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Helen's sitting-room, where she could see any one she liked and at any time she liked, was behind the dining-room on the ground floor, and from its window one saw a small neat garden with a plot of grass, bordering flower-beds, a row of little fruit-trees, black-branched but brightly foliaged, and high walls that looked as though they were built out of sooty plum cake.
Behind that frontier wide-stacked wood-burning locomotives were drawing long trains on tracks of steel; steamers came sighing up and down the muddy rivers; cities smeared the sky with clouds of coal smoke; under those sooty palls men in high hats and women in enormous hoop-skirts passed in afternoon promenade down the sidewalks; newspapers displayed the day's tidings in black head-lines; the telegraph flashed messages from one end of that land to the other; and where the sharp church steeple of the most remote village cut the sky, the people read and thought and talked the same things which were being discussed in Delmonico's at the same hour.
If you could add to it the sooty appearance of a coal-heaver, or a chimney-sweep, it would sit, upon this more precious than velvet garb, like spangles and lace.
There is a section of New York which rays out rather crazily from old Jefferson Market and Night Court in spokes of small streets that seem to run at haphazard angles each to the other that less sooty part of Greenwich not yet invaded by the Middle West in search of bohemia.
I will see it, if it shall kill me to live until then. But how shall I pass this night? What shall I do? What shall I do?" The glasses tinkle. The laughter bursts forth unrestrainedly. The banquet is moving to the inn-keeper's taste. The electric lights swing on long wires. The glass in the windows is full of imperfections and sooty. The phantasmagoria on the wall distracts the suffering man.
"I took them away from him and brought them down, but " He told about the contents of the camera cases being turned to a gritty, sooty powder. Then he added: "Dillon set them to destroy themselves. You understand. He's not a man. He's a creature from some planet other than Earth, passing for a human being. He's an Invader from space."
Oldbuck, he resolved gallantly to put confidence in his powers of impudence, of which, the reader may have observed, his natural share was very liberal. And this Doctor, Your sooty smoky-bearded compeer, he Will close you so much gold in a bolt's head, And, on a turn, convey in the stead another With sublimed mercury, that shall burst i' the heat, And all fly out in fumo. The Alchemist.
The sweep's name was Sooty, and one day when they were playing near the well, Malcolm fell in and would have been drowned had not Sooty dived in and rescued him, and the water had washed Sooty clean and he now stood revealed as Malcolm's long-lost father. So Malcolm would not let his mother put her arm round his neck any more.
When they sat down at the supper-table and were served with the sort of belated steamboat dinner which it recalled as vividly, the kind, sooty faces and snowy aprons of those who served them were so quite those of other days that they decided all repasts since were mere Barmecide feasts, and made up for the long fraud practised upon them with the appetites of the year 1850.
The day of the Emperor's stay was the one wet day Venice had known for months so dank and chill, with so sooty a sky, that my friend the artist, who had just been reading in the London paper that his work had not caught the glamour and the colour of Venice, that the South had not yet revealed its passionate secrets to him, chuckled grimly. What is all this nonsense about an Italian hothouse?