Lucius Davoren, Volume III by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Lucius had been working a little harder than usual on one of those September afternoons, and was just a shade more weary of Shadrack-Basin and its surroundings than his wont. He looked at the forest of spars visible yonder above the housetops, and wished that he and Lucille could have sailed together in one of those great ships, far out into the wild wide main, to seek some new-made world, where care was not, only love and hope. He had often envied the stalwart young Irishmen, the healthy apple-cheeked girls, the strong hearty wayfarers from north and south and east and west, whom he had seen depart, happy and hopeful, from possible penury here to follow fortune to the other side of the globe, in some monster emigrant-ship, which sailed gaily down the river with her cargo of human life. To-day he had felt more than usually oppressed by the fetid atmosphere of narrow alleys, the dirt-poison which pervaded those scenes in which he had been called to minister-human dens, many of them, which only he and the pale-faced High-Church curate of St. Winifred's, Shadrack-road, ever penetrated, excepting always the landlord's agent, who came as regular as Monday morning itself, with his book and his little ink-bottle in his waistcoat-pocket, ready to make his entry of the money which so very often was _not_ to hand. He gave a great sigh of relief as he came out of the last of the narrow ways to which duty had called him; a lane of tall old houses, in which one hardly saw the sky, and where smallpox had lately appeared-a more hateful visitor than even the agent with his ink-bottle.

‘I must get the taint of that place blown out of me somehow before I go to _her_,' thought Lucius. ‘I'll take a walk down by the docks, and get what air is to be had from the river.'