United States or Saint Martin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The paint on the house was peeling, gutters had rusted out, some of the porch flooring had rotted through, the yard was an unkempt tangle of matted grass and weeds and neglected shrubbery. The sight of it was like a stab to her, for she remembered the place as it had been, and the shock was akin to that of seeing a loved one in the garb of a tramp.
Snatching burning wood from the fire, they hurled it through the broken, windows in all directions. Rushing in to Bourne's shop, they rolled out tea canisters by dozens, which they emptied into the gutters, and then smashed to pieces. They then deliberately collected the shop paper around a pile of tea chests, and fired it, the shop soon filling with flames.
Venders of fruit, shoe-strings, collar-buttons, and other light merchandise were scattered along the sidewalks and gutters, trying to earn a living by the sale of their wares, while beggars occasionally stopped the more fortunate members of society with pathetic importunities for money to buy bread.
Mothers and children accompany the men, although they have for the most part to walk in the gutters. It is great sport to fall out and watch the whole mighty procession go by, and then, by taking a short cut, again to station one's self at the head. Stand at a street-corner, and it will take hours for the whole to pass you. Trapp, trapp! Trapp, trapp!
The rain, trickling from the gargoyles and gutters of the roofs, was collected in two large and deep stone tanks; sometimes the gardener's pail would disturb their green covering, letting one perceive for an instant the blue-blackness of their depths, but as soon as the circles disappeared, the vegetation once more drew together and covered them over afresh, without a movement, without a ripple, quiet and dead as the temple itself in the stillness of the evening.
I, too, am a philanthropist, Miss Julia I don't like your other name I, too, think and write for others. I, too, have dreams of a millennium, of days when the huge wheel shall be driven to a different tune, and faces be lifted to the skies that hang now towards the gutters. But details annoy me, details I cannot master.
In many cases it had thrown its branches over an entire house, clambering over the roof and encircling the phosphoric cage, so that the white house was dissected by its twigs and tendrils, while the red honeysuckle flowers depended in clusters from the walls, the roof gutters, and the light house globes above them.
If secrecy were an object, it was well secured by the sable sky, and the steady torrent which rolled down with electric weight and perpendicularity, making all nature resound with one long hush sh sh sh sh deluging the broad street, and turning the channels and gutters into mimic mill-streams which snorted and hurtled headlong through their uneven beds, and round the corners towards the turbid Liffey, which, battered all over with rain, muddy, and sullen, reeled its way towards the sea, rolling up to the heavens an aspect black as their own.
Bigot and his myrmidons plundered everybody, and the starving Acadians did not escape. They had managed to bring with them a little money and a few household treasures, of which they were soon robbed. For a time they were each allowed but four ounces of bread a day, and were reduced, it is said, to searching the gutters for food.
Down in the poor, crowded places, where the gutters fumed with filth, and doors stood open upon horrible passages and staircases, little children, barefooted, with one miserable garment on, sat on grimy stone steps, or played wretchedly about the sidewalks, impeding the passers of a better class who hastened with bated breath, amidst the fever-breeding nuisances, along to railway stations whence they would escape to country and sea-side homes.
Word Of The Day