distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter,
the virtuous mother in the sacred pangs of childbirth, gives
forth another victim to our thoughtless civilization;
surrounded by three generations whose inevitable presence is
more painful than her sufferings in that hour of travail;
while the father of her coming child, in another corner of the
sordid chamber, lies stricken by that typhus which his
contaminating dwelling has breathed into his veins, and for
whose next prey is perhaps destined, his new-born child.
These swarming walls had neither windows nor doors sufficient
to keep out the weather, or admit the sun or supply the means
of ventilation; the humid and putrid roof of thatch exhaling
malaria like all other decaying vegetable matter. The
dwelling rooms were neither boarded nor paved; and whether it
were that some were situate in low and damp places,
occasionally flooded by the river, and usually much below the
level of the road; or that the springs, as was often the case,
would burst through the mud floor; the ground was at no time
better than so much clay, while sometimes you might see little
channels cut from the centre under the doorways to carry off
the water, the door itself removed from its hinges: a resting
place for infancy in its deluged home. These hovels were in
many instances not provided with the commonest conveniences of
the rudest police; contiguous to every door might be observed
the dung-heap on which every kind of filth was accumulated,
for the purpose of being disposed of for manure, so that, when
the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hope of
refreshing it with the breeze of summer, he was met with a
mixture of gases from reeking dunghills.