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Updated: June 18, 2025
While the bells played "There Grows a Bonny Briarbush in Our Kale Yard," Auld Jock and Bobby slept. They slept while the tavern emptied itself of noisy guests and clattering crockery was washed at the dingy, gas-lighted windows that overlooked the cockpit. They slept while the cold fell with the falling day and the mist was whipped into driving rain.
The ideal entertainment would seem to be a gathering between four and seven, which is thoroughly understood to be a large gas-lighted party, which a lady enters properly dressed for a hot room, having a cloak which she can throw off in the hall, and where she can make her call long or short, as she pleases, and can find a cup of hot bouillon if she is cold, or tea if she prefers it, or a more elaborate lunch if her hostess pleases; and this ideal entertainment is not afternoon tea; it is a reception.
As the morning enters the stained, foul, dingy places of dissipation, which early in the evening had been the gas-lighted, garish scenes of riot and senseless laughter, and later the fighting ground of all the vile vermin of the night with their uncanny noises as when, the doors and windows having been at last opened, the light struggles in through stale tobacco-smoke, revealing dimly a discolored, reeking place, whose sights and odors are more in harmony with the sewer than the sweet April sunshine and the violets opening on southern slopes so when reason and memory, the janitors of the mind, first admitted the light of consciousness, only the obscure outline of miserable feelings and repulsive events were manifest to Haldane's introspection.
The two young-lady cousins whom he had brought and installed in his home thirsted for that gorgeous, nocturnal moth life in which no thirst is truly slaked, and dragged him with them into the iridescent, gas-lighted spider-web of society. "Now, you know you like it!" they said. "A little of it, yes. But I don't see how you can like it, who virtually live in it and upon it.
The pretty women, by this time in the short, gay foulards and in the dressy hats in which they will appear later at the Casino ball, are tripping up and down in the gas-lighted grounds. The scene is often illuminated by fireworks. At eight and a half the whole motley crew has entered the Casino, and there the most amusing dancing valse, galop, and polka is in vogue.
Now that her work was over, she began to feel what a terrible strain it had been. At first she lay back in the corner of the cab in a state of dreamy peace, watching the gas-lighted streets, the hurrying passengers, with a comfortable sense of security and rest.
Hot, gas-lighted theatric and operatic performances, beginning at eight, and ending at midnight; hot, crowded parties and balls; dancing with dresses tightly laced over the laboring lungs, these are almost the whole story. I bless the advent of croquet and skating. And yet the latter exercise, pursued as it generally is, is a most terrible exposure.
Oh, that drooping figure in their midst, with its clasped hands and its hidden face! I see it all again; I see it as in a dream; then darkness falls, and in the glare of gas-lighted streets, I am hastening along, solitary and sad, to my lonely home. "Oft expectation fails, and most oft there Where most it promises; and oft it hits Where Hope is coldest, and Despair most sits."
At night the girls slept securely under the canoe, which they raised on one side by means of forked sticks stuck in the ground. It was a grand sight to see the burning plains at night, reflected on the water. A thousand naming torches flickered upon its still surface, to which the glare of a gas-lighted city would have been dim and dull by contrast.
There young Toots was, at any rate; possessed of the gruffest of voices and the shrillest of minds; sticking ornamental pins into his shirt, and keeping a ring in his waistcoat pocket to put on his little finger by stealth, when the pupils went out walking; constantly falling in love by sight with nurserymaids, who had no idea of his existence; and looking at the gas-lighted world over the little iron bars in the left-hand corner window of the front three pairs of stairs, after bed-time, like a greatly overgrown cherub who had sat up aloft much too long.
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