United States or American Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The library where I found them was full of book cases-open bookcases, bookcases with glass doors, tall bookcases, dwarf bookcases, bookcases standing on legs, bookcases standing on the floor of statuettes yellow with smoke, of desks crowded with paper-weights, paper-knives, pens, and inkstands of "artistic" pat terns.
Ruth remembered that she had even intended to buy a crystal paper-weight with a view of the Great Orme at the bottom. The bookstall clerk had several crystal paper-weights with views of the pier, the Hotel Majestic, the Esplanade, the Happy Valley, but none with a view of the Great Orme. He had also paper-knives and watch-cases with a view of the Great Orme.
The gentleman himself was sitting before an enormous bureau, piled up with all sorts of useless papers, arrayed in the strictest order, and numerous ivory paper-knives, which had never been known to cut anything.
Picture-wire, too, was highly prized. There was not a picture left hanging in any of the offices. Metal paper-knives bought huge quantities of provisions from the eager Indian traders, and the story was current in the tower that Arthur had received eight canoe-loads of corn and vegetables in exchange for a broken-down typewriter.
It may have been an optical illusion, but he appeared to Sally to put on at least six pounds in weight on the first day of the new regime. As a serf looking after paper-knives and other properties, he had been for him almost slim. As a manager he blossomed out into soft billowy curves, and when he stood on the sidewalk in front of the theatre, gloating over the new posters which bore the legend,
You sall try for to mend him." Next day saw Bill and Ben surrounded by tools, scraps of wood and whalebone, bits of brass and tin, etcetera, busy as bees, and as happy as any two children who have invented a new game. Ben mended the umbrella admirably. At the same time, Bill fashioned and carved two or three paper-knives of wood with great neatness.
And Jimbo left his chair and went seriously over to the book-shelf above Mother's sofa-bed to arrange the signals. For between the tightly-wedged books he had inserted all the available paper-knives and book-markers he could find to represent railway-signals. They stuck out at different angles. He altered several, putting some up, some down, and some at right angles.
The vulgarity of fame when it becomes the cry of the most prosaic is, however, calculated justly to alarm the literary soul, and in the excess of Scott monuments, and wooden quaighs, and tartan paper-knives, there is a damping and depressing quality which we must all acknowledge.
Word Of The Day