He pitied the fettered youth of these begrimed and joyless towns--slaves, Men with Muckrakes (he had fished up an old "Pilgrim's Progress" from the lower depths of the van), who obstinately refused to raise their eyes to the glorious sun in heaven.

In his childish arrogance he would ask Barney Bill, "Why don't they go away and leave it, like me ?" And the wizened little man would reply, with the flicker of an eyelid unperceived by Paul, "Because they haven't no 'igh-born parents waiting for 'em.

They're born to their low estate, and they knows it." Which to Paul was a solution of peculiar comfort.
Even the blackened lands between the towns had their charm for Paul, in that he had a gleeful sense of being excluded from the wrath of God, which fell continuously upon them and the inhabitants thereof.

And here and there a belt of leafy country gave promise, or confirmed Barney Bill's promise, of the Paradise that would come.

Besides, what mattered the perpetuations of Bludston brickfields when the Land of Beulah shimmered ahead in the blue distance, when "Martin Chuzzlewit" lay open on his knees, when the smell of the bit of steak sizzling on the cooking stove stung his young blood?
And now they were in Warwickshire, county of verdant undulations and deep woods and embowered villages.
Every promise that Barney Bill had made to him of beauty was in process of fulfilment.