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This was a wide, wide track - for the humble followers of the camp of
wealth pitch their tents round about it for many a mile - but its
character was still the same. Damp rotten houses, many to let, many
yet building, many half-built and mouldering away - lodgings, where it
would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who let or those
who came to take - children, scantily fed and clothed, spread over
every street, and sprawling in the dust - scolding mothers, stamping
their slipshod feet with noisy threats upon the pavement - shabby
fathers, hurrying with dispirited looks to the occupation which
brought them 'daily bread' and little more -
mangling-women,
washer-women, cobblers, tailors, chandlers, driving their trades in
parlours and kitchens and back room and garrets, and sometimes all
of them under the same roof - brick-fields skirting gardens paled with
staves of old casks, or timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and
blackened and blistered by the flames - mounds of dock-weed, nettles,
coarse grass and oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion - small
dissenting chapels to teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries
of Earth, and plenty of new churches, erected with a little superfluous
wealth, to show the way to Heaven.
At length these streets becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and
dwindled away, until there were only small garden patches bordering
the road, with many a summer house innocent of paint and built of
old timber or some fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage-
stalks that grew about it, and grottoed at the seams with toad-stools
and tight-sticking snails. To these succeeded pert cottages, two and
two with plots of ground in front, laid out in angular beds with stiff
box borders and narrow paths between, where footstep never strayed
to make the gravel rough. Then came the public-house, freshly
painted in green and white, with tea-gardens and a bowling green,
spurning its old neighbour with the horse-trough where the waggons
stopped; then, fields; and then, some houses, one by one, of goodly
size with lawns, some even with a lodge where dwelt a porter and his
wife. Then came a turnpike; then fields again with trees and hay-
stacks; then, a hill, and on the top of that, the traveller might stop,
and - looking back at old Saint Paul's looming through the smoke, its
cross peeping above the cloud (if the day were clear), and glittering in
the sun; and casting his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew
until he traced it down to the furthest outposts of the invading army
of bricks and mortar whose station lay for the present nearly at his
feet - might feel at last that he was clear of London.
Near such a spot as this, and in a pleasant field, the old man and his
little guide (if guide she were, who knew not whither they were bound)
sat down to rest. She had had the precaution to furnish her basket
with some slices of bread and meat, and here they made their frugal
breakfast.
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