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


There I was presented to three of the friars, who were pleasant and jolly-looking men. Upon the roof was a kind of observatory, or look-out, simply furnished with billiard-tables and shuffleboards, while the implements for various other games lay about on small tables, with telescopes on stands, and comfortable arm-chairs.

On the putting greens the natural undulations of the ground have been levelled, and the greens are all as flat and smooth as billiard-tables. There are clumps of ornamental wood, flower-beds, and artificial ponds with goldfish swimming in them. It is all very pretty, but it is hardly golf.

Such is the arrangement of the ground-floor; the apartments on the first floor are at present occupied by restaurateurs, exhibitions of various kinds, billiard-tables, and academies de jeu, or public gaming-tables, where all the passions are let loose, and all the torments of hell assembled.

Miss Sanford hung back as Mr. Gleason threw open the portals, and called out encouragingly, "Come right in, ladies; there's no one here but the bar-keeper." Mrs. Truscott stepped lightly over the threshold, and glanced with smiling curiosity around. The first thing that caught her eye was a placard hanging at the entrance of a little alcove-like space beyond the rusty old billiard-tables.

In the middle of the square are a pavilion containing two billiard-tables, a boot-blacking arbour, covered with white and yellow jessamine and scarlet and cream-coloured honeysuckle, plenty of flower-beds, full of roses and orange-trees, and a monkey on a pole, who must, poor creature, have a sorry life of it, as it is his business to afford amusement to all the visitors to the baths.

In the artificial dusk, beyond the levels of shrouded billiard-tables, a white form heaved up from two chairs on which it had been extended. The middle of the day, table d'hote tiffin once over, was Schomberg's easy time. He lounged out, portly, deliberate, on the defensive, the great fair beard like a cuirass over his manly chest. He did not like Davidson, never a very faithful client of his.

Those who were intimate with the family, and were observant of men, were wont to remark that the son would never fill the father's shoes. These family friends, I may perhaps add, were generally markers at billiard-tables, head grooms at race-courses, or other men of that sharp, discerning class.

"And the other young men, those lounging guardsmen and great lazy dandies sprawling over sofas and billiard-tables, and stealing off to smoke pipes in each other's bedrooms, caring for nothing, reverencing nothing, not even an old gentleman who has known their fathers and their betters, not even a pretty woman what a difference there is between these men, who poison the very turnips and stubble-fields with their tobacco, and the gentlemen of our time!" thinks the Major; "the breed is gone there's no use for 'em; they're replaced by a parcel of damned cotton spinners and utilitarians, and young sprigs of parsons with their hair combed down their barks.

Twice in the week concerts are executed by the first performers of the opera-bouffe; and twice in the week invitations to tea-parties are sent to some of the neighbours, or accepted from them. Besides four billiard-tables, there are other gambling-tables for Rouge et Noir, Trente et Quarante, Faro, La Roulette, Birribi, and other games of hazard.

A few days ago I called the English roads perfect, and England the paradise of 'cyclers; and so it is; but the Normandy roads are even superior, and the scenery of the Arques Valley is truly lovely. There is not a loose stone, a rut, or depression anywhere on these roads, and it is little exaggeration to call them veritable billiard-tables for smoothness of surface.