United States or Morocco ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In dark corners huge wine-casks present their round dusty faces to the doubtful light, the smell of the kitchen pervades everything, tempered by the smell of wine from the neighbouring cellars; the floor is of rough stone worn by generations of cooks, potboys, and guests.
Potboys, grooms, and guests all craned their necks to get a glimpse of this strange and formidable being of whom they had heard such stories as curdled the blood and filled the night with troubled dreams. A crowd gathered about, whispering and nodding and pointing. The Iroquois beheld all this commotion with indifference not unmixed with contempt.
As soon as ever morning school was over he took his hat and traversed once more the familiar road between Saint Dominic's and the Cockchafer. "Is Cripps at home?" he inquired of the potboy. "Yas," said the boy. "Who wants him?" "I do, you young blockhead!" "You do? Oh, all right! I'll tell him, mister. Don't you collar no mugs while I'm gone, mind!" The very potboys despised and ridiculed him!
A common tap-room was an indifferent school of manners, whatever it might be for painting, and there this gifted lad was now often to be found late in the evening, carousing with hostlers and potboys, handing round the quart pot, and singing his song or cracking his joke.
On the evening after the examination he received a note from Cripps brought up in a most barefaced way by one of the potboys at the Cockchafer requesting the pleasure of Mr Loman's company at that pleasant spot immediately, to talk over business! "Why didn't he send it by post?" demanded Loman, angrily, of the disreputable messenger. "Don't you know if you were seen up here there'd be a row?"
The next moment she saw her sad mistake. "How funny!" cried the poor patient; "there's our old parson praying. Poor old parson! he tried to make me a teetotaller. It wouldn't do, Jacob. Ah, Jacob, never mind me. You're a jolly good fellow, but you don't understand things. Give us a song. What shall it be? `Three jolly potboys drinking at the "Dragon." What's amiss?
Pushing my way through the townsmen who had gathered, and whose numbers were swelled every moment by the afflux of aproned grocers, and potboys, and 'prentices, and others from the streets, I saw Cyrus laid on his back by the parapet, white and still, his father pacing heavily up and down, and his friend Captain Galsworthy fending off the prying onlookers with his cane.
Once more in Time's whirligig gentlemen and their footmen jostled one another on the Exchange, and a motley crew of peers and printers, vicars and admirals, professors, cooks, costermongers, cotton-spinners, waiters, coachmen, priests, potboys, hankers, braziers, dairymen, mail-guards, barristers, spinsters, butchers, beggars, duchesses, rag-merchants in one word, of Nobs and Snobs; fought and scrambled pell mell for the popular paper, and all to get rich in a day.*
In a few minutes the gang was entering the tavern, the long, cool room with barrels round the walls, where there were benches and a table and an old blind fiddler jerking his elbow at a jig. Noisily the party ranged about the table, and sat themselves upon the benches, while the drawers, or potboys, in their shirts, drew near to take the orders.
Word Of The Day