His eye was caught by a building of pale-blue tin, stencilled "Calvinist Chapel," before whose shuttered windows an Italian
organ-grinder .with a petticoated monkey was playing "Dolly Grey-"
Why, an
organ-grinder whom I met in Gorokhovaia Street would inspire more respect than they do, for at least he walks about all day, and suffers hunger--at least he looks for a stray, superfluous groat to earn him subsistence, and is, therefore, a true gentleman, in that he supports himself.
The
organ-grinder got awfully angry and said that he wanted to keep the monkey.
A poor tired Italian
organ-grinder, tramping with an equally tired monkey along the dusty roads, had to be bought off in a similar manner,--though he only cost sixpence.
Raskolnikov tried to persuade her to go home, and even said, hoping to work on her vanity, that it was unseemly for her to be wandering about the streets like an
organ-grinder, as she was intending to become the principal of a boarding-school.
Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn't have murdered the first
organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn's wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:
In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!" The
organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger.
"Hey, you Portugoosy
organ-grinder, take your monkey back to Gloucester.
Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in some way connected with Bloomsbury, and faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road; then a belated
organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square of Lincoln's Inn Fields, she was cold and depressed again, and horribly clear-sighted.
He scoffed at them as adventures, mountebanks, sideshow riffraff, dime museum freaks; he assailed their showy titles with measureless derision; he said they were back-alley barbers disguised as nobilities, peanut peddlers masquerading as gentlemen,
organ-grinders bereft of their brother monkey.
It has not the mellifluousness of Italian, Italian is the language of tenors and
organ-grinders, but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in flood."
I sprung myself upon them as a shipwrecked sailor--a sole survivor--stripped in the sea and landed without a stitch--yet they took no more interest in me than you do in Italian
organ-grinders. They were decent enough.
organ-grinder - a street musician who plays a hand organ or hurdy-gurdy