Two years after Kingsley's return Nansie and her uncle, who constituted the government of ways and means of the household, decided that the rooms they occupied were too dear; they paid for these rooms five shillings a week. They looked out for others, and decided upon two rooms at the top of a house in a narrow court, in comparison with which Church Alley was a paradise. This court was so narrow that the occupants of the houses on either side could hold conversation with each other from opposite windows. The rooms were very small, the ceilings very low, the ventilation horrible, the sanitary arrangements disgraceful--a description of affairs which renders it all the more wonderful how Nansie's daughter, Hester, and how Nansie herself, could have kept themselves pure and sweet in an atmosphere so inimical to healthful moral and physical growth. The court--with other thoroughfares as narrow and stunted and vicious in its immediate neighborhood--was built upon part of an estate which belonged to a family the head of which sat in the House of Lords. There was in the house in which Nansie resided a cellar, politely called a basement. In this cellar were two rooms--one back, one front. The back room had a fireplace, but no window; what light filtered into it was filtered through a pane of glass let into the compartment which divided it from the front room, and as this front room itself could boast of but one window, the light it supplied to its neighbor was of a character so dismal and forlorn as scarcely to relieve the darkness into which, by the laws of its structure, it was plunged. But, indeed, to call it by the name of light was the bitterest of mockeries, not alone because of the small play it had, but because of the dust and cobwebs which covered both sides of the pane of glass. In this back room, however, lived a family of father, mother, and three children, all pigging together--there is no other word to describe it--in the narrow space which may fitly be likened to the Black Hole of Calcutta. They had certainly one advantage--that they could run out when they pleased and breathe the fetid air of the court, and thence into wider thoroughfares where the air was not vile enough to poison them. Had this opportunity not been theirs they would have died in a week. The social station of the head of this family was that of a scavenger, for six months of the year out of work. His wife occasionally got half a day's washing to do; the children were young and helpless, and the life they all lived can be more easily imagined than described. To describe it faithfully would be impossible in the pages or columns of any respectable journal, the details were so frightful and vile. And it is in no class spirit, in no spirit but that of mournfulness and amazement, that the fact is repeated--that the virtual owner of this back cellar sat in the House of Lords.