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Updated: June 26, 2025
They once had a good long walk together; they walked to Harvard village and back, occupying a couple of days and walking about twenty miles a day. They had much conversation talked of Scott and Landor and others. They found the bar-rooms at the inns cold and dull places. The Temperance Society had emptied them. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar in one of them, but "was soon out on the piazza."
From which preamble we come to the statement; if you would study human nature on the road, you must simply go where men congregate and exchange ideas. The plots of nearly all Bret Harte's mining stories are thus closely associated with the bar-rooms and taverns of the mining towns of his day.
The high and the low are represented on the streets. The bar-rooms and beer-gardens are in full blast, and will not close until midnight. The better class establishments are quiet and orderly, but the noise and confusion increases as we descend the scale of the so-called respectability of these places.
Handsomely furnished offices had been opened on principal corners for the sale of city and country property. Hotels were crowded, bar-rooms were jammed. The preponderance of the male population had never been so pronounced, and every incoming train added to it. Money moved easily; wages were stiffening; tradesmen were in demand. There was material for many good stories in his investigations.
The proprietor is one of the pillars of an up-town church, and would feel his reputation ruined, and himself disgraced, if seen behind the counter of such a concern. He hires this man to play proprietor, and keeps the place open for the benefit of those who prefer bar-rooms to churches. You see, Christians go into anything that pays well, here."
The stage-coachmen of England, at the time of which I am speaking, considered themselves mighty fine gentry, nay, I verily believe the most important personages of the realm, and their entertaining this high opinion of themselves can scarcely be wondered at; they were low fellows, but masters at driving; driving was in fashion, and sprigs of nobility used to dress as coachmen and imitate the slang and behaviour of the coachmen, from whom occasionally they would take lessons in driving as they sat beside them on the box, which post of honour any sprig of nobility who happened to take a place on a coach claimed as his unquestionable right; and these sprigs would smoke cigars and drink sherry with the coachmen in bar-rooms, and on the road; and, when bidding them farewell, would give them a guinea or a half-guinea, and shake them by the hand, so that these fellows, being low fellows, very naturally thought no small liquor of themselves, but would talk familiarly of their friends lords so and so, the honourable misters so and so, and Sir Harry and Sir Charles, and be wonderfully saucy to any one who was not a lord, or something of the kind; and this high opinion of themselves received daily augmentation from the servile homage paid them by the generality of the untitled male passengers, especially those on the fore part of the coach, who used to contend for the honour of sitting on the box with the coachman when no sprig was nigh to put in his claim.
Ashore all is bustle and delighted confusion; the dulness of trade, which is the normal condition of Algiers between the arrivals of prizes, is forgotten in the joy of renewed wealth; the erstwhile shabby now go strutting about, pranked out in gay raiment, the commerce of the bar-rooms is brisk, and every one thinks only of enjoying himself. Algiers is en fête.
And what splendid and roomy and leisurely bar-rooms! particularly the grand ones of the St. Charles and St. Louis. Bargains, auctions, appointments, business conferences, &c., were generally held in the spaces or recesses of these bar-rooms. I used to wander a midday hour or two now and then for amusement on the crowded and bustling levees, on the banks of the river.
There was, in those days, an outpost of Satan overrated perhaps in importance by the college authorities, with proportionate overawing effect upon the students on the riverside, over against Cambridge. Here "trials of speed," trotting speed, were held; bar-rooms existed; it was rumored pools were sold.
They were given with ardor; and then General Belch was called out for a few remarks, "which he delivered," said the Evening Banner of the Union, "with his accustomed humor, keeping the audience in a roar of laughter, and sending every body happy to bed." The Committee-meeting was over, and the spectators retired to the neighboring bar-rooms. Mr. Slugby, Mr.
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