The time was to come, when that wine too
would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red
upon many there.
And now that the cloud settled on Saint
Antoine, which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the
darkness of it was heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the
lords in waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them;
but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a
terrible grinding and re-grinding in the mill, and certainly not in the
fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed
in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every
vestige of a garment that the wind shock. The mill which had worked them down,
was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and
grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every
furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent
everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing
that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag
and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum
of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless
chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its
refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves,
written in every small loaf of his Scanty stock of bad bread; at the
sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger
rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder;
Hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of
potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
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