Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB
[merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]

CHAPTER IV.

HOW SHALL I KEEP IT ALIVE?

WERE you ever led, reader, by chance or by choice, into one of the plague-courts of London? I do not speak of the Black Death of the fourteenth century, but of that pestilence which is hardly less fatal in our own times, the plague of neglected poverty,— starving on mouldy crusts and fiery gin,-choking in a poisoned atmosphere,―wallowing in the accumulated filth of countless years.

Have you ever trodden those crowded, mouldering lanes and alleys, where open sewers witches' cauldrons of festering filth-seethe and welter by the open doors,-nay, roll their rank pollution through the very heart of the poor man's home; where vermin, unnamed and unknown in civilized life, creep and writhe, and die and rot, on wall and floor and roof-a moving, mortifying crust of life and death-the mockery and bathos of the decorative art; where the sickly glare and the wearied smile of consumption ape the glance and the laughter of health; where the

« ZurückWeiter »