get
money enough to go on with the second; old speculators failed and were
succeeded by new; foundations sank from bad digging; walls were blown
down in high winds from hasty building; bricks were called for in such
quantities, and seized on in such haste, half-baked from the kilns,
that they set the carts on fire, and had to be cooled in pails of water
before they could be erected into walls--and still the new suburb defied
all accidents, and grew irrepressibly into a little town of houses,
ready to be let and lived in, from the one end to the other.

The new neighborhood offered house-accommodation--accepted at the higher
prices as yet only to a small extent--to three distinct subdivisions
of the great middle class of our British population. Rents and premises
were adapted, in a steeply descending scale, to the means of the middle
classes with large incomes, of the middle classes with moderate incomes,
and of the middle classes with small incomes. The abodes for the large
incomes were called "mansions," and were fortified strongly against the
rest of the suburb by being all built in one wide row, shut in at either
end by ornamental gates, and called a "park." The unspeakable desolation
of aspect common to the whole suburb, was in a high state of perfection
in this part of it. Irreverent street noises fainted dead away on
the threshold of the ornamental gates, at the sight of the hermit
lodge-keeper. The cry of the costermonger and the screech of the
vagabond London boy were banished out of hearing. Even the regular
tradesman's time-honored business noises at customers' doors, seemed as
if they ought to have been relinquished here. The frantic falsetto
of the milkman, the crash of the furious butcher's cart over the
never-to-be pulverized stones of the new road through the "park,"
always sounded profanely to the passing stranger, in the spick-and-span
stillness of this Paradise of the large incomes.

The hapless small incomes had the very worst end of the whole locality
entirely to themselves, and absorbed all the noises and nuisances, just
as the large incomes absorbed all the tranquillities and luxuries of
suburban existence. Here were the dreary limits at which architectural
invention stopped in despair. Each house in this poor man's purgatory
was, indeed, and in awful literalness, a brick box with a slate top to
it. Every hole drilled in these boxes, whether door-hole or window-hole,
was always overflowing with ch