United States or Dominica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Kitty Lorimer's Brougham may be seen drawn up next door to old Lady Lollipop's belozenged family coach; I roam through Belgravia, that pale and polite district, where all the inhabitants look prim and correct, and the mansions are painted a faint whity-brown: I lose myself in the new squares and terraces of the brilliant bran-new Bayswater-and-Tyburn-Junction line; and in one and all of these districts the same truth comes across me.

Having to communicate with a client of rank, who was condemned to be hanged for forgery, Sir Roger de Backbite, the attorney said, he had been to visit that party in the condemned cell; and on the way through the yard, and through the bars of another cell, had seen and recognized an old acquaintance of Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe and the lawyer held him out, with a particular look, a note, written on a piece of whity-brown paper.

You always have to keep your eyes in your head and your cutlass handy when you go ashore. The worst of them are what they call mulattoes; they are a whity-brown sort of chaps, neither one thing nor the other, and a nice cut-throat lot they are. A sailor who drinks too much and loses his boat is as like as not to be murdered by some of them before morning. I hate them chaps like poison.

I doubt, however, his allowing them such a luxury as a place of worship all to themselves. Such a privilege might not be well thought of by the neighbouring planters; indeed, it is almost what one might call a whity-brown idea, dangerous, demoralising, inflammatory, incendiary.

A rope comes through the beamed roof, and a man in the corner pulls it and clashes the bell a whity-brown man, whose clothes were once black- -a man with flue on him, and cobweb. He stares at me, wondering how I come there, and I stare at him, wondering how he comes there. Through a screen of wood and glass, I peep into the dim church. About twenty people are discernible, waiting to begin.

Whereupon the old gentleman put on his spectacles, and glanced over the sheet of whity-brown paper, which, ornamented with a picture of a gallows at the top, contained the biographies of the seven unlucky individuals who had that morning suffered the penalty of the law.

I made terrible long bargains, and examined the articles over and over, before I purchased. In the meantime, I would convey a sonnet or an acrostic under cover of a piece of cambric, or slipped into a pair of stockings; I would whisper soft nonsense into her ear as I haggled about the price; and would squeeze her hand tenderly as I received my halfpence of change, in a bit of whity-brown paper.

He talked, and he told anecdotes, and every one present listened to him with pleasure and deep attention, but no one with more eagerness than an elderly widow of good standing in society; and she was, in reference to all that Herr Alfred said, like a blank sheet of whity-brown paper, that quickly sucks the sweet things in, and is ready for more.

Hence, when the hatless, spare, whity-brown man in soiled cotton offered for sale the odd-shaped beads in a besmeared whisky-bottle for five pounds, his national trait expressed itself in a scoff.

It was opened by a pretty girl, whose thick chestnut hair and eyes to match contrasted richly with the dress she wore a dirty black dress, with great patches of lining bursting through holes like a whity-brown froth. 'Meg Gudgeon? said the girl in answer to our inquiries; and at first she looked at us rather suspiciously, 'upstairs, she's very bad like to die I'm a-seein' arter 'er.