Previous - Next

in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was
patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the
man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and
started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse,
of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's
shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad
bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was
offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting
chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in
every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some
reluctant drops of oil.

Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets
diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of
rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon
them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet
some wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed
and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among
them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor
foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused
about enduring, or inflicting. The trade signs (and they were almost
as many as the shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The
butcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat;
the baker, the coarsest of meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured
as drinking in the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of
thin wine and beer, and were gloweringly confidential together.
Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and
weapons; but, the cutler's knives and axes were sharp and bright, the
smith's hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker's stock was murderous.
The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many little
reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke off abruptly
at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the middle of the
street--when it ran at all: which was only after heavy rains, and
then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across the
streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and
pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted,
and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly
manner overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea,
and the ship and crew were in peril of tempest.

For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region
should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger,
so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and
hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the
darkness of their condition. But, the time was not come yet; and

Previous - Next