Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 9, 2025
There are plenty of planks to be obtained at a place three miles above here, and it would not take many hours to construct the false deck. If you send a messenger here giving me two days' notice, it shall be built and the peat stowed on it by the time you arrive."
Before him was a small moor-pool, in summer a mere reedy marsh, but now a bleak tarn, standing among dangerous mosses, sending ghostly echoes across the solitude, as the water washed wearily against the black peat shores, or rustled among the sere skeleton reeds in the shallow bays. Suddenly he stopped with a jar in his brain and a chill at his heart.
She did not know how to begin, so she sat on the other chair near the table and gazed at him intently with her sad eyes. She had thrown the pieces of glass, which she had collected in her apron, into the peat basket near the stove, and now she wrapped her apron round her hands, for she shivered with cold, although the room was so stifling.
There was humor in the old family as well as in their lodger. I found this out slowly. They used to gather round their peat fire in the evening, after the poultry had gone to sleep on the kitchen rafters, and take off their neighbors. None of them ever laughed; but their neighbors did afford them subject for gossip, and the old man was very sarcastic over other people's old-fashioned ways.
These conditions are fairly met in the great swamps of river plains and deltas and of coastal plains, such as the great Dismal Swamp, where thousands of generations of forests with their undergrowths contribute their stems and leaves to form thick beds of peat. A coal seam is a fossil peat bed.
It was but the other year that a lonely shepherd's wife near Tweedshaws, one stormy evening when snow drove wildly across the moor, thought that she heard the cry of a human voice come down the gale. Again and again, as she sat by her cosy fire of glowing peat she imagined that some one called for help.
A line of pearl-coloured mountains showed above the low horizon, and he had walked eight miles before he saw a pine-wood. Some hundred yards further on there was a green field, but under the green sod there was peat, and a man and a boy were cutting it. The heather appeared again, and he had walked ten miles before he was clear of whins and heather.
It is true that a yard of peat and a yard of wood are not the equivalents of each other, but the fuel on an acre of deep peat is worth much more than that on an acre of the best woodland. Besides this, wood is perishable, and the quantity of an acre cannot be increased beyond the amount just stated; peat is indestructible, and the beds are always growing. See post, Chap.
But the house was wind and weather proof, the hearths were kept bright, and the rooms pleasant with live fires of peat; and Archie might sit of an evening and hear the squalls bugle on the moorland, and watch the fire prosper in the earthy fuel, and the smoke winding up the chimney, and drink deep of the pleasures of shelter. Solitary as the place was, Archie did not want neighbours.
"Black Susy" on the moor was sending forth her black clouds of smoke, the knives of the cutting-machine bored themselves deep into the clammy ground, and the press worked slowly and silently like a good-natured domestic animal. A newly-built shed with its white walls looked dazzling in the sunshine, and all round about the long black rows of compressed peat were to be seen.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking