This was a wide, wide track--for the humble followers of the camp
of wealth pitch their tents round about it for many a mile--but
its character was still the same. Damp rotten houses, many to let,
many yet building, many half-built and mouldering away--lodgings,
where it would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who
let or those who came to take--children, scantily fed and clothed,
spread over every street, and sprawling in the dust--scolding
mothers, stamping their slipshod feet with noisy threats upon the
pavement--shabby fathers, hurrying with dispirited looks to the
occupation which brought them 'daily bread' and little more--
mangling-women, washer-women, cobblers, tailors, chandlers,
driving their trades in parlours and kitchens and back room and
garrets, and sometimes all of them under the same roof--
brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or
timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered
by the flames--mounds of dock-weed, nettles, coarse grass and
oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion--small dissenting chapels
to teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries of Earth, and
plenty of new churches, erected with a little superfluous wealth,
to show the way to Heaven.
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