Town crier

“ Under the lee of a calm convent wall
Bounding a quiet street. I knew the street,
One of those village byways strangely trapped
In the city's meshes, where at loudest noon
The silence spreads like moss beneath the foot,
And all the tumult of the town becomes
Idle as Ocean's fury in a shell. ”

“ In every street are to be seen one or more bodies extended on biers, returning to that home from which but short minutes before they had passed in health and life. The consternation—the agony of the town is not to be described—it is as if some dread punishment was felt to have fallen upon its inhabitants—every face is horror-stricken—every eye is dim. ”

“ I will raise up my voice to wail and to weep, and I will shake the whole gaol with my despairing cries, and I will awake the town, the so-called free town, which is only a larger gaol—so that I shall not suffer alone, but that others shall share in my last agony, in my last dread. ”

“ That same night, whilst we slept peacefully in our beds, terror so seized the populace that every young woman who had a village home to which she could withdraw, fled to it. Where horse or donkey was not available they escaped on foot, carrying the bundle which held their clothes, and the gates being shut at dark, numbers climbed down the steep incline of the city wall rather than risk the dangers which they feared might threaten them in the town. ”

“ The most able people of the whole city and suburbs were out of town; if any remained, it were such as were engaged by parish officers to remain; no habit of a gentleman or woman continued; the woeful calamity of that year was grievous, people dying in the open fields and in open streets. ”

“ And yet last night, when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures mourn. ”

“ They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognized its situation and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth and misery. ”

“ If a fire breaks 215out, it is the city of fires. If there is an Irish fight in Moyamensing, it is the city of perpetual riots. By-the-bye, after that summer when we really had several successive riots up-town, and down-town, we saw an English caricature of the City of Brotherly Love, where the spirit of William Penn, in hat and wig, was looking down sadly from the clouds at the rioters, who were all represented as Quakers, in strait, plain clothes, and broad brims, knocking each other about with sticks and stones, firing pistols, and slashing with bowie-knives. ”

“ Where the cows had been pastured, suddenly [Pg 248] there was water, and the royalties turned out, eager to see the famed “storm-flood.” But the wind died down, and the cows went back to their own. Night found the Old Town in a blaze of light. In every window of every house stood lighted candles; the river was alive with boats carrying colored lanterns and joyous singers. Above it all a black cloud of bewildered rooks flew with loud squawks from the old Cloister to the Dom and back again, frightened out of their night’s rest, and thinking, no doubt, that the end of the world had come. ”

“ What flocks and herds are daily hunted into the unproductive town, the town wherefrom nothing, nothing—for all its factories—takes birth; the town that visibly burns up, with never-ceasing reek of the never-ceasing burning, the substance of the world. The flame of life is fed fully in a thousand forms, and the flame of fire, smouldering in the furnaces at the foot of these chimneys, is the sign of the enormous sacrifice. ”

“ On such occasions, which are usually selected in the stillness of the morning or evening, the crier marches through the village, uttering his exhortation in a loud voice, and endeavouring to inculcate correct principles and sentiments. The young men and children of the village are directed how to demean themselves, in order to become useful and enjoy the esteem of good men, and the favour of the good spirit. ”

“ Picture to yourself nine-tenths of the town in ashes—or in charred blackened ruins—with thousands of the wretched inhabitants, who could not, or did not, make good their escape, wandering about homeless and starving, filling the air with their lamentations. ”

“ A terrible picture is drawn of the rapidity and voracity of the flames—people crying for help in every direction, 'insomuch that the people were so amazed that they knew not which way to turne, nor where the most neede was'—and of the number of people who were burned and the desolation of the town. ”

“ Very many sorrowing women and children were scattered through the town, whose hearts were sore with wounds that only time could heal, and the empty sleeve and the vacant chair were sad reminders on all sides. ”

“ Women—why dilate on the horror? Forty people were killed outright, over a hundred were wounded, and of these many subsequently died. In our cellar we listened to the storm, then when it was over we went through the town seeking out our people, anxious to help. We saw horses, mangled and bleeding, lying on the quay-side, a tree riven near the Pont Nôtre Dame, blood flowing in the gutters, telegraph wires lying in grotesque loops and coils on the roadway or hanging in festoons from the façades of houses. ”

“ The stroke of death makes a wider space in the village circle, and is an awful event in the tranquil uniformity of rural life. The passing bell tolls its knell in every ear; it steals with its pervading melancholy over hill and vale, and saddens all the landscape. ”

“ They turned out with their wagons and carried our baggage; gave us hot lunches at noon by the wayside; mayors of comfortable little towns made speeches of welcome and hastened us on our way; deputations of little girls and maidens came out to meet us, and the good citizens turned out by hundreds, locked arms, and marched with us down their main streets. It was circus day when we came to town, and every day was circus day, for there were many towns.
In the evenings our camps were invaded by whole populations. Every company had its campfire, and around each fire something was doing. ”

“ If it was a wedding, he was cordial, his step was light and his tile was set at a rakish angle. The man was an artist. And so in their limited sphere were the funeral bearers, who were among our New Year’s callers, too. They were a remnant from the days of the executioner, farther back even, to the time of the Black Death that killed half the people in [Pg 208] the town. Their guild was organized then, a sort of mutual insurance concern that made a man sure of getting underground at all events ”

“ From their lurking-place near the village, the three friends could hear many a wild whoop, now fierce and startling, now plaintive and mourning,—the one, as Nathan and Ralph said, the halloo for revenge, the other the whoop of lamentation,—at intervals chiming strangely in with unmeaning shrieks and roaring laughter, the squeaking of women and the gibbering of children, with the barking of curs, the utterance of obstreperous enjoyment, in which the whole village, brute and human, seemed equally to share. ”

“ The dead for the most part had been buried out of sight; and if grief and misery sat at the heart of many a household in the town—mourning for relations slain, or property plundered or destroyed,—in the camp without, no such feelings existed among the fierce and fanatical men. ”

“ Now, of course, the larger the town, the more varied and the more abundant is the noise in it. Even the domestic noises are dreadful to a man of acute nervous sensibility.”
In the City we have done much to remove this evil. The asphalte pavement has wrought wonders; the police have been also efficacious in putting a stop to some of our roughest and most discordant cries; and yet there is a volume of noise, ever rising up and filling the air, which must shorten many a life, and which must be a permanent source of misery. ”

“ We have not always lived in houses; and if we love the sight of a fire out-of-doors,—a camp-fire, that is to say, —as we all do, so that the, burning of a brush-heap in a neighbor's yard will draw us to the window, the feeling is but part of an ancestral inheritance. We have come by it honestly, as the phrase is. And so I need not scruple to set down another reminiscence of the same kind,—an early morning street scene, of no importance in itself, in the village of New Smyrna. ”

“ For three days the town was given up to pillage, and every barbarity which an infernal malice could suggest was perpetrated upon its despairing population. Women threw themselves from the house-tops to escape from their pursuers; mothers slew their daughters with their own hands rather than that they should fall into the power of the brutal foe. ”

“ The fire happened on the 9th of June, and as the houses of the town were mostly built of wood, it soon spread beyond the power of any efforts which the population could command to restrain it. The Custom-house, Roman Catholic Church, Protestant Episcopal Cathedral, Court-house, jail, ordnance store, all the newspaper and printing-offices, the banks, the Hall of Legislature, post-office, and police-office, were all burnt clown, together with two whole streets, each more than a mile long, leaving 12,000 persons without a habitation. ”

“ When head-hunters return to a village with human heads, the rejoicing is uproarious. Then the great drum is beaten frantically, and its deep hollow boom resounding far and wide through the hills announces to the neighbourhood the glad tidings of murder successfully perpetrated. Then the barrels, or rather the bamboos, of rice-spirit are tapped, and while the genial stream flows and the women and children dance and sing for glee, the men drink themselves blind and mad drunk. ”

“ There was no cry of a woman now, but only the howling of angry or drunken men, when they are in a rage with some one or with each other. What startled me was that, whereas the woman’s cry came from the street south of me, which I have called Fernando Street, the whole crowd of men, as they howled and swore, were passing along that street rapidly, and then stopped for an instant, as if they were coming up what I called Church Alley. ”

“ The crier shook the placard and the drum beat a ban.
The crier began to read again,—
"The above named, in whatever place they may be taken, will be immediately put to death after their identity has been established."
There was a stir in the crowd.
The crier added,—
"Whoever gives them shelter, or helps them to escape will be taken before a court-martial and put to death. ”

“ Almost in the first hour of its existence Boom Town saw one of its denizens killed by another who later was to hang for the deed. Born from tumultuous blood it was to be in its joys as well as in its struggles violent. Good men came into it and remained and with them came other men, who also remained. ”

“ The ancient people of the town could not but feel that something evil, something tragic was underway, and they would nod and whisper to one another of their fears. Towards nightfall, however, the combmakers became tired and spent, without having reached any definite conclusion, and in that mood they retired and stretched out their limbs in the old bed, with chattering teeth and half-sick with impotent rage. ”

“ The cry was half-smothered, and followed by a gurgling sound and noise as of a scuffle in the alley.
I rushed to the window and looked out. A band of half a dozen men was struggling and pushing away from Montgomery Street into the darker end of the alley. They were nearly under the window.
“Give it to him,” said a voice.
In an instant there came a scream, so freighted with agony that it burst the bonds of gripping fingers and smothering palms that tried to close it in, and rose for the fraction of a second on the foul air of the alley. ”

“ Following the day of the high wind which brought the prairie fire that so badly frightened the people of the town, the change of the wind to the east brought rain, and about two hundred automobiles that had been carrying people over Tipp county into the town. I remember the crowds but have no idea now many people there were, but that it looked more like the crowds on Broadway or State street on a busy day than Main Street in a burg of the prairie. ”

“ The whole town seems to be a seat of mirth, jollity and festivity, and looks very little like a place which has passed lately through war, siege and misfortune. It is only when you come to some ruined place, or stand by some demolished edifice that you are reminded of the hurricane that has swept by. ”

“ Whether she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. ”

“ It could not have been because the music was so [Pg 85] rare, for the band was made up of small storekeepers and artisans who thus turned an honest penny on festive occasions. Incongruously enough, I think, the official town mourner who bade people to funerals was one of them. It was like the burghers’ guard, the colonel of which—we thought him at least a general, because of the huge brass sword he trailed when he marched at the head of his men—was the town tailor, a very small but very martial man. ”