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Straggling grasses have outlined the flagstones of the steps with green; the ironwork is rusty. Moon and sun, winter, summer, and snow have eaten into the wood, warped the boards, peeled off the paint. The dreary silence is broken only by birds and cats, polecats, rats, and mice, free to scamper round, and fight, and eat each other. An invisible hand has written over it all: 'Mystery.
"Two hundred pounds of dynamite would do a lot of damage, Chris. I should think that it would certainly bring the wall down." "I have no doubt that it would do that, Peters, but the ironwork goes some ten yards farther, and no doubts rests on the solid rock. I expect the wall is put there more to finish the thing off than to carry much of the weight.
The kerchief, having been laid on the table and unwrapped, disclosed a fantastic piece of ironwork in the shape of a crown, set with stones of which the preciousness was concealed by a plentiful layer of dust. He lifted this, set it on my head for a moment, and, replacing it on the table, took up the brown-paper parcel. "This," said he, "contains the Great Seal.
Suddenly, as her weight pressed against the ironwork where only that morning a fastening had been mended, she felt a grip on her arm. She drew back, startled. "I beg your pardon!" said Anderson, smiling, but a trifle paler than before. "I'm not troubled with nerves for myself, but " He did not complete the sentence, and Elizabeth, could find nothing to say.
As we neared her, we observed that she must have encountered very heavy weather, as part of her foremast and mainmast had been carried away. Her sides looked dirty and worn, and all her ironwork was rusty, as if she had been a long time at sea. She proved to be the 'Lord Raglan, of about 800 tons, bound from Bankok, in Siam, to Yarmouth.
"I mean to have it open now;" and he rushed at the door, and thrust and drove, each effort moving it a little more and a little more, the ironwork yielding with groan after groan, as if it were remonstrating for being roused from a long, long sleep, till the door struck against the wall with an echoing bang; and once more the boys hesitated. But there was nothing to alarm them.
When I saw in Baedeker that "en face de cette eglise une tour de 1494, qui a un beau campanile en fer," my mind turned at once to that horrible iron spire at Rouen, and I felt disposed to look at the pavement when approaching the church. However, it is not modern, and not hideous; it is quite the reverse, a study in fine ironwork.
The horrid emanations might have flavoured the cargo of sugar. They seemed strong enough to taint the very ironwork. In addition Mr. Burns made it a personal matter. He assured me he knew how to treat a cargo of potatoes at sea had been in the trade as a boy, he said. He meant to make my loss as small as possible.
This he contrived by making a paste of rusty scrapings and wax, which he modelled into an exact representation of the head of a nail, and in this way he replaced each nail he drew by a facsimile of its head in wax. Great care was required to leave just a sufficient number of nails to keep the ironwork and hinges in their places.
Another black coating for ironwork, which is really a lacquer, is obtained by melting ozokerite, which becomes a brown resinous mass, with a melting-point at 140° F. The melted mass is then further heated to 212° F., the boiling-point of water. The objects to be lacquered are scoured clean by rubbing with dry sand, and are dipped in the melted mass.
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