" By dismal streets they
went, past silent, squalid houses and tall tenements looming grim and
ghostly in the faint light; crossing broad avenues very silent and
deserted at this hour, on and on until, dark and vague and mysterious,
the great river flowed before them only to be lost again as they plunged
into a gloomy court where tall buildings rose on every hand, huge and
very silent, teeming with life--but life just now wrapped in that
profound quietude of sleep which is so much akin to death. Into one of
these tall tenement buildings, its ugliness rendered more ugly by the
network of iron fire-escape ladders that writhed up the face of it,
Spike led the way, first into a dark hallway and thence up many stairs
that echoed to their light-treading feet--on and up, past dimly lit
landings where were doors each of which shut in its own little world, a
world distinct and separate wherein youth and age, good and evil, joy
and misery, lived and moved and had their being; behind these dingy
panels were smiling hope and black despair, blooming health and pallid
sickness, and all those sins and virtues that go to make up the sum
total of humanity.
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