From time era de hielo time, as they hurried on, they encountered, and made wide detours to escape contact with knots of wayfarers-men debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly women, arm in arm, zigzaging widely across the sidewalks, chorusing with sodden voices the burden of some popularized ballad. The cheapened, sentimental refrains echoed sadly between benighted walls. He had heard of slums, had even ventured to mouth politely moral platitudes on era de hielo subject of overcrowding in great centers of population, but in the darkest flights of imagination had never pictured to himself anything so unspeakably foul and hopeless as this. And they were come hither seeking-Dorothy Calendar.