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


The second act opens in the market square, lively with the choruses of Hindoos, Chinamen, fruit-venders, and sailors, and later on with the adventures of the English party in the crowd. A ballet, followed by the stabbing of Gerald, closes the act. In the third act the action hastens to the tragic denouement.

Fruit-venders scream their wares, Turkish officers on magnificent Arab horses prance by, and the crowd of strange and picturesque costumes bewilders you; and through all the noise and confusion glide the silent, veiled women. One almost doubts one's own identity. I was suddenly recalled to my senses, however, by a gentle thump on the elbow, and turning beheld the head of a diminutive donkey.

The movement in every part, so many carriages coming and going at full speed, the carromatas and calesas, the Europeans, the Chinese, the natives, each in his own peculiar costume, the fruit-venders, the money-changers, the naked porters, the grocery stores, the lunch stands and restaurants, the shops, and even the carts drawn by the impassive and indifferent carabao, who seems to amuse himself in carrying burdens while he patiently ruminates, all this noise and confusion, the very sun itself, the distinctive odors and the motley colors, awoke in the youth's mind a world of sleeping recollections.

The fruit-venders and organ-grinders form separate colonies, each distinguished by the peculiarities incident to the calling of its inhabitants, the crooked courts in the fruit-sellers' neighborhood being chiefly marked to outward observance by the number of two-wheeled hand-carts which, out of business hours, are crowded together there.

In front of the houses are the markets in the open air, fish, vegetables, carts of oranges; in the sun sit women spinning from distaffs or weaving fishing-nets; and rows of children who were never washed and never clothed but once, and whose garments have nearly wasted away; beggars, fishermen in red caps, sailors, priests, donkeys, fruit-venders, street-musicians, carriages, carts, two-wheeled break-down vehicles, the whole tangled in one wild roar and rush and babel, a shifting, varied panorama of color, rags, a pandemonium such as the world cannot show elsewhere, that is what one sees on the road to Resina.

Off Norman Street in the West End is a court which I have visited during the past week in company with two other gentlemen. The houses on this court are occupied by Italian fruit-venders for the most part. The court itself is littered up with refuse and decayed fruit in a most filthy and unhealthy manner. In one of these large tenement houses there is no family which occupies more than one room.

But your first view of Honolulu, that from the ship's deck, is one of the pleasantest you can get: it is a view of gray house-tops, hidden in luxuriant green, with a background of volcanic mountains three or four thousand feet high, and an immediate foreground of smooth harbor, gay with man-of-war boats, native canoes and flags, and the wharf, with ladies in carriages, and native fruit-venders in what will seem to you brightly colored night-gowns, eager to sell you a feast of bananas and oranges.

Hucksters fled into the dark of side lanes. Shopkeepers shot their door-bolts. Householders blew out lights. Fruit-venders made off without their baskets, and small urchins shrieked the alarm of "Baby-eaters! Baby-eaters!"

An hour later the launch from the yacht took him aboard at the ancient stone jetty, where the fruit-venders and wine-sellers shouted their jargon, and the seaweed clung to the landing stage. When Karyl had returned to the Palace after the inspection of the Fortress do Freres, he had sent word at once to that part of the Palace where Cara had her suite.

In front of the houses are the markets in the open air, fish, vegetables, carts of oranges; in the sun sit women spinning from distaffs or weaving fishing-nets; and rows of children who were never washed and never clothed but once, and whose garments have nearly wasted away; beggars, fishermen in red caps, sailors, priests, donkeys, fruit-venders, street-musicians, carriages, carts, two-wheeled break-down vehicles, the whole tangled in one wild roar and rush and babel, a shifting, varied panorama of color, rags, a pandemonium such as the world cannot show elsewhere, that is what one sees on the road to Resina.