"To see Sydney!" said Nellie.

They had turned several times since they started but the neighborhood
remained much the same. The streets, some wider, some narrower, all told
of sordid struggling. The shops were greasy, fusty, grimy. The groceries
exposed in their windows damaged specimens of bankrupt stocks, discolored
tinned goods, grey sugars, mouldy dried fruits; at their doors, flitches
of fat bacon, cut and dusty. The meat with which the butchers' shops
overflowed was not from show-beasts, as Ned could see, but the cheaper
flesh of over-travelled cattle, ancient oxen, ewes too aged for bearing;
all these lean scraggy flabby-fleshed carcasses surrounded and blackened
by buzzing swarms of flies that invaded the foot-path outside in clouds.
The draperies had tickets, proclaiming unparalleled bargains, on every
piece; the whole stock seemed displayed outside and in the doorway. The
fruiterers seemed not to be succeeding in their rivalry with each other
and with the Chinese hawkers. The Chinese shops were dotted everywhere,
dingier than any other, surviving and succeeding, evidently, by sheer
force of cheapness. The roadways everywhere were hard and bare,
reflecting the rays of the ascending sun until the streets seemed to be
Turkish baths, conducted on a new and gigantic method. There was no green
anywhere, only unlovely rows of houses, now gasping with open doors and
windows for air.

Air! That was what everything clamoured for, the very stones, the dogs,
the shops, the dwellings, the people. If it was like this soon after ten,
what would it be at noon?

Already the smaller children were beginning to weary of play. In narrow
courts they lolled along on the flags, exhausted. In wider streets, they