“It was not a pretty station where McCann found himself, and he glared ill-naturedly around with restless, aggressive eyes. The brick walls, the cheaply grained doors bearing their tarnished legends, “Gents,” “Ladies,” “Refreshment Saloon,” the rough raftered roof over the tracks,--everything was black and grimy with years of smoke, belching even now from the big locomotive, and gathering like an ill-conditioned thunder-cloud over the mob of scurrying, pushing men and women, a mob that swelled and scattered constantly in fretful confusion. A hustling business-man with a fat, pink face and long sandy whiskers, his silk hat cocked on one side in grotesque assumption of jauntiness, tripped over the clay-covered pick of a surly labourer, red of face and sweaty, blue of overalls and mud-coloured of shirt, and as he stumbled over the annoying implement scowled coarsely, and swore, with his cigar between his teeth. “Ragged and grimy children, hardly old enough to walk, sprawled and scrambled on the dirty platform, and as McCann hurried by, a five-year-old cursed shrilly a still more youthful little tough, who answered in kind. Vulgar theatre-bills in rank reds and yellows flaunted on the cindery walls; discarded newspapers, banana skins, cigar butts, and saliva were ground together vilely under foot by the scuffling mob. Dirt, meanness, ugliness everywhere--in the unhappy people no less than in their surroundings.... “The prospect was not much better outside than in. The air was thick with fine white dust, and dazzling with fierce sunlight. On one side was a wall of brick tenements, with liquor saloons, cheap groceries, and a fish-market below, all adding their mite to the virulence of the dead, stifling air. Above, men in dirty shirt-sleeves lolled out of the grimy windows, where long festoons of half-washed clothes drooped sordidly. On the other side, gangs of workmen were hurriedly repairing the ravages of a fire that evidently had swept clear a large space in its well-meant but ineffectual attempts at purgation. Gaunt black chimneys wound with writhing gas-pipes, tottering fragments of wall blistered white on one side, piles of crumbling bricks where men worked sullenly loading blue carts, mingled with new work, where the walls, girdled with yellow scaffolding, were rising higher, uglier than before; the plain factory walls with their rows of square windows less hideous by far than those buildings where some ignorant contractor was trying by the aid of galvanized iron to produce an effect of tawdry, lying magnificence. Dump-carts, market-waggons, shabby hacks, crawled or scurried along in the hot dust. A huge dray loaded with iron bars jolted over the granite pavement with a clanging, clattering din that was maddening. In fact, none of the adjuncts of a thriving, progressive town were absent, so far as one could see....