scrawled upon a wall with his fingers dipped in muddy wine-lees

BLOOD.

The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on

the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many

there.

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a

momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the

darkness of it was heavycold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and

want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presencenobles of

great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a

people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in

the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old

people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every

doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a

garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them

down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had

ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the

grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up

afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.

Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched

clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into

them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was

repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that

the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless

chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal,

among its refuse, or anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty

stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog

preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones

among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was

shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of

potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.

Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding

street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding

streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all

smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a

brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the

people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of

turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of

fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white

with what they suppressed; or foreheads knitted into the likeness

of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or inflicting. The

trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all,

grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted

up only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of

meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the

wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and

beer, and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was

represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons;