Round the Block: An American NovelBouton, John Bell
General
Round the Block: An American Novel
Bouton, John Bell
City and town life -- Fiction; Male friendship -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The boy Bog had now become, professionally, a creature of the night. He
was abroad at the, same hours as the burglars and garroters, and other
owls and weasels of society. Fink & Co. (Bog was the Co.) had secured
the bill posting for three theatres and one negro-minstrel hall. This
they called their heavy business. Carrying the huge damp placards, had
already given to Bog's shoulders a manifest tendency to roundness, which
he was constantly trying to overcome by straightening up. Fink, who was
the veteran bill poster of the town, was as round shouldered as a hod
carrier. But Bog thought of somebody, and stood as nearly erect as
he could.
The firm also obtained rather more than their share of ordinary bill
posting, from doctors, drygoods dealers, and other people who find their
profit in continually addressing the public from the summit of a dead
wall, or the muddy level of the curbstones. This they called their light
business. As it required neither strength nor practised dexterity of
manipulation, the firm intrusted it to assistants.
There were a dozen of these, all stout, hulking young fellows nearly as
old as Bog. They took a fancy to bill posting, and worked industriously
and faithfully at it, because it was nocturnal, mysterious, romantic.
The half dollar which they each received for a night's labor, enabled
them to lounge about the streets all day in glorious indolence.
Sometimes there was a prodigious rush of business, and then the firm
were obliged to hire an extra force of boys.
Once, when a quack undertook to take the public by storm with his "New
and Sure Cure for Dyspepsia," Fink & Co. put a colored poster as large
as a dining table on every wall and high fence below Sixty-first street;
small oblong bills every ten feet along the curbstones of Broadway,
Bowery, Wall street, Fulton street, Cortlandt street, and Third, Fourth,
Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Madison, and Lexington Avenues; besides throwing
cheap circulars, folded, into the front yards of about four thousand
residences in the fashionable quarters of the town--all in a single
night. This immense job took one hundred boys.
Bog had been in this partnership since the first of January. It was now
near the close of March. The firm had been very successful. Bog had
comfortably supported himself and his aunt (whose rheumatism got worse
in steady proportion as his business improved), and had invested more
than two hundred and fifty dollars in a Wall-street savings bank.
With this money at his disposal, Bog might have thrown away the greasy
cap and old coat and trowsers, spotted with paste, in which he pursued
his occupation. But when Bog was at his business, he was not above his
business. And he felt none the less attached to his old clothes because
they were two inches too short in the legs and arms, and pinched him a
little in all directions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account