The road, flinty and light grey in colour, was greasy with repellent-looking mud--there were puddles even in the asphalt-covered pathway which he trod.

On either side of him stretched the shrunken, unpastoral-looking fields of an industrial neighbourhood.
The town-village which stretched up the hillside before him presented scarcely a single redeeming feature.

The small, grey stone houses, hard and unadorned, were interrupted at intervals by rows of brand-new, red-brick cottages.

In the background were the tall chimneys of several factories; on the left, a colliery shaft raised its smoke-blackened finger to the lowering clouds.
After his first glance around at these familiar and unlovely objects, Philip Romilly walked with his head a little thrown back, his eyes lifted as though with intent to the melancholy and watery skies.

He was a young man well above medium height, slim, almost inclined to be angular, yet with a good carriage notwithstanding a stoop which seemed more the result of an habitual depression than occasioned by any physical weakness.