Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
Michael's Egypt had not been a very terrible house of bondage, and the darker moments of his abduction did not dwell on his memory; but years later, when first he tasted beer, he put down the glass with a shudder, as the smell and taste brought back a sense of distress, confusion, and horror in a gas-lit, crowded bar, full of loud-voiced, rough figures, and resounding with strange language and fierce threats to make him swallow the draught which, no doubt, had been drugged.
When he had finished, when the grave was filled and the upper soil smoothed over, I turned and, mentally and physically chilled, went slowly back into the hotel. As I entered the gas-lit corridor I saw a figure there at the door. It was Howard. He was still in the hotel, and though I detested his proximity even, I had no influence on his departure.
Of a night, when the big museum library was not open, he would sit on the bed of his room in Chelsea with his coat and a muffler on, and write out the lecture notes and revise his dissection memoranda, until Thorpe called him out by a whistle the landlady objected to open the door to attic visitors and then the two would go prowling about the shadowy, shiny, gas-lit streets, talking, very much in the fashion of the sample just given, of the God idea, and Righteousness, and Carlyle, and the Reorganisation of Society.
It is like an exhibition of the biograph, in which the scenes depicted go by at such a racing speed that it is difficult for the eye to follow them. There is an instantaneous vision of the old kitchen, seen at some abnormal unaccustomed hour of early morning in the winter-time. Three o'clock on the morning of January 3, 1865. A gas-lit scene of bustle and hurry. Gone.
A vision of streets, populous, and full of movement, but half-invisible in a pea-soup haze, through which the gas that takes the place of daylight most ineffectually glimmers. Gone. Then a room, still gas-lit when it should be broad day; a table spread with napery none too clean; a landlady in a dressing-gown and curl-papers; and breakfast.
Little more than a crevice in the precipice of tall, old buildings, on it fronted a business house whose firm name was known wherever the English language was read: "W. and R. Chambers, Publishers." From top to bottom the place was gas-lit, even on a sunny spring morning, and it hummed and clattered with printing-presses.
She had looked out of place in the artificial atmosphere of the boulevards, among the gas-lit cafés, dazzling shop-windows, flâneurs and gaily dressed women.
Now it is a city in earnest, with upwards of twenty thousand inhabitants gas-lit, with good plank side-walks and macadamized streets, and with vast sewers, and fine houses, of brick or stone. The main street, King Street, is two miles and more in length, and would not do shame to any town, and has a much more English look than most Canadian places have.
In the deep shadows the gas-lit shop fronts gleamed like five fires in a row, and before them, darkly outlined like a ghost against some purgatorial furnaces, passed to and fro the tall bird-like figure and eagle nose of Adam Wayne. He swung his stick restlessly, and seemed fitfully talking to himself. "There are, after all, enigmas," he said "even to the man who has faith.
Even on the wide, straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great, glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession, but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither they went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking