United States or Puerto Rico ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Oh, how often how wearily often have such scenes been enacted on the face of this fair world! And all to save a little lamp-oil! Yet again a great vessel plunges away to sea bearing a precious freight of some one thousand souls. Perhaps the owners reckon the cargo in the hold as being worth more than the human burden; but of course opinions differ.
A bottle holds more than twice as much as a flask, and it is never double the price. If you wish to have free-stone hearths dark, wash them with soap, and wipe them with a wet cloth; some people rub in lamp-oil, once in a while, and wash the hearth faithfully afterwards. This does very well in a large, dirty family; for the hearth looks very clean, and is not liable to show grease spots.
At the very beginning, with the sardines, which evidently had been pickled in lamp-oil, a terribly hairy man, the darkest of them all, with a beard that grew up into its owner's eyes and then sprung out again in tufts from his nose and ears, presented some elegiac regrets to the memory of Jean-Paul Marat, and declared that at the next revolution it would be necessary to realize the programme of that delightful friend of the people, and make one hundred thousand heads fall.
These fish, which are rather larger than sardines, are put out to dry by thousands along this coast. Men feed on them and so do the camels; they make lamp-oil out of them; they say the fish strengthens the camel's back, and they consider it good for camels to go once a year to the sea.
They call in at the dirty general shop, where margarine, cheese, bread, tinned meat and firewood are closely commingled in the dank air. A loaf, a pennyworth of margarine, a pennyworth of tea, a bundle of firewood, half a pound of sugar, a pint of lamp-oil exhaust their list of purchases, for the major part of their earnings is required for the rent.
A few stray swimmers are picked up, but the rest of the company will be seen nevermore. Fancy those women in that darkened steerage! Think of it, and then say what should be done to an owner who stints his officers in the matter of lamp-oil; or to a captain who does not use what the owner provides!
'How often, said mother, opening the door 'how often am I to tell you that you are NOT to play with paraffin? What have you been doing? 'We have burnt a paraffiny rag, Anthea answered. It was no use telling mother what they had done to the carpet. She did not know it was a magic carpet, and no one wants to be laughed at for trying to mend an ordinary carpet with lamp-oil.
In the vineyards, where the vines commonly trailed upon low elms and other trees, various vegetables grew between the rows, as they still do about Vesuvius; on the hills were olive-groves, which cost almost nothing to keep in order, and which supplied the "butter" and the lamp-oil of the Mediterranean world. We need not waste much compassion upon the life of the Roman working class.
Janki Meah had been blind for the thirty years during which he had served the Jimahari Collieries with pick and crowbar. All through those thirty years he had regularly, every morning before going down, drawn from the overseer his allowance of lamp-oil just as if he had been an eyed miner. What Kundoo's gang resented, as hundreds of gangs had resented before, was Janki Meah's selfishness.
"Oh! we do go on," said Ethel, smiling; "the worst thing I have done was expecting James to dress the salads with lamp-oil." "A Greenland salad! But don't talk of oil I have the taste still in my mouth after the Pyrennean cookery! Oh! Ethel, you would have been wild with delight in those places!" "Snowy mountains! Are they not like a fairy-dream to you now?
Word Of The Day