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"Everything you are taught to value has a likeness, and it is that likeness which the world values. Take a man out of the streets, poor and ragged, what will the world do with him? Send him to the workhouse, if not to the jail. Ask a great painter to take that man's portrait, rags, squalor, and all, and kings will bid for the picture.
Now and then a flamboyant tree comes into view, and as, at night, the head-lights of an approaching car eclipse all else, so this tree of burning scarlet draws eye and mind from adjacent human-made squalor. In all the tropics of the world I scarcely remember to have seen more magnificent color than in these unattended, wilful-grown gardens.
Along beside it ever runs that dark and haunting echo; that shadowy world-in-world with its accusing silence, its emphatic self-sufficiency. Mrs. Cresswell at first demurred. She thought of Elspeth's cabin: the dirt, the smell, the squalor: of course, this would be different; but well, Mrs. Cresswell had little inclination for slumming.
The large number of mosaics and inscriptions found in Die prove conclusively that in Roman times it was a favourite place of residence; and, so far as situation goes, it is not difficult to understand how this should have been the case. But in the condition in which the town found itself in the pitiless heat of August 1864, the only question for an English visitor was whether he could live through the time it was absolutely necessary to spend there. The poste arrived, as has been said, an hour and a half after its time; and the sole occupant of the coupé, who had lived on fruit and gooseberry syrup, and three penny worth of sweet cake at Crest, since a seven-o'clock breakfast, had wiled away the last hour by inventing choice bills of fare for the meditated supper. When the lumbering vehicle stopped in the main street of Die, which is here something under seven yards wide, an elderly woman stepped out from the dim crowd, with an uncovered tallow candle in her hand, and asked if there was anyone for the hotel. The unwonted 'yes' seemed to create some surprise; but she led the way promptly to her hotel, diplomatically meeting the rapid volley of questions respecting supper with an unpromising silence, and the first sight of the house itself dispelled for ever all hope. An entrance was effected by the kitchen; and not only was there no fire, but there was no light of any description; and the one dip we brought on to the scene betrayed such squalor on all sides, that the suggestion of a salle-
After the squalor of lodgings home was pleasant, and her father's invitation was cordial: "Henrietta, why don't you stay with us? Mildred," with a fond look at his wife, "never will allow your room to be used; it's always ready waiting for you."
It glorified the squalor of their clothing, the drawn fatigue of their faces. It gave them the fleeting glamour of spiritual beauty that comes to those in whom being has reached its highest expression, the perfect moment of completion caught amid life's incompleteness.
On that day I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest streets.
"This Ghetto London of ours," he says, "is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality, a world of dreams as fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient where they were woven."
Under my window, in the street called Cossitollah, flows all the motliness of a Calcutta thoroughfare in two counter-setting currents; one Chowriagee-ward, in the direction of Nabob magnificence and grace; the other toward the Cooly squalor and deformity of the Radda Bazaar; and as, in the glare of the early forenoon sun, the shadows of the hither or thither passing throngs fall straight across the way, from the Parsee's godown, over against me, to the gate of the pucca house wherein my look-out is, I watch with interest the frequent eddies occasioned by the clear-steerings of caste, Brahmin, Warrior, and Merchant keeping severely to the Parsee side, so that the foul shadow of Soodra or Pariah may not pollute their sacred persons.
"It is not fit that Ethel should give up everything, health and all, to such a set as these. They look as if they had been picked out of the gutter dirt, squalor, everything disgusting, and summer coming on, too, and that horrid place with no window to open! It is utterly unbearable!"