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Such a scene, dimly vanishing from the eye by the ray of here and there a tallow candle, glimmering through the small panes of scattered windows, would form a sombre contrast to the street as I beheld it, with the gas-lights blazing from corner to corner, flaming within the shops, and throwing a noonday brightness through the huge plates of glass.
He then came out and walked through roundabout ways, avoiding the gas-lights and the broad thoroughfares, to Dean Street. He climbed the fence and crept through the garden to the back door of the house. He had eaten nothing since early morning, and was beginning to be hungry.
They were now altogether beyond the gas-lights, and the evening was dark. Burgo, too, was lying with his face to the ground, expecting that the footsteps which he had heard would pass by him. "Who is that?" said he, turning round suddenly; but still he was not at once able to recognize Mr Palliser, whose voice was hardly known to him.
Two or three young men, hard-working young men to judge from appearance, were sitting with her at the long, magazine-strewn table. Gas-lights flared high above them, soft footfalls came and went in the warm, big room. At the desk the librarian was whispering with two nervous-looking young women. At one of the file-racks, Billy stood slowly turning page after page of a heap of papers.
The youth's eloquence and the glitter of the box reflecting, as it did at every turn, the gas-lights both in its steel and glass, had the desired effect shillings went down, and tickets went off rapidly, until only three remained. "Four, five, and ten, are the only numbers now remaining," observed the youth, running his eye up the list and wetting his pencil in his mouth.
They had another moment of rich silence when they paused in the gallery that leads from the Elevated station to the waiting-rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great night trains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred without dispersing the vast darkness of the place.
We, in our balcony, carried on a civil war against one another's torches, as is the custom of human beings, within even the narrowest precincts; but after a while we grew tired, and so did the crowd, apparently; for the lights vanished, one after another, till the gas-lights which at first were an unimportant part of the illumination shone quietly out, overpowering the scattered twinkles of the moccoli.
And what a freedom the city had! nothing snowbound here, but invitation, shops open, cars gliding, the millions transported back and forth, everything open and inviting. She was glad for her neat back room for gas-lights and running water for the comfort and ease of life.
In its ranks was the coster with his cockney speech and cockney wit, his fear of great silences and his sense of loneliness and desolation away from the flare of gas-lights and the raucous shouts of the crowds in Petticoat Lane so that when I met him in a field of Flanders with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him he confessed to the almighty Hump.
The rest of the evening they spent in wandering through the village, charmed with its bizarre mixture of quaintness and commonplaceness; in hanging about the shop-Windows with their monotonous variety of feather fans, each with a violently red or yellow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre, moccasins, bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouches, bows and arrows, and whatever else the savage art of the neighboring squaws can invent; in sauntering through these gay booths, pricing many things, and in hanging long and undecidedly over cases full of feldspar crosses, quartz bracelets and necklaces, and every manner of vase, inoperative pitcher, and other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geological formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by the heat of the gas-lights and the persistence of the mosquitoes.
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