acquaintance; but before doing
so, in order to understand their position and follow with intelligence
their several stories, it will be necessary to enter a little upon the
subject of ancestry.

Joseph Mutimer's father, Henry by name, was a somewhat remarkable
personage. He grew to manhood in the first decade of our century, and
wrought as a craftsman in a Midland town. He had a brother, Richard,
some ten years his junior, and the two were of such different types of
character, each so pronounced in his kind, tha