lthy 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 me