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There was a smell of clay and moist sugar and tarpaulins and damp khaki, and chloride of lime, very pungent in one's nostrils, and when the curtain went up on a well fitted stage and "The Follies" began their performance, the squalor of the place did not matter.
It was this flame in her heart which had kept her like one alone, apart and unsoiled in the midst of squalor and vice, which had made her girlhood so unspeakably sad.
The prospect is not enlivening; nor do the low brick houses, given up to nondescript longshore traffic, and freely punctuated with gilt-lettered saloons, add to its impressiveness. Squalid it is without doubt, this particular aspect of New York; but what is the squalor of West-street to that of Limehouse or Poplar? Are our own dock thoroughfares always paved to perfection?
The misery and squalor which we people of civilization bear with so much complacency as a necessary part of the manufacturing system, is just as necessary to the community at large as a proportionate amount of filth would be in the house of a private rich man.
To her the Terra Vergine was Paradise itself; to be fed, to be clothed, to have a mattress to sleep on, to work amongst the flowers and the grass and the animals it was all so beautiful, she thought sometimes that she must be in heaven. She spoke little. Since she had been under this roof she had grown ashamed of the squalor and starvation and wretchedness of her past existence.
I have tried to give some notion of the general distribution of comfort, which was never riches, in the Boy's Town; but I am afraid that I could not paint the simplicity of things there truly without being misunderstood in these days of great splendor and great squalor. Everybody had enough, but nobody had too much; the richest man in town might be worth twenty thousand dollars.
Before me was the olla-podrida of touring fashion and fellaheen squalor; the smell of camels and attar of roses; the polyglot chatter of European pleasure-seekers and the tom-toms of Arab pilgrims. Then once more I saw her. But still I did not see her face. I suppose there were other persons with her. I did not notice. I did notice the salient thing.
As Dave watched her slovenly shuffle to and from the kitchen, preceded and pursued by young Metfords in all degrees of childish innocence, his mind flew back to dim recollections of his own mother, and the quiet, noiseless order of their home. Even in the latter days, when he and his father had been anything but model housekeepers, they had never known such squalor as this.
The starving mothers and motherless babes, the homelessness and squalor, the hopelessness and despair, are beyond all words and all conception, save to those who saw and lived among them. It is past and let it rest.
It would, indeed, have surprised those who associate all Gypsy life with the squalor which in England, and especially near London, marks the life of the mongrel wanderers who are so often called Gypsies.
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