one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that

approached them, had damned it into little pools; these were

surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to

its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands

joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their

shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their

fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little

mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from

women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths;

others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;

others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here

and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new

directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed

pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister winerotted

fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry

off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

got taken up along with it that there might have been a scavenger

in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in

such a miraculous presence.

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voicesvoices of men,

women, and childrenresounded in the street while this