| | 1 | Author: | Simms
William Gilmore
1806-1870 | Requires cookie* | | | 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.” | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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