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"There were more air-holes in those days," he said, "but our ancestors were a tougher race than we. Coarse brutes, most of them, I imagine," he added, lighting a cigarette. "Drank beer for breakfast, and smoked clay pipes before meals. Fancy if one had their constitutions and our tastes!" "The two would scarcely go together," Jeanne remarked.
The land did not appear to be more than a mile distant from me, and it was evident that I stood upon ice which was fast to it. Indeed, when I was first cast upon this ice, I might have known, had I paused to reflect, that land must be very near, as the name 'fast ice' indicates clearly of itself that simple fact. "With this lighting up of the air, various thoughts came into my mind.
Where Claudius sat was a small stage with footlights and curtain complete, and an orchestra for a miniature piano such as are used in yachts, and six musicians; the performers sat to face the audience respectfully in the good Old German style. The lighting was by means of clusters of gas-jets at intervals in the long ceiling and along the walls.
"The hall was packed to suffocation, and beneath the glare of the electric light specially installed for this occasion by Messrs. Ampre & Son of Pumpton, the building being at ordinary times strikingly deficient in the matter of artificial lighting in spite of the efforts of the more progressive members of the town council the faces of not a few of the fairer sex could be observed."
But hyperbole was common then, and from Celler's second book we learn that even in the extravagant times of Louis XIV the lighting problem was an obstacle. It caused theatrical enterprises to keep chiefly to pieces which could be performed in the open air or at any rate by daylight.
The mercurial young gentlemen who addict themselves to that exciting department of letters are open to censure as being too fitful, too prone to flit, bee-like, from flower to flower, now lighting momentarily upon an indecipherable tombstone, now perching upon a rusty morion, here dipping into crumbling palimpsests, there turning up a tattered reputation from heaps of musty biography, or discovering that the brightest names have had sad blots and blemishes scoured off by the attrition of Time's ceaseless current.
In a short time the shell-fish were cooked, and we enjoyed our repast, though we should have been glad to have had some substitute for bread to eat with the molluscs. Having cleaned out some of the larger shells, we cooked a further supply, which we packed within them, and then tied them up in our handkerchiefs, that we might be saved the necessity of lighting another fire.
It would have helped me a lot then, if I could have opened my mouth and yelled at the top of my voice." Sergeant Daniel Whitley was leaning against a stump, and while he was calmly lighting a pipe he regarded the three boys with a benevolent gaze. "None of you need be ashamed of bein' scared," he said.
Fortunately the entire story of lighting as science came to the aid of trader and householder is revealed in the lights of former days, which as time went on became more varied and numerous, found in collections of well-authenticated specimens.
He soon found them, and lighting the torch, revealed to Peterkin's wondering gaze the marvels of the place. But we were too wet to waste much time in looking about us. Our first care was to take off our clothes and wring them as dry as we could.
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