She does not appear too clean, her hair is reduced to mangy patches of dusty black curls, showing here and there on the top of her smooth black pate. The forehead is furrowed and her cheeks sunken, the chin protrudes, and is the heaviest and most noticeable of all the features. Her lips have vanished, and the eyes peer through dull-red rims from behind a half-screen of fallen skin. She is bent double by age and the infirmities born of rough work. There, all day long, she sits selling gingerbread cake beneath the half-shade of decaying archways. No one ever seems to buy her dainties, but there she sits all day long staring vacantly into nothing. Occasionally she fingers her cakes, and the movement of her hands disturbs a cloud of flies who claim her cookies as their own. She is listless and entirely dumb; there is no crowd of chattering loafers round her stall, no group of children playing hide-and-seek under the shadow of her protection. She is alone--a picture of desolation. She will sit there gazing at nothing, heeding nothing, until she finds the consolation of the sleep of death. As a conversationalist she is quite impossible. If a white man stops to give her greeting, she replies not by word of mouth, but with an out-thrust hand. She has money greed. Half her day is spent in silent pleading for alms. Altogether she is not picturesque; she lacks the elements of cleanliness, and her cookies are not wholesome. She is something to pass by with a shudder--a human being of the lowest species undergoing a very slow process of decay. If she has intelligence, it is hidden with her life-story behind the shrunken eyes half-hidden by the dull-red rims and hanging skin.