United States or Nicaragua ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The kind General who came to meet me was still patiently standing on the platform, but one of the two "cars" he had engaged for me and my baggage had taken itself off! As the rain was descending in water-spouts, I need scarcely say it was the "covered car" which had driven away! This meant a thorough wetting for my cousin and me.
The men in both the boats were all this time employed in baling, for the crests of the seas came toppling over, now on the quarter, now running up alongside over the gunwales, wetting the people through and through.
Such lavatories were familiar enough to him, among the railway stations and hotel corridors which he frequented to sell his papers, but he had never seen one more richly appointed than this. He was rather short for the stationary bowl, but he succeeded in wetting the tips of his very dirty fingers and drawing them down over his face.
A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put in his shoe" to protect his foot for doing this piece of heavy work on the Lord's Day, was fined, and paid forty shillings.
Enough that they kept their watch closely until the coming on of the same heavy thunder-storm which burst upon the visitors to the sorceress in Prince Street; and that when the first drops of that shower were falling, conceiving themselves very unlikely to be repaid for a thorough wetting, they temporarily withdrew to the Station-house, or, as the act would now be expressed, "raised the blockade" for a very limited period.
There was not a bench, not a chair in the nave, across which people passed, as they might pass through a railway station, wetting and soiling the precious mosaic pavement with their muddy shoes; and tired women and children sat round the bases of the columns, even as in railway stations one sees people sitting and waiting for their trains during the great crushes of the holiday season.
Lassels, in reciting the benefits of travel, plays upon that growing sensitiveness of the country gentleman about his innocent peculiarities: "The Country Lord that never saw anybody but his Father's Tenants and M. Parson, and never read anything but John Stow, and Speed; thinks the Land's-end to be the World's-end; and that all solid greatness, next unto a great Pasty, consists in a great Fire, and a great estate;" or, "My Country gentleman that never travelled, can scarce go to London without making his Will, at least without wetting his hand-kerchief."
He had stones at command: he had a well, he said, that yielded both stones and water, which was more than everybody could say; and in order to make it a sound bit of work, he fetched a lump of quick-lime from the kiln, where they burned quantities of it to scatter over the clay-soil, and first wetting it with water till it fell into powder, and then mixing it with sand which he riddled from the gravel he dug from the garden, he made it into good strong mortar.
At 4.30, amidst great cheering, we steamed out and began the thousand mile run to Capetown, slowly climbing the long wooded pass, under an angry, lowering sky. At the top a stormy sun was setting in a glowing furnace of rose-red. We hastily rigged some tarpaulins over our limber, and escaped a wetting from a heavy shower.
But just then an opportunity was offered that promised the securing of the prey without the necessity of wetting a stitch of his clothes. The fish had been all the while bounding about upon the spread sail-cloth, near the edge of which it had now arrived.
Word Of The Day