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For all over the flimsy wooden houses, the wretched palings, the galvanized iron roofing, the ugly verandas, hang gorgeous draperies of the giant acacias, the brilliant flamboyantes, the bountiful, yellow allamanda, the generous breadfruit, and the uplifting glory of the cocoanut-trees, while magnificent vines and creepers cover the tawdry paint of the façades and embower the homes in green and flower.
These may be cleaned and handled without giving the backache to women. Many colored girls boast of having painted their own floors and woodwork. Much of this has been learned in the boarding school. A tawdry home expresses its mistress as do her clothes. Next to the kitchen a fully equipped bath room is now the most important room in the house.
It was not needed that the baker should hear these words; already he knew everything. His soul had told him everything in the moment he saw the sun-browned man with the rings in his ears! On went the baker, his head bowed on his breast, the sun shining like tawdry brass, the snow glistening like a slimy, evil thing.
I frankly acknowledge the Company's clerks on such occasions could do a rushing business selling tawdry stuff at fabulous prices. Meanwhile, in the main hall, the Bourgeois, or partners, of the great North-West Company were holding their annual General Assembly behind closed doors.
Restless and irritated by the trivial conversation of girls of her own age and the amorous tendencies of the stronger sex of the same age and also a good bit older, she had spent the afternoon in the hotel grounds, waiting for the evening, when she could slip away by herself; having realised that the best time of all in Thebes of the Hundred Gates is at fall of night, when the shadows cast a seemly cloak over the vulgarity of the modern buildings, and give an air of romance even to the glittering lights of the appalling esplanade, which flaunts its tawdry modernity cheek by jowl with the quay, built by one of the Ptolemies, and in use even to the present day.
At some of the Pooneahs the evening's gaiety winds up with a nautch or dance, by dancing girls or boys. I always thought this a most sleep-inspiring exhibition. It has been so often described that I need not trouble my readers with it. The women are gaily dressed in brocades and gauzy textures, and glitter with spangles and tawdry ornaments.
In this comparison, allowance must be made for the opposite building taste of each nation; especially as Richmond has an appearance of substantial comfort in its massive brick mansions and rusticated cottage groups. The French Sheen is, on the contrary, gayer; the exterior of the residences being whitened, or what is still more artificial, coloured and decorated in tawdry French taste.
But images, like dolls, tricked out in the tawdry finery, are the objects which this people adore, and to whom they attribute more miraculous powers than were ever ascribed to the gods of their heathen ancestors. Humboldt says, "This people have changed their ceremonies, but not their religious dogmas." But let us take a look at the interior of this town.
In the years that followed it was rapidly rebuilt, Roman architecture and decoration, of often tawdry and inferior character, replacing the chaste and artistic Greek. Once more the city became a centre of gayety, ostentation, and licentiousness, when, in 79 A.D., the eruption of Vesuvius came, and the overwhelming storm of ashes came down like a thick-descending fall of snow on the doomed city.
In modern France the chances of escape from the parliamentary game, tawdry at its best, at its worst a social peril, are much greater than in this country. The names and forms of the thing are not of ancient institution. There is therefore no opportunity for bamboozling people with a sham continuity, or of mixing up the interests of the party hacks with the instinct of patriotism.
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