al look of
the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a cockney
type began to emerge discernibly--a cynical young mongrel barbaric
of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics fashioned
apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper comedians.
The female of his kind came with him--a pale girl, shoddy and a little
rouged; and they communicated in a nasal argot, mainly insolences and
elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people showed change: in
place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean, and not
unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors began to
be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much fostered by the
public journals.

The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a nucleus,
and spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and in its
vitals, like benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in the body
of a man, missions and refuges offered what resistance they might to the
saloons and all the hells that cities house and shelter. Temptation
and ruin were ready commodities on the market for purchase by the
venturesome; highwaymen walked the streets at night and sometimes
killed; snatching thieves were busy everywhere in the dusk; while
house-breakers were a common apprehension and frequent reality. Life
itself was somewhat safer from intentional destruction than it was in
medieval Rome during a faction war--though the Roman murderer was more
like to pay for his deed--but death or mutilation beneath the wheels lay
in ambush at every crossing.

The politicians let the people make all the laws they liked; it did
not matter much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians.
Law-making was a pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more.
Singular fermentation of their humor, they even had laws forbidding
dangerous speed. More marvelous still, they had a law forbidding smoke!
They forbade chimneys to smoke and they forbade cigarettes to smoke.
They made laws for all things and forgot them immediately; though
sometimes they would remember after a while, and hurry to make new laws
that the old laws should be enforced--and then forget both new and old.
Wherever enforcement threatened Money or Votes--or wherever it was too
much to bother--it became a joke. Influence was the law.

So the place grew. And it grew strong.

Straightway when he came, each man fell to the same worship:

Give me of thyself, O Bignes