The poor penurious horde, naught in the cooking pot and naught in the belly.

With a little manœuvring they contrived to meet on the doorstep which was […] in a boiling stream of passers-by, hurrying business people speeding past in a flurry of fumes and dust in the bright haze.

Incidentally, the eval { } block around the method call is the Perlish way of catching exceptions.

There were many hideous histories the colonel could have told you of, unmeet to be set down, and he was familiar with this talk of pelvic anomalies which were congenital.