The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance.

We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery.

Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling.

At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot.
Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like an apparition from another and better world, the way the children ran after it and alongside.

And as far as I could see were the solid walls of brick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me.