United States or Djibouti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
'He sells shoddy new reach-me-downs as pawned old clo, complained Lazarus Levy, who had taken over S. Cohn's business, together with his daughter Deborah, 'and he charges the Sudminster donkey-heads more than the price we ask for 'em as new. Talk of the devil ! At this point Simeon Samuels stalked into the synagogue, late but serene.
A great peace reigned in every heart, almost like the Sabbath peace coming into the middle of the week. 'If they had only taken my advice earlier, said Solomon Barzinsky to his wife, as he rolled his forkful of beef in the chutney. 'You can write to your father, Deborah, said Lazarus Levy, 'that we no longer need the superior reach-me-downs.
French and German will certainly be aggregating languages during the greater portion of the coming years. Of the two I am inclined to think French will spread further than German. There is a disposition in the world, which the French share, to grossly undervalue the prospects of all things French, derived, so far as I can gather, from the facts that the French were beaten by the Germans in 1870, and that they do not breed with the abandon of rabbits or negroes. These are considerations that affect the dissemination of French very little. The French reading public is something different and very much larger than the existing French political system. The number of books published in French is greater than that published in English; there is a critical reception for a work published in French that is one of the few things worth a writer's having, and the French translators are the most alert and efficient in the world. One has only to see a Parisian bookshop, and to recall an English one, to realize the as yet unattainable standing of French. The serried ranks of lemon-coloured volumes in the former have the whole range of human thought and interest; there are no taboos and no limits, you have everything up and down the scale, from frank indecency to stark wisdom. It is a shop for men. I remember my amazement to discover three copies of a translation of that most wonderful book, the Text-book of Psychology of Professor William James,[ERRATUM: for 'The Text Book of Psychology, read 'The Principles of Psychology'.] in a shop in L'Avenue de l'Opera three copies of a book that I have never seen anywhere in England outside my own house, and I am an attentive student of bookshop windows! And the French books are all so pleasant in the page, and so cheap they are for a people that buys to read. One thinks of the English bookshop, with its gaudy reach-me-downs of gilded and embossed cover, its horribly printed novels still more horribly "illustrated," the exasperating pointless variety in the size and thickness of its books. The general effect of the English book is that it is something sold by a dealer in bric-
So now we're bloomin' toffs, an' I'll get a pair of reach-me-downs this very bloomin' night. And what price that there room you was talkin' about?" It was the beginning of a new life. Dickie wrote out their accounts on a large flagstone near the horse trough by the "Chequers," with a bit of billiard chalk that a man gave him. It was like this: Got Box 4 Box 4 Box 4 Box 4 Dog 40 Dog 14 70
The whole thing was compounded of a newspaper vocabulary, stale tags picked up from the reach-me-downs of middle-class rhetoric. Olivier was particularly amazed at the lack of simplicity. He forgot that literary simplicity is not natural, but acquired: it is a thing achieved by the people of the elect.
Bingo struck an attitude and began to declaim: "As the sable shades of Night were broodin' over the beleaguered town of Gueldersdorp, the manly form of a mysterious bearded stranger in grey reach-me-downs and a felt slouch might have been observed directin' its steps from one to the other of the various outlyin' pickets posted on the veld ..."
"Well there again. ... When I took him down to the country, looking rather like a tramp from a 'Shelter, with an untrimmed beard, and a suit of reach-me-downs he'd slept round the Park in for a week, I felt sure my mother'd carry the silver up to her room, and send for the gardener's dog to sleep in the hall the first night. But she didn't." "I see. 'Women and children love him. Oh, Wade!"
He shrank from the prospect of being confronted next day, at the height of his misery, with these appalling reach-me-downs. An idea struck him. "Yes, send 'em," he said. "What's the name and address?" "Daniel Brewster," said Archie, "Hotel Cosmopolis." It was a long time since he had given his father-in-law a present.
Occasionally the old mate would come dressed in the latest city fashion, and at other times in a new suit of reach-me-downs, and yet again he would turn up in clean white moleskins, washed tweed coat, Crimean shirt, blucher boots, soft felt hat, with a fresh-looking speckled handkerchief round his neck.
He wore no longer the well-cut clothes of Mr. Douglas Romilly's Saville Row tailor, but a ready-made suit of Schmitt & Mayer's business reach-me-downs, an American felt hat and square-toed shoes. "She said a week," he repeated. "It's a fortnight to-day. I'll go to the restaurant at the corner. I must find out for myself what all this noise means, what the city has to say."
Word Of The Day