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She came presently to a junction of roads near the Fleet ditch, and saw the huge coal-fire flaming with a sickly glare in the sunshine, tended by a spectral figure, half-clad and hungry-looking, to whom she gave an alms; and at this juncture of ways a great peril awaited her, for there sprang, as it were, out of the very ground, so quickly did they assemble from neighbouring courts and alleys, a throng of mendicants, who clustered round her, with filthy hands outstretched, and shrill voices imploring charity.
A bright coal-fire was glowing in the grate, for it was a chilly evening, and bright jets of gas were burning in chandeliers.
The white light of the astrallamp, and the red glow of the bright coal-fire, made the room brilliant and cheerful; and before the fire, in a deep arm-chair, sat Mr. Pringle, looking just fit to be seated in such a chair, and in such a room.
She leans against the iron trellis-work, and one slim white hand sweeps back the sunny hair that is playing about her temple. Her thoughts are not so very far away. He is standing in the shadow of a curtained niche in a room whose light comes mainly from the flickering coal-fire in the grate, for the October evening is chill.
Thoughts such as these had made the moment of presenting that drawing the moment of a great event in her life and there it was now, placed on one side by other hands than the hands into which it had been given; laid down carelessly at the mere entrance of a servant with a tea-tray; neglected for the childish pleasure of kneeling on the hearth-rug, and toasting a muffin at a clear coal-fire! Mrs.
It was a dismal, rainy day yesterday, and we had a coal-fire in the sitting-room, beside which I sat last evening as twilight came on, and thought, rather sadly, how many times we have changed our home since we were married.
But here we close the window-shutters, and make ourselves cosey by a coal-fire. All three of the children, and, I think, my wife and myself, are going through the hooping-cough. The east-wind of this season and region is most horrible. There have been no really warm days; for though the sunshine is sometimes hot, there is never any diffused heat throughout the air.
The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture.
For he worshipped the sand and pebbles and rocks and dunes and hills of his adored desert, and knew the effect it sometimes made, even at the paltry distance of a mile or two from some teeming city, upon both male and female denizens of the West, who bloom palely in the heat of a coal-fire, and lift their faces thankfully to the red lozenge which, for eight months of an English year, represents the sun shining through fog or cloud.
It would be a great pity, for with your mistaken ideas of comforts, with your love of coal-fire and raw beef-steak, together with your severe notions of what is proper or improper, you would soon spoil the place, and render it as stiff and gloomy as any sectarian village of the United States, with its nine banks, eighteen chapels, its one "a-b-c" school, and its immense stone jail, very considerately made large enough to contain its whole population.
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