Risking exposing myself as an illiterate retard, but this sentence trips me up:

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth,

"retired from" implies to me the waters went away. Yet, considering everything else is about how this street is drowning in rainwater and mud, Dicken's clearly means the opposite.

Is this some old timey shift in meaning, or am I missing something about the construction of that sentence?

The punctuation of the first two sentences is also fucking with me tbh.

Risking exposing myself as an illiterate retard, but this sentence trips me up:

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth,

"retired from" implies to me the waters went away. Yet, considering everything else is about how this street is drowning in rainwater and mud, Dicken's clearly means the opposite.

Is this some old timey shift in meaning, or am I missing something about the construction of that sentence?