r in
Clapperton Street. It was impossible to imagine that anyone lived here
but dried-up little men with greenish-white complexions and
hatchet-shaped whiskers and gnawed mustaches, dried-up little men whose
wives kept arsenic in small triangular cupboards by the bed.

"I wouldn't mind having lodgings here," said Barnes. He had caught sight
of a square of cardboard at the farther end of the street. This was the
outpost of an array of apartment cards, for the next street was full of
them. The next street was evidently a little nearer to the period of
final dilapidation; but Michael fancied that, in comparison with the
middle-aged respectableness of Clapperton Street, this older and now
very swiftly decaying warren of second-rate apartments was almost
attractive. Street followed street, each one, as they drew nearer to
Victoria Station, being a little more raffish than its predecessor, each
one being a little less able to resist the corrosion of a persistently
inquinating migration. Sometimes, and with a sharp effect of contrast,
occurred prosperous squares; but even these, with their houses so
uniformly tall and ocherous, delivered a presage of irremediable
decadency.

Suddenly the long ranks of houses, which were beginning to seem
endless, vanished upon the margin of a lake of railway lines. Just
before the hansom would have mounted the slope of an arcuated bridge, it
swung to the right into Leppard Street, S.W. The beginning of the street
ran between two high brown walls crowned with a ruching of broken glass:
these guarded on one side the escarp of the railway, on the other a coal
yard. At the farther end the street swept round to an exit between two
rows of squalid dwellings called Greenarbor Court, an exit, however,
that was barred to vehicles by a row of blistered posts. Some fifty
yards before this the wall deviated to form a recess in which five very
tall houses rose gauntly against the sky from the very edge of the
embankment. Standing as they did upon a sort of bluff and flanked on
either side by blind walls, these habitations gave an impression of
quite exceptional height. This was emphasized by the narrow oblong
windows of which there may have been nearly fifty. The houses were built
of the same brick as the walls, and they had deepened from yellow to the
same fuscous hue. This promontory seemed to serve as an appendix for the
draff of the neighborhood's rubbish. The ribs of an umbrella; a child's
boot; a b