United States or Antigua and Barbuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


I have told about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and it was called "trench-foot." Many men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to swell, and then to go "dead," and then suddenly to burn as though touched by red-hot pokers.

Even in my sleep, the clumsy and grinning features of this tormenting imp haunted me like a spectre: my visions were nothing but chins and cricket-bats; walking- sticks, sustaining themselves upon human excrescences, and pokers dancing a hornpipe upon the tip of a nose.

"Now, Mr What-the-devil's-your-name, you must drink off a glass of my burnt brandy, or I shall be jealous," cried another; "and when I am jealous I always takes to red-hot pokers." Resistance was in vain, the poker was again taken from between the bars, and the burnt brandy went down.

Delane followed a stream of people entering the Abbey through the north transept. He was carried on by them, till a verger showed him into a seat near the choir, and he mechanically obeyed, and dropped on his knees. When he rose from them, the choir was filing in, and the vergers with their pokers were escorting the officiating Canon to his seat.

Just like what you and I once saw raised in a paltry village near Chelmsford, after a poor hungry fox, who, watching his opportunity, had seized by the neck, and shouldered a sleek-feathered goose: at what time we beheld the whole vicinage of boys and girls, old men, and old women, all the furrows and wrinkles of the latter filled up with malice for the time; the old men armed with prongs, pitch-forks, clubs, and catsticks; the old women with mops, brooms, fire-shovels, tongs, and pokers; and the younger fry with dirt, stones, and brickbats, gathering as they ran like a snowball, in pursuit of the wind-outstripping prowler; all the mongrel curs of the circumjacencies yelp, yelp, yelp, at their heels, completing the horrid chorus.

Beginning with the private houses so occupied, they broke open the doors and windows; and while they destroyed the furniture and left but the bare walls, made a sharp search for tools and engines of destruction, such as hammers, pokers, axes, saws, and such like instruments.

But dismay replaced their joy as they heard the words of the first Crow: "They can't get back to their rooms before their pokers grow cold, and it is only a matter of a few minutes until they chill, anyway, so all that we have to do is to wait here a little while, and then go back and finish up our work and perhaps add a little extra on account of this last piece of rambunctiousness."

"How did you hear of me? Do you mind telling me?" "Just through an agency," said Mrs. Friend, flushing a little. "I wanted to leave the situation I was in, and the agency told me Lord Buntingford was looking for a companion for his ward, and I was to go and see Lady Mary Chance " The girl's merry laugh broke out: "Oh, I know Mary Chance twenty pokers up her backbone! I should have thought "

Up these steps thronged a great crowd of people armed with anything they could snatch up at the moment frying-pans, pokers, fire shovels, and any article of domestic use which at short notice might be turned into a weapon of defence. Luckily for us there was one cool head amongst us.

Knife-handles, umbrella-tops, the heads of walking-sticks selected from the stock, the fingers of the family in general, but especially of Johnny, nutmeg-graters, crusts, the handles of doors, and the cool knobs on the tops of pokers, were among the commonest instruments indiscriminately applied for this baby's relief.