United States or Singapore ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"And when I go downtown and view the weary, unwashed females and the overly ambitious painted ones, people in impossible bargain shoes and summer furs; fat men in plaid suits and Alpine hats; undernourished children being dragged along by unthinking adults; stray dogs wistfully sniffing at passers-by in hopes of finding a permanent friend; tired, blind work horses standing in the sun and resignedly being overloaded for the day's haul; fire sales of fur coats; candy sales of gooey hunks; a jewellery special of earrings warranted to betray no tarnish until well after Christmas; brokers' ads and vaudeville billboards and rows upon rows of awful, huddled-up, gardenless homes with families lodged somewhere between the first and twelfth stories the general chasing after nothing, saving nothing and, saddest of all, the complacent delusion that they have achieved something well worth while it makes me willing to earn and learn as I do."
The Sultan's palace, a large modern building on the familiar Arab lines, lies in a treeless and gardenless waste enclosed by high walls and close above the blue Atlantic. The sun was already beating down on the great plain thronged with horsemen and with the native population of Rabat on mule-back and foot.
They lived in a large, ugly house, one of a long row of ugly houses in a dull gardenless street, where the sidewalks were paved, and the plane trees which bordered the road were stunted and dusty. In the near neighbourhood ran a railway line, a car line, and four bus routes, so that noise and dust were familiar elements in the Gordons' lives so familiar, indeed, that they passed unnoticed.
All at once he realized that Rose-Marie was a distinct addition to the humdrum life of the place; that she was like a sweet old-fashioned garden set down in the gardenless slums. He started to say something of the sort before he remembered that a quarrel lay, starkly, between them. Rose-Marie, herself, could scarcely have told why she was so bubbling over with gladness.
Slowly they would pace along, enjoying the sweeter air of the suburbs, or, gardenless themselves, would stand to peep through garden-gates at the well-ordered array of geranium, calceolaria, verbena; sniffing the fragrance from the serried rows of stocks, the patches of mignonette, or the blossoming lime-trees overhead.
It is not to be wondered at that he did so; for Master Gyfford, after twenty-seven years' residence in Madras and more than twenty-seven years in the East, was in poor health, and lately he had been taken ill with a 'a violent fitt of the Stone and Wind Collick. The gardenless 'Factory' in the Fort was a gloomy apology for a 'Governor's House, and the crowd of employees that were accommodated there must have been a serious infliction upon the invalid Governor; and he found the Garden House an agreeable retreat.
It almost scared him to see how she hated her life, though at another time it might have been amusing to note how she despised her gardenless house. Of course it wasn't a country-house, and she couldn't get used to that.
Word Of The Day