in, you will see them roaming towards bed by scores, eating their
way to the last. Occasionally, some youth among them who has overeaten
himself, or has been worried by dogs, trots shrinkingly
homeward, like a prodigal son: but this is a rare case: perfect
self-possession and self-reliance, and immovable composure, being
their foremost attributes.
The streets and shops are lighted now; and as the eye travels down
the long thoroughfare, dotted with bright jets of gas, it is
reminded of Oxford Street, or Piccadilly. Here and there a flight
of broad stone cellar-steps appears, and a painted lamp directs you
to the Bowling Saloon, or Ten-Pin alley; Ten-Pins being a game of
mingled chance and skill, invented when the legislature passed an
act forbidding Nine-Pins. At other downward flights of steps, are
other lamps, marking the whereabouts of oyster-cellars – pleasant
retreats, say I: not only by reason of their wonderful cookery of
oysters, pretty nigh as large as cheese-plates (or for thy dear
sake, heartiest of Greek Professors!), but because of all kinds of
caters of fish, or flesh, or fowl, in these latitudes, the
swallowers of oysters alone are not gregarious; but subduing
themselves, as it were, to the nature of what they work in, and
copying the coyness of the thing they eat, do sit apart in
curtained boxes, and consort by twos, not by two hundreds.
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Dickens, Charles – American Notes for General Circulation
But how quiet the streets are! Are there no itinerant bands; no
wind or stringed instruments? No, not one. By day, are there no
Punches, Fantoccini, Dancing-dogs, Jugglers, Conjurers,
Orchestrinas, or even Barrel-organs? No, not one. Yes, I remember
one. One barrel-organ and a dancing-monkey – sportive by nature,
but fast fading into a dull, lumpish monkey, of the Utilitarian
school. Beyond that, nothing lively; no, not so much as a white
mouse in a twirling cage.
Are there no amusements? Yes. There is a lecture-room across the
way, from which that glare of light proceeds, and there may be
evening service for the ladies thrice a week, or oftener. For the
young gentlemen, there is the counting-house, the store, the barroom:
the latter, as you may see through these windows, pretty
full. Hark! to the clinking sound of hammers breaking lumps of
ice, and to the cool gurgling of the pounded bits, as, in the
process of mixing, they are poured from glass to glass! No
amusements? What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of
strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety
of twist, doing, but amusing themselves? What are the fifty
newspapers, which those precocious urchins are bawling down the
street, and which are kept filed within, what are they but
amusements? Not vapid, waterish amusements, but good strong stuff;
dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs
of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and
pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined
lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life
the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed
and prostrate body-politic, every Samaritan of clear conscience and
good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping
of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey. – No
amusements!
Let us go on again; and passing this wilderness of an hotel with
stores about its base, like some Continental theatre, or the London
Opera House shorn of its colonnade, plunge into the Five Points.
But it is needful, first, that we take as our escort these two
heads of the police, whom you would know for sharp and well-trained
officers if you met them in the Great Desert. So true it is, that
certain pursuits, wherever carried on, will stamp men with the same
character. These two might have been begotten, born, and bred, in
Bow Street.
We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day; but of
other kinds of strollers, plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice,
are rife enough where we are going now.
This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and