Many a person looked at us as we passed; almost everybody knew us, but few, even of our own neighbours, saluted us; we were Nonconformists and Quakers.
I had never been in the town since the day I came through it with John Halifax.

The season was much later now, but it was quite warm still in the sunshine, and very pleasant looked the streets, even the close, narrow streets of Norton Bury.

I beg its pardon; antiquaries hold it a most "interesting and remarkable" place: and I myself have sometimes admired its quaint, overhanging, ornamented house-fronts--blackened, and wonderfully old.

But one rarely notices what has been familiar throughout life; and now I was less struck by the beauty of the picturesque old town than by the muddiness of its pathways, and the mingled noises of murmuring looms, scolding women, and squabbling children, that came up from the alleys which lay between the High Street and the Avon.

In those alleys were hundreds of our poor folk living, huddled together in misery, rags, and dirt.