“What a horrid place!” I said.  “I never was here before.  Why don’t they pull such a street down?”

“What is to become of the people who live in it?” said my father.

“Let them live in one of the bigger streets,” I said; “it would be much more comfortable.”

“Very likely,” he said; “but they would have to pay much more for their houses; and if they haven’t the money to pay with, what’s to be done?”

I could not say, for, like older social reformers than myself, I felt more sure that the reform was needed, than of how to accomplish it.  But before I could decide upon what to do with the dirty little street, we had come to a place so very much worse that it put the other quite out of my head.  There is a mournful fatality about the pretty names which are given, as if in mockery, to the most wretched of the bye-streets in large towns.  The street we had left was called Rosemary Street, and this was Primrose Place.

Primrose Place was more like a yard than a street; the houses were all irregular and of different ages.  On one side was a gap with palings round it, where building was going on, and beyond rose a huge black factory.  But the condition of Primrose Place was beyond description.  I had never seen anything like it before, and kept as close to my father as was consistent with boyish, dignity.  The pathway was broken up, children squalled at the doors and quarrelled in the street, which was strewn with rags, and bones, and bits of old iron, and shoes, and the tops of turnips.  I do not think there was a whole unbroken window in all the row of tall miserable houses, and the wet clothes hanging out on lines stretched across the street, flapped above our heads.  I counted three cripples as we went up Primrose Place.  My father stopped to speak to several people, and I heard many complaints of the bad state of trade to which my sister had alluded.  He gave some money to one woman, and spoke kindly to all; but he hurried me on as fast as he could, and we turned at last into one of the houses.

My ill-humour had by this time almost worked itself off in the fresh air, and the novel scenes through which we had come; and, for the present, the morning’s disappointment was forgotten as I followed my father through the crowded miserable rooms, and clambered up staircase after staircase, till we reached the top of the house, and stumbled through a latched door into the garret.  After so much groping in the dark, the light dazzled me, and I thought at first that the room was empty.  But at last a faint “Good day” from the corner near the window drew my eyes that way; and there, stretched on a sort of bed, and supported by a chair at his back, lay the patient we had come to see.