impurities into
transitory dust which the next wind can sweep away, in contrast with the
damp, adhesive grime that incorporates itself with all surfaces (unless
continually and painfully cleansed) in the chill moisture of the English
air. Then the all-pervading smoke of the city, abundantly intermingled
with the sable snow-flakes of bituminous coal, hovering overhead,
descending, and alighting on pavements and rich architectural fronts, on
the snowy muslin of the ladies, and the gentlemen's starched collars and
shirt-bosoms, invests even the better streets in a half-mourning garb. It
is beyond the resources of Wealth to keep the smut away from its premises
or its own fingers' ends; and as for Poverty, it surrenders itself to the
dark influence without a struggle. Along with disastrous circumstances,
pinching need, adversity so lengthened out as to constitute the rule of
life, there comes a certain chill depression of the spirits which seems
especially to shudder at cold water. In view of so wretched a state of
things, we accept the ancient Deluge not merely as an insulated
phenomenon, but as a periodical necessity, and acknowledge that nothing
less than such a general washing-day could suffice to cleanse the slovenly
old world of its moral and material dirt.

Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are numerous in the
vicinity of these poor streets, and are set off with the magnificence of
gilded doorposts, tarnished by contact with the unclean customers who
haunt there. Ragged children come thither with old shaving-mugs, or
broken-nosed tea-pots, or any such make-shift receptacle, to get a little
poison or madness for their parents, who deserve no better requital at
their hands for having engendered them. Inconceivably sluttish women enter
at noonday and stand at the counter among boon-companions of both sexes,
stirring up misery and jollity in a bumper together, and quaffing off the
mixture with a relish. As for the men, they lounge there continually,
drinking till they are drunken,--drinking as long as they have a halfpenny
left, and then, as it seemed to me, waiting for a sixpenny miracle to be
wrought in their pockets, so as to enable them to be drunken again. Most
of these establishments have a significant advertisement of "Beds,"
doubtless for the accommodation of their customers in the interval between
one intoxication and the next. I never could find it in my heart, however,
utterly to condemn these