United States or Mexico ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then, there were drinking shops, with such shocking odors issuing from doors and windows; and red-faced, blear-eyed men, half drunk, leaning against the barrels, and sitting on the side-walks; and decayed fruit, in windows so thick with dirt that one could scarcely see through them; and second-hand, faded dresses and bonnets for sale, swinging from out the doorways; and girls with uncombed hair and bare feet and bold faces, fighting and swearing; and old, gray-haired men, smoking pipes and drinking.
Here is an old-time cobblestone, then long, smooth stretches of asphalt. Again, just dirt, and the three meet and mingle in stretches long and short, in whose variations one seeks in vain for a reason. So with side-walks, brick passes to flagging, to asphalt, to dirt and back again in the distance of half a block. And even the brick changesoften and suddenly.
Next day Dirck and I were in the saddle at six precisely, and we rode through the streets just as the blacks were washing down their stoops and side-walks; though there were but very few of the last, in my youth.
And now, when they come to rest at noonday, you will see, if you watch them, that before Trotter takes his boots off he feeds the dog. And the Signor fetches him water. Beyond the arcaded side-walks, whose square-pillared arches stand before the house-fronts like cloisters, the streets of Thun were channels 'of standing sunlight, radiating heat from every cobblestone.
Grouped round the band-stand were clerks, shopmen, schoolboys in Hessian boots, and little girls wearing brightly-coloured handkerchiefs round their heads. In the main walks and side-walks, as if engaged in an endless quadrille, there moved a vivacious throng, composed of officers, students, and ladies. They soon met Dubova, Schafroff, and Yourii Svarogitsch, and exchanged smiles as they passed.
The crowd behind the police-kept lines surged expectantly into closer formation; spectators hurried up from side-walks and stood craning their necks above the shoulders of earlier arrivals.
Forthwith, your journeymen and subordinates learn the habit. Hence our hat-shops, and house-scaffoldings, and side-walks, and wharves, and dockyards, and cellars, and lofts ring with blasphemies. Men argue that, if it is right for a man worth fifty or a hundred thousand dollars to swear, it can be overlooked in men who have merely their day's wages.
Not only was the roadway so soft that every turn of a wheel loaded it inches deep with the sticky compound, and made it so heavy that the driver had frequently to stop and clear his wheels with a stick, but, trodden from the crossings into the side-walks, it covered them with a slimy mixture very difficult to walk on.
The street is more gloomy than the house; black, slimy mud, inches deep on crossings; the same black, slimy mud in footprints on side-walks; hopeless-looking people hurrying by, so unhappy by reason of the drizzle that a weird sort of family likeness is to be seen in all their faces. This is all that can be seen outside. It is better not to look.
In truth, I and my shooting-jacket produced quite a sensation in Liverpool: and I have no doubt, that many a father of a family went home to his children with a curious story, about a wandering phenomenon they had encountered, traversing the side-walks that day. In the words of the old song, "I cared for nobody, no not I, and nobody cared for me."
Word Of The Day