sort
of a home was it? It would be far easier to say what it was not than
what it was. Let us follow the owner himself as he comes in from his
work, jaded and heart-sore, the night after Samuel's departure.

The house is the worst in the row, for it is the cheapest--the tyrant
"Drink" will not let his slave afford a better. The front door opens
opposite the high dead wall of another block of houses, so that very
little daylight comes in at the sunniest of times--no loss, perhaps, as
the sunshine would only make misery, dirt, and want more apparent. A
rush-bottomed chair--or rather the mutilated framework of one, the seat
being half rotted through, and the two uppermost bars broken off with a
jagged fracture--lies sufficiently across the entrance to throw down any
unwary visitor. A rickety chest of drawers--most of the knobs being
gone and their places supplied by strings, which look like the tails of
rats which had perished in effecting an entrance--stands tipped on one
side against the wall, one of its legs having disappeared. A little
further on is a blank corner, where a clock used to be, as may be traced
by the clusters of cobwebs in two straight lines, one up either wall,
which have never been swept away since the clock was sold for drink. A
couch-chair extends under the window the whole length, but one of its
arms is gone, and the stump which supported it thrusts up its ragged top
to wound any hand that may incautiously rest there; the couch itself is
but a tumbled mass of rags and straw. A table, nearly as dilapidated,
and foul with countless beer-stains, stands before the fire, which is
the only cheerful thing in the house, and blazes away as if it means to
do its best to make up for the very discouraging state of things by
which it finds itself surrounded. The walls of the room have been
coloured, or rather discoloured, a dirty brown, all except the square
portion over the fire-place, which was once adorned with a gay paper,
but whose brilliancy has long been defaced by smoke and grease. A
broken pipe or two, a couple of irons, and a brass candlestick whose
shaft leans considerably out of the perpendicular, occupy the
mantelpiece. An old rocking-chair and two or three common ones
extremely infirm on their legs, complete the furniture. The walls are
nearly bare of ornament; the exceptions being a highly-coloured print of
a horse-race, and a sampler worked by Betty, rendered almost invisible
by dust.