Yes, they were poor, absolutely poor ; not in the sense accepted by society, which means that people have fifteen hundred a year and would like to spend three thou sand ; or have three thousand and find life intolerable because they have not six. Mrs Trevornock and her two daughters man aged to face life upon a reliable income of something under a hundred and fifty pounds a year. They had occasional wind falls, or the problem might have proved insoluble ; but after reckoning these casual inlets of money the tota of their income rarely reached two hundred pounds a year ; but this was before the Crimean war, six-and-twenty years ago, and the cost of living was less in those days than it is now. Yet their poverty never degenerated into ugliness. The little semi-detached house at Cam berwell — rent, twenty-five pounds per annum — had a dainty prettiness not al ways attainable by people of larger means. I The mother and daughters were so fond of each other, and so fond of their home, that the whole of life was sweetened by this overflowing fountain of love. They were always trying to surprise each other with some improvement in house or garden, were it only a shilling rose bush in the border, or a penny bunch of violets in a vase on the mantelpiece. They were in dustrious, ingenious, and temperate. They cared very little how they dined, but they cared very much about the house in which they lived. Ugliness and dirt were loathsome to them. The semi detached cottage at Camberwell was as clean and pure as a homestead far away in a pastoral land, remote from the smoke of cities. Mrs Trevornock's existence was a perpetual warfare against "the blacks :" not an oppressed negro race, but those wandering atoms of solidified smoke which came floating on the wings of the wind from the tall chimneys of Lambeth and Bermondsey. South lane, Camberwell, is one of those places which progress has doubtless eradi cated from the face of the earth. Pro gress means building land at two thousand pounds an acre, houses in serried ranks, close as a square of infantry, mere pack ing-enses set on end, with just as much garden to each as would serve as a drying ground for half-a-dozen pocket-handker chiefs. South-lane knew nothing of pro gress. 