The keeper smiled sadly.

'To fall back on, indeed! and down on, too. At all events, you rich
might help to make Christians of them, and men of them. For I'm
beginning to fancy strangely, in spite of all the preachers say,
that, before ever you can make them Christians, you must make them
men and women.'

'Are they not so already?'

'Oh, sir, go and see! How can a man be a man in those crowded
styes, sleeping packed together like Irish pigs in a steamer, never
out of the fear of want, never knowing any higher amusement than the
beer-shop? Those old Greeks and Romans, as I read, were more like
men than half our English labourers. Go and see! Ask that sweet
heavenly angel, Miss Honoria,'--and the keeper again blushed,--'And
she, too, will tell you. I think sometimes if she had been born and
bred like her father's tenants' daughters, to sleep where they
sleep, and hear the talk they hear, and see the things they see,
what would she have been now? We mustn't think of it.' And the
keeper turned his head away, and fairly burst into tears.

Lancelot was moved.

'Are the poor very immoral, then?'

'You ask the rector, sir, how many children hereabouts are born
within six months of the wedding-day. None of them marry, sir, till
the devil forces them. There's no sadder sight than a labourer's