Characteristic of the locality is a certain row of one-storey
cottages--villas, the advertiser calls them--built of white
brick, each with one bay window on the ground floor, a window
pretentiously fashioned and desiring to be taken for stone, though
obviously made of bad plaster. Before each house is a garden,
measuring six feet by three, entered by a little iron gate, which
grinds as you push it, and at no time would latch. The front-door
also grinds on the sill; it can only be opened by force, and quivers
in a way that shows how unsubstantially it is made. As you set foot
in the pinched passage, the sound of your tread proves the whole
fabric a thing of lath and sand. The ceilings, the walls, confess
themselves neither water-tight nor air-tight. Whatever you touch is
at once found to be sham.
In the kitchen of one of these houses, at two o'clock on a Saturday
afternoon in September, three young people were sitting down to the
dinner-table: a girl of nearly fourteen, her sister, a year younger,
and their brother not yet eleven. All were decently dressed, but
very poorly; a glance at them, and you knew that in this house there
was little money to spend on superfluities.
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