substantial, useful;--but so dreary! so cold! so dark! There are
children in the court, and yet all is silent. I always hurry past
that place as if it were a prison. Restraint, sickness, age,
extreme poverty, misery, which I have no power to remove or
alleviate,--these are the ideas, the feelings, which the sight of
those walls excites; yet, perhaps, if not certainly, they contain
less of that extreme desolation than the morbid fancy is apt to
paint. There will be found order, cleanliness, food, clothing,
warmth, refuge for the homeless, medicine and attendance for the
sick, rest and sufficiency for old age, and sympathy, the true and
active sympathy which the poor show to the poor, for the unhappy.
There may be worse places than a parish workhouse--and yet I hurry
past it. The feeling, the prejudice, will not be controlled.

The end of the dreary garden edges off into a close-sheltered lane,
wandering and winding, like a rivulet, in gentle 'sinuosities' (to
use a word once applied by Mr. Wilberforce to the Thames at Henley),
amidst green meadows, all alive with cattle, sheep, and beautiful
lambs, in the very spring and pride of their tottering prettiness;
or fields of arable land, more lively still with troops of stooping
bean-setters, women and children, in all varieties of costume and
colour; and ploughs and harrows, with their whistling boys and
steady carters, going through, with a slow and plodding industry,
the main business of this busy season. What work beansetting is!
What a reverse of the position assigned to man to distinguish him
from the beasts of the field! Only think of stooping for six,
eight, ten hours a day, drilling holes in the earth with a little
stick, and then dropping in the beans one by one. They are paid
according to the quantity they plant; and some of the poor women
used to be accused of clumping them--that is to say, of dropping