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In an eddy in the seething crowd was a placid-faced Aymara, bedecked in the most tawdry manner with gewgaws from Birmingham or Manchester, sedately playing a melancholy tune on a rustic syrinx or Pan's pipe, charmingly made from little tubes of bamboo from eastern Bolivia. At the close of the festival, on a Sunday afternoon, the costumes disappear and there occurs a bull-baiting.
The whole suburb before entering Southwark was rich in orchards and gardens, lying round the detached houses of the wealthier merchants and citizens. Approaching the river-side, to the left, the eye might see the two circular spaces set apart, the one for bear, the other for bull-baiting.
"How long is this little game of yours to continue, this bull-baiting?" he inquired. "How long am I to be made a butt of for the amusement of a lot of imbeciles?" Miss Thorn crossed over and seated herself on the ground beside him. "You must be sensible," she said, in a tone that she might have used to a spoiled child. "I know it is difficult after the night you have had.
Carvel should delight in a good main between two cocks, or a bull-baiting, or a breaking of heads at the Chestertown fair, where he went to show his cattle and fling a guinea into the ring for the winner.
How coolly Gardiner disposes of this well-turned rhetorical phrase: "The order for the complete suppression of bear-baiting and bull-baiting at Southwark and elsewhere was grounded, not, as has been often repeated, on Puritan aversion to amusements giving 'pleasure to the spectators, but upon Puritan disgust at the immorality which these exhibitions fostered."
On my request that he would send orders for that to be brought, he promised to do so. The 18th day I was with him again and continued till night, when he shewed me his house, with the amusement of duck-hunting with water spaniels, and bull-baiting with English dogs.
In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy bull-baiting or getting drunk. But the literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us.
I nearly died last week before I could get any one to bring me my afternoon chocolate. The men had all rushed off to a bull-baiting, and the women were romping or fighting in the laundry, except my own women, who are too genteel to play with the under-servants, and had taken a holiday to go and see a tragedy at Oxford. I found myself in a deserted house.
Upon a small lake a dolphin four-and-twenty feet in length came swimming, within its belly a lively orchestra; Italian tumblers swung from rope to bar; and crowds gathered at the places where bear and bull-baiting were to excite the none too fastidious tastes of the time. All morning the gay delights went on, and at high noon the cry was carried from mouth to mouth: "The Queen! The Queen!"
And our will further is, that women shall have leave to carry rushes to the church, for the decoring of it, according to auld custom. But we prohibit all unlawful games on Sundays, as bear-baiting and bull-baiting, interludes, and, by the common folk mark ye that, sir playing at bowls."
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