Each house in this poor man's purgatory was, indeed, and in awful literalness, a brick box with a slate top to it.

Every hole drilled in these boxes, whether door-hole or window-hole, was always overflowing with children.

They often mustered by forties and fifties in one street, and were the great pervading feature of the quarter.

In the world of the large incomes, young life sprang up like a garden fountain, artificially playing only at stated periods in the sunshine.

In the world of the small incomes, young life flowed out turbulently into the street, like an exhaustless kennel-deluge, in all weathers.