Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
After all, Wickham Place was a grave. Meg, I've a startling idea." "What is it?" "Drink some milk to steady you." Margaret obeyed. "No, I won't tell you yet," said Helen, "because you may laugh or be angry. Let's go upstairs first and give the rooms an airing." They opened window after window, till the inside, too, was rustling to the spring. Curtains blew, picture-frames tapped cheerfully.
And it was no servant who stood in front of him, under the flickering beam of the lobby-lamp. It was Mary Morfe herself. The simple explanation was that she had just sped her brother and Eva Harracles, and had remained in the lobby for the purpose of ascertaining by means of her finger whether the servant had, as usual, forgotten to dust the tops of the picture-frames.
They talked of ghosts that went about dressed in white, quite noiselessly, or rattling their chains through the rooms of houses, appeared to people lying in bed, frightened guilty persons; of figures that stepped out of their picture-frames and moved across the floor; of the horror of spending a night in the dark in a church no one dared do that; of what dreadful places churchyards were, how the dead in long grave-clothes rose up from their graves at night and frightened the life out of people, while the Devil himself ran about the churchyard in the shape of a black cat.
After a time this Auvergnat, a match for five ordinary Auvergnats, bought up old saucepans and kettles, old picture-frames, old copper, and chipped china. Gradually, as the shop was emptied and filled, the quality of the stock-in-trade improved, like Nicolet's farces.
The little boot and shoe dealers, clothiers, hatters, and furriers, the small merchants in carpets, crockery, and furniture, the venders of hardware and household utensils, of leathern goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical instruments, and even toys all had the same pathetically unanswerable question to propound.
For there were only a few touch-me-nots in the two vases on the mantel-piece; there were wild-flowers and prairie-grasses over the picture-frames; there were asparagus-stalks in the fireplace; there was well, there was a tout-ensemble of coolness and delightfulness, of freshness and repose.
Brave Otto! thy exertions were rewarded at last! For he lighted at length upon the very apartment where Wolfgang had partaken of supper, and where the old couple who had been in the picture-frames, and turned out to be the lady's father and mother, were now sitting at the table. "Well, Bertha has got a husband at last," said the lady.
She had been working, since she was fifteen, at all sorts of odd jobs: cash-girl in a department store; running errands for a fashionable modiste; cashier in a dairy lunch-room; making picture-frames.
The particular interpretation, is that you move, wipe, and replace every article in the room, from the piano down to the tiniest ornament; that you "take a cloth," and go over every inch of accessible surface, including panelling, mop-boards, window frames and sashes, looking-glass-frames, picture-frames and cords, gas or lamp fixtures; reaching up, tiptoeing, climbing, stooping, kneeling, taking care that not even in the remotest corner shall appear one inch of undusted surface which any slippered individual, leaning back in his arm-chair, can spy out.
Two pages, I distinctly recollect, were devoted to the encouragement of the manufacture of umbrella stands out of old gaspiping. Anything less adapted to the receipt of hats and umbrellas than gas-piping I cannot myself conceive: had there been, I feel sure the author would have thought of it, and would have recommended it. Picture-frames you fashioned out of gingerbeer corks.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking