United States or Azerbaijan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


But once before the door, with Lefever close at hand, he pounded the cracked panels till the windows shook. Some time elapsed before there was any response. The pounding continued till a flickering light appeared at a window. There was an ill-natured colloquy, a delay, more impatience, and at length the landlord reluctantly opened the door. He held in his hand an oil-lamp.

Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks with a force that shivered it to atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his son a blow that felled him to the floor. It was the first time in all his life that he had ever raised his hand against any one of his children. Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at his elbow and stumbled off to his own chamber with a cloud before his eyes.

The explorer Schweinfurth speaks of writing out in the evenings his memoranda respecting these people by the light of a little oil-lamp contrived by himself, which was supplied with some questionable-looking grease furnished by the natives. The smell of this grease, he says, could not fail to arouse one's worst suspicions against the negroes.

The next flight of steps, turning in the reverse direction, was faintly illuminated, like the hall below, by one oil-lamp, placed in some invisible position above us. Ascending the second flight of stairs and crossing a short corridor, we discovered the lamp, through the open door of a quaintly shaped circular room, burning on the mantel-piece.

The room was sufficiently large, but it was low ceiled and suggested the basement of an old-fashioned house. It was badly lit, too. Only an oil-lamp, on a table set with a cold supper for two, sought to discover the obscure limits of its tunnel-like length. There was no suggestion of poverty about the place. It was modest. That was all.

"You cannot be cold, for the stove is hot; and you can put your head on your bundle, and you will be as comfortable as if you were in your bed. "And it is time for you three to go to bed, too. Off with you: make haste!" So saying, he took the oil-lamp from the table, and went towards the kitchen. The three boys clattered along after him.

In my room I could hear a continuous murmuring, no doubt from the saloon bar below, and occasional rounds of hearty merriment. That would be the place for news, and I went down to get it. An oil-lamp veiled in tobacco smoke was hanging from a beam of a sooty ceiling.

The furnishings of the room consisted of a table, a trunk, a white shelf containing plates and earthenware pots, and a pine wall-bracket that supported an oil-lamp. Dolores was a woman of about fifty; she wore black clothes, a red kerchief knotted around her forehead like a bandage and another of some indistinct colour over her head.

Meantime the youth could not take his eyes off the young woman, so that at length he found himself fascinated, or rather bewitched. She kept her eyes for the most part veiled with the loveliest eyelids fringed with darkest lashes, and he gazed entranced; for the red glow of the little oil-lamp covered all the strangeness of her complexion.

Like most of the quarters occupied by British officers, the house occupied by Major Roger Ticknor and his wife Mabel was "enemy property," and its only virtue consisted in its being rent free. Grim, Jeremy, little Ticknor and his smaller wife, and I sat facing across a small deal table with a stuttering oil-lamp between us.