A Strange Border [pp. 573-576]

EoTanED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by D. APPLETON & CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
No. 112.-VoL. V.] SATURDAY, MAY 20, 1871.
[PRICE TEN CENTS.
A STRANGE BORDER.
T is the melancholy fate of most cities to be befringed by impuri- iron paths emerging from banks of green, miles away, glistening and
ties and disagreeables of one character or another; to fray out intermingling as they come; into dripping docks redolent of scourings
into barely habitable dinginess in the matter of dwellings and door- and opaque fluctuating washings; into various landings rich in new
yards; to melt away by slow degrees into noisy regions of machinists' associations, and new beginnings reflected upon by heavy-eyed, grate
A SCENE IN THE OUTSKIRTS OF NEW YORK.
shops, where grime and smoke abound; into wide, salty marshes,
cropped and uncropped, ditched and staked; into dreary tracts of
gravelly barrenness, diffuse of quivering heats or blinding with pathless snows; into tumultuous river-sides with adjacent towering, unclean hives for the wretches of the quarter; into low burrowings for
the villains and debauchees of everywhere; into focuses of straggling
ful foreigners; into a general indefiniteness, an uncomfortable, unrefreshing state of beginning and ending; into a seeming hopeless inability to be any thing but an incorrigible, tiresome waste.
All assemblages of human habitations thus wear their skirts,
from hamlets of six houses to the Londons of as many hundred
thousands. They all sweep outward much to the same purpose,
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