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 regrinding 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 shook. 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, or anything to eat. Hunger was the inion
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A Tale of Two Cities
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.
Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding
streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all
smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a
brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the
people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of
turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of
fire were not w**ng among them; nor compressed lips, white
with what they suppressed; or foreheads knitted into the likeness
of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or inflicting. The
trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all,
grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted
up only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of
meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the
wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and
beer, and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was
represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons;
but, the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the
smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was
murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many
little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke off
abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the
middle of the street—when it ran at all: which was only after heavy
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A Tale of Two Cities
rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses.
Across the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung
by a rope and pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these
down, and lighted, and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim
wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea.
Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril of
tempest.
For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that
region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and
hunger, so long, as to concei
