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You know, Lieber Herr, said Vater Böhm, there is nothing in the whole Kaiserstadt so astonishing to strangers as our signboards. Those beautiful paintings that you see—Am Graben and Hohe Markt,—real works of art, with which the sign-boards of other countries are no more to be compared, than your hum-drum English music is to the delicious waltzes of Lanner, or the magic polkas of Strauss.
The American did not make himself any more popular by pulling down the old street sign-boards bearing Spanish names, and substituting ugly card-board placards marked in ink with fresh names, such as America Street, McKinley Street, and Roosevelt Street; he had also named a street after himself!
At length, in the distance, we saw a solitary fragment of a brick wall standing in a wide hollow, a sign that we were nearing a habitable region once again. We passed by riddled German sign-boards Vormarschstrasse, Hohenzollernstrasse, Kaiserstrasse, Mackensenstrasse, Admiral Scheerstrasse.
So you see, I am getting along fine." "You are doing Great Work for a Mere Child," said the Parent. "If you keep on, you may be U.S. Senator some day. But tell me, where did you get all of these Sign-Boards, Placards, Head-stones and other Articles of Vertu?" "I swiped those," replied the Collegian. "In order to be a real Varsity Devil, one must bring home a few Souvenirs every Night he goes out.
Its dazzling color effect, its pile of massive gilding in grotesque ornamentation, its wonderful sign-boards in bewildering hieroglyphics, and its host of odd-looking humanity all is at variance with anything the traveler has before seen. To successfully view Canton requires some urbanity, a wealth of patience, and a stomach not readily overthrown by gruesome and unusual sights.
It was a stare made up of wonder, and instinctive dislike, and human pity, and young disgust. She raised her voice: "Did you not see those signs? Scoundrel, puppy, foreign-born poacher, didn't you see my sign-boards?"
A second Glasgow in appearance, the houses built substantially of red brick, six stories high huge sign-boards outside each floor denoting the occupation of its owner or lessee heavily-laden drays rumbling along the streets quays at which steamboats of fairy architecture are ever lying massive warehouses and rich stores the side walks a perfect throng of foot-passengers the roadways crowded with light carriages, horsemen with palmetto hats and high-peaked saddles, galloping about on the magnificent horses of Kentucky an air of life, wealth, hustle, and progress are some of the characteristics of a city which stands upon ground where sixty years ago an unarmed white man would have been tomahawked as he stood.
On a certain wet night, in the spring of the year 1587, the rain was doing its utmost to sweeten the streets of old Paris: the kennels were aflood with it, and the March wind, which caused the crowded sign-boards to creak and groan on their bearings, and ever and anon closed a shutter with the sound of a pistol-shot, blew the downpour in sheets into exposed doorways, and drenched to the skin the few wayfarers who were abroad.
As the contributor moved onward down the street, luminous on either hand with crimsoning and yellowing maples, he was so filled with the tender serenity of the scene, as not to be troubled by the spectacle of small Irish houses standing miserably about on the flats ankle deep, as it were, in little pools of the tide, or to be aware at first, of a strange stir of people upon the streets: a fluttering to and fro and lively encounter and separation of groups of bareheaded women, a flying of children through the broken fences of the neighborhood, and across the vacant lots on which the insulted sign-boards forbade them to trespass; a sluggish movement of men through all, and a pause of different vehicles along the sidewalks.
At eight we landed again, and travelled by a stage-coach for four hours through a pleasant and well-cultivated country, perfectly French in every respect: in the appearance of the cottages; the air, language, and dress of the peasantry; the sign-boards on the shops and taverns: and the Virgin's shrines, and crosses, by the wayside.
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