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Thar's notices printed plenty big, an' posted up in every drink-shop from the dance hall to the Sunflower saloon; which they reads as follows RUIN! RUIN! RUIN! CUT LOOSE! JACK RAINEY MAKES GOOD ALL DRINKS FOR ONE WEEK. NAME YOUR POISON! "'At this yere time, it's about half through Jack Rainey's week, an' the pop'lace of Lido, in consequence, is plumb happy an' content.
"Ef ye pay th' siller for a double pot a' 'arf and 'arf. Hi might tell ye"; and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward a ginshop near by. "Very well," said I; "I'll buy you a double pot of 'arf and 'arf, this time." The man seemed a bit surprised, but no smile came over his spattered rainbow face as he led the way into the drink-shop.
"'Gents, it's no avail to pursoo me an' Yuba throughout them four feverish days. We drifts from one drink-shop to the other, arm in arm, as peaceful an' pleased a pair of sots as ever disturbs the better element. Which we're the scandal of Tucson; we-all is that thickly amiable it's a insult to other men. Thus ends my first dooel; a conflict as bloodless as she is victorious.
The kindly, seemly woman remains at home in her drawing-room, papa slumbers if he is one of the stay-at-home sort; but Gerald, and Sidney, and Alfred are out in the drink-shop hearing talk fit to make Rabelais turn queasy, or they are in the billiard-room learning to spell "ruin" with all convenient speed, or perhaps they have "copped it" that is the correct phrase rather early, and they are swaggering along, shadowed by some creature half girl, half tiger-cat who will bring them up in good time.
Many sottish-looking, or if not sottish with the beery texture of those whose only recreation is to be bestially merry at the drink-shop. This was the impression in which the few who strode with the free air of the ideal Australian workman were lost, as the few comfortable seeming women were lost in the general weariness of their weary sex. Jollity there was none to speak of.
So, in many a drink-shop in England, a piano or a band adds to the attractions, and gives a false air of aestheticism to pure animalism. Isaiah feels the incongruity that music should be so prostituted, and expresses it by adding to his list of musical instruments 'and wine' as if he would underscore the degradation of the great art to be the cupbearer of sots.
In less time than a week, however, his wife leaves him; an' also that drink-shop wherein he officiates is blown down by a high wind. "'That bar-keep emerges from the rooms of his domestic hopes an' the desolation of that gin mill, an' endows a lady of his acquaintance with this opal ornament. It ain't twenty-four hours when she cuts loose an' weds a Mexican.
If the ordinary village inn were nothing but the foul drink-shop which its enemies allege, if all that it provided was an irresistible temptation to depravity, the majority of the people who resort to it now would very soon leave it alone. And the same is true of the little lowly places in the town.
Nobody worried then about diphtheria; they only died of it. Mimic frigates, too! What patriotism! These gardens are as much lost as those of the Hesperides. A cemetery swallowed them up the cemetery which adjoins the old St. Pancras Churchyard. The Tavern, shorn of its amenities, a mere drink-shop, survived as far down the century as 1874, soon after which date it also disappeared.
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