Explore "On some Late Great Victories" by William Makepeace Thackeray on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On the 18th day of April last I went to see a friend in a neighboring Crescent, and on the steps of the next house beheld a group something like that here depicted. A newsboy had stopped in his walk, and was reading aloud the journal which it was his duty to deliver; a pretty orange-girl, with a heap of blazing fruit, rendered more brilliant by one of those great blue papers in which oranges are now artfully wrapped, leant over the railing and listened; and opposite the nympham discentem there was a capering and acute-eared young satirist of a crossing-sweeper, who had left his neighboring professional avocation and chance of profit, in order to listen to the tale of the little newsboy.
That intelligent reader, with his hand following the line as he read it out to his audience, was saying: -- "And -- now -- Tom -- coming up smiling -- after his fall -- dee -- delivered a rattling clinker upon the Benicia Boy's -- potato-trap -- but was met by a -- punisher on the nose -- which," &c. &c.; or words to that effect. Betty at 52 let me in, while the boy was reading his lecture and, having been some twenty minutes or so in the house and paid my visit, I took leave.