You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons: which you
may reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned steamboats,
in eight hours.
What a city Lyons is! Talk about people feeling, at certain
unlucky times, as if they had tumbled from the clouds! Here is a
whole town that is tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky; having been
first caught up, like other stones that tumble down from that
region, out of fens and barren places, dismal to behold! The two
great streets through which the two great rivers dash, and all the
little streets whose name is Legion, were scorching, blistering,
and sweltering. The houses, high and vast, dirty to excess, rotten
as old cheeses, and as thickly peopled. All up the hills that hem
the city in, these houses swarm; and the mites inside were lolling
out of the windows, and drying their ragged clothes on poles, and
crawling in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and gasp
upon the pavement, and creeping in and out among huge piles and
bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or rather not
dying till their time should come, in an exhausted receiver.
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