t tropical. Possibly the dense overcrowding of this quarter with
human life enhanced the burning sensation of the thick air breathed out
and breathed in again, unrefreshed, by multitudes of lungs. Here,
there, and everywhere human beings stood about idly. Groups of untidy
women, in twos and threes, gossiped; lazy men lolled against the
houses, smoking in sullen silence; and for every grown-up person there
were fully a dozen of squalid children playing, shouting, staring, and
squabbling with a vigour no heat could abate.

There was little traffic, so to say, in Mulliner's Rents; it was quite
select in that one single respect. Nothing on wheels penetrated the
unlovely quarter save a coster's barrow of fruit; unwholesome little
yellow pears and cruelly green apples of the lowest type of apple-kind
being the wares of the moment. It was truly a sad and sorrowful haunt,
this of the man-made town; and so it seemed to the two travellers fresh
from the God-made country--from the wholesome breezes of the _caller_
salt air of Northbourne--when they plunged into its midst.

'Courage, captain!' said Philip Price, when he noticed the blanching of
the elder man's brown face and the unutterable loathing of horror that
spoke out of every feature. 'We've got to put our shoulder to the
wheel, and leave no stone unturned to find Alick, and carry him out of
this pestilent hole.'

Philip Price, before his health broke down, had been for a few months
doing duty as curate in a still more squalid colony of human nests than
even this. When the sailor flinched, and hung back, Philip strode
forward, determined to conquer, unheeding the battery of stares turned
upon himself and his companion by the inhabitants, and the
free-and-easy comments, of which they were by no means chary.

Already the captain and Philip had that day spent many fruitless hours
in the search, when they hit on a fresh clue and an address in
Mulliner's Rents. But here, even, difficulties bristled, and the tide
of hopelessness was setting in upon both men when a wretched old crone
was dragged out of a public-house to confront them, with dazed eyes and
with a hateful odour of gin oozing from her whole person.

'Yes--well, yes,' she grudgingly admitted, in answer to the eager
questions of the searchers; 'I does know a boy down with fever. What
o' that? I ain't done no harm to him! He's 'ad the best I could
offer; and five shillin's don't go far when there's sickness