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Updated: July 3, 2025
He groped his way with infinite care to the door, on the wall adjoining which, he presumed, the electric-light switch would be. It was nearly ten years since he had last been inside Windles, and it never occurred to him that in this progressive age even a woman like his aunt Adeline, of whom he could believe almost anything, would still be using candles and oil-lamps as a means of illumination.
By this time the light had increased sufficiently for us to see the white fronts of the houses, and the long empty street, where rows of oil-lamps were sputtering and flickering, and as they went out, filling the clean, morning air with the fumes of the dying wicks.
The whole effect is very graceful and it makes a sight long to be remembered, when the "feast of lights" takes place and the island and the parapets and the granite curbings are illuminated with hundreds of little oil-lamps.
The compact group of dancers was crowded round the musicians' platform, for the csárdás can only be properly danced under the very bow as it were of the gipsy leader. The barn looked gaily lighted up with oil-lamps swinging down from the rafters above, and it had been most splendidly decorated for the occasion with festoons of paper flowers and tri-colour flags.
Across a broad, rose-marbled terrace garlanded with a golden wealth of orange-trees and odorous oleanders.. ... under a trellis-work covered with magnolias whose half-shut, ivory-tinted buds glistened in the moonlight like large suspended pearls, . . then through a low-roofed stone-corridor, close and dim, lit only by a few flickering oil-lamps placed at far intervals, . . then on they went, till at last, ascending three red granite steps on which were carved some curious hieroglyphs, they plunged into what seemed to be a vast jungle enclosed in some dense tropical forest.
After landing from the mail-steamer in the dark, we had had merely impressions of oven-like heat, and of a long, dim-lit drive in endless suburbs of flimsily built, wooden houses, through the spice-scented, hot, black-velvet night, enlivened with almost indecently intimate glimpses into humble interiors, where swarthy dark forms jabbered and gesticulated, clustered round smoky oil-lamps; and as the suburbs gave place to the open country, the vast leaves of unfamiliar growths stood out, momentarily silhouetted against the blackness by the gleam of our carriage lamps.
On my way homewards to the town I beheld the half dozen sky-rockets which composed the display of fire-works, and also the two rows of oil-lamps on the cornices over the church-door, which formed the brilliant illuminations. Neither sight seemed to collect much crowd or create much excitement.
The light in the guard-house, half derived from the waning oil-lamps of the night, and half from the overcast day, was in a correspondingly uncertain condition. Some registers were lying open on a desk, and an officer of a coarse, dark aspect, presided over these. "Citizen Defarge," said he to Darnay's conductor, as he took a slip of paper to write on. "Is this the emigrant Evremonde?"
Round the minarets thousands of lamps are lighted, and between the towers the sacred names hang in flaming lights. Inside the mosque, on chains fifty feet long, hang chandeliers, full of innumerable oil-lamps in small round glass bowls, and on extended lines hang other lamps as close as the beads of a rosary. The floor of the mosque is a sea of light, but the interior of the dome is hid in gloom.
Yet this is what hundreds of poor boys and girls have done at Tuskegee. Hundreds still attend the night-school, but electric lights have taken the place of the large oil-lamps. Tuskegee is now more modern than it was when I was a student there. Barrels and boxes are no longer used in the raw state for furniture, as was largely the case at that time.
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