Come wi' me, and see."
We went on through a back street or two, and then into a huge, miserable
house, which, a hundred years ago, perhaps, had witnessed the luxury, and
rung to the laughter of some one great fashionable family, alone there
in their glory. Now every room of it held its family, or its group of
families--a phalanstery of all the fiends;--its grand staircase, with the
carved balustrades rotting and crumbling away piecemeal, converted into a
common sewer for all its inmates. Up stair after stair we went, while wails
of children, and curses of men, steamed out upon the hot stifling rush of
air from every doorway, till, at the topmost story, we knocked at a garret
door. We entered. Bare it was of furniture, comfortless, and freezing cold;
but, with the exception of the plaster dropping from the roof, and the
broken windows, patched with rags and paper, there was a scrupulous
neatness about the whole, which contrasted strangely with the filth and
slovenliness outside. There was no bed in the room--no table. On a broken
chair by the chimney sat a miserable old woman, fancying that she was
warming her hands over embers which had long been cold, shaking her head,
and muttering to herself, with palsied lips, about the guardians and the
workhouse; while upon a few rags on the floor lay a girl, ugly, small-pox
marked, hollow eyed, emaciated, her only bed clothes the skirt of a large
handsome new riding-habit, at which two other girls, wan and tawdry, were
stitching busily, as they sat right and left of her on the floor.
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