United States or Mali ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She secured the staircase door, after she had passed through it listened, and satisfied herself that nothing was stirring then went on slowly along the corridor to the window. Leaning on the window-sill, she looked out at the night. The clouds were over the moon at that moment; nothing was to be seen through the darkness but the scattered gas-lights in the suburb.
For who knows that Almira, but for these keys, which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords would not have been floating, dead, in the brown stream which slides through the meadows by her father's door, or living, with that other current which runs beneath the gas-lights over the slimy pavement, choking with wretched weeds that were once in spotless flower? Poor Elsie!
Certainly, the sedulous manner in which the new tragedy had been advertised was not without result. To me, unused as I was to theatre-going, the host of people, the hot air, the glare of the gas-lights were intoxicating. In a flutter of anxiety for Tom's success, of sweet perturbation at the prospect of meeting Claire, at first I could grasp but a confused image of the scene.
Directly in front and on the left, thousands of camp fires burning in the rear of stacks made from line-of-battle, blazed in parallel rows, regular as the gas-lights of the avenues of a great city, and illumining by strange contrasts of light and shade the animated forms that encircled them.
We stopped there that night, and next day were off, whirled along through boundless landscapes of villages, and meadows, and parks: and over arching viaducts, and through wonderful tunnels; till, half delirious with excitement, I found myself dropped down in the evening among gas-lights, under a great roof in Euston Square. London at last, and in the West-End!
She laughed softly, and they looked around together at the dimly burning gas-lights, the creaking scenery being drawn back from the stage, the woman with a brush and mop sweeping, and at that dismal perspective of holland-shrouded auditorium beyond, now quite deserted. "At least," she said, "your impressions cannot be mixed ones. It is hideous here."
He had taken her by the hand he was leading her out into the gusty night, where all lights flared the gas-lights marching up the street over the hill into the unknown, and the lights gleaming at her like eyes in the dark bulk of the carriage waiting before the door.
It was night, the moon was in her zenith, and there seemed nothing between her and the earth but glittering gold. The moon, the stars, and the innumerable gas-lights, gave the city a panoramic appearance.
And in the midst of that pandemonium, infuriated soldiers, the audience and the crowd, the stage, and all its actors and actresses, its paint-pots, spangles, and gas-lights the life blood from those veins, the best and sweetest of the land, drips slowly down, and death's ooze already begins its little bubbles on the lips.
An audience of fluttering fans and wrinkled shirt collars the evening was warm under the gas-lights sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself.
Word Of The Day