"Slum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hegan's uncle. She'll have his money also some day—but Lord, how he does hold on to it meantime! It's quite tragic, if you come to know him—he's frightened at his own shadow. He goes in for slum tenements, and I guess he evicts more people in a month than you could crowd ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... street there runs a stream of water of exquisite clearness. There is very little crowding in the way of house-building. Each house in the city is surrounded by a green lawn, a garden and an orchard, so that poverty and squalor of the slum type is practically unknown. The communistic idea of homes in common, which has received so much attention of late years, was not adopted by the founders of this city, who, however, took excellent precautions ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... time the train first began to slow down. It was morning—somewhere. Jimmy looked furtively out of the slit at the edge of the door to see that the train was passing through a region of cottages dusted black by smoke, through areas of warehouse and factory, through squalor and filth and slum; and vacant lots where the spread of the blight area had been so fast that the outward improvement had not time to build. Eventually the scene changed to solid areas of railroad track, and the trains parked there thickened until he could ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... a dirty slum; not because I am naturally unclean,—I have not a drop of Neapolitan blood in my veins,—but because I generally find a certain sediment of philosophy precipitated in its gutters. A clean street is terribly prosaic. There is no food for thought in carefully ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... this lack of the "picturesque cult" which one finds in these English towns; the beautiful is allowed always to be the useful, and the family washing hangs on a line outside many a Tudor house as easily as in a London slum. In Boutport Street—that old street that runs more than halfway round Barnstaple, "about the port"—stands the Golden Lion Hotel, which was formerly the town house of the Earl of Bath, and was enriched in the seventeenth century by most beautiful moulded plaster ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... laughter. Myra was shocked. A slum girl to speak like this of Vassar students? She noticed then, with a queer pang, that Sally made for the window group, who at once made a place for her. Sally ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... the place!" said Mike. "Look!" and his eyes rested on two gross men—music-hall singers—who sat with their agent, sipping Chartreuse. "Three years ago," he said, "they were crying artichokes in an alley, and the slum ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... to the booking-office amongst the rest of the crowd, and there was far more pushing and struggling than was at all necessary for that purpose. Presently a burly ruffian, with a low East End face of the slum pattern and complexion, rolled out a volley of oaths at me. He asked where the —— I was pushing and what game I was up to, as though I were a professional pickpocket like himself. He had the advantage of me in being ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a family marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a third family, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions may vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the parents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer colonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand to the family ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... modern towns, is being practically rebuilt to the annihilation of its old-world features, which used to give to Naples its peculiar charm and its marked individuality amongst large sea-ports. Long ago has disappeared Santa Brigida, that picturesque high-coloured slum, on whose site stands the garish domed gallery of which the Neapolitans are so proud; gone in these latter days is classic Santa Lucia with its water-gate and its fountain, its vendors of medicated water and frutti di mare, those toothsome shell ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... will help to do this,—if lighting street lamps on a moral slum will end some of the more despicable acts committed by men who hold other men's property in trust,—sound economics will depend in part on this measure, but it depends in part on more ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... is doing they patronize. I have known them be everywhere, from the Drawing-room to a Guild-meeting in a back slum, and all with equal appetite. That is one reason why I fear I shall not see much of your mother; they are never tired, and I shall never get out alone. The house is to be full of people, and we are to be ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was then no sound of any laughter, but we rather edged away toward the gate, looking to see the crazy beast loose, and charging us. To add to her attractions, the board had fallen partly off, and only covered one eye, giving her the look of a crazy old woman in a Sydney slum. Meanwhile, the calf stood looking on, a little perplexed, and seemed to be saying: "Well, now, is this life? It doesn't seem as if it was all it was cracked up to be. And this is my mamma? What ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hand the instrument of civilization, without sentencing any one, and brigandage and robbery will disappear before its light. And if human beings in large industrial centers are herded together in tenements and slum hotels, how can a humane judge aggravate the penalties against sexual crimes? How can the sense of shame develop among people, when young and old of both sexes are crowded together in the same bed, in the same corrupted and corrupting environment, which robs ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... "He's only a slum kid!" grumbled the officer. "'Tain't worth while to take so much trouble. 'Sides, the folks won't want um ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... he was due in the bar-room at eight o'clock in the morning; the bar-room was in a slum in the Bowery; and he had only been able to keep himself in health by getting up at five o'clock and going for long walks in ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... pathetic to see some of the messes Tommy gets together to fill his craving for dessert. The favorite is a slum composed of biscuit, water, condensed milk, raisins, and chocolate. If some of you folks at home would get one look at that concoction, let alone tasting it, you would dash out and spend your last dollar for a package to send to some ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... will mean nothing less than fellowship in the sufferings of our fellows, fellowship to the point of radically affecting our lives. Sympathy will go deeper than a sense of pity for those less fortunate, and a giving to them a warm hand and a good lift up. The poor woman, living in a slum district, being visited by a mission visitor, spoke for the universal human heart when she said earnestly, "We don't want things; we want love." As we get up close to our Lord Jesus there will come the indwelling ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... penalties may greatly be diminished by the amelioration of the organism of society. There is the born criminal, as there is the born inmate of an asylum for the insane. But there is also the manufactured criminal; the product of the slum, the victim of ignorance, the prey of the walking-delegate, the sufferer from over-work and undernourishment, the inhabitant of the filthy and overcrowded tenement, the man robbed of his self-respect, who has no share in the sweetness and light of civilization. A society ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the lower end of Essex Street the appearance of a deep black canon with cliff-dwellers living in tiers all the way up, their watch-fires showing like so many dull red eyes through the night. The hall was pitch-dark, and the whole building redolent of the slum; but in the stuffy little room where the pedler lived there was, in spite of it all, an atmosphere of home that set it sharply apart from the rest. One of these visits I will always remember. I had stumbled in, unthinking, upon ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... house—it was probably in a slum, certainly in a mean street—one stepped direct from the pavement into a small kitchen, where an elderly man sat smoking a long clay pipe. A covered stairway rose mysteriously from one side of this apartment into the two bedrooms above. A door beside the stairway opened into a tiny scullery, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... idealism, sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom—all the splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was clean, noble, and alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... Mr. Dinwiddie, veiling his hope that it was not. But the assent was general. They were all as excited over the prospect of a picnic as if they were slum children about to enjoy their first charitable outing, and it was settled that they were to start at ten o'clock. Mrs. Minor and Miss Gold went into the kitchen to help Mrs. Larsing make sandwiches and salads, and the others ran down ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... is now practically emancipated through the action of sentimental persons. He may go to school or not, as he likes; and, while the decent and orderly poor are harried by School Board regulations, the rough of the slum snaps his fingers without fear at all regulations. If one of the bad boys from the "rookeries" does go to school, he soon learns that he may take his own way. If he is foul-mouthed, thievish, indecent, or insolent, and is promptly punished, he drags his teacher into ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... a Ranger and one of Hickock's ranch hands, all three disguised in shabby and grease-stained cast-offs borrowed at the ranch, and driving a dilapidated aircar from the ranch junkyard, were sent to visit the slum village of Bonneyville. They spent all day there, posing as a trio of range tramps out of favor with ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... a land the filth and poverty of which Is unimaginable to those who have never left England. The sterile waterless rocks make it impossible to live with any decency. The worst English slum is luxury in comparison. Barely enough water to drink. None to wash in. One day I had nothing but dirty melted snow out of a hole. Vermin swarmed and no one worried about them. "If we had only as many gold pieces as lice," said folk cheerfully, "this would be the richest land in Europe." The population, ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... abominable thing! Why, the grass would all be trampled down; and these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,—a fire, for instance, or a brawl,—might easily bring infectious diseases on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters and their like run about, playing their innocent games. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... slum and the gutter Are off "to the country" in troops, To feed on new eggs and fresh butter, To frolic with balls and with hoops; These three, with their eyes on the poster That hints unattainable joys, Must envy the son of the Coster, The waifs of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... wage must choose a tuberculosis incubator for a home. Ireland is a one-room-home country. In the great "rural slum" districts, the one-room cabin prevails. Country slums exist where homes cannot be supported by the land they are built on—they occur, for instance, in the rocky fields of Galway and Donegal and in the stripped bog lands of Sligo. Galway and Donegal cabins are made of ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... there were the same places to her, and him and him were the same person. A girl of that type comes to a bad end: he had seen it often, the type and the end, and never separate. Can one not prophesy from facts? He saw a slut in a slum, a drab hovering by a dark entry, and the vision cheered him mightily for one glowing minute and left him unoccupied for the next, into which she thronged with the flutter of wings and the sound of ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... 'unemployed' Italian,—half-naked children, running hither and thither in the mud, and screaming like tortured wild animals,—this kind of shiftless, thriftless humanity, pictured against the background of ugly modern houses, such as one might find in a London back slum, made up a cheerless prospect, particularly as the blue sky was clouded and it was beginning to rain. One touch of colour brightened the scene for a moment, when a girl with a yellow handkerchief tied round her head passed ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the square crumbled apart, a wrecked rainbow, and melted away in radiant streams, and in the turn of a wrist the three dirtiest and raggedest and cheerfulest little slum-girls in Austria were capering about in the spacious vacancy. It ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... France. Discord demented bursts the bounds of Dis; Mad Murder raves and Horror holds her hell. Hades up-heaves her whelps. In human forms Up-flare the Furies, serpent-haired and grin Horrid with bloody jaws. Scaled reptiles crawl From slum and sewer, slimy, coil on coil— Danton, dark beast, that builded for himself A monument of quicksand limed with blood; Horse-leech Marat, blear-eyed, vile vulture born; Fair Charlotte's dagger robbed ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... lifted his head to say presently. 'Oh, I can't tell you what he has done for me! He nursed me all through in that slum of a Whitechapel—me, of all people! And when I begged his pardon for all my bad conduct you should have seen his face! Theo, if you'll give me your word never to tell it to any one, I cried like a baby; for Price looked for ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... Meyerbeer seemed to have settled the matter. One Dumersau, who translated the words into French, was very enthusiastic about the music and made Joly enthusiastic too; everything looked bright for the moment, and Wagner moved from the slum where he had been living to an abode a little less slum-like, in the Rue du Helder. On the day he moved the Renaissance went bankrupt again. I say again, because Joly became bankrupt punctually every three months—a fact which explains Meyerbeer's readiness ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... panic was indescribable. This old tree plaza, about which the early city was built, is now in the centre of Chinatown, of the Italian district and of the "Barbary Coast," the "Tenderloin" of the Western metropolis. It is the chief slum district of the city. The tremor here ran up the Chinatown hill and shook down part of the crazy buildings on its southern edge. It brought ruin also to some of the Italian tenements. Portsmouth Square became the refuge ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... and smell in the narrow slum were worse than usual. A hot Saturday night in midsummer is a bad time in the slums, and worse in the slum public-houses. It was so on the night I speak of. In and out of the suffocating bar the dirty stream of humanity came and went. Men who ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... of all the poor quarters, the Salvation Army has divided them into twenty slums, in each of which they have established their Headquarters and send out their soldiers to investigate and assist cases of poverty and misery of every kind. Each slum Headquarters is provided with halls for meetings, rooms for the officials, a Kindergarten, and Dormitories which also serve as shelters or hospitals for urgent cases. In one year 26,290 families were visited by the Army and 38,290 received assistance. Employment, temporary ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... stinking doors where women stood to scold And drunken waits at Christmas with their horn Droning the news, in snow, that Christ was born; And windy gas lamps and the wet roads shining And that old carol of the midnight whining, And that old room above the noisy slum Where there was wine and fire and talk with some Under strange pictures of the wakened soul To whom this earth was but ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... greater sinner in this respect than the American—turns out a score of novels which are mediocre, not from their subjects, but from their utter lack of the artistic quality. It matters not whether they treat of middle-class life, of low, slum life, or of drawing-room life and lords and ladies; they are equally flat and dreary. Perhaps the most inane thing ever put forth in the name of literature is the so-called domestic novel, an indigestible, culinary sort of product, that might be named ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... rid of all I can—and come to live as near as I can to Whitechapel, and slum! I'm free now.' Then looking at her cousin's sorrowful, wistful face, 'Work, work, work, that's all that's good for me. Soberly, Lettice, this is my plan,' she added, sitting down again. 'I know how it all is left. This new ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and old, slum-dweller and country schoolmaster, rich young noble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood, upheld by one vision, the unbroken, grassy slope that stretched from behind the German lines to the town of Thiaucourt. In the trenches behind the slaty trunks of the great ash trees, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... The slum ends and sides of our Christian cities and huge heathendom, jostle elbows in the likeness of their moral conditions. The need is everywhere, crying earnestly, wretchedly out to us. There is good mission ground anywhere you ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... vagaries of the Spirit of Beauty! From how many high places will she turn away, yet delight to waste herself upon a slum like this! How fantastic the accident that had brought such a face to flower in such a spot!—and yet hardly more fantastic, he reflected, than that which had sown his own family haphazard where they were. Was it the ironic fate of power to be always a god in exile, turning mean ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... objectionable, as he can be entertaining when he chooses, but I can't imagine why she should take up her abode here. It is not a question of charity.' Here she noticed my entrance, but calmly went on talking to Constance as if I were not there. 'Let her take herself off to some nursing Sisterhood or slum work in the East of London. I hate a half-and-half kind of person. If they are too good to live our life and mingle in our society, let them take up a religious vocation, instead of being a perpetual source of annoyance and aggravation ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... was followed at noon when slum was served. Night mess in England invariably was cheese and tea and jam, which was always good as far as it went. The entire 311th regiment was served from one kitchen. It was good fortune that the Americans had individual mess kits ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... the only one in any way habitable being the "Hotel Metropole," a name which has become suggestive of gold-laced porters and gilded halls. It was, therefore, rather a shock to enter a noisome den, suggestive of a Whitechapel slum, although its prices equalled those of the Carlton in Pall Mall. The house was new but jerry-built, reeked of drains, and swarmed with vermin. Having kept us shivering for half an hour in the cold, a sleepy, shock-headed lad with guttering ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... to the sergeant and fell out of the ranks. He laid his clumsy hand on the woman's arm; she set down on the pavement the parcel she had been carrying. There they stood for a full minute gazing at each other dumbly, oblivious to the passing crowds. She wasn't pleasing to look at—just a slum woman with draggled skirts, a shawl gathered tightly round her and a mildewed kind of bonnet. He was no more attractive—a hulking Samson, perhaps a day-labourer, who whilst he had loved her, had probably beaten her. They had come to the hour of parting, ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... that's the way that Bendy ran his mission in the slum, And preached the Holy Gospel to the fightin' men ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... step but as I direct you. The word must be, 'Sir Piers Rookwood calls.' We'll overhaul the swag here. This crack may make us all for life; and if you'll follow my directions implicitly, we'll do the trick in style. This slum must be our rendezvous when all's over; for hark ye, my lads, I'll not budge an inch till Luke Bradley be set free. He's an old friend, and I always stick by old friends. I'd do the same for one of you if you were in the same scrape, so, damn you, no flinching; besides, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that understanding I'll tell you,' replied the traveller. 'Did you ever hear of the great commercial house of Bilson & Slum? But it doesn't matter though, whether you did or not, because they retired from business long since. It's eighty years ago, since the circumstance happened to a traveller for that house, but he was a particular friend of my uncle's; and my uncle told the story to me. It's a queer name; ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... social and economic legislation which must be essentially local or municipal in their character. The Government should see to it, for instance, that the hygienic and sanitary legislation affecting Washington is of a high character. The evils of slum dwellings, whether in the shape of crowded and congested tenement-house districts or of the back-alley type, should never be permitted to grow up in Washington. The city should be a model in every respect for all the cities of the country. The charitable and correctional ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... days of the colony, we have the more modern amusements, German opera and Italian opera and the theatre and subscription concerts. Then we have balls nearly every night in the season and dinner-parties and luncheons and lectures and musical parties, and we study a good deal and 'slum' a little. Last winter I belonged to a Greek class and a fencing class, and a quartette club, and two private dancing classes, and a girls' working club, and an amateur theatrical society. We gave two private concerts for charities, you know, and acted the Antigone for the benefit of the Influenza ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... Parker, and you can't help showing it. No wonder you took to avoidin' us; no wonder I've had to foller you over the Burnt Wood Crossin' time and again, to get to see ye. I see it all now: ye can't stand the kempany I brought ye to! Ye had to wipe the slum gullion of Eureka Gulch off your hands, Lacy"— He stopped, gasped for breath, and then lifted his voice more savagely, "And now, what's this? Wot's this hogwash? this yer lyin' slander about his gettin' things on the kempany's credit? Eh, ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... basin, bended knee and comforted pilgrim-feet and refreshed spirit,—this is our family crest. We're kin to all the race through Jesus. Black skin and white, yellow and brown; round heads and long, slanting eyes and oval, in slum alley and palatial home, below the equator and above it,—all are ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... meat on a table, and fell dead of exhaustion. Dr. Barnardo was sent for, and beside the dead body of the mother he was surprised, as well he might be, to find five well-fed, chubby children. The poor, slum mother had literally starved herself to death that her children might live! Truly, as Coleridge says, "A mother is the holiest thing alive;" and God never intended that the almshouse or the orphan asylum should be the only refuge held open for a mother ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... in itself a very considerable diffusion of the purely "working" classes also. Their centres of occupation will be distributed, and their freedom to live at some little distance from their work will be increased. Whether this will mean dotting the country with dull, ugly little streets, slum villages like Buckfastleigh in Devon, for example, or whether it may result in entirely different and novel aspects, is a point for which at present we are not ready. But it bears upon the question that ugliness and squalor upon the main road will appeal ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... she took a bus and went down at seven o'clock. She was uneasy and nervous. She had not spoken in the evening before, and in all her sheltered life she had never seen the milling of a night crowd in a slum district. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... noticed and made, at the least, the recipient of kindly offers, she contrives to cause every one within reach of her to feel the sting of her enraged vanity. When I think of some women who are to be met with in various quarters, from the "slum" to the drawing-room, I am driven to wonder—shocking as it may seem—that crimes of violence are not more frequent than they are. It is most melancholy to notice how well the shrew fares compared with some poor creatures of gentler nature. In the lower ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... to go out and fly it on a vacant lot in the rear of our lodgings, accompanied by a large portion of the unoccupied population of Manchester. The kite broke its string one day, and I saw it descend over the roofs of a remote slum region towards the south, and I never recaptured it. But my chief energies were devoted to acquiring the art of fencing with the small-sword from one Corporal Blair, of the Fourth Dragoon Guards—a regiment which had distinguished itself in the Crimean War. The ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... derelicts—illuminated by the heroic deed of Kuvalda, as by an unquenchable star. Kuvalda loses his mainstay when his comrade, the schoolmaster, dies. He is enraged at the brutal treatment meted out to him and to the other inhabitants of the slum by the Officials of the City and the Government. He embroils himself with ill-concealed purpose with his deadly enemy the merchant Petunikov and insults the police. His object is gained. He is beaten, ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... a slum and found ourselves by the sea, upon a long, level beach of dark sand. The pier stood half-a-mile ahead, and we now determined to proceed without further delay to the boats, return to the "Rhine," and safely ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... destruction of the guilds by the State. Their struggles. Mutual Aid in strikes. Co-operation. Free associations for various purposes. Self-sacrifice. Countless societies for combined action under all possible aspects. Mutual Aid in slum-life. Personal aid. ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... sign of grey in his mud colored hair suggests that he is at all events probably under forty, without prejudice to the possibility of his being under twenty. A Londoner would recognize him at once as an extreme but hardy specimen of the abortion produced by nature in a city slum. His utterance, affectedly pumped and hearty, and naturally vulgar and nasal, is ready and fluent: nature, a Board School education, and some kerbstone practice having made him a bit of an orator. His dialect, apart from its base nasal delivery, is not unlike that of smart London society ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... give their full strength and time to the direct going and telling. These are highly favored in privilege. Some of these may go to deserted darkened places in the home land. Some may go to the city slum, which in its dire need is of close kin to the foreign-mission land. These are yet ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... gouged—one of them death-mask things; Don't seem the sort of man, do I, as might be the pal of kings? Slouching along in smelly rags, a bleary-eyed, no-good bum; A knight of the hollow needle, pard, spewed from the sodden slum. Look me all over from head to foot; how much would you think I was worth? A dollar? a dime? a nickel? Why, I'M THE WEALTHIEST ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... decency, and home life become more difficult and, for many, impossible. The residents gradually group themselves in districts corresponding to their economic incomes, and the poorer parts of the population become tenement dwellers in the neighborhood of factories or become segregated in "slum" districts ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... her for the purpose of carrying her cloak and calling her carriage. Among the working classes life, of necessity, remains primitive; the law of the cave is still, with slight modification, the law of the slum. But in upper and middle-class circles the man is now the ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... or shrines with candles burning, and bright pictures of saints adorn the walls. It is a strangely pathetic sight, this festa of the children of the South, this attempt to keep an Italian Christmas amid the cold damp dreariness of a London slum. The colony has its own church, San Pietro, copied from some Renaissance basilica at Rome, a building half tawdry, half magnificent, which transports him who enters it far away to the South. Like every Italian church, it is |117| at once the Palace ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... a type of life naturally intolerable to happier and more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger scale and consuming larger populations than had ever been known before. They meant cities growing larger than provinces, factories growing larger than cities; they meant the empire of the slum. They meant a degree of detailed repetition and dehumanised division of labour, to which no man born would surrender his brief span in the sunshine, if he could hope to beat his ploughshare into a sword. The nations of the earth ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... how it comes in!" said Mickey. "If you could read the papers, you'd know. 'Sterilized,' is what they do to the milk in hot weather to save the slum kids. That's us, Lily. 'Deodorized,' is taking the bad smell out of things. 'Vulcanized,' is something they do to stiffen things. I guess it's what ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of the West, and the homeland, in slum as in polite circles, in commercial quarters as in the university world, the heart that is in touch with Jesus' heart sees and hears and feels and senses things as they are under the surface or sticking boldly out through the surface. And ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... restaurant which was especially attractive. I should never have discovered it for myself, for I am not very adventurous or fond of exploring. It was situated in a slum and approached through an abominable alley. It was found first, I believe, by some A.S.C. officers permanently stationed in the town, who had time on their hands for exhaustive research. I was taken there by ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... the bread-lines. As a result, the provisions General Folsom had taken possession of diminished with perilous rapidity. How were the soldiers to distinguish between a shabby middle-class man, a member of the I.L.W., or a slum dweller? The first and the last had to be fed, but the soldiers did not know all the I.L.W. men in the city, much less the wives and sons and daughters of the I.L.W. men. The employers helping, a few of the known union men were flung out of the bread-lines; but that amounted to nothing. To make ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... rush through the slums, and then preach a sensational sermon about bad places in the slums, of which most people never knew before! To reform is to know something of the conditions which produce the slums—it is not to scatter the slum-people broadcast elsewhere in the town; it is not alone to give them baths, playgrounds, circulating libraries of books and pictures, dancing-parties, and social clubs. To reform the slums is to set up a new ideal of God, and of righteous conduct ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... marked. There was no cheating him of his due. "Slum" was his sobriquet by the courtesy of prairie custom. "Ranks" was purely a paternal heirloom and of no ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... who will be sure to invite her over week ends. If she gets tired she can go to them, you know. And really, I was glad to have something come up to take her away from that miserable little country slum she has been so crazy about. I was dreadfully afraid she would catch something there or else they would rob us and murder us and kidnap ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... ruined our agriculture, our army has become composed of starving slum dwellers who, according to the German notion are better at shouting than at fighting. German generals have pointed out that in the South African war our regular and auxiliary troops often raised the white flag and surrendered, without necessity, sometimes to ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... so famous in another connexion. Later on I heard much more about the exploits of this champion bird-destroyer of the village from (strange to say) a bird-catcher by trade, a man of a rather low type of countenance, and who lived, when at home, in a London slum. On the common where he spread his nets he had found, he told me, about thirty nests containing eggs or fledglings; but this boy had gone over the ground after him, and not many of the nests had escaped his ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... nothing of the oportunities they afford for the display of multifarious shreds and patches of colour. Then the houses themselves are often brightly, not to say loudly, painted; so that in the clear, sparkling atmosphere characteristic of New York, the most squalid slum puts on a many-coloured Southern aspect, which suggests Naples or Marseilles rather than the back streets of any English city. Add to this that the inhabitants are largely of Southern origin, and ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... them simply: "It is a real Revolution this time, comrades, and no mistake about it. Come to such a place this evening; all the neighbourhood will be there; we are going to redistribute the dwelling-houses. If you are tired of your slum-garret, come and choose one of the flats of five rooms that are to be disposed of, and when you have once moved in you shall stay, never fear. The people are up in arms, and he who would venture to evict you will have to ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... about his life, and she told about hers—a pitiful and moving story. She had been brought to America as an infant; her father had been killed in an accident, and her mother had supported several children by scrub-work. Lizzie had grown up in a slum on the far east side of New York, and she could not remember a time when she had not been sexually preyed upon; lewd little boys had taught her tricks, and men would buy her with candy or food. And yet there had been something ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... intoxication which was overpowering him. For the chorus girls' dressing room was there, and you saw a crowd of twenty women and a wild display of soaps and flasks of lavender water. The place resembled the common room in a slum lodging house. As he passed by he heard fierce sounds of washing behind a closed door and a perfect storm raging in a washhand basin. And as he was mounting up to the topmost story of all, curiosity led him to risk one more little peep through an open ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Half-starved, I guess. Then she prayed some. Don't get stuck up, tenner. We one-spots hear ten prayers, where you hear one. She said something about 'who giveth to the poor.' Oh, let's cut out the slum talk. I'm certainly tired of the company that keeps me. I wish I was big enough to move in society ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... a certain distance. With her placid permission he went as far as a house in the neighbourhood at which she had business: she let him know it was not where she lived. She lived, as she said, in a mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in connexion with whom she spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties and regular occupations. She wasn't, the mourning niece, in her first youth, and her vanished freshness had left something behind that, for Stransom, ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... the poor. Behind our flourishing warehouses and shops we see the hovels of the artisan. We watch along our highroads the long procession of labourers deserting their ancestral villages for the cities; we trace them to the slum and the sweater's den; we follow them to the poorhouse and the prison; we see them disappear engulfed in the abyss, while others press at their heels to take their place and share their destiny. And in face of all this we do not think it to be our ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... dukes and countesses lived the most resplendent lives, and spoke such beautiful language, and had such a way with them! He felt a curious pride in being able to enter into all their haughty emotions. Then, one day, he began a story about a poor little outcast boy in a slum. At first he did not care for it. His soaring spirit disdained boys in slums. It had its being on higher planes. But he read on, and, reading on, grew interested, until interest was intensified into absorption For the outcast boy in the slums, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Again the setting is Wild West, on the Mexican border, the theme of the tale being the outrages inflicted upon American citizens by VILLA, and what seemed then the bewildering delay of Washington over the vindication of the flag. The "Alley" of its unfortunate name is the slum in Kansas City where Dave, stranded on his way westward, met the girl to whom the laws of fiction were inevitably to join him. I fancy that one of Mr. CULLEY'S difficulties may have lain in the fact that, when the tale, following Dave, had finally shaken itself from the dust of ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... friends with some of the villagers and arrange to turn over their rations so that they would be cooked by the housewife and eaten with the luxurious accompaniment of chair and table. The diplomat would invite a few friends to enjoy with him the welcome change from the "slum" ladled out of the caldrons of the battery rolling kitchen. I had always supposed that I had in my battery a large number of men who could speak German—a glance over the pay-roll would certainly leave that impression—but when I came to test it out, ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... knee; His head upon his hand; And tho' he's slept ten hours or more, His back is weak, his feet are sore, And he can hardly stand. And, as he goes to get his chow, He says, "By Gosh!—I don't see how A soldier lives so long. The spuds is rotten and the slum Is always worse than on the bum. The coffee is too strong. That cow was killed ten years before They organized this bloomin' war; These flapjacks taste like wood." And so he growls through all the day, And fills his ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... gone, that makes the politician's job so profitable in our large cities, and that of the patriot and the housekeeper so wearisome. We all know the process. The immigrant has no patent on it. It afflicts the native, too, when he goes to a town where he is not known. In the slum it reaches its climax in the second generation, and makes of the Irishman's and the Italian's boys the "toughs" who fight the battles of Hell's Kitchen and Frog Hollow. It simply means that we are creatures of environment, that a man everywhere is largely what his neighbors and his children ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... of nature and of man. While much of it was beautiful, it was one of the most unhealthy spots in the world— sickness, disease, and swift death attacking the Europeans who ventured there. The natives were considered to be the most degraded of any in Africa. They were, in reality, the slum-dwellers of negro-land. From time immemorial their race had occupied the equatorial region of the continent, a people without a history, with only a past of confused movement, oppression, and terror. They seem to have been visited by adventurous navigators ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... see Town Children playing, O my brothers, With their bats and leathern spheres? They are herding where the slum-reek fumes and smothers, And that isn't play, one fears. The young rustics bat in verdant meadows, The young swells are "scrummaging" out west; They are forming future GRACES, STODDARTS, HADOWS; They are having larks, which, after all, is best. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... us, Lady Anne," he said, stumbling over his words. "We had made up our minds to give up the big house and look for a slum practice. The children—I have two living—are not very strong, any more than Mildred. We put all we could into the venture of taking the house. It ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... looking as well as I could wish. Margaret loves him, but she does not take the right care of him. I don't know what the world is coming to when mothers do not know how to rear their offspring. There is Margaret, with her slum kindergartens, taking care of everybody else's children but her own. If she only performed her church duties as eagerly! Mr. Rutland is displeased with her. I shall give her a talking to—only, you'd better do it, Anthony. Somehow, I have never ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... had been in New Haven before. In 1892 I addressed the students of Yale University on the subject of city mission work and, as a result of that address, had been invited to make some investigations and outline a plan for city mission work for the students. I spent ten days in the slum region there, making a report and recommendations. On these the students began the work anew. I was asked at that time to attach myself to the university as leader and instructor in city missions, but work in New York seemed ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... 14th.—Glorious sunny day, but very cold. Still in Boulogne, but out of Park Lane Siding slum, and among the ships again. Some French sailors off the T.B.'s are drilling on one side ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... of large cities means the growth of slum-life. Hear me, you who live out in the uncrowded part of the country. Maud Ballington Booth tells of finding five families, living in one attic room in New York City, with no partitions between. Here they "cook, eat, sleep, wash, live ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... and dimes and trolly-cars. Of course this only meant that I had forgotten, ungratefully, the country in which any story by ALICE HEGAN RICE might be expected to be laid. Anyhow, Calvary Alley proves an admirable entertainment, a tale of a girl's expanding fortunes, from the grim slum that gives its name to the book, through many varied experiences of reform schools, a bottling factory and membership of the ballet, up to the haven of matrimony. Through them all, Nance, the heroine, carries a very human and engaging personality, so that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... example, that the simplest kind of life was compatible with the highest intellectual aims; would he, in the long-run, have served the world half as well had he forced himself to live amid the squalor of a New York slum? Are not we so much the wiser and stronger by the lessons taught in the hut beside Walden Pond, that it would be the poorest compensation for their loss to know that Thoreau by dint of effort made himself a fairly efficient city ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... and sad, wide-apart eyes of the Slav: a blond, round-cheeked boy whose shy yet stolid face could only have been bred in Germany, or Alsace; sharp-featured, rat-eyed fellows who might have been collected at Montmartre or in a Marseilles slum; others who were nondescripts of no complexion and no expression; waifs from anywhere; a brown-skinned Spaniard and an Italian or two; a Negro with the sophisticated look of a New York "darkee"; a melancholy, hooded Arab, ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... depot-agent. It quite disconcerted him for a moment; but, upon learning my object, he referred me to a Salvation Army woman, whom I immediately looked up and fortunately found at home. She was pleased to receive one on such an errand, and agreed to accompany me to the dance-hall and slum district that night. ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... neither kith nor kin, nor friends, nor even acquaintances; but, being something of a miser, scraped and screwed to amass money she had no need for, and dwelt in a wretched little apartment in a back slum, whence she daily issued to work ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... knots"! How the little lamp of the first experiment grew, and grew into gorgeous centers of sun-like radiance, shining everywhere, illuminating hitherto darkened, impenetrable places, carrying the torch of civilization round the entire world. Alike in slum and palace, in homes of poverty, and set to shine in the gilded resorts of the noble and wealthy; blessing the student, and the vast army of enforced workers; lighting the paths of men, and the ways of the multitude; ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... printers, from 10 P.M. until 3 A.M., walking home with the milk-carts in the lead-blue morning; sitting in the outer office of one of the greatest city editors for three of these years; studying every "first night," every picturesque slum, every visiting or indigenous notoriety at close range—to catalogue a life like this, add that it was the life of a handsome, well-dressed, high-spirited girl, and pretend that it was an existence unqualified by male adjectives, would be the ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... necessity for climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare say he calls Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is this: that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more indefensible slum-landlords, while the other has come to treating as divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club; if you mention poverty to him he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice something that is conjectured to be "Do ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... went on, "as you've had 'em every month. I dare say the purchase money if it's carefully invested will bring you in as much. But even if it doesn't bring in quite as much, you mustn't forget that Calder Street's going down—it's getting more and more of a slum. And there'll always be a lot of bother with tenants of ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Jim, "I had a letter from my brother Joe the other day, and he says Tom has altogether gone to the bad. He met him drunk coming out of some slum in Holborn, and followed him for a long time in hopes of being able to speak to him, but the fellow couldn't, or wouldn't recognise him, and only swore. He is living at ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... "simple minded" or "foolish"; to be pitied, and the subject of many a jest, but entirely harmless. A large number of the feeble-minded are so nearly normal that they are considered merely shiftless or stupid. Nearly every rural community has one or more families, and not infrequently a small slum neighborhood, who are ne'er-do-wells, more or less delinquent and frequently requiring aid from the town. Thanks to modern psychology, we now know that many of these adults have the intelligence of only a seven or nine-year-old child and that they are ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... happened in an ill-chosen neighborhood: one of those crowded slum quarters, swarming with Mexicans and Italians and other foreigners. Of course, that was the only neighborhood in which it could have happened, because it is only there that children run wild in the streets at night. There was one child under the front wheels, crushed almost in half, ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... larger all the time. She visited the members in their slum homes. She fitted herself into the family. If the baby needed tending, she tended to it. If someone was sick, she helped to nurse the sick person. Always she told the family about Christ and His power to save. The people of the slums came to love this home missionary and many of them were won ...
— White Queen of the Cannibals: The Story of Mary Slessor • A. J. Bueltmann
... industry is one of the chief causes of the decay of modern family life. Certain aspects of our industrialism, such as the labor of women and children in factories, the growth of cities, and the loss of the home through the slum and the tenement, the higher standards of living and comfort, and the resulting higher age of marriage,—all of these have had, to a certain extent at least, a disastrous effect upon the family. Some of these ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... Binch, the coal-merchants, reappeared as the stenographer of the Police Court, and finally edged his way into the power-house of the Apex Water-Works. He boarded with old Mrs. Flynn, down in North Fifth Street, on the edge of the red-light slum, he never went to church or attended lectures, or showed any desire to improve or refine himself; but he managed to get himself invited to all the picnics and lodge sociables, and at a supper of the Phi Upsilon Society, to which he had contrived to affiliate himself, he made the best speech ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the Church in such an unscholarly way that he could not in any probability rise to a higher grade through all his career than that of the humble curate wearing his life out in an obscure village or city slum—that might have a touch of goodness and greatness in it; that might be true religion, and a purgatorial course worthy of being followed by a ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... something grimly amusing in the suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen. Instead of, "Flee from the wrath to come," etc., they might have: "Don't ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... doctor informs me—a nerve-center, known as the solar plexus, is situated. He revolved, too, with considerable agility, round his opponent, and gradually drew the battle nearer and nearer to the side lane outside. He knew enough of slum-chivalry by now to be aware that if a sympathizer, or sycophant, of the young man happened to be present, he himself would quite possibly (if the friend happened to possess sufficient courage) suddenly collapse from a disabling blow on the back of the neck. Also, he was not sure whether ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... for the warmth and action of the forge. Blacksmiths, like other specialists, vary, and the difference may be expressed as that between the man who fits the shoe to the hoof, and the man who fits the hoof to the shoe—in other words, the workman and the sloven. Doubtless many a slum-housed artisan in the big town, driven from his country home by the flood of unfair foreign competition, looks back with longing to the bright old cottage garden of his youth and in his dreams hears the music of the forge, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... and thus compete keenly for rooms in the centres of industry; more important still, the value of central ground for factories, shops, and ware-houses raises to famine price the habitable premises. It is notorious that overcrowded, insanitary "slum" property is the most paying form of house property to its owners. The part played by rent in the problems of poverty can scarcely be over-estimated. Attempts to mitigate the evil by erecting model dwellings have scarcely touched the lower classes of wage-earners. The labourer prefers ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... supernatural authority of democracy. He points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which Mr. Blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. If man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatchford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is against the best interests of the State to allow the slum inhabitant to vote. On the other hand, it is entirely to the best interests ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... tramp does not usually come from the slums. His place of birth is ordinarily a bit above, and sometimes a very great bit above. A confessed failure, he yet refuses to accept the punishment, and swerves aside from the slum to vagabondage. The average beast in the social pit is either too much of a beast, or too much of a slave to the bourgeois ethics and ideals of his masters, to manifest this flicker of rebellion. But the social pit, out of its discouragement and viciousness, breeds criminals, men who prefer ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... in which they were implicated was institutional, not personal. Their punishment was rank injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as provocative of further crime, instead of a means of repression. On the other hand, when it appears that the congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we are not urged by the spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of institutional causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of building materials, the incapacity ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... admirable definition. Georgie is a singularly acute and humorous interpretation of the home life led by the American who is neither too rich to be aping the English nor too poor to avoid the other extreme of Europeanism in slum or hovel. The book is worth reading as holding 'a mirror up to nature,' and it is also worth praising because it discloses between its lines a kindly and unspoiled nature on the ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... and have little time and less inclination to weigh questions from the larger world. To this fact may be attributed the slight interest such people take in municipal government and the dominance of slum and saloon influences. It is not so with the farmer. He reads much and widely, and the solitary plow-furrow and the quiet country road conduce to thought. A certain sturdy intelligence follows, which again and again has proven the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... beyond earlier imagining. The changes, even on the material side, have not been all gain. There is many a case of reckless waste of resources to lament, many an instance of half-developed opportunity and even of slipping backwards. With the millionaire came the slum, and the advantages of great corporations were often balanced by the 'frenzied finance' and the unhealthy political influence of those in control. Yet, on the whole, progress, especially in the last twenty years, has been unquestioned ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... United States and work on these is starting forward. In addition, three hundred millions have been allocated to public works to be carried out by states, municipalities and private organizations, such as those undertaking slum clearance. The balance of the public works money, nearly all of it intended for state or local projects, waits only on the presentation of proper projects by the states and localities themselves. Washington has the money and is waiting for the proper projects to which ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... Gerald's tardy movements had been overcome, off they started to their beloved slum, Emilia looking as if she were setting forth for Elysium, and they were seen no more, even when five o'clock tea was spread, and Anna making it for her Uncle Lance and his wife, who had just returned, full ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... being shipped in a famous colony to Canada. The colony went to pieces in a deplorable failure on facing its first year of difficulties, but she had married a Canadian frontiersman and remained. She wore all the slum marks—bad teeth, loose-feeble-will in the mouth, furtive whining eyes. She was clean personally and paraded her religion in unctuous phrase; but I need only to tell a Canadian that she had lived in her shanty three years and it was still ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... the city slum and the home of wealth and pride Who'll have one home when the storm is come, and fight for it side by side, Who'll hold the cliffs 'gainst the armoured hells that batter a coastal town, Or grimly die in a hail of shells when ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to say that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art, there is still too much sham golfing English on ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw |
