Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
"Now I know that Peter would do anything for a woman or child, or an honest, straight, hard-up chap," said Mitchell, straightening out his legs and folding his arms, "but I can't quite understand his being so partial to drunken scamps and vagabonds, black sheep and never-do-wells. He's got a tremendous sympathy for drunks. He'd do anything to help a drunken man. Ain't it marvellous?
The old enemy, who had crawled up the walls of the asylum and slimed himself through my grated windows, and coiled around my heart in frightful dreams, again had me in his possession. Thus began one of the most maniacal and terrible drunks of my life. I became possessed of the wildest and most unreal thoughts that ever entered a crazed brain.
"I know of one who was born last night. And that's only one of a lot. We have thousands of kids and old people sick people too, and cripples and drunks all that these lovely jobs of ours have left on our backs. They've got to be carried. Who's to take care of 'em, feed 'em, doctor 'em? If we're going to run the earth let's begin at home. What does anyone know about that?"
The bartender, grasping the mallet even more firmly, arose on his toes and peered over the bar, not quite sure of what he might discover. He had read of infernal machines although he had never seen one. "What the blazes!" he exclaimed in almost a whisper; and then his face went hard. "You get out of here, quick! You've had too much already! I've seen drunks, but G'wan! Get out!"
Everybody knows where to find him, and nearly everybody goes to him for assistance of one sort or another, especially the poor of the tenements. He is always obliging. He will go to the police courts to put in a good word for the "drunks and disorderlies" or pay their fines, if a good word is not effective. He will attend christenings, weddings, and funerals.
The Manilamen and Kanakas and Torres Strait islanders, on the other hand, bring all the money they do not spend on the pearling schooner to the island, and "blow it in", like men. They knife each other sometimes, and now and again have to be run in wholesale, but they are "good for trade". The local lock-up has a record of eighteen drunks run in in seven minutes.
There are so many drunks, that interruptions are constant and irrepressible, and every interruption breaks your grip on the audience. Moral: Don't speak there. On a corner where you get an audience of typical working men disturbances are rare and in a majority of cases if they are not easily suppressed it is lack of tact on the part of the speaker.
"Every time I tried it I was shore blinded by the most awful an' horrible neck-kerchief I've ever had the hard luck to lay my eyes on. Of all the drunks I ever met, them there colors was Hey! Wait a minute!" he shouted at Hopalong's back. "Dave, gimme yore cayuse an' a rifle quick!" cried Hopalong from the middle of the street as he ran towards the store.
He had originally been quartered at Sydney, and had fought many bitter battles with the notorious "pushes" of Bondi, Surry Hills and The Rocks. After that, duty at Ninemile was child's play, and he never ran in fewer than two drunks at a time; it was beneath his dignity to be seen capturing a solitary inebriate.
Sounds kind o' fishy to me, and Joey says it does to him, too, but he couldn't work nothin' more out o' the drunks because about that time Sworn-off himself comes buttin' in and asks these guys what they think they're doin' on this side the river, and they beat it back to Peru toot sweet. He's got their goat, all right, and I wouldn't wonder if he's got Joey's, too.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking