United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We had come to Kamchatka with minds and mouths heroically made up for an unvarying diet of blubber, tallow candles, and train-oil; but imagine our surprise and delight at being treated instead to such Sybaritic luxuries as purple blueberries, cream, and preserved rose-leaves! Did Lucullus ever feast upon preserved rose-petals in his, vaunted pleasure-gardens of Tusculum? Never!
The appearance of deserted native encampments still further confirmed Mackenzie in his belief that he had at length reached the land of the Esquimaux. Round their fireplaces were found scattered pieces of whalebone, and spots were observed where train-oil had been spilt.
"What has it got in it?" broke in some one; "molasses, kerosene, or train-oil?" "Well, I lay she's loaded, boss. I ain't shuk her up sence I drapt in, but I lay she's loaded." "Yes," said the agricultural editor, "and it's the meanest bug- juice in town regular sorghum skimmings." "Dat's needer yer ner dar," responded Uncle Remus.
I mean that of him, who equally fond of flirting as the former, has yet a lively fear of an action at law. Love-making with him is a necessity of his existence he is an Irishman, perhaps, and it is as indispensable to his temperament as train-oil to a Russian.
In their columnar movements they somewhat resemble the porpoise, long processions being frequently seen, composed of three in a row, perhaps led by a single whale. Among the Samoyeds, at Chabanova, on the Siberian coast, the white-whale fisheries amount to fifteen hundred or two thousand pood of train-oil a year.
This importation consists chiefly of sugars and tobacco, of which the consumption in Great Britain is scarcely to be conceived of, besides the consumption of cotton, indigo, rice, ginger, pimento or Jamaica pepper, cocoa or chocolate, rum and molasses, train-oil, salt-fish, whale-fin, all sorts of furs, abundance of valuable drugs, pitch, tar, turpentine, deals, masts, and timber, and many other things of smaller value; all which, besides the employing a very great number of ships and English seamen, occasion again a very great exportation of our own manufactures of all sorts to those colonies; which being circulated again for consumption there, that circulation is to be accounted a branch of home or inland trade, as those colonies are on all such occasions esteemed as a branch of part of ourselves, and of the British government in the world.
We cut the fish open, and hung them over the drying poles standing in the field over by our own warehouse for the preparation of dried fish, and we let the liver stand in small tubs to rot until it became train-oil.
Every one depended on the whale fishery, and almost every male inhabitant had been, or hoped to be, a sailor. Down by the river the smell was almost intolerable to any but Monkshaven people during certain seasons of the year; but on these unsavoury 'staithes' the old men and children lounged for hours, almost as if they revelled in the odours of train-oil.
It was an imposing portico to a shamble of sheds. The railway terminus is the real gate of the modern city. Yet what absurdly incongruous things these London city gates are a salad jumble of architecture and machinery with a mayonnaise of train-oil and soot! As I waited for my friend long trains came rumbling in under a canopy of smoke that hung about the grim iron rafters of this labyrinth.
The salt-fish ration was probably rather better than the meat, but the cheese was nearly always very bad, and of an abominable odour. The butter was no better than the cheese. It was probably like so much train-oil. The bread or biscuit which was stowed in bags in the bread-room in the hold, soon lost its hardness at sea, becoming soft and wormy, so that the sailors had to eat it in the dark.
Word Of The Day