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It was lined on either side by fine Colonial houses, set in gardens, some of which still held dials and bricked walks; wide, deep gardens some of which still were ghostly sweet. But the majority of the mansions had been turned into Italian tenement houses. The gardens were garbage heaps. The houses were filthy and disheveled.
But, after all, what did such garbage matter? It would of course be a comfort to thrash the editor. But our modern life breeds such creatures, and they have to be borne. He let himself into a silent house. His letters lay on the hall-table. Among them was a handwriting which arrested him. He remembered, yet could not put a name to it. Then he turned the envelope. "H'm. Lady Grosville!"
The position was no sinecure whether regarded from the point of view of getting up at six in the morning to see that the men were early at work; or of following the loaded wagons, uneasily dropping their contents at intervals, to their dreary destination at the dump; or of insisting that the contractor must increase the number of his wagons from nine to thirteen and from thirteen to seventeen, although he assured me that he lost money on every one and that the former inspector had let him off with seven; or of taking careless landlords into court because they would not provide the proper garbage receptacles; or of arresting the tenant who tried to make the garbage wagons carry away the contents of his stable.
Garbage cans and waste-baskets were made to take care of these things. Tidiness is worth more to a business man than most of them realize. In the first place it gives a favorable impression to a person coming in from the outside, and, in the second place, it helps those on the inside to keep things straight.
Scattered memories out of the past, mere fragments she had told him, here flashed back into his mind: humorous little incidents of daily battles she had waged in rotten old tenement buildings with rags and filth and garbage, with vermin, darkness and disease. Mingled with these had been accounts of dances, weddings and christenings and of curious funeral rites.
The uncovered garbage cans clattered as they were thrown one by one into the truck. Dust, and a smell of putrid things, hung in the air about the men as they worked. A guard stood by with his legs wide apart, and his rifle-butt on the pavement between them. The early mist hung low, hiding the upper windows of the hospital.
The writer personally knows a consulting engineer who was following a general engineering practice when called upon one day to advise a group of capitalists in the matter of a garbage-disposal plant of new design for a large mid-Western city. His services were sought not because he was a garbage expert, but rather because he was expert in intricate pipe layouts and the like.
As to the struggle to which Milton, with Cromwell, Vane Pym, Hampden, Selden, and Chillingworth, gave his life, it is in the eyes of his present biographer, an ignoble "fray," a "biblical brawl," and its fruits in the way of theological discussion are nothing but "garbage."
Lastly, whereas there was a place neer Jerusalem, called the Valley of the Children of Hinnon; in a part whereof, called Tophet, the Jews had committed most grievous Idolatry, sacrificing their children to the Idol Moloch; and wherein also God had afflicted his enemies with most grievous punishments; and wherein Josias had burnt the Priests of Moloch upon their own Altars, as appeareth at large in the 2 of Kings chap. 23. the place served afterwards, to receive the filth, and garbage which was carried thither, out of the City; and there used to be fires made, from time to time, to purifie the aire, and take away the stench of Carrion.
I cannot say how it may be with the lower houses, but those high up are pronouncedly odoriferous; for the inhabitants have no means of disposing of their garbage save by exposing it on their little shelves to be dried up by the sun, or washed down by the rain over the windows and doors of their neighbours beneath. I wonder how a sanitary officer would tackle the problem of sweetening Troo.
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