Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/773

 *ways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth out on their shoes from the back-yard into the court, and from the court up into the main street; while above, hanging like cliffs over the streets—those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin—the houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into the dingy, choking night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go, scented Belgravian! and see what London is! and then go to the library which God has given thee—one often fears in vain—and see what science says this London might be!

"Ay," he muttered to himself, as he strode along, "sing awa; get yoursel' wi' child wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, like the rest o' the poets, and gang to hell for it."

"To hell, Mr. Mackaye?"

"Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie—a warse ane than ony fiends' kitchen, or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the pulpits—the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures—and kenning it—and not being able to get oot o' it, for the chains o' vanity and self-indulgence. I've warned ye. Now look there"

He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a miserable alley—

"Look! there's not a soul down that yard but's either beggar, drunkard, thief, or warse. Write anent that! Say how you saw the mouth o' hell, and the two pillars thereof at the entry—the pawn-broker's shop o' one side, and the gin palace at the other—twa monstrous deevils, eating up men, and women, and bairns, body and soul. Look at the jaws o' the monsters, how they open and open,