Household words, no. 304, January 19, 1856 : $b A weekly journal — John Shaqi
Household words, no. 304, January 19, 1856 : $b A weekly journal
General
Household words, no. 304, January 19, 1856 : $b A weekly journal
English literature -- Periodicals
“There are a small bed with silk curtains, two satin quilts, and no
blanket; a hair mattress; a plain wicker basket stands on a table, with
a silk night-gown and night-cap in it; a candle with an extinguisher;
some billets of wood on each side of the fire. He goes to bed alone,
rises, lights his fire, and tends it himself, and nobody knows when he
rises, which is very early, and he is up several hours before he calls
anybody. He dines in a small room adjoining, in which there is nothing
but very common things. He sometimes, they say, sups with his daughters
and their company, and is very merry, and sings French songs; but at
present he is in low spirits.”
Finally, let us show how Mrs. Calderwood brings her acutely
haggis-loving mind to bear upon the English ignorance of what is good
for dinner.
“As for their victuals, they make such a work about, I cannot enter
into the tastes of them, or rather, I think they have no taste to enter
into. The meat is juicy enough, but has so little taste that if you
shut your eyes, you will not know, by either taste or smell, what you
are eating. The lamb and veal look as if they had been blanched in
water. The smell of dinner will never intimate that it is on the table.
No such effluvia as beef and cabbage was ever found in London! The
fish, I think, have the same fault.”
At the want of a sufficiently high smell to the fish eaten by the
English, we are very well content to stop, and stop accordingly.
THE ROVING ENGLISHMAN.
THE SHOW OFFICER.
We go stumbling along the unpaved streets of Galatz by the dim light
of a lantern carried before us by a servant. The town, although the
chief commercial city of the Danubian Principalities, and numbering its
inhabitants by tens of thousands, is of course unlighted. The outward
civilisation of these countries showy as it appears, has unhappily gone
no further, up to the present time, than jewellery and patent-leather
boots. Light, air, and cleanliness are at least two generations a-head
of it.
Our hotel, the best in the town, is not better than a Spanish inn on
the Moorish frontier. The doors do not shut, the windows do not open.
There is a bed, but it is an enemy rather than a friend to repose. The
bed-clothes are of a dark smoke-colour, stained in many places with
iron-moulds, and burned into little black holes by the ashes of defunct
cigars. The bed, bedstead, and bed-clothes are alive with vermin.
They crawl down the damp mouldy walls, and swarm on the filthy floor,
untouched by the broom of a single housemaid since its planks were laid
down. Battalions move in little dark specks over the pillow-case; they
creep in and out of the rents and folds of the abominable blanket. On a
crazy wooden chair--of which one of the legs is broken--stands a small
red pipkin, with a glass of dingy water in the centre. A smoky rag,
torn and unhemmed, is laid awry beside it. They are designed for the
purposes of ablution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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