United States or Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If you had come to me and said, 'I am too well off; I am being spoiled and petted to death; the simplicity and dignity of life is being wholly lost in all this fashionable flattery, this public notoriety and applause; and to recover myself a little as a kind of purification I am going to put aside my trappings; I will go and work as a hod-carrier for three months or six months; I will live on the plainest fare; I will bear patiently the cursing the master of the gang will undoubtedly hurl at me; I will sleep on a straw mattress' then I could have understood that.
In class recitation or spelling match his father's millions did not aid him in competing with Patsy Halloran, the mathematical prodigy whose father was a hod-carrier, nor with Mona Sanguinetti who was a wizard at spelling and whose widowed mother ran a vegetable store.
Patricia's speech on this occasion was of an unfettered and heady nature. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she said, when she had finally paused for breath, and had wiped away her tears, and had powdered her nose, viciously, "to bully a weak and defenseless woman in this way. I dare say everybody in the house has heard us brawling and squabbling just like a hod-carrier and his wife.
Hence, this boy, from the age of eight or nine years, smart, intelligent, and ambitious, was constantly at work at some such employment; and often, during his father's drunken fits, he was the chief support of the family. Besides serving as scare-crow, he assisted his father in his mason's work, and became a hod-carrier as soon as he was able to carry a hod.
Upon his arrival, the Queen sent a graceful message, and invited him to Windsor Castle, where she received him with all the honors; but he told me no foreign tribute touched him deeper than the words of an English hod-carrier, who came up to the carriage door at Harrow, and asked permission to take the hand of the man who had written the "Voices of the Night."
If we can only hold out a little longer just a little I am sure there'll be plenty to do for everybody." Then he began to show distress again. "I could have got work to-day if I had been a carpenter, or if I'd been a joiner, or a slater, or a bricklayer, or a plasterer, or a painter, or a hod-carrier. Didn't I try that, and was refused?" "I'm glad of it," said Mary.
And so you see that the wife of an intoxicated army officer or lawyer or banker may be in as much danger from his drunken and insane fury, when alone with him and unprotected, as the wife of a street-sweeper or hod-carrier." "I have never thought of it in that way." "No, perhaps not.
"I suppose this Burke will be a hod-carrier, or something of that kind, when he is a man." "While you are a member of Congress." "Very likely," said Godfrey, loftily; "and he will claim that he was an old schoolmate of mine. It is disgusting." "Of course it is. However, we needn't notice him." "I don't mean to."
"We were speaking of the effects of intemperance on the more cultivated and refined classes, and I said that it mattered little as to the social condition; the hurt of drink was the same and the disturbance of normal conditions as great in one class of society as in another, that a confirmed inebriate, when under the influence of intoxicants, lost all idea of respectability or moral responsibility, and would act out his insane passion, whether he were a lawyer, an army officer or a hod-carrier.
A hod-carrier told her that he had just seen the bird in Saint-Melaine, in Mother Simon's store. She rushed to the place. The people did not know what she was talking about. At last she came home, exhausted, with her slippers worn to shreds, and despair in her heart. She sat down on the bench near Madame and was telling of her search when presently a light weight dropped on her shoulder Loulou!
Word Of The Day