But Barnabas shook his
head.
"Take care of her, Bo'sun," said he, clasping the sailor's hand,
"take great care of her." So saying, he closed the door upon them,
and stood to watch the rumbling coach down the bustling street until
it had rumbled itself quite out of sight.
CHAPTER LXVII
WHICH GIVES SOME ACCOUNT OF THE WORST PLACE IN THE WORLD
A bad place by day, an evil place by night, an unsavory place at all
times is Giles's Rents, down by the River.
It is a place of noisome courts and alleys, of narrow, crooked
streets, seething with a dense life from fetid cellar to crowded
garret, amid whose grime and squalor the wail of the new-born infant
is echoed by the groan of decrepit age and ravaging disease; where
Vice is rampant and ghoulish Hunger stalks, pale and grim.
Truly an unholy place is Giles's Rents, down by the River.
Here, upon a certain evening, Barnabas, leaning out from his narrow
casement, turned wistful-eyed, to stare away over broken roof and
chimney, away beyond the maze of squalid courts and alleys that
hemmed him in to where, across the River, the sun was setting in a
blaze of glory, yet a glory that served only to make more apparent
all the filth and decay, all the sordid ugliness of his surroundings.
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