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Hard by is the "Stannaro," or hardware tinker, who is always re-bottoming dilapidated pans, and drives a brisk trade in those clumsy, murderous-looking knives. Further on is the greengrocer, with the long strings of greens, and sausages, and flabby balls of cheese, and straw-covered oil-flasks dangling in festoons before his door.
How supremely dismal the rooms looked in their emptiness, with the litter of packing lying about! old boots and shoes in one corner; a broken parasol in another; battered fragments of toys everywhere; empty colour-tubes; old newspapers and magazines; a regiment of empty oil-flasks and wine-bottles in the den of a kitchen into which Mr. Fairfax peered curiously, out of very weariness.
For now when a medimnus of wheat was selling for a thousand drachmæ in the Upper City, and men were obliged to eat the parthenium that grew about the Acropolis, and shoes and oil-flasks, he was drinking all day long and amusing himself with revels and pyrrhic dances, and making jokes at the enemy: he let the sacred light of the goddess go out for want of oil; when the hierophant sent to ask for the twelfth part of a medimnus of wheat, he sent her as much pepper; and when the members of the Senate and the priests entreated him to have pity on the city and come to terms with Sulla, he dispersed them by ordering the archers to fire on them.
A large stone, put in the middle of a barrel of meal, is a good thing to keep it cool. The covering of oil-flasks, sewed together with strong thread, and lined and bound neatly, makes useful tablemats. A warming-pan full of coals, or a shovel of coals, held over varnished furniture, will take out white spots.
He speaks of the presents made to guests at feasts, the tablets of ivory and parchment, the dice-boxes, style-cases, toothpicks, golden hair-pins, combs, pomatum, parasols, oil-flasks, tooth-powder, balms and perfumes, slippers, dinner-couches, citron-tables, antique vases, gold-chased cups, snow-strainers, jeweled and crystal vases, rings, spoons, scarlet cloaks, table-covers, Cilician socks, pillows, girdles, aprons, mattresses, lyres, bath-bells, statues, masks, books, musical instruments, and other articles of taste, luxury, or necessity.
I have, I confess, but indifferent skill in these sedentary arts. When I want clothes I buy them from the weaver, when I want sandals, such as I am now wearing, I purchase them from the shoemaker. I do not carry a ring, since I regard gold and precious stones of as little value as pebbles or lead. As for flesh-scrapers and oil-flasks and other utensils of the bath I procure them in the market.
It is identified with the modern feverfew by Smith in Rees' Cyclopædia, a plant of the chamomile kind; rather unpleasant for food, as one might conjecture. The oil-flasks were of coarse leather. A map of the Topography of Athens has been published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Leake's Topography of Athens, K.O. Müller, in Ersch und Gruber, Encyclop. art.
It is said that rats will insert their tails into oil-flasks, and allow each other in turn to suck off the liquid thus obtained. Mice, I suspect, are fully as sagacious as rats; perhaps they are more so. In their foraging expeditions what cleverness do they exhibit! When one or two have been caught in a trap, how careful are the rest of the community not to be tempted by the treacherous bait.
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