It was a little street, shabbily symmetrical—a double row of insignificant, dingy-brick houses. Muffled in the dusk of the fading winter afternoon, it seemed sunk in squalid, listless slumber. In the distance a church-bell was tolling its joyless mechanical Sunday tale. A man stood in the roadway, droning the words of a hymn-tune. He was old and decayed and sluttish: he wore an ancient, baggy frock-coat, and, through the cracks in his boots, you could see the red flesh of his feet. His gait was starved and timid: the touch of the air was very bitter. And when he had finished his singing, he remained gazing up at the rows of lifeless windows, with a look of dull expectancy in his bloodshot, watery eyes.
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