Immediately upon my arrival in the city of Newsboys and Three-cent
Stages, I proceeded, as is hereinbefore mentioned, to the white-faced
Hotel which is surmounted by the bird called Shanghai, who seems from
the top of his lofty perch where he roosts in unreachable security, to
crow over neighboring boroughs, and exult in the great glory of the
Manhattan Island. It required, however, but a few days to weary of the
"constant noise and confusion" of this saintly mansion, and to become
sick of the eternal presence of men in white aprons who are everywhere
at the same time, and who are, mathematically speaking, a constant
quantity.
These waiters are certainly ubiquitous; at the table there is one at
each elbow, at night a stranger is escorted to bed by a grand
procession, and one pulls off his boots while another unbuttons his
shirt-collar, and a third lights the gas and turns down the bed-clothes;
a waiter meets you at the door, another takes away your overcoat and
gives it to a waiter who presents you with a brass check for it--there
are waiters in the bar, in the washroom, in the barber-shop, in the
cellar, in the reading-room; waiters running races through the halls all
night; there is always a snowy neckerchief and an outstretched palm when
you leave the premises, and on sunshiny days there is invariably a
distant glimpse of a white-jacket on the roof of the house.
As soon after my arrival as I could collect my senses, and knew enough
not to take every M. P. for a foreign ambassador, and pull off my hat to
the Star, I deemed it advisable to search for lodgings more quiet, and
not so expensive.
It took about a fortnight to restore my mind to its accustomed serenity,
and then having become, to a certain extent, a fixture in this high old
town, it became necessary to search out a fit habitation, wherein I
might eat, sleep, change my shirt (Damphool blushes), and attend to the
other comforts of the external _homo_, and the inner individual.
My friend Bull Dogge having deserted his late place of residence, (on
account of the perpetual reign of salt mackerel at the breakfast table),
we started together on a voyage of discovery. To describe all the
dilapidated gentlewomen, whose apartments we inspected--all the many
inducements which were used to persuade us to take up our quarters in
all sorts of musty smelling rooms, and to recount how many promises we
made to "call again," would take too much time.
Suffice it to say, that at six o'clock in the evening, wearied out and
desperate, we cast anchor in the domicile of an Irish lady with one eye.
She assured us that her boarders were all "rispictible, and found their
own tibaccy, and that there was divil a bug in the place."
We took adjoining rooms, and resignedly went down to tea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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