The poorer classes swarmed along a great
part of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and
what characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed
to prevail. You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without
great adversity, just as you cannot have day without night, and
the more Liverpool evidently flourished the more it plainly
languished. I found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not
overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the
suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But then,
after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful
riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that
distance, and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.
III
At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we
rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought
it too thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not
now say that there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted
the hospitality of a pastry-cook's shop.
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