The doctor nodded, and, whistling low, began an examination.

CHAPTER III

On the dun borderland of Islington and Hoxton, in a corner made by the intersection of the New North Road and the Regent’s Canal, is discoverable an irregular triangle of small dwelling-houses, bearing the name of Wilton Square.  In the midst stands an amorphous structure, which on examination proves to be a very ugly house and a still uglier Baptist chapel built back to back.  The pair are enclosed within iron railings, and, more strangely, a circle of trees, which in due season do veritably put forth green leaves.  One side of the square shows a second place of worship, the resort, as an inscription declares, of ‘Welsh Calvinistic Methodists.’  The houses are of one storey, with kitchen windows looking upon small areas; the front door is reached by an ascent of five steps.

The canal—­maladetta e sventurata fossa—­stagnating in utter foulness between coal-wharfs and builders’ yards, at this point divides two neighbourhoods of different aspects.  On the south is Hoxton, a region of malodorous market streets, of factories, timber yards, grimy warehouses, of alleys swarming with small trades and crafts, of filthy courts and passages leading into pestilential gloom; everywhere toil in its most degrading forms; the thoroughfares thundering with high-laden waggons, the pavements trodden by working folk of the coarsest type, the corners and lurking-holes showing destitution at its ugliest.  Walking northwards, the explorer finds himself in freer air, amid broader ways, in a district of dwelling-houses only; the roads seem abandoned to milkmen, cat’s-meat vendors, and costermongers.  Here will be found streets in which every window has its card advertising lodgings:  others claim a higher respectability, the houses retreating behind patches of garden-ground, and occasionally showing plastered pillars and a balcony.  The change is from undisguised struggle for subsistence to mean and spirit-broken leisure; hither retreat the better-paid of the great slave-army when they are free to eat and sleep.  To walk about a neighbourhood such as this is the dreariest exercise to which man can betake himself; the heart is crushed by uniformity of decent squalor; one remembers that each of these dead-faced houses, often each separate blind window, represents a ‘home,’ and the associations of the word whisper blank despair.

Wilton Square is on the north side of the foss, on the edge of the quieter district, and in one of its houses dwelt at the time of which I write the family on whose behalf Fate was at work in a valley of mid-England.  Joseph Mutimer, nephew to the old man who had just died at Wanley Manor, had himself been at rest for some five years; his widow and three children still lived together in the home they had long occupied.  Joseph came of a family of mechanics; his existence was that of the harmless necessary artisan.  He