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Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious! He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had another side.
That prim, old-fashioned little woman, with her cramped ways, was his mother; his father had been a drunkard and had been killed at his work: that was his parentage; it was their fault that he led this poverty-stricken existence. He walked on, without looking up at all the swarming life around him, went step by step over the slippery cobbles, straight to his work.
One day a whole band of poverty-stricken and ailing folks went to the Mayor, knelt down in his courtyard, and implored him with sobs to allow the Grotto to be reopened; and the words they spoke were so pitiful that all who heard them wept.
The neighbourhood was a poverty-stricken one, and the kind Colonel, with his tripping step and simple manner, was soon a familiar figure in it, chatting with the seamen, taking provisions to starving families, or visiting some bedridden old woman to light her fire. He was particularly fond of boys. Ragged street arabs and rough sailor-lads crowded about him.
In that poverty-stricken house, the money spent on fuel alone, in the height of summer, would have comfortably maintained the inmates; but neither Sibyll nor Madge ever thought to murmur at this waste, dedicated to what had become the vital want of a man who drew air in a world of his own. This was the first thing to be provided for; and Science was of more imperative necessity than even Hunger.
For getting on in the world and for carving out one's own little niche, nothing beats having poverty-stricken, but sensible and respectable parents. Many a fellow has been heard to deplore the lack of opportunities in his early youth when, in reality, nothing stood in his way, unless it may have been the rather unhandy handicap of being poor.
In the decay of that long southern autumn a more sombre opulence was added to the gay colours; a different spirit filled the air, so that I realised suddenly that old romantic Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. It lay a-dying still, gorgeous in corruption, sober yet flamboyant, rich and poverty-stricken, squalid, magnificent.
In the meantime, some wretched, poverty-stricken Caunians, who in some pitiful employment as camp-followers had accompanied the king's army, by chance joined these attendants of Cyrus, supposing them to be of their own party. But when, after a while, they made out that their coats over their breastplates were red, whereas all the king's people wore white ones, they knew that they were enemies.
Yet in this, and much more such poverty-stricken, swine-husk argument, Letty seemed to hear a gospel of liberty, and scarcely needed the following injunctions of Tom, to make a firm resolve not to utter a word concerning him. To do so would be treacherous to him, and would be to forfeit the liberty he had taught her! Thus, from the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.
It was a bright revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always under cover.
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