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Updated: June 16, 2025
Although he had no words with 'Rion, and really no trouble with the crew in general, he felt that trouble was brewing. And the worst of it was, it was trouble which he did not know how to avert. It was not so easy to fill the empty berth in the forecastle, even from the offscourings of the docks. It was a time when dock labor was at a premium. And short voyages never did interest good sailormen.
Surely there were in them elements of 'sweetness and light, which might have been cultivated to some fine fruit, had there been anything like sweetness and light in their first conquerors the offscourings, not of Spain and Portugal only, but of Germany, Italy, and, indeed, almost every country in Europe.
And the men who butchered their fellow-creatures thus, were neither pagans from distant savage lands, nor ruffians, the refuse and offscourings of our own people. They were in calm blood reasonable, nay, religious men, maintaining a fair repute both heavenward and earthward.
There was, moreover, a very widespread impression that the North was carrying on the war chiefly by means of mercenaries, Germans, Irishmen, and "the offscourings of Europe," as the uncomplimentary phrase ran, who enlisted for the sake of the bounty, and were equally prompt at exhibiting their indifferentism to the grave issues at stake and their blackguardism in dealing with the hostile populations.
Our grandfathers and our fathers, for that matter had a somewhat acrid conception of humour, and the offscourings of the city ministered to this peculiar humorous sense in a singular way. But a leaven of propriety has now crept in, and the evil beings who were wont to pollute the sweet air preserve some moderate measure of seemliness.
Several tables were ranged along the walls, at each of which sat a group of the most horrible-looking savages that probably ever were seen out of jail the very dregs and offscourings of Moscow.
So that many stragglers found their way to the English dining-board, each bringing with him his own national bad manners, and causing much annoyance to the Disagreeable Man, who was a true John Bull in his contempt of all foreigners. The English table was, so he said, like England herself: the haven of other nation's offscourings.
Till a few years ago, the first three days of Easter were a carnival season in this old town, during which the idle and disreputable part of London poured itself into the streets like an inundation of the Thames, as unclean as that turbid mixture of the offscourings of the vast city, and overflowing with its grimy pollution whatever rural innocence, if any, might be found in the suburban neighborhood.
At first the Christians were the miserable offscourings of society, slaves, criminals, and lunatics. They burrowed in the Catacombs, they fastened themselves upon a decaying and magnificent civilization like the parasites they were.
The thought of his childhood companions, the little waifs like himself who came from the offscourings of the earth. They had loved him he knew. He recalled slowly, laboriously, little incidents from his early history. They were dim and uncertain, many of them, but little kindnesses stood out.
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