United States or Cambodia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And was it a London cockney crow-word of the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow's head from the perusal of his pothouse newspaper columns? Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall, required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of collapses.
"Time to get up, dear!" This is Oliver a little sternly from the upper berth. "That was your bath that came in a minute ago and said something in Cockney. At least I think it was mine's voice is a good deal more like one of Peter's butlers " "But, Ollie, I'm so comfortable!" "So am I. But think of breakfast." "Well breakfast is a point."
Jane, with her cockney common-sense, her shrewdness, her outspoken criticism of follies, her unfailing sympathy in essentials, was welded into the very structure of his being. Only when he had lost her did he realize this. Amidst all the artificialities and pretences and pseudo-emotionalities of his young actor's life, she was the one thing that was real.
He has no resilience in his nervous system. He has never trained himself in nerve-control, being so stolid and self-reliant. Now, the nervous man, the cockney, for example, is always training himself in the control of his nerves, on 'buses which lurch round corners, in the traffic that bears down on him, in a thousand and one situations which demand self-control in a 'nervy' man.
"Well, now, Frank, that is" expostulated Harry "that is just the most snobbish thing I ever saw you do; aint you ashamed of yourself now, you genuine cockney!" "Not a bit my gun has not been used these three months, and something might have got into the chamber!"
Of his own nature the baby is interested in the ticking of a watch; and the time will come when you will have to tell him, if you only tell him the wrong time. And that is exactly what the second-rate civilisation does. But the vital point is here. The abstract barbarian would copy. The cockney and incomplete civilisation always sets itself up to be copied.
He says they put the Big 'Un down in the lazaret, and they're goin' to croak him sure, and if we got any guts we'll go aft tonight and turn him loose. That's what Cockney says." Well, I let myself go, verbally. I said things about that Cockney, and I was only sorry Cockney was not there to hear them. I knew most of the hard words of three languages, and I used them all.
"'Ullo!" he said with a strong Cockney accent, as he came up out of the fog, and the flare of the match gave him a full view of her, standing there with her lips shut hard, and, the hand-bag clutched up close to her with both hands. "You wot called, was it? Wot price me for arnswerin' of you, eh?" "Yes, it was I that called," she replied, making a brave front of it.
Such anecdotes of our habits and customs as they crammed him with, it would appear, never were heard before; nothing was too hot or too heavy for the luckless cockney, who, when not sipping his claret, was faithfully recording in his tablet the mems. for a very brilliant and very original work on Ireland.
"You'll have a letter surely, from him in a week or so," smoothly answered the cockney, finally. And then the owner of the Newport Art Gallery sadly departed. "I am in his power," he musingly said. "He knows all about me; and I nothing of him. He is a fiend, that fellow; and he will perhaps keep clear of my friends on the other side. He is too smart to commit himself."
Word Of The Day