United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Do you let this window stand wide this way when you are at work here, all day?" asked the husband. The opening alluded to was on Prytania street, and looked across the way to where the asylumed widows of "St Anna's" could glance down into it over their poor little window-gardens. "Why, yes, dear!"
A man of fortune, aged a hale sixty or so, who came and stood on the corner, and sometimes even rested a foot on Mary's door-step, waiting for the Prytania omnibus, and who, on his returns, got down from the omnibus step a little gingerly, went by Mary's house, and presently shut himself inside a very ornamental iron gate, a short way up St. Mary street. A child would have made him acquainted.
As the cobblestones rattled under the doctor's equipage rolling leisurely up Prytania Street, Tony's wife sat in her chair and laughed, laughed with a hearty joyousness that lifted the film from the dull eyes and disclosed a sparkle beneath.
"It certainly is!" replied the Doctor, and averted his face. For when the group and he were nearest together and the moon shone brightly upon the four, he saw, beyond all question, that the older man was his visitor of a few evenings before and that the younger pair were John and Mary Richling. Excellent neighborhood, St. Mary street, and Prytania was even better.
Tony and his wife had always been in this same little queer old shop on Prytania Street, at least to the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the neighbourhood. When or how they came, or how they stayed, no one knew; it was enough that they were there, like a sort of ancestral fixture to the street.
"Who lives there?" is a question not asked concerning houses as small as theirs; and a young man, in a well-fitting suit of only too heavy goods, removing his winter hat to wipe the standing drops from his forehead; and a little blush-rose woman at his side, in a mist of cool muslin and the cunningest of millinery, these, who always paused a moment, with a lost look, in the vestibule of the sepulchral-looking little church on the corner of Prytania and Josephine streets, till the sexton ushered them in, and who as often contrived, with no end of ingenuity, despite the little woman's fresh beauty, to get away after service unaccosted by the elders, who could imagine that these were from so deep a nook in poverty's vale?
By and by, at Richling's earnest and restless desire, they moved their lodgings again. And thus we return by a circuit to the morning when Dr. Sevier, taking up his slate, read the summons that bade him call at the corner of St. Mary and Prytania streets. The house stands there to-day. A small, pinched, frame, ground-floor-and-attic, double tenement, with its roof sloping toward St.
"What? Kincaid's Bat ?" "No-o, the Zouaves! Infantry! when the one only sane thing to do," cried every cannoneer of Camp Callender in its white lanes or on three-hours' leave at home on Bayou Road or Coliseum Square or Elysian Fields or Prytania street "the one sane thing to do," insisted the growingly profane lads to their elders, and assented the secretly pained elders to them, "the one thing that, if only for shame's sake, ought to have been done long ago, was to knock Fort Pickens to HELL with SHELL!" Sadly often they added the tritest three-monosyllabled expletive known to red-hot English.
He was a great, black-bearded, hoarse-voiced, six-foot specimen of Italian humanity, who looked in his little shop and on the prosaic pavement of Prytania Street somewhat as Hercules might seem in a modern drawing-room. You instinctively thought of wild mountain-passes, and the gleaming dirks of bandit contadini in looking at him. What his last name was, no one knew.
Mary street, corner of Prytania. Lower corner opposite the asylum. The place was far up in the newer part of the American quarter. The signature had the appearance as if the writer had begun to write some other name, and had changed it to Richling.
Word Of The Day