"Leave us leisure to be good."
One who has no time for thought will almost certainly go astray; and men and women whose lives are spent in fighting the wolf from their doors, will fight him with whatever comes to hand, and will sometimes catch up strange weapons.
So it might chance that these living wishes may have wings also, and the beggar's soul may rise as well as his body.
I should like to set a regiment of such wishes galloping down Grind street this coming Christmas, and stopping at every door.
That was a sorrowful street a few years ago, and I don't know that it has grown merry since. A tall block of tenement-houses walled the northern side from end to end, leaving off so abruptly that, had they been written words instead of brick houses, there would have been a —— after them. Indeed, if the reader has a fancy for a miserable pun, he might say that there was a dash after them, houses being scarce.
A very sensitive person, on looking at that block, would be likely to straighten himself up, draw his elbows close to his sides, and feel as though his nose was unnecessarily large. It is not impossible that he might "toe in" a little in walking, unless he reached the next street. Not a curve was visible in the whole block, horizontal and perpendicular reigning supreme. The mean brick front came to the very edge of the sidewalk, and the windows and doors were as flat as though they had been slapped in the face when in a soft state. Every house was precisely like every other house, and the only way of finding any particular one was by counting doors.
"These houses toe the mark," the builder had said when he looked on his completed work, standing complacently with his hands in his pockets, and his head a little on one side.
"Toe the mark" was the right phrase. The two meagre steps that led to each front door suggested the thought, and the whole had an air of soul obedience.
The tenants in this block were of that pitiable class called "decent," which generally means poor; too independent to beg, straining every nerve to live respectably, and making an extra strain to hide the first one; people whose eyes get a little wild at the prospect of sickness, who shudder at the thought of a doctor's bill and workless days, who sometimes stop their toil for a moment, and wonder what may be the meaning of such words as "ease," "contentment," "pleasure." There were clerks and book-keepers whose families burst out through their incomes in every direction; starving artists of all sorts; and the rest, people who toiled down in the dark, at the foundations over which soared the marble palaces of the rich, darkening heaven.
These people had got in a way of dressing alike; they had the same kind of curtains, and the same plants stretching beseeching shoots toward the tantalizing line of sunshine that let itself down, slow and golden, to the middle of the second floor windows, then drew back over the roofs of the houses opposite, while little flowers of all colors looked lovingly and reproachfully after it, cheated so day after day, but never quite losing faith that some day the bright-winged comforter would come quite down to their hearts.