Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
It has been well said that a love of nature is a strong characteristic even of the roughest type of Britons. An Englishman's first idea of a holiday is to get into the country, even if his second is apt to be a search for the country beer-house. Of birds, and beasts, and trees, and flowers, there is a good deal even of rustic lore. Of the wonders of the deep we know much less.
His teeth chattered with cold; he could scarcely call the hour or sound his horn. He would willingly have gone into a beer-house to warm himself at the fire.
Hunger and thirst were, however, beginning to be rather inconveniently felt; and as our calculations might after all be erroneous, we judged it prudent to seek, in a little ale-house by the way-side, such refreshment as could be procured. Our hotel was of the very humblest description; namely, the beer-house of a small hamlet, and could furnish only brown bread, cheese, butter, and beer.
It happened, then, that shortly after the time when Professor von Baumgarten conceived the idea of the above-mentioned experiment, he was walking thoughtfully homewards after a long day in the laboratory, when he met a crowd of roystering students who had just streamed out from a beer-house. At the head of them, half-intoxicated and very noisy, was young Fritz von Hartmann.
Pestilent Jacobinical tracts, conceived and composed in the sinks of manufacturing towns, found their way into the popular beer-house, Heaven knows how, though the tinker was suspected of being the disseminator by all but Stirn, who still, in a whisper, accused the Papishers.
Meanwhile, a superb sergeant-major of the National Guard, newly equipped, a big, full-blooded fellow, with a red beard, the husband of a fashionable dressmaker, who every evening at the beer-house, after his sixth glass of beer would show, with matches, an infallible plan for blocking Paris and crushing the Prussian army like pepper, and was foolish enough to insist upon it.
He seemed a harmless, hard- working man; never seen at the beer-house; always seen with his neatly- dressed little grandchild in his quiet corner at church on Sundays; a civil, well-behaved man too; who touched his hat to the bailiff and took it off to the vicar.
The house was still and dark, as if either deserted, or all within it retired to rest. "I think that open door leads at once to the rooms Mr. Margrave hires; he can go in and out without disturbing the other inmates. They used to keep, on the side which they inhabit, a beer-house, but the magistrates shut it up; still, it is a resort for bad characters. Now, sir, what shall we do?
The lamp was alight also in the little beer-house next door to it, where the Shipping Gazette could be borrowed, if it were not already out on loan; for children constantly go there for it, with a request from mother, learning their geography that way in Malabar Street, while following a father or a brother round the world and back again, and working out by dead-reckoning whether he would be home for Christmas.
How I reached the street after those words; whether they opened the door for me; whether they led me out or kicked me out, I assure you I do not know. I only came to myself, when Márton seized my arm in the street and shouted at me: "Well sir Lieutenant-Governor, you walk right into me without even seeing me. I got tired of waiting in the beer-house and began to think that they had run you in too.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking