United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She knew every detail of the melancholy squalor of it, the dragging hours, the nights of lying awake listening to the occasional passing of belated cabs, or the squeaks and nibbling of mice in the old walls. "If you had conducted yourself sensibly you need not have gone," continued her mother. "I could have made an excuse and left you here.
Breen found, upon the vigorous inquiry which she set on foot, that the operatives were deplorably destitute of culture and drainage. She at once devoted herself to the establishment of a circulating library and an enlightened system of cess-pools, to such an effect of ingratitude in her beneficiaries that she was quite ready to remand them to their former squalor when her son-in-law returned.
That dreaded voice would rouse her from the sleep of death almost, she thought. Shaking with cold and dread, she followed him along the lighted platform, and out into the gloom and squalor of the streets. A heavy rain was coming down in sheets, driven in their faces by a cold, gusty wind.
Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class, fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river, a house boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried slips of front and back gardens, on a May evening some ten or twelve years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts had been reached.
But Elnathan looked cheerful under all my talk. It didn't impress him a mite, I could see. He felt safe. He wuz sure the squalor and sufferin' never would or could touch him. He thought, in the words of the Him slightly changed, that: "He could read his title clear to Mansions with all the modern improvements." He and The Little Maid wuz safe.
Within the love-driven universe which you have learned to see as a whole, you will therefore find egotism, rebellion, meanness, brutality, squalor: the work of separated selves whose energies are set athwart the stream. But every aspect of life, however falsely imagined, can still be "saved," turned to the purposes of Reality: for "all-thing hath the being by the love of God."
But this old, rough-tongued, weather-beaten, and heart-tortured prophet, who had saved not tens but thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of the world thousands of little girls rescued from defamation, thousands of women rescued from the sink of horrid vice, thousands of men new-born from lives of unimaginable crime and iniquity, thousands of homes once dreary with squalor and savagery now happy and full of purest joy; nay, who could see, as I have seen in India, whole tribes of criminal races, numbering millions, and once the despair of the Indian Government, living happy, contented, and industrial lives under the Flag of The Salvation Army he who could see all this, and who could justly say, 'But for me these things had never been, was not happy and was not satisfied.
Nothing can be more so than to quit one's own hearth for the life of saloons. The squalor and misery of the homes is not enough to explain the current which carries each man away from his own. Why does the peasant desert for the inn the house that his father and grandfather found so comfortable? It has remained the same. There is the same fire in the same chimney.
A threat of death yesterday, misery, starvation and squalor! all the hideousness of a destroying anarchy, that had nothing to give save a national fete, a tinsel goddess, some shallow laughter and momentary intoxication, a travesty of clothes and of religion and a dance on the ashes of the past.
"I suppose you ought to go to a factory town like Fall River, if you really wanted to deal with overwork and squalor." "I'm beginning to think there's no such thing anywhere," she said desperately. The doctor's eyes twinkled sympathetically. "I don't know whether Benson earned his three houses altogether in the hat-shops.
Word Of The Day