This quarter passed, they came upon the haunts of commerce and
great traffic, where many people were resorting, and business was
already rife. The old man looked about him with a startled and
bewildered gaze, for these were places that he hoped to shun. He
pressed his finger on his lip, and drew the child along by narrow
courts and winding ways, nor did he seem at ease until they had
left it far behind, often casting a backward look towards it,
murmuring that ruin and self-murder were crouching in every street,
and would follow if they scented them; and that they could not fly
too fast.
Again this quarter passed, they came upon a straggling
neighbourhood, where the mean houses parcelled off in rooms, and
windows patched with rags and paper, told of the populous poverty
that sheltered there. The shops sold goods that only poverty could
buy, and sellers and buyers were pinched and griped alike. Here
were poor streets where faded gentility essayed with scanty space
and shipwrecked means to make its last feeble stand, but
tax-gatherer and creditor came there as elsewhere, and the poverty
that yet faintly struggled was hardly less squalid and manifest
than that which had long ago submitted and given up the game.
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