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The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Our old home
The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne Our old home Author:Nathaniel Hawthorne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OUR OLD HOME CONSULAR EXPERIENCES THE Consulate of the United Statesin my day, was located in Washington Buildings (a shabby and smoke-stained edifice... more » of four stories high, thus illustriously named in honor of our national establishment), at the lower corner of Brunswick Street, contiguous to the Goree Arcade, and in the neighborhood of some of the oldest docks. This was by no means a polite or elegant portion of England's great commercial city, nor were the apartments of the American official so splendid as to indicate the assumption of much consular pomp on his part. A narrow and ill-lighted staircase gave access to an equally narrow and ill-lighted passageway on the first floor, at the extremity of which, surmounting a door frame, appeared an exceedingly stiff" pictorial representation of the Goose and Gridiron, according to the English idea of those ever to be honored symbols. The staircase and passageway were often thronged, of a morning, with a set of beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels (I do no wrong to our own countrymen in styling them so, for not one in twenty was a genuine American), purporting to belong to our mercantile marine, and chiefly composed of Liverpool Blackballers and the scum of every maritime nation on earth ; such being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the navigation of the world with England. These specimens of a most unfortunate class of people were shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board, and clothing; invalids asking permits for the hospital ; bruised and bloody wretches complaining of ill treatment by their officers ; drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplex- ingly intermingled with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men. All of them (save here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped landsman ...« less