The Christmas Books of Mr. M.A. TitmarshThackeray, William Makepeace
General
The Christmas Books of Mr. M.A. Titmarsh
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Christmas stories, English
What a Babel of tongues it is in this splendid hall with gleaming marble
pillars: a ceaseless rushing whisper as if the band were playing its
music by a waterfall! The British lawyers are all got together, and
my friend Lankin, on his arrival, has been carried off by his brother
serjeants, and becomes once more a lawyer. "Well, brother Lankin," says
old Sir Thomas Minos, with his venerable kind face, "you have got your
rule, I see." And they fall into talk about their law matters, as
they always do, wherever they are--at a club, in a ball-room, at a
dinner-table, at the top of Chimborazo. Some of the young barristers
appear as bucks with uncommon splendor, and dance and hang about the
ladies. But they have not the easy languid deuce-may-care air of the
young bucks of the Hicks and Kicklebury school--they can't put on
their clothes with that happy negligence; their neck-cloths sit quite
differently on them, somehow: they become very hot when they dance, and
yet do not spin round near so quickly as those London youths, who have
acquired experience in corpore vili, and learned to dance easily by the
practice of a thousand casinos.
Above the Babel tongues and the clang of the music, as you listen in the
great saloon, you hear from a neighboring room a certain sharp
ringing clatter, and a hard clear voice cries out, "Zero rouge," or
"Trente-cinq noir. Impair et passe." And then there is a pause of a
couple of minutes, and then the voice says, "Faites le jeu, Messieurs.
Le jeu est fait, rien ne va plus"--and the sharp ringing clatter
recommences. You know what that room is? That is Hades. That is where
the spirited proprietor of the establishment takes his toll, and thither
the people go who pay the money which supports the spirited proprietor
of this fine palace and gardens. Let us enter Hades, and see what is
going on there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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