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Updated: May 21, 2025
If smoking is indulged in, have placed upon the table a number of small match boxes, ashes receivers, and between the chairs spittoons. And here let me add a few words upon smoking taken from an English authority, but which, with a few exceptions will apply equally well to lovers of the weed upon this side of the water.
I had never been under that kind of discipline, and to have a pin-headed gamin order me to clean spittoons was more than I could stomach. At the end of the week I went to the proprietor, and said, "If you have nothing better for me to do than sweep the floor and run errands, I think I'll quit." With some surprise my boss studied me.
"We must have a bonfire this evening in the Champ-Gaillard," went on the other, "made of Master Andry's books." "And the desks of the scribes!" added his neighbor. "And the beadles' wands!" "And the spittoons of the deans!" "And the cupboards of the procurators!" "And the hutches of the electors!" "And the stools of the rector!"
Here we found ourselves in a large low room containing some thirty or forty tables, and fitted up after the universal restaurant pattern, with cheap-looking glasses, rows of hooks, and spittoons in due number. The air was heavy with the combined smells of many dinners, and noisy with the clatter of many tongues.
For two hours she waited to see President Johnson, in an anteroom "among the huge half-bushel-measure spittoons and terrible filth ... where the smell of tobacco and whiskey was powerful." When she finally reached him, he immediately refused her request, explaining that he had a thousand such solicitations every day.
Lincoln himself made a few remarks, which seemed so simple and rang so true, and were so free from political rococo and decoration generally, that even the young men forgot their sweethearts to listen. Then Mr. Lincoln went into the hotel, and the sun slipped under a black cloud. The lobby was full, and rather dirty, since the supply of spittoons was so far behind the demand.
So the ladies passed out in single file; Mr Jefferson Brick and such other married gentlemen as were left, acknowledging the departure of their other halves by a nod; and there was an end of THEM. Martin thought this an uncomfortable custom, but he kept his opinion to himself for the present, being anxious to hear, and inform himself by, the conversation of the busy gentlemen, who now lounged about the stove as if a great weight had been taken off their minds by the withdrawal of the other sex; and who made a plentiful use of the spittoons and their toothpicks.
The city was swarming with delegates and visitors. All the hotels were filled; the saloons roared with drinking crowds. How many thousand cigars were lighted every minute! Stubs decorated the floors, the spittoons, the sidewalks. The houses of ill fame were riotous with men let loose upon a holiday.
"That's all right," he exclaimed. "That's all right. He ain't had it easy, you know. Scrubbing spittoons is enough to take the polish off any guy. I'm telling you he's there. Forty ways. You'll see, bo. You'll see." "I'm waiting," I said. "Keep right on," Sheener advised me. "Keep right on. The old stuff is there. It'll show. Take it from me." I laughed at him.
Under any other name than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit of these things was "gay."
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