he
darkness of it was heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance and want,
were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great
power all of them; but most especially the last. Samples of a
people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the
mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old
people young, shivered at every corner.... The mill which had
worked them down was the mill that grinds young people old; the
children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and
upon the grown faces, and plowed into every furrow of age and
coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent
everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the
wretched clothing that hung upon the poles and lines; hunger was
patched into them with straw and rags and wood and paper; hunger
was repeated in every modicum of fire-wood that the man sawed off;
hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from
the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything
to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written
in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the
sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for
sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in
the turned cylinder; hunger was shred into atoms in every farthing
of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.

"Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offense and stench, with other narrow winding
streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all
smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a
brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the
people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of
turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of
fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with
what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of
the gallows-rope they mused about enduring or inflicting."--_A Tale
of Two Cities._

* * * * *

In these ghastly colors Charles Dickens painted the picture of poverty
and its starving victims in France on the eve of the French revolution,
and yet, "every