"Rushlight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves down upon the straw which served them as mattress and feather bed, exactly as it does to the present day in the gipsy's tent in our byways. The labourer's only light by night was the smouldering fire. Why should he burn a rushlight when there was nothing to look at? and reading was an accomplishment which few labouring men were ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... his weapon at the bidding of the Duke was close at hand, and probably it was still there. Each successive hazard audaciously faced emboldened him the more; and so he ventured along, searching amid a multitude of doors in dim rushlight till he came upon one that was different from its neighbours only inasmuch as it had a French motto painted across the panels. The motto read "Revenez bientot," and smiling at the omen, Count Victor once more took his valour in his fingers and turned ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... it did," continued Tom, "in my opinion, it began with a wax taper, and ended in the smoke of a farthing rushlight. You have made it appear to be a ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... sitting round a table in the dark, went off to bed as the darkness began. Everybody did so. Old Numa Pompilius himself, was obliged to trundle off in the dusk. Tarquinius might be a very superb fellow; but we doubt whether he ever saw a farthing rushlight. And, though it may be thought that plots and conspiracies would flourish in such a city of darkness, it is to be considered, that the conspirators themselves had no more candles than honest men: both parties were ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... has kept the tear: All in a wintry night from far he came To soothe the sorrows of a suffering dame, Whose husband robbed him, and to whom he meant A lingering, but reforming punishment: Home then he walked, and found his anger rise When fire and rushlight met his troubled eyes; But these extinguished, and his prayer addressed To Heaven in hope, he ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... have me become an ordinary clergyman of the Church of England?" he cried indignantly, as he switched on the light in his bedroom shortly before midnight—for the rushlight in the cell of the modern man of God is supplied at a strength of so many volts. "Would she have me become the model country parson, preaching to the squire and other yokels on Sunday, and chatting ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Fox rose to his feet, and stretched both his arms out wide. He and Farnsworth were alone in the narrow inn parlour, lighted only by one flickering rushlight. So small was the room that the whitewashed walls pressed close on every side. So low was the ceiling that when Fox arose and drew himself up to his full height the black oak beams were scarce a hand's breadth above ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... no further than the middle of the nave, where there was hardly a soul, and took a chair beside a solitary rushlight which looked amid the vague gloom of the inaccessible architecture like a lighthouse at the foot ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of my friends in the village, who lent me a volume at a time from their small libraries. These I would carry inside my shirt, and would only dare to produce when I could slip away into the fields, and lie hid among the long grass, or at night when the rushlight was still burning, and my father's snoring assured me that there was no danger of his detecting me. In this way I worked up from Don Bellianis of Greece and the 'Seven Champions,' through Tarleton's ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stood all the pomp and power of the Church. And on each side of her were two rows of burning lights, of all sizes, the greatest as large as the highest and biggest tower in the world, and the least no larger than a small rushlight. 'Wife,' said the fisherman, as he looked at all this greatness, 'are you pope?' 'Yes,' said she, 'I am pope.' 'Well, wife,' replied he, 'it is a grand thing to be pope; and now you must be easy, for you can be nothing greater.' 'I ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... pleased wonder at the sight. "Ye daft auld wife!" she said, answering a thought that was not; and she blushed with the innocent consciousness of a child. Hastily she did up the massive and shining coils, hastily donned a wrapper, and with the rushlight in her hand, stole into the hall. Below stairs she heard the clock ticking the deliberate seconds, and Frank jingling with the decanters in the dining-room. Aversion rose in her, bitter and momentary. "Nesty, tippling puggy!" she thought; and the next ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a widow, with a pension of five shillings a week, which enabled her to live, although too small to afford subsistence to her son, was in a small garret up a dark stair in one of the poorest of the back streets of Liverpool. Nicholas set working away by the flame of a farthing rushlight, and at dawn he was up ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... holy moon! Stand on the top of Helice, And if my own true love you see, Ah! if you see the purple shoon, The hazel crook, the lad's brown hair, The goat-skin wrapped about his arm, Tell him that I am waiting where The rushlight glimmers ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... but sound and wholesome, as we discovered on trial, and more acceptable to our palates than beer. To work, therefore, the dame and her maidens went, and in half an hour we saw before us, on a nice clean cloth, and by the flame of a farthing rushlight, half a dozen eggs, sundry lumps of pork, some rye-bread and butter, and a flask of white wine. They did not continue long in the order of their integrity. The eggs disappeared in a twinkling. Several fierce inroads were made into the bread and butter, and even the bacon suffered considerably. ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... the face of death. There was the yearning to know More, to seek it, to follow it over earth's ends, though the quest led to the abyss of a watery grave. What did they want, these fool fellows, following the rushlight of their own desires? That is just it. They didn't know what they sought, but they knew there was something just beyond to be sought, something new to be known; and because Man is Man, they set out on the quest of the unknown, chancing life and death for the sake of a little gain ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... a slight click, but concluded at once that it was nothing but a further fall of the latch, and was glad it was no louder. The same moment she saw, by the dim rushlight, the signs of struggle which the room presented, and discovered that Richard was gone. Her first emotion was an undefined agony: they had murdered him, or carried him off to a dungeon! There were the bedclothes ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... which the English Government answers always briefly, "No; both the Marriages or none!"—Will the reader consent to a few compressed glances into the extinct Dubourgay Correspondence; much compressed, and here and there a rushlight stuck in it, for his behoof. Dubourgay, at Berlin, writes; my Lord Townshend, in St. James's reads, usually rather ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... very unwell, Jonas," she said, and extending her hand, lit a tallow candle at the meagre flame of the rushlight. ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... direction of the wind. Her hair was disheveled. She wore a dark cloak over her parti-coloured night kimono. By the dim light of the andon (a rushlight in a square paper box), Asako could see that the cloak was spotted ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... grew fearfully mysterious—closed their windows in the open day—played cards from morning till night, and sometimes through the night—with no other eye upon them than the very feeble, faint-glimmering one of their farthing rushlight;—they carried directions in their pocket—learnt them off—repeated them until they grew familiar as their oaths, and more familiar than their prayers. To realize between them a standing capital of five pounds, a sum essential to their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Larry did not tell us such horrid stories," said she, as she laid the rushlight on the table; "I'll be dhramin' all ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... question I will borrow from the satire itself, as you choose to term your scurrilous lampoon. Our present affair, then, is to consider whether Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation writer, in rushlight emulation of the wax-candles that illumine our Noctes, shall be raised, as he aspires, to the dignity of Fellow of the Blackwood Society. In the note at page 13 of the said lampoon, you state that "Lord Byron declared that no gentleman could write in Blackwood;" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... in the Moon, consisting of Essays and Critiques." London, 1804. Of no value. After shining feebly like a rushlight for about two months, it went out ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... of the most brilliant is Sirius, or the Dog-star, which it is calculated gives just one-twenty-millionth part of the light of the sun, or about as much as that of a farthing rushlight. It would seem that such a shabby degree of brilliancy was hardly worth having; but when it is remembered that it takes three years to come, it really seems hardly worth while to travel so far to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... in a moment, he stood in the living-room which he had left little more than an hour before. It was untenanted, but not in darkness; a rushlight, set in an earthen vessel on the hearth, flung long shadows on the walls and ceiling, and gave to the room, so homely in its every-day aspect, a sinister look. The door of Gentilis' room was shut; probably he ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... sadly we all walk'd down From his room in the uppermost story; A rushlight was placed on the cold hearth-stone, And we left him alone ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... looked out upon the lawn, so that Seaton's watchtower was not many yards from it; then, as the tool-house was only lighted from above, he bored a hole in the wooden structure, and through this he watched, and slept, and watched. He used to sit studying theology by a farthing rushlight till the lady's bedtime, and then he watched for her shadow. If it appeared for a few moments on the blind, he gave a sigh of content and went to sleep, but awaked every now and then to see that all ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... candle. The rest of the party said that he would not. He perhaps had conceived the plan before. Taking a wooden bowl, he lined it with putty, and into it embedded small pieces of looking-glass, by which means a perfect reflector was formed; he then placed his rushlight in front of it, and won his wager. Among the company was Mr William Hutchinson, dock-master of Liverpool, who seizing the idea, made use of copper lamps, and formed reflectors much in the same way as the ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... miserly old wretch lived there, needing only a little light to count up his hoard, and caring little for any intrusive wind, if it did not blow away his treasure. I fancied I could see him running over the tale of his coin by a feeble rushlight—squat, perhaps, on the dirty tile-floor—then locking his box, and placing it carefully under the pillow of his straw pallet, then tip-toeing to the door to examine again the fastening, then carefully extinguishing ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... point when he thinketh he standeth. Of him who prided himself on his honour I should expect that one day, in the long run it might be, he would do some vile thing. Not, probably, within the small circle of illumination around his wretched rushlight, but in the great region beyond it, of what to him is a moral darkness, or twilight vague, he may be or may become capable of doing a deed that will stink in the nostrils of the universe—and in his own when he knows it as it is. The ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald |
