United States or Latvia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A pot of porter and a noggin of gin on a stained deal table, accompanied by two or three broken, smoke-blackened pipes, some tattered song-books, and old numbers of the "Covent Garden Magazine," betrayed the tastes of the artist, and accounted for the shaking hand and the bloated form. A jovial, disorderly, vagrant dog of a painter was Tom Varney.
The walls were smoke-blackened, pitted with numerous small and clear-cut holes, and decorated with initials carelessly cut by men who had come and gone. Such was Cowan's, the best patronized place in many hot and dusty miles and the Mecca of the cowboys from the surrounding ranches.
Here was adventure with no raconteur's glamour, no bookish gloss. Here was Romance. Romance unshaven, illiterate, with its coat off making coffee in a smoke-blackened tomato-can, but Romance nevertheless. That this romance should touch her life, Louise had not the faintest dream. She was alone ... but, pshaw! Boyar was grazing near, and besides, she was not really afraid of the men.
Then the glowing and mellow brick of Lincoln, its scarlet roof tiles what could be more satisfying for instance than the dash of vivid red in the tiling of the old Palace as you see it on the slope among its gardens from the opposite upland? its smoke-blackened façades, the abundance, all over the hill, of old embowered gardens, full of trees and thickets and greenery, its grassy spaces, its creeper-clad houses; the whole effect is one of extraordinary richness of hue, of age vividly exuberant, splendidly adorned.
It was just eleven weeks since the plague had broken out, when the watchman in the tower and other people who were standing in high places saw a strange procession wind from the plain into the streets of the new town between the smoke-blackened stone walls and the black ash-heaps of the wooden houses. A multitude of people!
As a preliminary experience it was all somewhat daunting, and the country forbidding, raw, even more unfinished than smoke-blackened Lancashire, and very cold; but I had found that every one seemed contented, and many of them proud of that new land, and I could see no reason why I too should not grow fond of it. At least I had not seen a hungry or a ragged person since I landed in Canada.
I'd hate to die!" he muttered, and, turning, followed the shore of the lake and struck into the timber in the direction in which the other had been going. An hour later he slipped silently behind the trunk of a tree at the edge of a tiny clearing in the center of which stood a single, smoke-blackened tepee.
Near by was the smoke-blackened ruin of the farmhouse, fired by the Russians when they retreated from the riverbed. Two men were removing the debris, cleaning the confusion, preparatory to rebuilding. They were clad in blue. Pigtails hung down their backs. I was in China! I rode to the shore, into the village of Kuelian-Ching. There were no lounging men smoking long pipes and chattering.
The apartment or cell allotted to us was, however, so filthy that we decided to push on at once to Pasingán, the next stage, four farsakhs distant. Koom is noted for the size and venom of its scorpions; and the dim recesses of the dark, cobwebby chamber, with its greasy walls and smoke-blackened ceiling, looked just the place for these undesirable bedfellows.
If we pass under the archway into Dean's Yard, we find a backwater indeed, where the roar of traffic scarcely penetrates, where sleek pigeons coo in the elm-trees round a grass plot, as if they were in the close of one of the sleepiest of provincial towns instead of in the midst of one of the greatest cities in the world. On the east side there is a long building of smoke-blackened, old stone.
Word Of The Day