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Updated: June 15, 2025
In the cabin there was only one lamp, and that was swung over the table, looking in all its smoky smelliness as if it had hung there for ages without a scrubbing. The table was covered with dirty dishes scattered upon an oilcloth spread. The room smelled of fish, tobacco, and coal-oil, and we were obliged to go to the door now and then for fresh air.
The nuns had presented a supply of skim-milk and butter. Mr. Spear provided jam, pickles, and coal-oil for the lamps. The Mounted Police contributed two dollars to pay for the "band" the fiddle and the concertina and ammunition enough for the feu de joie.
Glancing about him in a furtive, almost in an apprehensive way, he crossed the front room to the middle room, which was his bed chamber, the kitchen being the room at the rear. In the middle room he lit a coal-oil lamp which stood upon a small centre table.
He went to the door and looked out, and saw a man dash out of a room across the hall, and burst in the door of the next room. There was a woman in there with her clothes on fire. She'd upset a coal-oil stove, or something. The man Pinkie had seen beats the fire out, and everybody in the tenement begins to collect around the door. And then Pinkie goes pop-eyed.
Well, washing's a thing I'm not fond of either, and it's kind of curious that when one man starts in at it everybody wants the coal-oil can." They murmured languid concurrence, for, as he said, clothes must be washed and mended now and then, and the man who has just finished a long day's arduous toil seldom feels any great inclination for the task.
Yet I was determined to suspend all judgment, even after I could see that she was making no particular effort to meet me half-way, though she did acknowledge that Dinkie, in his best bib and tucker, was a "dawling" and even proclaimed that his complexion due, of course, to the floor-shellac and coal-oil reminded her very much of the higher-colored English children.
Priscilla was already in her high chair demanding food. At the back of the room, on the long table once used for tools and tubes, Agnes was busy with a coal-oil stove and Nancy's copper blazer. A heartening aroma of fresh coffee was mingling with other good odours from that region. Contentedly, the Bradleys dined.
After puttin' considerable time on the old chimney, makin' some new stove-pipe and a patent damper of our own from coal-oil cans, and usin' the sides of some of the same in place of glass in the windows, we did get fixed some sort of comfortable. Anyhow, we had a house over our heads that could not blow down in a blizzard, and a solid door which kept out mad dogs at night.
But manlike he did a frightfully human and earthly thing; he knocked his foot against an empty coal-oil can, and stood betrayed in his purpose of flight. She turned her head and looked at him like one just waking from a too-vivid dream. She frowned, and then she smiled with a little ironical twist to her soft curving lips.
"He merely sat up drinking one winter night with a couple of whisky bottles beside him. Then in the morning he was awakened by the cold; the fire had gone out. He stumbled out to get the can of coal-oil from the stable, still dazed with drink, brought it in and poured some on the wood. Some more wood was wanted.
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