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Updated: June 19, 2025
There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway. Little tumuli of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all seasons, encroached upon its high places.
But no answer was returned, though the peal resounded through a number of apartments, and was echoed from the court-yard walls without the house, startling the pigeons from the venerable rotunda which they occupied, and alarming anew even the distant village curs, which had retired to sleep upon their respective dunghills.
And then there was a postyard, ankle-deep in mud, with steaming dunghills and vast outhouses half ruined; and looking on this dainty prospect, an immense, old, shadeless, glaring, stone chateau, with half its windows blinded, and green damp crawling lazily over it, from the balustraded terrace to the taper tips of the extinguishers upon the turrets.
Parasite little tenements, with the cramp in their whole frame, from the dwarf hall-door on the giant model of His Grace's in the Square to the squeezed window of the boudoir commanding the dunghills in the Mews, made the evening doleful.
One might incline to think, that the prejudice in favour of bad smells had not quite abandoned the inhabitants, who could allow for months, and that even in the consummating fervour of the summer sun, and in open despite of his face too, of putrifying dunghills within the precincts of their city.
Women and children, all day long, were seen searching gutters and dunghills for morsels of food, which they disputed fiercely with the famishing dogs. The green leaves were stripped from the trees, every living herb was converted into human food, but these expedients could not avert starvation.
They had an air of resting there aloof; with a little fancy you might have taken them, in their plain print frocks, for six goddesses reclining on the knoll and watching the harvesters at work on the plain below poor drudging mortals and unmannerly: "High births and virtue equally they scorn, As asses dull, on dunghills born; Impervious as the stones their heads are found, Their rage and hatred steadfast as the ground."
Know, however, that with every one in this world, externals are successively closed, and internals are opened, and thereby they are prepared for heaven or hell; and as the evil of adultery defiles the internals of the mind above every other evil, you must needs be conveyed down to the defiled principles of your love, and these are in the hells, where the caverns are full of stench arising from dunghills.
At the end, on a terrace, rises the once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its facade, reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with muddy water in the old <i>pieces d'eau</i> and dunghills on the old parterres.
Moreover, though he was a little wrong-headed and not a little pig-headed, he was a noble-minded man, and nothing noble passed him unobserved or unappreciated. "That Bartley's daughter!" said he to Julia. "Ay, when roses spring from dunghills, and eagles are born of sparrow-hawks. Brave girl! brave girl!" "Oh, uncle," said Julia, "I am so glad you appreciate her!"
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