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 here and there, and barked at in volleys by dogs stationed on all the higher islets in the unsavoury lake.  If Dora had not been a colonial child, and if I could have feared for myself with Harold by my side, I don’t think we should ever have arrived, but Farmer Ogden and his son came out, and a man and boy or two; and when Eustace was recognised, they made what way they could for us, and we were landed at last in a scrupulously clean kitchen with peat fire and a limeash floor, where, alas! we were not suffered to remain, but were taken into a horrid little parlour, with a newly-lighted, smoking fire, a big Bible, and a ploughing-cup.  Mrs. Ogden was a dissenter, so we had really no acquaintance, and, poor thing, had long been unable to go anywhere.  She was a pale trembling creature, most neat and clean, but with the dreadful sallow complexion given by perpetual ague.  She was very civil, and gave us cake and wine, to the former of which Dora did ample justice, but oh! the impracticability of those people!

The men had it all out of doors, but when I tried my eloquence on Mrs. Ogden I found her firmly persuaded not only that her own ill health and the sickness in the hamlet were “the will of the Lord,” but in her religious fatalism, that it was absolutely profane to think that cleansing and drainage would amend them; and she adduced texts which poor uninstructed I was unable to answer, even while I knew they were a perversion; and, provoked as I was, I felt that her meek patience and resignation might be higher virtues than any to which I had yet attained.

Her husband, who, I should explain, was but one remove above a smock-frock farmer, took a different line.  He had unsavoury proverbs in which he put deep faith.  “Muck was the mother of money,” and also “Muck was the farmer’s nosegay.”  He viewed it as an absolute effeminacy to object to its odorous savours; and as to the poor people, “they were an ungrateful lot, and had a great deal too much done for them,” the small farmer’s usual creed.  Mr. Alison could do as he liked, of course, but his lease had five years yet to run, and he would not consent to pay no more rent, not for what he didn’t ask for, nor didn’t want, and Mr. Bullock didn’t approve of—­that he would not, not if Mr. Alison took the law of him.