ildren. They often mustered by forties
and fifties in one street, and were the great pervading feature of the
quarter. In the world of the large incomes, young life sprang up like
a garden fountain, artificially playing only at stated periods in the
sunshine. In the world of the small incomes, young life flowed out
turbulently into the street, like an exhaustless kennel-deluge, in all
weathers. Next to the children of the inhabitants, in visible numerical
importance, came the shirts and petticoats, and miscellaneous linen of
the inhabitants; fluttering out to dry publicly on certain days of the
week, and enlivening the treeless little gardens where they hung, with
lightsome avenues of pinafores, and solemn-spreading foliage of stout
Welsh flannel. Here that absorbing passion for oranges (especially
active when the fruit is half ripe, and the weather is bitter cold),
which distinguishes the city English girl of the lower orders,
flourished in its finest development; and here, also, the poisonous
fumes of the holyday shop-boy's bad cigar told all resident nostrils
when it was Sunday, as plainly as the church bells could tell it to all
resident ears. The one permanent rarity in this neighborhood, on week
days, was to discover a male inhabitant in any part of it, between the
hours of nine in the morning and six in the evening; the one sorrowful
sight which never varied, was to see that every woman, even to the
youngest, looked more or less unhappy, often care-stricken, while youth
was still in the first bud; oftener child-stricken before maturity was
yet in the full bloom.

As for the great central portion of the suburb--or, in other words,
the locality of the moderate incomes--it reflected exactly the lives of
those who inhabited it, by presenting no distinctive character of its
own at all.

In one part, the better order of houses imitated as pompously as they
could, the architectural grandeur of the mansions owned by the large
incomes; in another, the worst order of houses respectably, but
narrowly, escaped a general resemblance to the brick boxes of the
small incomes. In some places, the "park" influences vindicated their
existence superbly in the persons of isolated ladies who, not having a
carriage to go out in for an airing, exhibited the next best thing, a
footman to walk behind them: and so got a pedestrian airing genteelly in
that way. In other places, the obtrusive spirit of the brick boxes
rode about, thinly di