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Even as his brother Richard could not rest unless he was prominent as an agitator, so it became a necessity to 'Arry to lead in the gin-palace and the music-hall. He made himself the aristocrat of rowdyism. But it was impossible to live without ready money, and his mother, though supplying him with board and lodging, refused to give him a penny.
A young woman cannot enter a gin-palace and drink her glass at the counter as I see scores do any night without gradually going further and losing all the modesty and grace of womanhood. A young man cannot touch gambling in any of its forms without almost inevitably being drawn under its fascinations, as one who is slowly involved in a wily serpent's coils.
It was very late, and I was picking my way among the dirty loungers who were clustering round the doors of a great gin-palace, when a man staggered out from among them, and held out his hand to me with a drunken leer.
"God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform," she wrote apropos of the gin-palace, and set very distinctly before her spiritual retainers all that Providence might intend by this unexpected hindrance; and so quite contented herself about her nephew, whose views on this and many other subjects were so different from her own.
She had been talking a great deal about this gin-palace for the last twenty-four hours; and to hear Miss Leonora, you might have supposed that all the powers of heaven must fail and be discomfited before this potent instrument of evil, and that, after all, Bibles and missionaries were much less effective than the stoppage of the licence, upon which all her agents were bent.
It was not more than a couple of hundred yards long, and was hemmed in on either hand by squalid cottages. As if to emphasize the misery of the locality, and perhaps in a measure to account for it, at the further end I discovered a gin-palace, whose flaring lights illuminated the streets on either hand with brazen splendour.
Through the long, dim streets, and past the tall rows of silent houses, the full tide of life eddied and poured in rapid current; stout burghers, closely muffled and staff in hand; children grown prematurely old, with the hard marks of vice already branded on their features; young girls with flaunting ribbons and bold, flushed faces; pale-faced operatives, and strong men whose brawny limbs told of the Titanic labours of the foundry; the clerk from his desk; the shopkeeper from his store; the withered crone, and the careless navvy, swayed and struggled through the living mass; and with them trooped the legions of want, and vice, and ignorance, that burrow and fester in the foetid lanes and purlieus of the large British cities: from the dark alleys where misery and degradation for ever dwell, and from reeking cellars and nameless haunts, where the twin demons of alcohol and crime rule supreme; from the gin-palace, and the beer-shop, and the midnight haunts of the tramp and the burglar, they came in all their repulsiveness and debasement, with the rags of wretchedness upon their backs, and the cries of profanity and obscenity upon their lips.
The companion picture, of course, should be: 'Property in town, in chancery. It should consist of two orthree hideous, sordid, window-broken, rat-deserted, paintless, blackened houses, that should look as if they had once been too good company for the neighbourhood, and had met with a fall in life, not deplored by any one. At the opposite corner should be a flaunting new gin-palace.
She too had a favourite district, which was in London, and where also a great work was going on; and her missionary, and her Scripture-readers, and her colporteur were all in a wonderful state of excitement about a new gin-palace which was being fitted out and decorated in the highest style of art on the borders of their especial domain.
She stood some moments gazing after him till out of sight, then she drew her hand suddenly across her eyes, and retracing her steps, was, in her turn, caught hold of by a rougher hand than hers, as she passed the gin-palace. She shook off the grasp with a passionate scorn, and went straight home. Home! is that the right word? Poor sister mortal!
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