"Woodbine Cottage" had sounded hopeful, when first he was advised to take a look at it. Dunn soon found, however, that dreams of country prettiness and twining creepers must be put aside.
Littleburgh was a bustling manufacturing town, of perhaps some nine or ten thousand inhabitants, and, viewed from a money point of view, it might be regarded as a very thriving place. There were cloth-factories and other factories, some of the former being worked almost entirely by women. Fresh houses and streets were being run up in all directions: so the builders were just then having a fairly good time of it. Of course rents were proportionately dear.
The town lay in a flat unbeautiful neighbourhood; very different from the fair and hilly landscape the Dunns were used to look upon. Long rows of small red or white houses, as much alike one to another as a supply of pill-boxes, stretched away to the east and south; and beyond them lay wide brick-fields, with a kiln here and there.
"Woodbine Cottage" stood exactly in the middle of one such row. It was flanked by "Rose Cottage" and "Myrtle Cottage." But no roses, myrtles, or woodbine grew anywhere near.
The cottage contained four rooms, two below and two above; so it did well enough for a small family as to space. It opened straight upon the pavement, without an inch of garden in front, and with only a minute yard behind. No doubt the Dunns were well off to have so much. Some cottages in Littleburgh could boast no back yard at all. Still—when they should think of the garden they had left, the pinks and sweet-williams, the roses and geraniums, cannot we imagine how they would feel?
They had arrived quite early that morning, and Dunn had immediately gone straight off to his new work. He was not a man to waste one day without necessity.
For hours since, Susan and her eldest girl, Nancy, had been scrubbing and scouring. The bedrooms and the kitchen were now almost in order. Only the little parlour remained. Susan was bent upon getting that straight too, before her husband should come in.
"Just to make him feel home-like," she said once or twice.
But Susan was very tired, and her back ached. They had started early by train, and she had been up late the night before. So at length she stood still for a minute to rest, gazing out upon the street, and then it was that the words escaped her lips,—
"They call this 'Woodbine Cottage!'"