Hard Times

"We were peeping at the circus," muttered Louisa, haughtily, without lifting up her eyes, "and father caught us."

He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red. She was still doing this, five minutes afterwards.

"What are you about, Loo?" her brother sulkily remonstrated. "You'll rub a hole in your face."

"You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I wouldn't cry!"

"Sleary's Horse–riding"

steps, a brazen door–plate, and a brazen door–handle full stop. It was a size larger than Mr. Bounderby's house, as other houses were from a size to half–a–dozen sizes smaller; in all other particulars, it was strictly according to pattern.

The Bank offered no violence to the wholesome monotony of the town. It was another red brick house, with black outside shutters, green inside blinds, a black street–door up two white

A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly tending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of Heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell, or changed its quarter: a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness:-Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen.

Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.

It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to–morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill–smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam–engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of

He had not much hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.