want to go back?" said I, fearing he was growing
restless.

His face worked, and he said, "When I feel like a stone round Eustace's
neck."

"Why should you feel so? You are a lever to lift him."

"Am I? The longer I live with you, the more true it seems to me that I
had no business to come into a world with such people in it as you and
Miss Tracy."

Eustace came back, fidgeting to get a pen mended, an operation beyond
him, but patiently performed by the stronger fingers. We said no more,
but I had had a glimpse which made me hope that the pilgrim was
beginning to feel the burthen on his back.

Not that he had much time for thought. He was out all day, looking
after the potteries, where orders were coming in fast, and workmen
increasing, and likewise toiling in the fields at Ogden's farm, making
measurements and experiments on the substrata and the waterfall, on
which to base his plans for drainage according to the books Lord
Erymanth had lent him.

After the second day he came home half-laughing. Farmer Ogden had
warned him off and refused to listen to any explanation, though he must
have known whom he was expelling--yes, like a very village Hampden, he
had thrust the unwelcome surveyor out at his gate with such a
trembling, testy, rheumatic arm, that Harold had felt obliged to obey
it.

Eustace, angered at the treatment of his cousin, volunteered to come
and "tell the ass, Ogden, to mind what he was about," and Harold added,
"If you would come, Lucy, you might help to make his wife understand."

I came, as I was desired, where I had never been before, for we had
always rested in the belief that the Alfy Valley was a nasty, damp,
unhealthy place, with "something always about," and had contented
ourselves with sending broth to the cottages whenever we heard of any
unusual amount of disease. If we had ever been there!

We rode the two miles, as I do not think Dora and I would ever have
floundered through the mud and torrents that ran down the lanes. It
was just as if the farm had been built in the lower circle, and the
cottages in Malebolge itself, where the poor little Alfy, so pure when
it started from Kalydon Moor, brought down to them all the leakage of
that farmyard. Oh! that yard, I never beheld, imagined, or made my way
through the like, though there was a little causeway near the boundary
wall, where it was possible to creep along on the stones, rousing up a
sleeping pig or a dreamy donkey her