Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: October 25, 2025
There are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language and its agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall witch-hats, with one of them saying: "I wass enjoying myself shocking, look you."
Putchett had not been shaved for some days, and had apparently neglected the duty of facial ablution for quite as long a time, he turned pale and looked quickly behind him and across the street; then muttering "Just my luck!" and a few other words more desponding than polite in nature, he hurried to the Post-Office, where he penciled and dispatched a few postal-cards, signed in initials only, announcing an unexpected and temporary absence.
Would it be better that they should take to open mendicancy, or try to win the soft American heart with such acquired slang as "Skiddoo to twenty-three"? One who had no postal-cards had English enough to say he would go away for a penny; it was his price, and I did not see how he could take less; when he was reproached by a citizen of uncommon austerity for his shameless annoyance of strangers, I could not see that he looked abashed in fact, he went away singing.
At one place there was a file of fishermen, including a fisherwoman, drawing their net by means of a rope carried across the carriage-way from the seawall, with a splendid show of their black eyes and white teeth and swarthy, bare legs, and always there were beggars, both of those who frankly begged and those who importuned with postal-cards.
She had fled from Antwerp at the time of the bombardment, and was supporting herself by needlework at Assen, where she was the only Belgian person, and I suppose she was tired of "neutrals" and wanted to see us because we were of the Allies. She urged us to tell her what she could do for us, and we asked her for some postal-cards, so we could tell our friends that we had escaped.
Of course, they wished to sell us postal-cards, but they were willing to accept charity on any terms.
Hansom cabs, prowling in search of a fare, passed through the street where a woman was being robbed of a fortune, the drivers occupied only with thoughts of a possible shilling; a housemaid with a jug in her hand and a shawl over her bare head, hastened to the near-by public-house; the postman made his rounds, and delivered comic postal-cards; a policeman, shedding water from his shining cape, halted, gazed severely at the sky, and, unconscious of the crime that was going forward within the sound of his own footsteps, continued stolidly into Wimpole Street.
This terrible traffic pervades all southern Europe, and everywhere pesters the meeting traveller with undesired bargains. In its presence it is almost impossible to fit a scene with the apposite phrase; and yet one must own that it has its rights. What would those boys do if they did not sell, or fail to sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor problem, so many-faced in our time.
To send one of these epistles was expensive twenty-five cents from New York to Boston. However, the electric telegraph and cheap postage and postal-cards may have been said, in a way, to have ruined correspondence in the old sense; lovers and fond mothers doubtless still write long letters, but the business of the letter-writer proper is at an end.
I could not insist too much upon this notion with the reader who has never been there, or has not received picture postal-cards from sojourning correspondents. These would afford him a portrait of the chief features and characteristics of the place not too highly flattered, for in fact it would be impossible for even a picture postal-card to exaggerate its beauty.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking