Page:London - The People of the Abyss.djvu/342

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284
THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.

It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it is untellable. But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a fearful slime that

Down Leman Street to the Docks.

quickened the pavement with life, a mess of unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the nightly horror of Piccadilly and the Strand. It was a menagerie of garmented bipeds that looked some thing like humans and more like beasts, and to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarled too fiercely.