* * * * *
I had thought of mines before: but in a very languid way, till this
article, and other things that I read, as it were struck my brain a slap
with the notion. For 'there,' I said, 'if anywhere, shall I find a
man....'
* * * * *
I went out from that building that morning feeling like a man bowed down
with age, for the depths of unutterable horror into which I had had
glimpses during that one night made me very feeble, and my steps
tottered, and my brain reeled.
I got out into Farringdon Street, and at the near Circus, where four
streets meet, had under my furthest range of vision nothing but four
fields of bodies, bodies, clad in a rag-shop of every faded colour, or
half-clad, or not clad at all, actually, in many cases, over-lying one
another, as I had seen at Reading, but here with a markedly more
skeleton appearance: for I saw the swollen-looking shoulders, sharp
hips, hollow abdomens, and stiff bony limbs of people dead from famine,
the whole having the grotesque air of some _macabre_ battle-field of
fallen marionettes.
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