A PIGEON, oppressed by excessive thirst, saw a goblet of water painted on a
signboard. Not supposing it to be only a picture, she flew towards it with a loud whir and unwittingly dashed against the
signboard, jarring herself terribly.
This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our
signboard.
It got about that he had made a poor job of the box; and as he, when taxed with this, emphatically confirmed it, he got no other commission; and his
signboard served thenceforth only for the amusement of pedestrian tourists and of shepherd boys with a taste for stone throwing.
This species of weather-vane which looked upon the pavement was the
signboard.
One afternoon, last summer, while walking along Washington Street, my eye was attracted by a
signboard protruding over a narrow archway, nearly opposite the Old South Church.
Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably proveably DONE, thus giving notice like some stark
signboard - under that accession of accent the situation itself had turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to.
When we add that the weather-beaten
signboard bore the half-obliterated semblance of a magpie intently eyeing a crooked streak of brown paint, which the neighbours had been taught from infancy to consider as the 'stump,' we have said all that need be said of the exterior of the edifice.
The
signboard was dark and indecipherable by now, and hung black against the sky and the gray moorland beyond, about as inviting as a gallows.
Oh, these insufferable streets, shops, bakers'
signboards, street lamps, and sleighs!" thought Rostov, when their leave permits had been passed at the town gate and they had entered Moscow.
Signboards, shaken past endurance in their creaking frames, fell crashing on the pavement; old tottering chimneys reeled and staggered in the blast; and many a steeple rocked again that night, as though the earth were troubled.
When I got into the streets upon this Sunday morning, the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay: the
signboards were painted in such gaudy colours; the gilded letters were so very golden; the bricks were so very red, the stone was so very white, the blinds and area railings were so very green, the knobs and plates upon the street doors so marvellously bright and twinkling; and all so slight and unsubstantial in appearance - that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime.
Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being; and by such cheap
signboards as the color of his beard or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character.