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One sort of visitors especially interested me: they were schools of little boys or girls, under the guardianship of their instructors, charity schools, as I often surmised from their aspect, collected among dark alleys and squalid courts; and hither they were brought to spend a summer afternoon, these pale little progeny of the sunless nooks of London, who had never known that the sky was any broader than that narrow and vapory strip above their native lane.
The windows of many of them were broken and they were otherwise tumbledown, and the young reporter realized that he was in one of the most squalid parts of New York.
"The sun's getting low," she said lightly, "and I must see that view from the top." Chantel was rising, but sat down again with a scowl, as she turned to Rudolph. "You've never seen it, Mr. Hackh? Do come help me up." Inside, with echoing steps, they mounted in a squalid well, obscurely lighted from the upper windows, toward which decaying stairs rose in a dangerous spiral, without guard-rail.
Thick, malodorous vapours arose from the squalid streets, lying back on the level, and from the crowded shipping of the port. These hung in the stagnant air, about the forest of masts and the funnels of steamers. And the noise of the place was as that of Bedlam let loose. The long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal pitched from the baskets down the echoing, iron shoots.
Below, rich brown-stone; above, along the country road which was then Fifth Avenue, a waste, squalid yet in its way picturesque, that extended almost to Mount Morris Park. "Here lived," "Fifth Avenue" tells us, "over five thousand as poverty-stricken and disreputable people as could be seen anywhere.
Next day the savage Cossacks were seen amid all this wealth, still covetous of the squalid and tattered garments of the unfortunate creatures who had become their prisoners: they stripped them, and then collecting them in troops, drove them along naked on the snow, by hard blows with the shaft of their lances.
"Jotham Powell brought some goods over from the Flats for his wife, and he drove right on home with them," she explained. He gazed blankly about the kitchen, which looked cold and squalid in the rainy winter twilight. "How is she?" he asked, dropping his voice to Mattie's whisper. She looked away from him uncertainly. "I don't know. She went right up to her room." "She didn't say anything?" "No."
The fact was strikingly the reverse. The army was in excellent spirits, probably from the highly-agreeable contrast of the budding April woods with the squalid trenches, and the long-unfelt joy of an unfettered march through the fields of spring. General Lee shared this hopeful feeling in a very remarkable degree.
You may clothe the drunkard, fill his purse with gold, establish him in a well furnished house, and in three, six, or twelve months, he will once more be on the "Embankment," haunted by delirium tremens, dirty, squalid and ragged. "The remedy, to be effectual, must change the circumstances, when they are the cause of his wretched condition, and lie beyond his control.
These men, spending their days in some hive of machinery, and their nights in squalid tenements built in dreary rows, which in cities such people are doomed to inhabit, were very bitter against the upper classes, and indeed against all who lived in decent comfort.
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