Plain as is the fare, it was better than the old man had existed on for years; but though better it was not his dinner.  He was not sitting in his old chair, at his own old table, round which his children had once gathered.  He had not planted the cabbage, and tended it while it grew, and cut it himself.  So it was, all through the workhouse life.  The dormitories were clean, but the ward was not his old bedroom up the worm-eaten steps, with the slanting ceiling, where as he woke in the morning he could hear the sparrows chirping, the chaffinch calling, and the lark singing aloft.  There was a garden attached to the workhouse, where he could do a little if he liked, but it was not his garden.  He missed his plum-trees and apples, and the tall pear, and the lowly elder hedge.  He looked round raising his head with difficulty, and he could not see the sign-post, nor the familiar red-bricked farmhouse.  He knew all the rain that had fallen must have come through the thatch of the old cottage in at least one place, and he would have liked to have gone and rethatched it with trembling hand.  At home he could lift the latch of the garden gate and go down the road when he wished.  Here he could not go outside the boundary—­it was against the regulations.  Everything to appearance had been monotonous in the cottage—­but there he did not feel it monotonous.

At the workhouse the monotony weighed upon him.  He used to think as he lay awake in bed that when the spring came nothing should keep him in this place.  He would take his discharge and go out, and borrow a hoe from somebody, and go and do a bit of work again, and be about in the fields.  That was his one hope all through his first winter.  Nothing else enlivened it, except an occasional little present of tobacco from the guardians who knew him.  The spring came, but the rain was ceaseless.  No work of the kind he could do was possible in such weather.  Still there was the summer, but the summer was no improvement; in the autumn he felt weak, and was not able to walk far.  The chance for which he had waited had gone.  Again the winter came, and he now rapidly grew more feeble.

When once an aged man gives up, it seems strange at first that he should be so utterly helpless.  In the infirmary the real benefit of the workhouse reached him.  The food, the little luxuries, the attention were far superior to anything he could possibly have had at home.  But still it was not home.  The windows did not permit him from his bed to see the leafless trees or the dark woods and distant hills.  Left to himself, it is certain that of choice he would have crawled under a rick, or into a hedge, if he could not have reached his cottage.

The end came very slowly; he ceased to exist by imperceptible degrees, like an oak-tree.  He remained for days in a semi-unconscious state, neither moving nor speaking.  It happened at last.  In the grey of the winter dawn, as the stars paled and the whitened grass was stiff with hoar frost, and the rime coated every branch of the tall elms, as the milker came from the pen and the young ploughboy whistled down the road to his work, the spirit of the aged man departed.