The oil and cotton lamps, though regularly trimmed twice or thrice in the long winter nights, burnt feebly at the best; and at a late hour, when they were unassisted by the lamps and candles in the shops, cast but a narrow track of doubtful light upon the
footway, leaving the projecting doors and house-fronts in the deepest gloom.
At length, having passed nearly across the bridge, we approached the termination of the
footway, when our progress was impeded by a turnstile of some height.
It overlooked a clean, melancholy, unfrequented canal, which had a narrow riva or convenient
footway on either side.
The broken
footway is so narrow that when Allan Woodcourt comes to where the woman sits, he has to turn into the road to pass her.
"Didn't you tell me this morning," he said, "that one of the tradespeople declared he had met Rosanna yesterday, on the
footway to Frizinghall, when we supposed her to be ill in her room?"
In the parlour window of this little habitation, which is so close upon the
footway that the passenger who takes the wall brushes the dim glass with his coat sleeve--much to its improvement, for it is very dirty--in this parlour window in the days of its occupation by Sampson Brass, there hung, all awry and slack, and discoloured by the sun, a curtain of faded green, so threadbare from long service as by no means to intercept the view of the little dark room, but rather to afford a favourable medium through which to observe it accurately.
Once more the door banged, and a slight, slim-built boy perhaps fifteen years old, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, leaned in over the high
footway. His pasty yellow complexion did not show well on a person of his years, and his look was a mixture of irresolution, bravado, and very cheap smartness.
The window being accessible from the
footway, he looked in over the blind, returned the shuttlecock, and put his question.
Below, here by the water-side, where the bowsprits of ships stretch across the
footway, and almost thrust themselves into the windows, lie the noble American vessels which having made their Packet Service the finest in the world.
Wet days, when the rain came slowly, thickly, obstinately down; when the street's throat, like his own, was choked with mist; when smoking umbrellas passed and re-passed, spinning round and round like so many teetotums, as they knocked against each other on the crowded
footway, throwing off a little whirlpool of uncomfortable sprinklings; when gutters brawled and waterspouts were full and noisy; when the wet from the projecting stones and ledges of the church fell drip, drip, drip, on Toby, making the wisp of straw on which he stood mere mud in no time; those were the days that tried him.
The newsboys, as he went, were crying themselves hoarse along the
footways: "Special edition.
The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no
footways, but broke off abruptly at the doors.