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