Excerpt from Mary There is an hour in the twenty-four that has magic in it, that makes common things strange and ugly things beautiful, and London an enchanted city. It is the hour before sunrise, when a greenish-blue light creeps slowly over the housetops, and the street lamps grow dim. Over the river perhaps there is a flush of rose-colour - the first smile of the new day, but in the streets there is only this pale herald of the dawn. That strange light lent a certain artistic beauty to the decadence of Sanders Street, which once had dignity and even fashion, but was w a place of tenement houses and squalid shops - a street that had been slowly withering for a century, but had been the pink of respectability, though a little off colour as to fashion, a hundred years ago. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.