Which Gives Some Account of the Worst Place in the World

A bad place by day, an evil place by night, an unsavory place at all
times is Giles's Rents, down by the River.

It is a place of noisome courts and alleys, of narrow, crooked
streets, seething with a dense life from fetid cellar to crowded
garret, amid whose grime and squalor the wail of the new-born infant
is echoed by the groan of decrepit age and ravaging disease; where
Vice is rampant and ghoulish Hunger stalks, pale and grim.

Truly an unholy place is Giles's Rents, down by the River.

Here, upon a certain evening, Barnabas, leaning out from his narrow
casement, turned wistful-eyed, to stare away over broken roof and
chimney, away beyond the maze of squalid courts and alleys that
hemmed him in to where, across the River, the sun was setting in a
blaze of glory, yet a glory that served only to make more apparent
all the filth and decay, all the sordid ugliness of his surroundings.

Below him was a dirty court, where dirty children fought and played
together, filling the reeking air with their shrill clamor, while
slatternly women stood gossiping in ragged groups with grimy hands
on hips, or with arms rolled up in dingy aprons. And Barnabas
noticed that the dirty children and gossiping women turned very
often to stare and point up at a certain window a little further
along the court, and he idly wondered why.

It had been a day of stifling heat, and even now, though evening was
at hand, he breathed an air close and heavy and foul with a thousand
impurities.