CHAPTER IX.

IN MUCKMAMmon's rents.

OWN in the country the sky was blue, flecked

Dow

with white clouds that looked like flocks of Fairy-land fresh-washed sheep. The sunlight was rich again, and beneath its warm smile, green leaf and blade were dancing in triumph over the dark prisons from which they had escaped. Flowers were opening like the shy eyes of wakening babes: and flowers were open in a broad blaze—an ecstatic stare of astonishment at the beauty of the world in which they found themselves. White butterflies were flitting over the flowers, fluttering hither and thither as if intoxicated with their fragrance. Rustling boughs, booming and buzzing bees, chirping crickets, humming flies, chirruping and carolling birds, breezes whispering secrets to the fresh

grass and young corn that bent to listen, brooks gurgling round moist mossy stones, the bleating of lambs, the lowing of oxen, the whinnying of foals, children's voices, the tinkling of sheep-bells and horse-bells, all sounds heard anywhere, harmonised into an exhilarating or a deliciously dreamy music. Even worn-out old farmer's-men got a few minutes' respite from rheumatism, as they felt the sun strike through their faded, patched smock-frocks. Even poor drudges of farmer's-men's wives remembered the time when they were merry little girls — a momentary gleam came into their lack - lustre eyes as they watched their little ones tumbling or making daisy-chains and cowslip-balls upon the sunny green.

"Let me see how my poor Londoners are faring," said Hoity Toity.

And in an instant he was at the mouth of Muckmammon's Rents.

The sun was shining there, too-after a fashion. A hot, brassy smoke-fog, that tasted of brimstone, hung over the grimy Rents, jammed into a cleft that Muckmammon had found unoccupied in a black

region, in which squat rows of houses stood back to back and nose to nose. Two persons could not get into Muckmammon's Rents at the same time; even a single person, if stout, had to sidle through the narrow slit between two houses that was the entrance to the double row of hovels-fifteen on a side-out of whose tenants, although the sties were not fit for pigs, Muckmammon screwed a comfortable income.

The space between the hovels was rather wider than the slit, but when the inhabitants of the Rents sat on their door-steps, if they had stretched out their legs, instead of nursing their knees, their toes would have met in the ink-black gutter which had "made itself” in the middle of the court unpaved. This narrow little slip of sloppy ground was the general yard, rubbish-hole, lounging-place, playground, and drying-ground of the Rents-the Rents houses had no back-doors.

Many-knotted lines were stretched from house to house, with damp, dripping clothes hung upon them, which it seemed strange that anybody should have taken the trouble to pretend to wash. What

colour they could have been when they went into the washtub, if that was their colour when they came out of the washtub, it was hard to guess. And even if they had been washed as white as driven snow, they would soon have got as black as ever when hung out to dry in that smoky court, with greasy heads, shoulders, and hands constantly flinging them up or thrusting them aside.

On the ash-heaps that rose beside the inky gutter, like the ballast-hills on the banks of the black Tyne, grubby-like children were digging for cabbage-stalks, oyster-shells, herring-heads, and bottle-necks; at the bottom of the court, lads were gambling for halfpence; dusty, bristly men were lounging about with their hands in their pockets— some smoking, others looking enviously at the smokers; yellow-skinned, unwashed women sat on their doorsteps or lounged against their doorposts, gossiping and wrangling. Two of them were fighting like wild-cats-scratching each other's faces and necks with their claw-like, crooked fingers, and worrying each other's back-hair with their clenched teeth.

Though the houses had only four rooms each, some of them held more than four families. Through the open doors and windows, and between the heads and over the shoulders of the listless or loud-talking idlers, men, women, and children could be seen hard at work in the crowded roomscrowded although most scantily furnished. These workers worked on in a dull, dogged way at their stitching, hammering, pegging, pasting, glueing, and what not. They seemed to have no pleasure in their work, but from the time they got up to the time they lay down to sleep again-weak children and women working many an hour longer than the working-day strong working-men make such a fuss about-these feeble workers stuck to their dreary toil, because they knew that to stop meant to starve. They scarcely allowed themselves time to snatch the meagre meals their low-paid labour earned.

Hoity Toity stopped before a house in which, in a room on the ground floor, a woman was stitching as monotonously as a clock ticks, but a great deal faster a woman as careworn as those poor women down in the bright country, and without any cheer