row, shut in at either end by ornamental gates, and called a "park."
The unspeakable desolation of aspect common to the whole suburb, was in
a high state of perfection in this part of it. Irreverent street noises
fainted dead away on the threshold of the ornamental gates, at the
sight of the hermit lodge-keeper. The cry of the costermonger and the
screech of the vagabond London boy were banished out of hearing. Even
the regular tradesman's time-honored business noises at customers'
doors, seemed as if they ought to have been relinquished here. The
frantic falsetto of the milkman, the crash of the furious butcher's
cart over the never-to-be pulverized stones of the new road through the
"park," always sounded profanely to the passing stranger, in the
spick-and-span stillness of this Paradise of the large incomes.

The hapless small incomes had the very worst end of the whole locality
entirely to themselves, and absorbed all the noises and nuisances, just
as the large incomes absorbed all the tranquillities and luxuries of
suburban existence. Here were the dreary limits at which architectural
invention stopped in despair. Each house in this poor man's purgatory
was, indeed, and in awful literalness, a brick box with a slate top to
it. Every hole drilled in these boxes, whether door-hole or
window-hole, was always overflowing with children. They often mustered
by forties and fifties in one street, and were the great pervading
feature of the quarter. In the world of the large incomes, young life
sprang up like a garden fountain, artificially playing only at stated
periods in the sunshine. In the world of the small incomes, young life
flowed out turbulently into the street, like an exhaustless
kennel-deluge, in all weathers. Next to the children of the
inhabitants, in visible numerical importance, came the shirts and
petticoats, and miscellaneous linen of the inhabitants; fluttering out
to dry publicly on certain days of the week, and enlivening the