Hot corn: Life Scenes in New York IllustratedRobinson, Solon
General
Hot corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated
Robinson, Solon
New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Temperance -- Fiction
At first it did not contain that great broadway to death. True, death
had his abode there, but he kept in a cave out of sight. He did not
thrust his hideous visage into the face of every guest, as he does now.
The place of his "exchange" was then a place of green grass and flowers
and sparkling fountains, upon which all the interior windows of that
great caravansery looked down with joy and gladness, smiling o'er the
perfumed atmosphere, and beauty admired beautiful flowers, and listened
to love-inspiring songs of birds, and pattering of falling water in the
great marble basin. Ah! that was a court, worthy of such a traveller's
home. But it did not produce the profit that flows to the owner through
another liquid channel, where that fountain once leaped, played and
sparkled in the sunshine. Lovely eyes still look down from the
surrounding chamber windows, not upon the flowers and birds and crystal
waters, but upon an unsightly dome, and in fancy through its roof, and
there they see their husbands, brothers, fathers, friends, putting an
enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains. How fancy will work;
how it will send sharp pangs to the heart; sharper than a two-edged
sword; how the feeble wife will look down upon that roof, and pray for
it to give up her husband. Other wives have prayed the tomb for the same
object, both equally effective. Both will pray to both again, and both
will feel that hardest of all pangs for a wife to bear, the pang that
tells of a lost husband; lost in one case almost as sure as the other;
the loss more hard to bear, when lost while living, than when lost by
death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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