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1Author:  Simms William Gilmore 1806-1870Add
 Title:  The prima donna  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: I had changed my lodgings, seeking shelter in the suburbs, from the crowd and confusion of Broadway and the Park. The omnibus, at a shilling a ride, enabled me, while enjoying a seclusion akin to that of country life, to seek the city at any moment when pleasure or business called me thither. The second morning after my transition, I suffered myself to look round upon my new neighbourhood. I found myself in very good quarters for a single man. Our house was well arranged and spacious. It stood apart from all others, while, on either hand, the green of a well-stored vegetable garden gratified the eye, and the breezes from two quarters of the compass poured in at my windows. We were just in advance of the onward march of city improvements. Our pavements were incomplete, and the clang and clamour of cart, cab and carriage, were moderate accordingly, when compared with the stunning sounds with which they momently assailed me in Broadway. But, as if to qualify this advantage, there was just opposite, one of those annoyances which are to be found in the suburbs of every large city, in the shape of a cluster of low, crowded and filthy looking rookeries,—a nest of wooden structures, dingy, dark, narrow, and tumbling to decay, which still, however, gave shelter to a crowd of inmates. Every tenement of this nest, was filled from basement to attic;—the people were of the very poorest, and some of them, evidently, of the most dissolute, character. Rags and dirt were the conspicuous badges at every window, and no prospect could be more melancholy than that of the poor, puny, little children, who were despatched from rise of morn to set of sun, to glean, as beggars, from better furnished portions of the city, their daily supplies of pennies and “cold victuals.”
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