- end_line
- 5715
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5658
- text
- TEMPLE SECOND
A stranger in London on Saturday night and without a copper! What
hospitalities may such an one expect? What shall I do with myself this
weary night? My landlady won’t receive me in her parlour. I owe her
money. She looks like flint on me. So in this monstrous rabblement must
I crawl about till, say, ten o’clock, and then slink home to my
unlighted bed.
The case was this: The week following my inglorious expulsion from the
transatlantic temple, I had packed up my trunks and damaged character,
and repaired to the paternal, loving town of Philadelphia. There chance
threw into my way an interesting young orphan lady and her aunt-duenna;
the lady rich as Cleopatra, but not as beautiful; the duenna lovely as
Charmian, but not so young. For the lady’s health, prolonged travel had
been prescribed. Maternally connected in old England, the lady chose
London for her primal port. But ere securing their passage, the two were
looking around for some young physician, whose disengagement from
pressing business might induce him to accept, on a moderate salary, the
post of private Esculapius and knightly companion to the otherwise
unprotected pair. The more necessary was this, as not only the voyage to
England was intended, but an extensive European tour to follow.
Enough. I came; I saw; I was made the happy man. We sailed. We landed on
the other side; when, after two weeks of agonised attendance on the
vacillations of the lady, I was very cavalierly dismissed, on the score
that the lady’s maternal relations had persuaded her to try, through the
winter, the salubrious climate of the foggy Isle of Wight, in preference
to the fabulous blue atmosphere of the Ionian Isles. So much for
national prejudice. _Nota Bene._--The lady was in a sad decline.
Having ere sailing been obliged to anticipate nearly a quarter’s pay to
foot my outfit bills, I was dismally cut adrift in Fleet Street without
a solitary shilling. By disposing, at certain pawnbrokers, of some of my
less indispensable apparel, I had managed to stave off the more
slaughterous onsets of my landlady, while diligently looking about for
any business that might providentially appear.
So on I drifted amid those indescribable crowds which every seventh
night pour and roar through each main artery, and block the by-veins of
great London, the Leviathan. Saturday night it was; and the markets and
the shops, and every stall and counter were crushed with the one
unceasing tide. A whole Sunday’s victualling for three millions of human
bodies, was going on. Few of them equally hungry with my own, as through
my spent lassitude, the unscrupulous human whirlpools eddied me aside at
corners, as any straw is eddied in the Norway Maelstrom. What dire
suckings into oblivion must such swirling billows know! Better perish
’mid myriad sharks in mid Atlantic, than die a penniless stranger in
Babylonian London. Forlorn, outcast, without a friend, I staggered on
through three millions of my own human kind. The fiendish gas-lights
shooting their Tartarean rays across the muddy, sticky streets, lit up
the pitiless and pitiable scene.
Well, well, if this were but Sunday now, I might conciliate some kind
female pew-opener, and rest me in some inn-like chapel upon some
stranger’s outside bench. But it is Saturday night. The end of the weary
week, and all but the end of weary me.
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