"He stopped at the end of a miserable blind alley, where a dirty gas-lamp just served to make darkness visible, and show the patched windows and rickety doorways of the crazy houses, whose upper stories were lost in a brooding cloud of fog; and the pools of stagnant water at our feet: and the huge heap of cinders which filled up the waste end of the alley—a dreary black, formless mound, on which two or three spectral dogs prowled up and down after the offal, appearing and vanishing like dark imps in and out of the black misty chaos beyond. "The neighbourhood was undergoing, as it seemed, 'improvements,' of that peculiar metropolitan species which consists in pulling down the dwellings of the poor, and building up rich men's houses instead; and great buildings, within high temporary palings, had already eaten up half the little houses; as the great fish and the great estates, and the great shopkeepers, eat up the little ones of their species—by the law of competition, lately discovered to be the true creator and preserver of the universe. There they loomed up, the tall bullies, against the dreary sky, looking down with their grim, proud, stony visages, on the misery which they were driving out of one corner, only to accumulate and intensify it in another. "The house at which we stopped was the last in the row; all its companions had been pulled down; and there it stood, leaning out with one naked ugly side into the gap, and stretching out long props, like feeble arms and crutches, to resist the work of demolition. "A group of slatternly people were in the entry, talking loudly, and as Downes pushed by them, a woman seized him by the arm. "'Oh! you unnatural villain!—To go away after your drink, and leave all them poor dead corpses locked up, without even letting a body go in to stretch them out!' "'And breeding the fever, too, to poison the whole house!' growled one. "'The relieving-officer's been here, my cove,' said another; 'and he's gone for a peeler and a search-warrant to break open the door, I can tell you!' "But Downes pushed past unheeding, unlocked a door at the end of the passage, thrust me in, locked it again, and then rushed across the room in chase of two or three rats, who vanished into cracks and holes.