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Updated: June 3, 2025
Peeps into their interiors reveal dirty, poorly furnished rooms, and large families, pigging squalidly together at meal times, while unkempt men and slatternly women lean from open windows, and scold in French, or chatter with crowds of ragged and bare-legged children, playing in the gutters.
If we are not happy; if we do not even see the way to happiness; if all our power merely helps us to destroy each other, or to make the rich more vulgarly rich and the poor more squalidly poor; if the great energy of Germany has hurried her to her own ruin; still we do not ask whether we may not have made some fundamental mistake about our own nature and the nature of the universe, and whether Germany has not merely made it more systematically and more philosophically than the rest of us.
The poor woman, who is said to have been very pretty, is punished for her sins, for she is now squalidly hideous if she is still anything at all. She is losing her hair and teeth, her skin is like a leper's, she is a horror to herself; her hands are horrible, covered with greenish pustules, her nails are loose, and the flesh is eaten away by the poisoned humors."
It was surprising how many of the bilious, bare-legged children who collected to gaze at his framed specimens were brought to be photographed, for most of the villagers were squalidly poor and the farmers were entering their busy season. During this time he had opened the Harbison domicile to himself, being son of a friend who had sat in the State legislature with Mr. Harbison.
Here, as, with audacious disregard of the chance-medley of smashed guards and obliterated paddle-boxes, the great water-wagons graze wheels upon the ripple-paved turnpike of the river, the steamboat-runner, squalidly red from the effects of last night's carouse, and reeking sensibly of the alcoholic "morning call," may be recognized by the native manner in which he makes the pier peculiarly his own, by the inflammatory character which unremitting dissipation has imparted to the inhaling apparatus of his unclassical features, by the filthy splendor of his linen, which a low-buttoning waistcoat, gorgeous and dirty likewise, unbosoms disadvantageously to the gaze of the beholder, by the invariable "diamond" pin, of gift-book style, with which the juncture of the first-mentioned integument is effected, if not adorned, and, above all, by the massive guards and guy-chains with which his watch is hitched on to the belaying arrangements of Chatham Street garments, the original texture and tint of which have long been superseded by predominant grease.
It is a foolish community that can house whole classes, useful and helpful, honest and loyal classes, in such squalidly unsuitable dwellings. It is by no means the social economy it seems, to use up old women, savings and inexperience in order to meet the landlord's demands.
Here are the water boatmen, who swim on their backs with two oars spread cross-wise, and the flat water scorpions; here, squalidly clad in mud, is the grub of the largest of our dragonflies, so curious because of its manner of progression: it fills its hinder parts, a yawning funnel, with water, spurts it out again and advances just so far as the recoil of its hydraulic cannon.
To have just left a party at the house of Cambaceres, where life was so large, where minds could expand, where the splendor of the Imperial Court was so vividly reflected, and to be dropped suddenly into a sphere of squalidly narrow ideas was it not like a leap from Italy into Greenland? "Living here is not life!" said he to himself, as he looked round the Methodistical room.
"But you Amidst this beauty You are not this ill-conditioned, squalidly bred lad of whom I have been reading?" He smiled. "There intervenes a certain Change," he said. "Have I not hinted at that?" Section 1
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