United States or Saint Barthélemy ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I saw no dance-houses, such as there were in Hamburg; and by nine o’clock the festivities of the day were at an end. The Easter fair lasted some five or six weeks, and at its termination its merriment disappeared. The wandering minstrels wailed their last notes as they departed, and the quiet city was left to its students and the pigeons.
Though inclined to court after the manner of the pillager who has captured a city, his boisterous addresses pleased the wanton matrons and, more naturally, the facile Cythereans of the music halls and dance-houses.
A dozen rival auctioneers vend their wares, and gallop fast horses up and down the street. The drinking and gambling saloons and dance-houses are in full blast, all with bands of music to allure the passing miner, who comes into town on Sunday to spend his earnings. The discoverer of Virginia is the miner par excellence, a good-natured Hercules clad in buckskin, or a lion in repose.
Crowds walking up and down, bars lighted up, theatres going on, dance-houses in full swing, billiard-tables where you could hear the balls clicking away till daylight; miners walking down to their night shifts, others turning out after sleeping all the afternoon quite fresh and lively; half-a-dozen troopers clanking down the street, back from escort duty.
So pure, the man never came near her without a dull loathing of himself, a sudden remembrance of places where he had been tainted, made unfit to touch her, rows in Bowery dance-houses, waltzes with musk-scented fine ladies: when this girl put her cool little hand in his sometimes, he felt tears coming to his eyes, as if the far-off God or the dead mother had blessed him.
The third and fourth-class houses, and then the streets, are reached quickly, after which the dance-houses and the Five Points hells claim their victims.
The streets are swarming with constantly arriving new-comers; the stores and saloons are literally crammed at all hours; dance-houses and can-can dens exist; hundreds of eager, expectant, and hopeful miners are working in the mines, and the harvest reaped by them is not at all discouraging.
The sale of liquors is enormous, and the work of destruction of body and soul that is going on is fearful. The bar-rooms, beer-gardens, restaurants, clubs, hotels, houses of ill-fame, concert-halls and dance-houses, are doing an enormous trade, and thousands are engaged in the work of poisoning themselves with drink.
I've been drinking for two days and one whole night, on my feet all the while, wandering alone in that big strange New York, going through places where they murdered men for ten cents, mixing myself up with the worst people in low bar-rooms and dance-houses, and they saw I had money in my pocket, too, and yet nobody touched me, or offered to lay a finger on me. Do you know why?
"Jack dances and sings, and is always content, In his vows to his lass he'll ne'er fail her; His anchor's atrip when his money's all spent, And this is the life of a sailor." But poor Landless danced quite as often at the gangway, under the lash, as in the sailor dance-houses ashore.
Word Of The Day