United States or Serbia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
With your old familiar household gods to greet your gaze whenever you glance up, and all your little knick-knacks spread around you with the photos of all the girls that you have loved and lost ranged upon the mantel-piece, and half a dozen disreputable-looking pipes scattered about in painfully prominent positions with one carpet slipper peeping from beneath the coal-box and the other perched on the top of the piano with the well-known pictures to hide the dingy walls, and these dear old friends, your books, higgledy-piggledy all over the place with the bits of old blue china that your mother prized, and the screen she worked in those far by-gone days, when the sweet old face was laughing and young, and the white soft hair tumbled in gold-brown curls from under the coal-scuttle bonnet
No fire was laid, only a few scraps of torn paper and the bowl of a broken corn-cob pipe were visible behind the bars, and in the corner and rather thrust away was an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge.
"She can't do it!" cried Ethel confidently; but Pixie had not made her boast without counting the cost. What if there was no article of furniture within reach, there was a shelf overhead to which one could cling and work slowly along hand over hand until the coal-box offered a friendly footing!
But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed. "A merry Christmas, uncle!
Poor fellow! if he has managed to live through the horrors of that slaver's hold, now that he has taken a turn for the better he may recover. He must have been a splendidly healthy fellow, and " "Well, he arn't now, sir, anyhow," said Morgan. "What'll I do with young coal-box, sir? Better chain him up in the shed, hadn't I, or he'll be off?"
'Young Soapy, o' the Centre Section, 'im that was struck off the strength at Wipers later through stoppin' a Coal-Box, tried to come the artful, an' 'ad the front to 'alt the Division padre one day an' ask 'im if 'e'd any spares o' pocket Testaments in store, makin' out 'e'd lost 'is through lendin' it to 'is Number One, who had gone "Missin'." Soapy made out 'e couldn't sleep in 'is bed at night which wasn't sayin' much, seein' we mostly slep' in our seats or saddles them nights becos 'e hadn't read a chapter o' the Testament first.
It was a common habit of Purple Sanderson to call attention at night to the resemblance of the den to some little ward in a hospital. Upon this night, when Sanderson and Grief were buried in slumber, Pennoyer moved restlessly. "Wrink!" he called softly into the darkness in the direction of the divan which was secretly a coal-box. "What?" said Wrinkles in a surly voice.
Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part.
Jenkins, and sniffing again strongly, but without result. "That's right! she won't let 'em serve her with short onions, she won't; she has a tongue of her own. I wonder how much beer there'll be!" He sat on pretty patiently, for him, about half an hour, and then took the liberty of replenishing the fire from a coal-box that stood there.
"Not until I started back did I know that we had been furiously bombarded, that the noise I had heard was shells breaking all about the place. A 'coal-box, as they call them here, had fallen in the garden and dug a great hole!" "And when the young ladies went out, were they watching the bombs burst?" I inquired. "Not at all," he said.
Word Of The Day