The Romance of Zion Chapel




CHAPTER I


OF A CURIOUS MEETING OF EXTREMES

On the dreary suburban edge of a very old, very ignorant, very sooty,
hardhearted, stony-streeted, meanly grim, little provincial town there
stands a gasometer. On one side of this gasometer begins a region of
disappointed fields, which, however, has hardly begun before a railway
embankment cuts across, at an angle convenient for its entirely
obscuring the few meadows and trees that in this desolate land do duty
for a countryside. The dull workmen's streets that here abruptly
present unfinished ends to the universe must console themselves with the
gasometer. And indeed they seem more than content. For a street boasting
the best view, as it runs out its sordid line longer than the rest, is
proudly called Gasometer Street. Some of the streets that are denied the
gasometer cluster narrow and dark, hardly built twenty years perhaps,
yet long since drearily old,--with the unattractive antiquity of old
iron and old clothes,--round a mouldy little chapel, in what we can only
describe as the Wesleyan Methodist style of architecture. Cased in
weather-stained and decaying stucco, it bears upon its front the words
"New Zion," and the streets about it are named accordingly: Zion
Passage, Zion Alley, Zion Walk, Zion Street. There is a house too which
had been lucky enough to call itself Zion View, the very morning before