Irk here, has swept away some of these courts and lanes, laying others completely open to view.  Immediately under the railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which surpass all the others by far, just because it was hitherto so shut off, so secluded that the way to it could not be found without a good deal of trouble.  I should never have discovered it myself, without the breaks made by the railway, though I thought I knew this whole region thoroughly.  Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping-room all in one.  In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I found two beds—­and such bedsteads and beds!—­which, with a staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled the room.  In several others I found absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned against it.  Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet.  This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the third by the river, and besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow doorway alone led out into another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept labyrinth of dwellings.

Enough!  The whole side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings.  And how could the people be clean with no proper opportunity for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants?  Privies are so rare here that they are either filled up every day, or are too remote for most of the inhabitants to use.  How can people wash when they have only the dirty Irk water at hand, while pumps and water pipes can be found in decent parts of the city alone?  In truth, it cannot be charged to the account of these helots of modern society if their dwellings are not more cleanly than the pig-sties which are here and there to be seen among them.  The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six or seven cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge, the floors of which stand at least two feet below the low-water level of the Irk that flows not six feet away from them; or like the upper floor of the corner-house on the opposite shore directly above the bridge, where the ground floor, utterly uninhabitable, stands deprived of all fittings for doors and windows, a case by no means rare in this region, when this open ground floor is used as a privy by the whole neighbourhood for want of other facilities!