FullReads

“I don’t know,” said my sister, timidly, “but he said something about not affording it, and spending money, and about trade being bad, and he was afraid there would be great distress in the town.”

Oh, these illogical women! I was furious. “What on earth has that to do with us?” I shouted at her. “Father’s a doctor; trade won’t hurt him. But you are so silly, Minnie, I can’t talk to you. I only know it’s very hard. Fancy staying a whole year boxed up in this beastly town!” And I had so worked myself up that I fully believed in the truth of the sentence with which I concluded–

“There never WAS anything so miserable!”

Minnie said nothing, for my feelings just then were something like those of the dogs who (Dr. Watts tells us)

“delight
To bark and bite;”

and perhaps she was afraid of being bitten. At any rate, she held her tongue; and just then my father came into the room.

The door was open, and he must have heard my last speech as he came along the passage; but he made no remark on it, and only said, “Would any young man here like to go with me to see a patient?”

I went willingly, for I was both tired and half-ashamed of teasing Minnie, and we were soon in the street. It was a broad and cheerful one, as I said; but before long we left it for a narrower, and then turned off from that into a side street, where the foot-path would only allow us to walk in single file–a dirty, dark lane, where surely the sun never did shine.

“What a horrid place!” I said. “I never was here before. Why don’t they pull such a street down?”

“What is to become of the people who live in it?” said my father.

“Let them live in one of the bigger streets,” I said; “it would be much more comfortable.”

“Very likely,” he said; “but they would have to pay much more for their houses; and if they haven’t the money to pay with, what’s to be done?”

I could not say, for, like older social reformers than myself, I felt more sure that the reform was needed, than of how to accomplish it. But before I could decide upon what to do with the dirty little street, we had come to a place so very much worse that it put the other quite out of my head. There is a mournful fatality about the pretty names which are given, as if in mockery, to the most wretched of the bye-streets in large towns. The street we had left was called Rosemary Street, and this was Primrose Place.

Primrose Place was more like a yard than a street; the houses were all irregular and of different ages. On one side was a gap with palings round it, where building was going on, and beyond rose a huge black factory. But the condition of Primrose Place was beyond description. I had never seen anything like it before, and kept as close to my father as was consistent with boyish, dignity. The pathway was broken up, children squalled at the doors and quarrelled in the street, which was strewn with rags, and bones, and bits of old iron, and shoes, and the tops of turnips. I do not think there was a whole unbroken window in all the row of tall miserable houses, and the wet clothes hanging out on lines stretched across the street, flapped above our heads. I counted three cripples as we went up Primrose Place. My father stopped to speak to several people, and I heard many complaints of the bad state of trade to which my sister had alluded. He gave some money to one woman, and spoke kindly to all; but he hurried me on as fast as he could, and we turned at last into one of the houses.