United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Countless brilliant scenes of life and manners are shown him, but never move him. He goes to church, and calls the practices there degrading and superstitious: as if HIS altar was the only one that was acceptable. He goes to picture-galleries, and is more ignorant about Art than a French shoeblack.
"Yes at least I have been told so." "By whom?" "By a boy a shoeblack who " "A shoeblack!" exclaimed Mr Merrett. "Is that your only authority?" "I believe he is honest," I said; "he overheard a conversation between Masham and a friend, in which Masham mentioned that Hawkesbury owed him £15." "Really," said Mr Merrett, "this is almost absurd to take such testimony as that."
Shorn of his graceful limbs, and brought down from his high estate to circumstances of utter destitution, and the deepest misery, he made shift to stump back to his old master, and beg for some relief. By the locksmith's advice and aid, he was established in business as a shoeblack, and opened shop under an archway near the Horse Guards.
Left alone in a friend's lodging with a broken arm and other contusions, and a small shoeblack to look after me, who had once robbed me of my penknife and a sixpence! I was rather doubtful whether his new employment was quite as congenial to him as his old. Indeed, I rather pitied him as he sat there silent and motionless like a watch-dog on guard.
He had evidently got himself up for the occasion, for his shoeblack uniform had been well brushed, his hands and face severely washed, and his hair plastered well down with soap-and-water. "Come in, Slidder that's your name, isn't it?" said the doctor. "It is, sir Robin Slidder, at your sarvice," replied the urchin, giving me a familiar nod. "'Ope your leg ain't so cranky as it wos, sir.
I was held up as the Irish Bluebeard, and libels of me were printed, and gross caricatures drawn representing me flogging Lady Lyndon, whipping Lord Bullingdon, turning him out of doors in a storm, and I know not what. There were pictures of a pauper cabin in Ireland, from which it was pretended I came; others in which I was represented as a lacquey and shoeblack.
Bless my soul! he 'ain't even got a box nothin' but a scrubby pair o' brushes as I'm alive! He ain't no shoeblack. He's a thief as purtends to black shoes, and picks pockets. Bill. You're a liar! I never picked a pocket, in my life. James. Bad language, you see! What more would you have? Tho. Who'd iver lia' thowt o' sich wickedness in a boy like that! Bill. I ain't a wicked boy, no.
Austin took no more notice of them than if they had been flies, but as soon as the shoeblack had finished, and been generously rewarded, he presented them each with a penny. "Wot's this for?" growled the foremost. "We ain't beggars, we ain't. Wot d'ye mean by it?" "Aren't you? I thought you were," said Austin. "However, you can keep the pennies. They will buy you bread, you know."
Round a gambling-table, by the side of the ci-devant Bishop of Autun, Talleyrand, sat Madame Hounguenin, whose husband, a ci-devant shoeblack, has, by the purchase of national property, made a fortune of nine millions of livres L375,000.
After years of domestic life, on which he is said to look back but rarely and with reluctance, he got a position as secretary and shoeblack and tutor in Chinese to a M. Callery, and left the province of Chin-li for Paris. For three months this devoted man sent Quzia-Tom-Alacer small sums of money, and after that his kindness became, as Douglas Jerrold said, unremitting.
Word Of The Day