I had a thousand times rather have had one of the outside cars, but I knew she would not hear of it unless she was with me, so I resigned myself to the stuffiness and rattling of a Dublin cab.
We crossed the city and climbed a steep hill and came presently to a region of darkness and desolation as it seemed to me, in which the houses were intolerably dreary--high, black houses that shut out the sky, fallen on evil days, since they were all sooty and grimy, with windows which had not been cleaned for years, many of them broken, and twisted and rusty railings guarding the areas.
I shuddered at the thought of the people who lived in such places.
I could see that they had once been places of consideration but now they were slums.

Here and there a mean shop stood out, or the old house had been turned into a pawn office, or a builder's or baker's.

Dirty children sat on the pavements or played in the gutters, while their dirty mothers gossiped in groups; and the men lounged to and from the public-houses, which were, indeed, the only bright spots in those dreadful streets.
I was relieved, when at last the cab stopped, that I had come to the end of my journey.
The last street down which we had driven was drearier than the rest, in a sense, but more respectable.

There were wire blinds to all the lower windows, and there was no sign of life in the short street from end to end.
Our house crossed the end of the street, which was in a way an approach to it.

It stood within stone walls, and was a great square building with wings thrown out, the style of it the pseudo-classical which was so much in favour in Ireland in the eighteenth century.
There was a great gate in the middle of the long wall; at one side of it a postern, which I pushed and found to be open.