These churches lifted their hard stone faces insolently, registering their yearly alms in the morning journals.

To be sure the back-seats were free for the poor; but the emblazoned crimson of the windows, the carving of the arches, the very purity of the preacher's style, said plainly that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man in a red wamus to enter the kingdom of heaven through that gate.
Nature itself had turned her back on the town: the river turned aside, and but half a river crept reluctantly by; the hills were but bare banks of yellow clay.

There was a cinder-road leading through these.
Margret climbed it slowly.

The low town-hills, as I said, were bare, covered at their bases with dingy stubble-fields.

In the sides bordering the road gaped the black mouths of the coal-pits that burrowed under the hills, under the town.