accessible by steep and narrow staircases, infamously ill-adapted
for the passage up-stairs of the sick or down-stairs of the dead.

A-bed in these miserable rooms, here on bedsteads, there (for a
change, as I understood it) on the floor, were women in every stage
of distress and disease. None but those who have attentively
observed such scenes, can conceive the extraordinary variety of
expression still latent under the general monotony and uniformity
of colour, attitude, and condition. The form a little coiled up
and turned away, as though it had turned its back on this world for
ever; the uninterested face at once lead-coloured and yellow,
looking passively upward from the pillow; the haggard mouth a
little dropped, the hand outside the coverlet, so dull and
indifferent, so light, and yet so heavy; these were on every
pallet; but when I stopped beside a bed, and said ever so slight a
word to the figure lying there, the ghost of the old character came
into the face, and made the Foul ward as various as the fair world.
No one appeared to care to live, but no one complained; all who
could speak, said that as much was done for them as could be done
there, that the attendance was kind and patient, that their
suffering was very heavy, but they had nothing to ask for. The
wretched rooms were as clean and sweet as it is possible for such
rooms to be; they would become a pest-house in a single week, if
they were ill-kept.

I accompanied the brisk matron up another barbarous staircase, into
a better kind of loft devoted to the idiotic and imbecile. There
was at least Light in it, whereas the windows in the former wards
had been like sides of school-boys' bird-cages. There was a strong
grating over the fire here, and, holding a kind of state on either