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He passed lightly over days spent in countries near home, but grew even more and more animated as he went farther afield, and reached the Eastern surroundings in which he delighted. "Shall I tell you about Palestine? I never knew anything stranger than arriving at that railway station and seeing `Jerusalem' written up on the hoardings.
With all his jabberings, Honeycutt is sly and furtive and is obsessed with the idea that there is one thing he won't tell." "Will you go and see him one more time?" "What's the good, Mark? If he does know, he gets lockjaw at the first word. I've tried " "There's one thing we haven't tried. Old Honeycutt is as greedy a miser as ever gloated over a pile of hoardings.
It was a well-known fact in the family that on such an occasion he would lie in bed, and that before twelve o'clock he would have managed to extract from his wife's little hoardings at any rate two bottles of soda-water and two glasses of some alcoholic mixture which was generally called brandy.
A constant stream of people passed by me, eyes met and challenged mine and passed more and more I wanted then to stay if I went eastward towards Piccadilly, women who seemed then to my boyish inexperience softly splendid and alluring, murmured to me as they passed. Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings clamoured strangely at one's senses and curiosities.
In the holy temple were arcades of shops; through its precincts hurried the trams; the pictures of trade were displayed; men were building hoardings in my soul and posting notices of idol-worship, and hurrying throngs were reading books of the rites of idolatry. Instead of the mighty anthem of the ocean I heard the roar of traffic.
I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous with "Vote for Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the government benches. There was nothing impossible in such dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him?
The sea-fog flew high in heaven; and at the level of man's life and business it was clear and chill. By silent consent we paid the hack off, and proceeded arm-in-arm towards the "Poodle Dog" for dinner. At one of the first hoardings I was aware of a bill-sticker at work: it was a late hour for this employment, and I checked Pinkerton until the sheet should be unfolded. This is what I read:
As the International Relish is now a matter of history, the demand for it having spread as far east as Chicago and those places, I may add that it was this capable woman again who devised the large placard for hoardings in which a middle-aged but glowing bon-vivant in evening dress rebukes the blackamoor who has served his dinner for not having at once placed Ruggles' International Relish upon the table.
I was too interested in noting how each of his hands involuntarily closed on itself, in his relief at not being called upon to part with some of his hoardings, to answer with aught but a nod. "You have your reasons for keeping close, of course," he growled as he led the way toward the basement stairs. "You're not out of the woods, is that it? Or has the great lady bargained with you? Um? Um?"
The spirit of the place requires them, as much as the captives who came in the triumphs, as the Goths and Huns, as the pilgrims of the Mediæval Jubilees, and it subdues them: subdues them, as it subdues with the chemistry of this odd climate of crumble and decay, the new dreadful houses; as it has made, with the marvellous rank Roman vegetation, a sort of Forum or Palatine of the knocked-down modern houses, the empty unfinished basements behind the hoardings under my window.