Page:The drama of three hundred and sixty-five days.djvu/98

THE DRAMA OF 365 DAYS humanity that take away all your pride in the dignity of man's estate. The prevailing colour is yellow, the dominant odour is noxious, the thoroughfares are narrow, and often unpaved. In the busier quarters the shops are sometimes spacious, but more frequently they are mere slits in the monotonous facades. When closed, as on Sunday, these slits give the appearance of a row of prison cells. When open they present crude pictures on the inner faces of their doors—pictures of boots, caps, trousers, stockings or corsets, a typology which seems to be more necessary than words to inhabitants who have not, as a whole, been taught to read.

And then the people themselves! Perhaps there is not in all the world a more hopeless-looking race, with their lagging lower lips, their dull grey eyes, their dosy, helpless, exanimate expression, suggesting that the body is half-asleep and the spirit no more than half-awake. To see them slouching along the streets, or sitting in stupefied groups at the doors of brandy-shops, passing a single bottle from mouth to mouth, is to realize how low humanity may fall in its own esteem under the rule of an alien government. To watch them at prayer in their little Catholic churches is to feel that they have been made to think of themselves as the least of God's creatures, unworthy to come to His footstool—always ready to kiss the earth, and never daring 94