The Fortunes of Oliver HornSmith, Francis Hopkinson
General
The Fortunes of Oliver Horn
Smith, Francis Hopkinson
Baltimore (Md.) -- Fiction; Bildungsromans; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Painters -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
On Mrs. Boggs's right sat Bates--a rising young lawyer with political
tendencies--one of the first men to cut his hair so "Zou-Zou" that it
stood straight up from his forehead; and next to him Morgan, the
editor, who pored over manuscript while his coffee got cold; and then
Nelson, and Webster, and Cummings all graded in Miss Ann's mind as
being eight, or ten, or twelve-dollar-a-week men, depending on the
rooms that they occupied, and farther along, toward Miss Sarah, Cranch
and Cockburn--five-dollar boys these (Fred was another), with the
privilege of lighting their own coke fires, and of trimming the wicks
and filling the bulbs of their own burning-fluid lamps. And away down
in the far corner, crumpled up in his chair, crouched the cheery little
hunchback, Mr. Crumbs, who kept a book-stall on Astor Place, where
Bayard Taylor, Irving, Halleck, Bryant, and many another member of the
Century Club used to spend their late afternoons delving among the old
volumes on his shelves.
All these regular boarders, including Fog-horn Cranch and Fred,
breakfasted at eight o'clock. Waller, the painter, and Tomlins, the
swell, breakfasted at nine. As to that descendant of the Irish kings,
Mr. Cornelius McFudd, he rose at ten, or twelve, or two, just as the
spirit (and its dilutions of the night before) moved or retarded him,
and breakfasted whenever Miss Ann or Miss Sarah, who had presided
continuously at the coffee-urn from eight to ten, could spare one of
her two servants to carry a tray to his room.
Last and by no means least, with her eyes devouring every expression
that flitted across the new arrival's face, there beamed out beside
Miss Ann, a tail, willowy young person, whom Fred, in answer to an
inquiring lifting of Oliver's eyebrows, designated as the belle of the
house. This engaging young woman really lived with her mother, in the
next street, but flitted in and out, dining, or breakfasting, or
spending a week at a time with her aunts, the Misses Teetum, whenever
an opportunity offered--the opportunity being a vacant and non-paying
room, one of which she was at the time enjoying.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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