road through a field. And so, by fragments of an ancient terrace,
and by some rugged outbuildings that had once been fortified, and
passing under a ruined gateway we came to the old farm-house in the
thick stone wall outside the old quadrangle of Hoghton Towers:
which I looked at like a stupid savage, seeing no specially in,
seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses to resemble it;
assigning the decay I noticed to the one potent cause of all ruin
that I knew, - poverty; eyeing the pigeons in their flights, the
cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the pond, and the fowls
pecking about the yard, with a hungry hope that plenty of them
might be killed for dinner while I stayed there; wondering whether
the scrubbed dairy vessels, drying in the sunlight, could be goodly
porringers out of which the master ate his belly-filling food, and
which he polished when he had done, according to my ward
experience; shrinkingly doubtful whether the shadows, passing over
that airy height on the bright spring day, were not something in
the nature of frowns, - sordid, afraid, unadmiring, - a small brute
to shudder at.

To that time I had never had the faintest impression of duty. I
had had no knowledge whatever that there was anything lovely in
this life. When I had occasionally slunk up the cellar-steps into
the street, and glared in at shop-windows, I had done so with no
higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy young dog or
wolf-cub. It is equally the fact that I had never been alone, in
the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself. I had been
solitary often enough, but nothing better.

Such was my condition when I sat down to my dinner that day, in the
kitchen of the old farm-house. Such was my condition when I lay on