Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
Such were the strangely novel ideas which went flashing through Miss Leonora's mind as she went home to dinner, ejecting summarily the new gin-palaces and her favourite colporteur.
"Once he entered one of those gin-palaces, which, like the golden gates of hell, entice the miserable to worse misery, and seated himself close to a half-tipsy, good-natured wretch, who made room for him on a bench by the wall. He was comforted even by this proximity to one who would not repel him.
Now and then, too, he heard his name called out aloud in the streets by some of Nixey's friends, as he passed the prospering gin-palaces with their groups of loungers about the doors; but though he could catch the sound of the laugh and the sneer that followed him, he could take no notice.
I think that I did not see or hear even so much simple drunkenness in London as formerly, but again this may have been merely chance. I fancied that formerly I had passed more gin- palaces, flaring through their hell-litten windows into the night; but this may have been because I had become hardened to gin-palaces and did not notice them.
While they walked towards the City, evening was spreading her grey mantle over the sky. The lamps had been lighted, and the enticing blaze from gin-palaces and beer-shops streamed frequently across their path. At the corner of a narrow street they were arrested by the sound of music in quick time, and energetically sung.
Tipplers in gin-palaces ran to the doors and said, "There they go", "That's your sort", "Hurrah, my hearties!" or, "Go it, ye cripples!" according to the different stages of inebriation at which they had arrived; and belated men of business stopped to gaze, and then resumed their way with thoughts and speculations on fire and fire insurance, more or less deep and serious according to temperament.
When the geologist of the after-world begins his work who can tell how many hundreds of thousands of years hence? he will find, over all our stratification and palæontology, a DRIFT containing the remains of the ancient human species here a tibia of a stockbroker, there the skull of a poet here a lady's dressing-case in a fossilised state, there a gentleman's box of cigars: besides all these odds and ends, there will doubtless be ruins of temples, fortresses, ships, gin-palaces, and other pertinents of an active, passionate humanity, the purposes of which will form most curious matter of speculation for the more angelic species then at last come upon the earth.
We often meet the assertion that we cannot make people moral by Acts of Parliament; but if dens of infamy, which it is perilous to enter, are swept away, if gin-palaces and public-houses which flood the land with ruin are diminished in number, and in their hours of trade, it would certainly lessen the evils we deplore.
In every city arise so-called "places" "gin-palaces," they are called in fiction; in Chicago we euphemistically say merely "places," in which alcohol is dispensed, not to allay thirst, but, ostensibly to stimulate gaiety, it is sold really in order to empty pockets.
"But let us turn to a subject more fruitful. London seemed like a great waste of dingy dwellings and badly constructed palaces, the whole sleeping under a canopy of sickly smoke. Everything wore a sombre, heavy air even the men seemed born to methodize on some one object. Show-shops, beer-shops, and gin-palaces, made the very air reek with their stifling fumes.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking