Book The First: Poverty Chapter 31 Spirit

Anybody may pass, any day, in the thronged thoroughfares of the
metropolis, some meagre, wrinkled, yellow old man (who might be supposed
to have dropped from the stars, if there were any star in the Heavens
dull enough to be suspected of casting off so feeble a spark), creeping
along with a scared air, as though bewildered and a little frightened
by the noise and bustle.

This old man is always a little old man. If he
were ever a big old man, he has shrunk into a little old man; if he were
always a little old man, he has dwindled into a less old man. His coat
is a colour, and cut, that never was the mode anywhere, at any period.

Clearly, it was not made for him, or for any individual mortal. Some
wholesale contractor measured Fate for five thousand coats of such
quality, and Fate has lent this old coat to this old man, as one of a
long unfinished line of many old men. It has always large dull metal
buttons, similar to no other buttons. This old man wears a hat, a
thumbed and napless and yet an obdurate hat, which has never adapted
itself to the shape of his poor head.

His coarse shirt and his coarse
neckcloth have no more individuality than his coat and hat; they have
the same character of not being his--of not being anybody's. Yet this
old man wears these clothes with a certain unaccustomed air of being
dressed and elaborated for the public ways; as though he passed the
greater part of his time in a nightcap and gown. And so, like the
country mouse in the second year of a famine, come to see the town
mouse, and timidly threading his way to the town-mouse's lodging through
a city of cats, this old man passes in the streets.