, and coats, and rags stuffed
in, and men with bloodshot eyes and desperate faces sitting dogged with
their hats on, staring at nothing, or leaning on their ragged elbows on
broken tables, scowling from between their dirty hands at the world and
the future; while in higher rooms sat solitary girls in hard wooden
chairs, a pile of straw covered with a rug in the corner, and a box to
put a change of linen in, driving the needle silently and ceaselessly
through shirts or coats or trowsers, stooping over in the foul air during
the heat of the day, straining their eyes when the day darkened to save a
candle, hearing the roar and the rush and the murmur far away, mingled in
the distance, as if they were dead and buried in their graves, and
dreaming a horrid dream until the resurrection.

Only sometimes an acute withering pain, as if something or somebody were
sewing the sewer and pierced her with a needle sharp and burning, made
the room swim and the straw in the corner glimmer; and the girl dropped
the work and closed her eyes--the cheeks were black and hollow beneath
them--and she gasped and panted, and leaned back, while the roar went on,
and the hot sun glared, and the neighboring church clock, striking the
hour, seemed to beat on her heart as it smote relentlessly the girl's
returning consciousness. Then she took up the work again, and the needle,
with whose little point in pain and sickness and consuming solitude, in
darkness, desolation, and flickering, fainting faith, she pricked back
death and dishonor.

At neighboring corners were the reefs upon which human health, hope,
and happiness lay stranded, broken up and gone to pieces. Bloated faces
glowered through the open doors--their humanity sunk away into mere
bestiality. Human forms--men no longer--lay on benches, hung over chairs,
babbled, maundered, shrieked or wept aloud; while women came in and took
black bottles from under tattered shawls, and said nothing, but put down
a piece of money; and the man behind the counter said nothing, but took
the money and filled the bottles, which were hidden under the tattered
shawl again, and the speechless phantoms glided out, guarding that little
travesty of modesty even in that wild ruin.

In shops beyond, yards of tape, and papers of pins, and boots and shoes
and bread, and all the multitudinous things that are bought and sold
every minute, were being done up in papers by complaisant, or surly, or
conceited, or well-behav