United States or Christmas Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I was always willing to live more simply than you. You know I was!" "I know you always said so, my dear. But how many bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes would you be willing to have at the street door below?
I was always willing to live more simply than you. You know I was!" "I know you always said so, my dear. But how many bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes would you be willing to have at the street door below?
The Japanese servant, whose station was at the forward-turret ammunition-hoist, reported the service of the whisky to his mates, and from here the news spread as news will in a cellular hull up to turrets and gun-rooms, through speaking-tubes and water-tight bulkheads, down to stoke-hold, engine-rooms, and steering-room; and long before Captain Blake had thought of taking a drink the whole ship's company was commenting, mentally and openly, and more or less profanely, on the story that "the old man was getting drunk in the conning-tower."
"I am waiting," she added with an indescribable accent of annoyance and surprise, as if she had never been kept waiting before, in all the fifty years of her more or less fashionable life. There were speaking-tubes in the porter's lodge, communicating with each floor of the great Conti palace, but the porter did not move. "I cannot go upstairs and leave the door," he said.
The corners in some of the rooms were cut off and shaped up into closets and recesses, so that Euphemia said the corners of every room were in some other room. Near the back of the flat was a dumb-waiter, with bells and speaking-tubes. When the butcher, the baker, or the kerosene-lamp maker, came each morning, he rang the bell, and called up the tube to know what was wanted.
Around the inner walls were the nerve-terminals of the structure the indicators, telegraph-dials, telephones, push-buttons, and speaking-tubes, which communicated with gun-stations, turrets, steering-room, engine-rooms, and all parts of the ship where men were stationed.
To the right, on entering that building, was a blacksmith's shop, with an anvil, forge, and various implements. This forge is occasionally needed to make repairs, spare parts, and accessories of the engines of the lighthouse. To the right, in a corridor, were speaking-tubes. "Those tubes go to the bedside of every man employed here," said Mr. Cutting.
"My dear fellow, this gives you but a faint outline of it, but time and paper would fail me if I were to tell in detail of the mode by which all this can be done by the captain of the Thunderer himself, by means of speaking-tubes and electricity and a `director, so that he can, while standing in the fighting tower, aim, point, and fire, as if with his own hand, guns which he cannot see, and which are forty feet or so distant from him.
He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouser-presses all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's domestic economy. And whenever my wonder paid the expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I really don't see how people manage to live without that."
"Well," she would say, "if we have got to sacrifice Art to steam-heat and speaking-tubes...." The young man was both amazed and exasperated by her spirit and her pertinacity; he could only be kept in trim and in temper by Bingham's frequent assurances that she was a very clever girl and a very well-meaning one, after all.
Word Of The Day