the street, a merchandise gathered up from what poverty itself had thrown
away, a heap of filthy stuff analogous to Christian's bundle of sin.

Sometimes, though very seldom, I detected a certain gracefulness among the
younger women that was altogether new to my observation. It was a charm
proper to the lowest class. One girl I particularly remember, in a garb
none of the cleanest and nowise smart, and herself exceedingly coarse in
all respects, but yet endowed with a sort of witchery, a native charm, a
robe of simple beauty and suitable behavior that she was born in and had
never been tempted to throw off, because she had really nothing else to
put on. Eve herself could not have been more natural. Nothing was
affected, nothing imitative; no proper grace was vulgarized by an effort
to assume the manners or adornments of another sphere. This kind of
beauty, arrayed in a fitness of its own, is probably vanishing out of the
world, and will certainly never be found in America, where all the girls,
whether daughters of the upper-ten-dom, the mediocrity, the cottage, or
the kennel, aim at one standard of dress and deportment, seldom
accomplishing a perfectly triumphant hit or an utterly absurd failure.
Those words, "genteel" and "ladylike," are terrible ones and do us
infinite mischief, but it is because (at least, I hope so) we are in a
transition state, and shall emerge into a higher mode of simplicity than
has ever been known to past ages.

In such disastrous circumstances as I have been attempting to describe, it
was beautiful to observe what a mysterious efficacy still asserted itself
in character. A woman, evidently poor as the poorest of her neighbors,
would be knitting or sewing on the door-step, just as fifty other women
were; but round about her skirts (though wofully patched) you would be
sensible of a certain sphere of decency, which, it seemed to me, could not
have been kept more impregnable in the coziest little sitting-room, where