"Soot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blessed stove was roaring white-hot; there were cosey, cane-bottomed arm-chairs, and a none-too-pleasant-looking barkeeper who glared suspiciously at us as we came in. A man cannot spend continuous days and nights in his clothes, beating trains, fighting soot and cinders, and sleeping anywhere, and maintain a good "front." Our fronts were decidedly against us; but what did we care? I had the price ...
— The Road • Jack London
... a great glare, and then an explosion, which brought down a quantity of soot from the old-fashioned open chimney, covering me all over and making me look like a young sweep, as I was standing right in front of the fireplace, and came in for the full benefit of it. I was not at ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... is one who has walked forth upon the industrial world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and decked with honours, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot and oil."—ISAAC TAYLOR, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... walls five feet high, a pitched roof of some sort of grass with several holes in it. In the center of the room was a fireplace three feet high and four square, with several steaming glazed pots over a fire of encinal fagots. The walls were black with soot of the smoke that partly wandered out of an irregular hole in the farther end of the room. The eight-year-old son of the family was eating corn-stalks with great gusto, tearing off the rind with his teeth and chewing the stalk ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... stood a chair that no one ever dreamed of occupying; and Harris shuffled about as he had for nearly thirty years, serving coarse food on coarse china, and taking a personal interest in the conversation. After dinner they went into Nannie's parlor that smelt of soot, where the little immortal canvas still hung in its gleaming gold frame near the door, and the cut glass of the great chandeliers sparkled faintly through slits in the old brown paper-muslin covers. Sometimes, as they talked, the house would shake, and Nannie's light ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... ordered his dog, a mastiff crossed with a bull-dog, to lie down on his soot-bag, which he had placed inadvertently almost in the middle of a narrow back-street in the town of Southampton. A loaded coal-cart passing by, the driver desired the dog to move out of the way. On refusing to do so, he was scolded, then beaten, first gently, and afterwards ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... cinders, swelling the hideous uproar into which entered sounds of every kind: shrieks, groans, the rattle of musketry, the crash of falling walls. Men could scarce see one another; great livid clouds drifted athwart the sun and obscured his light, bearing with them an intolerable stench of soot and blood, heavy with the abominations of the slaughter. In every quarter the work of death and destruction still went on: the human brute unchained, the imbecile wrath, the mad fury, of ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... hawk-like, over him, ready with fist or foot for any lack of haste, or failure with the fire. Not until, with flint and steel, he lighted a strip of spongy wood and thrust it under the dry hay, and a flame leaped up and caught the soot on a hanging kettle, did she leave him and go on a quest for ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... suburban residence was situated in a well-wooded park, if that can be called well-wooded where there are no woods, but only stunted undergrowths sickening with the baleful fumes that proceed from the city of darkness in the distance, and black with the soot of a thousand chimneys. The member apologized politely enough for bringing us to this almost uninhabitable and Heaven-forsaken region; but I begged him not to mind: it was only a more blasted scene than the ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... translation from the French version of Johnson's Rambler, No. 190. MALONE. Mrs. Piozzi relates how Murphy, used to tell before Johnson of the first time they met. He found our friend all covered with soot, like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and strange smell, as if he had been acting Lungs in the Alchymist, making aether. 'Come, come,' says Dr. Johnson, 'dear Murphy, the story is black enough now; and it was a very happy day for me that brought you ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... it, extremely odd; he was low in stature; and this defect was enhanced by a distortion of the spine, so considerable as almost to amount to a hunch; his features, too, had all that sharpness and sickliness of hue which generally accompany deformity; he wore his hair, which was black as soot, in heavy neglected ringlets about his shoulders, and always without powder—a peculiarity in those days. There was something unpleasant, too, in the circumstance that he never raised his eyes to meet those ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... house was seen to be ruinous throughout, and filled with a violent and abominable reek. And it also teemed with everything that could disgust the eye or the mind: the door-posts were begrimed with the soot of ages, the wall was plastered with filth, the roof was made up of spear-heads, the flooring was covered with snakes and bespattered with all manner of uncleanliness. Such an unwonted sight struck terror into the strangers, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... of the flame is blue. It does not give much light: it makes no smoke or soot; but it does give a great ...
— Child's Health Primer For Primary Classes • Jane Andrews
... your name to the stars! What does it signify where the soul goes to? If crowds of avantcouriers give notice of our descent that the devils may put on their holiday gear, wipe the accumulated soot of a thousand years from their eyelashes, and myriads of horned heads pop up from the smoking mouth of their sulphurous chimneys to welcome our arrival! 'Up, comrades! (leaping up). Up! What in the world is equal to this ecstacy of delight? ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... him with burning breath, now surrounding him with fresh clouds of smoke, now covering him with sparks, which fell on his hair, neck, and clothing. The tunic began to smoulder on him in places; he cared not, but ran forward lest he might be stifled from smoke. He had the taste of soot and burning in his mouth; his throat and lungs were as if on fire. The blood rushed to his head, and at moments all things, even the smoke itself, seemed red to him. Then he thought: "This is living fire! Better ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... as white as mine," said she, with a sudden gleam of pity. It lasted but a moment. "But his heart is black as soot. Say, do I not well to remove a traitor ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Molnuches and Pampas, but the Serranos place the bones on a high frame-work of canes or twigs to bleach in the sun and rain. While the dissector is at work on the skeleton, the Indians walk incessantly round the tent, having their faces blackened with soot, dressed in long skin mantles, singing in a mournful voice, and striking the ground with their long spears, to drive away the evil spirits. Some go to condole with the widow and relations of the dead, if these are wealthy enough ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... the Satyug or beginning of time the sun rose in the north; and in each succeeding Yug or era it has veered round the compass until now in the Kali Yug or Iron Age it rises in the east. In Chhattisgarh, before burying a corpse, they often make a mark on the body with butter, oil or soot; and when a child is subsequently born into the same family they look for any kind of mark on the corresponding place on its body. If any such be found they consider the child as a reincarnation of the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... rubbing it over me. Before she got through, she cut me all to pieces. I still have signs of those whelps on me today. In the fight I managed to bite her on the wrist, causing her to almost bleed to death. I finally got away and ran to a hiding place of safety. [HW: I] They used soot and other things trying ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... slugs. She had placed pieces of orange-peel around cherished young plants to attract the depredators and she held a jar of soot; into the soot the slugs were dropped as she ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and sauntered out through the kitchen into the long lean-to addition, that was used as a summer kitchen now, and the moment he opened the door there poured out a thick volume of black smoke and flying soot. The old-fashioned oil stove had a way of letting its wicks "work up," as Shad said, if left too long to ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... or of Christ, except in words which you never have heard, and which it would have been well if he had never heard. He cried half his time, and laughed the other half. He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week; and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the week; and when he had not enough to eat, which happened every day in the week likewise. And he laughed the other half of the day, when he was tossing ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... struck her eyes was the furnace, that hot and feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which, by the quantities of soot clustered above it, seemed to have been burning for ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... traverses these defiles. There are seven of them, which are called, in the language of the country, Las siete bellotas. Of all these, the most terrible is the midmost, down which rolls an impetuous torrent. At the upper end of it rises a precipitous wall of rock, black as soot, to the height of several hundred yards; its top, as we passed, was enveloped with a veil of bretima. From this gorge branch off, on either side, small dingles or glens, some of them so overgrown with trees and copse-wood, that the eye is unable ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... usual, but, as the weather was overcast, it only peered now and then through the broken gray clouds. There were mutterings of thunder and a few drops of rain fell, big and heavy with black soot. Then the shower stopped and a stillness like that before a great storm settled over the land. The day, instead of growing lighter, grew darker and ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... affairs o' the nation, The twasome they seldom were mute; Bonaparte, the French, and invasion, Did saur in their wizens like soot. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... ulcers, thus being dependent apparently on chronic irritation. Cancer of the lip in pipe smokers is a case in point. Cancerous tumors of the skin often develop on the arms of workers in paraffin, tar, or soot, the chemical irritation of these substances being the cause. On the contrary, the proportion of those thus affected among the exposed is very small and forces the conclusion that if the real cause were in the irritation vastly ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... an inland-cliff precipitate; From tiny caves peeped many a soot-black poll; In each a mother-martin sat elate, And of the ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... imitated with needle by her Who guides it with art and skill. Sometimes, too, though 'tis not so attractive, I should consent to play the cook— No less important task of woman 'tis To watch the kitchen most carefully. I should not be ruffled By dust and ashes on the hearth, by soot on stoves and pots; Nor would I hesitate to swing the axe And chop the firewood, And not to feed and rake the fire up, Despite the ashy dust that fills the nostrils. My particular delight it would ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... first used it in the liquid form. Burton, in his "Anatomy of Melancholy," mentions it as early as 1621. "The Turks have a drink they call coffee, (for they use no wine,)—so named of a berry as black as soot, and as bitter, which they sip up as warm as they can suffer, because they find by experience that that kind of drink, so used, helpeth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... her half his paper and Cherry took it, realizing with cheerful indifference that there was a streak of soot on one cuff, and that her hands were affected by grease and hot water. She read jokes and recipes and answers to correspondents, and small editorial fillers as to the number of nutmegs consumed in China yearly, and the name and circumstances of the oldest ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... dear; Benny in mischief again. This time he has rubbed soot on all the door-handles, and the whole house is black with it. I hate to trouble you, father, but I expect you'll have to speak to him. I do love the child so, I'm not strict enough—I'm ashamed to say it, but they all think so, and I know it's true—and Adam ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... 374 bawling sweep, frequently contracts it to we-ep or e-ep; the former not altogether incompatible with the situation of the shivering little being who crawls along the streets under a load of soot, to the great annoyance of the well dressed passengers; however, it has the effect of warning them of his approach. The dustman, above curtailment, as if he felt his superiority over the flue-faker, lengthens his sound to dust-ho, or dust-wo; besides, he is dignified by carrying a bell in one hand, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... had opened and a lad, about sixteen, grimy and black with soot and iron, stepped into the yellow glare of the oil lamp. Ted Barton seized him by ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that's worth messin' up yer clane clothes for," said Mary Ellen, sternly. "Lord! To see the cinders in yer hair, an' the soot in yer ears—it does bate all—" As she talked, she scrubbed us ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... silent. He listlessly regarded the illuminated blackness overhead, where long flakes of soot floated from the sides and bars of the chimney-throat like tattered banners in ancient aisles; whilst through the square opening in the midst one or two bright stars looked down upon them from the grey March sky. The sight ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... in mind of the country to have wild ducks coming down to the pool, and—there were the two wild ducks! One, as the cry had told me, was a drake, and he had once been white, but old age and Arrowfield soot and the dirty little black yard where he generally lived had changed his tint most terribly, and though he plunged in, and bobbed and jerked the water all over his back, and rubbed the sides of his head and his beak all among his feathers, they ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... an' punctooate thet as you please. I allus do, it kind of puts a noo soot of close onto a word, thisere funattick spellin' doos an' takes 'em out of the prissen dress they wair in the Dixonary. Ef I squeeze the cents out of 'em it's the main thing, an' wut they wuz made for; wut 's left ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... true, though if it were it would be the most welcome and beautiful sight in all the world. Yet it was only a ship! Just one ship and a lot of men! The ship was not even a handsome one, being merely a three-masted steam sealer, greasy and smeared in every part with coal soot from her tall smoke stack. She lay a mile or so away, but well within the pack, through the outer edge of which she had forced a passage. The men, evidently her crew, who were on the ice near the foot of Cabot's ridge, were a disreputable looking ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... fences except just in the centre where the prisoners' huts were located. But there seemed to be guards everywhere. The first thing that struck us was the dirt of everything, the smoke of the coke ovens covered the whole place with a layer of soot. ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... action in question, the food undergoes changes which are similar to this burning of wood. A part of the food is digested and taken up by the blood, while another portion remains undigested, and passes the bowels as solid dung—corresponding to soot. This part of the dung then, we see is merely so much of the food as passes through the system without being materially changed. Its nature is easily understood. It contains organic and inorganic matter in nearly the same condition ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... is, of course, the stove, and what kind it shall be, whether gas, coal, or oil. Those of us who have grown accustomed to the immunity from those inevitable accompaniments of a coal range, ashes, soot, dust, and heat, afforded by the gas range, with its easily regulated broiler and oven, could hardly be persuaded to go back to first principles, as it were, and the coal range. But when this is necessary, either for warmth or because there is no gas connection in the house, ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... Mrs. Herbert. "Now remember, children, when you are going to bake meat, the first thing you have to look after is the condition of the oven. If the soot has not been swept away from the back and round about, your oven will not heat satisfactorily, no matter how much coal you pile on the fire; and if the shelves are dirty, that is, if a little syrup from the last pie which was baked in it, or splashes of fat from ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... to have passed away from him again,—seemed to be something which, as it had arisen with Argemone, was lost with her also,—one speck of the far blue sky which the rolling clouds had covered in again. As he passed under the shadow of the huge soot-blackened cathedral, and looked at its grim spiked railings and closed doors, it seemed to him a symbol of the spiritual world, clouded and barred from him. He stopped and looked up, and tried to think. The rays of the ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... great black woodpecker, or Gertrude's bird, and flew from her kneading- trough right up the chimney; and till this very day you may see her flying about, with her red mutch on her head, and her body all black, because of the soot in the chimney; and so she hacks and taps away at the trees for her food, and whistles when rain is coming, for she is ever athirst, and then she looks for a drop ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... making to one of the front windows. "Keep where you are," said Amelia. "They'll come quiet in a minute or two." And Amelia no doubt was right. Calling for the police when there is a row in the house is like summoning the water-engines when the soot is on fire in the kitchen chimney. In such cases good management will allow the soot to burn itself out, without aid from the water-engines. In the present instance the police were not called in, and I am inclined to ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... built, and rocked in consequence, and the dust raised by the rapid movement of the train swept through cracks and open windows, and sprinkled the passengers with a fine and irritating coating of soot and earth. There was one servant to the entire twenty-two passengers. He spoke eight languages, and never slept; but as his services were in demand by several people in as many different cars at the same moment he satisfied no ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... rise of Telegraph Hill. It was a sordid and grimy wilderness, topped with a gray maze of wires and pierced with thousands of chimney stacks. Many of the roofs were covered with tin long since blackened by rust and soot. Here and there could be seen clothes hung out to dry. Occasionally upon the flanking walls of some of the larger buildings was displayed an enormous painted sign, a violent contrast of intense black and staring white amidst the sooty brown ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... to civilization and Christianity. But the Frenchmen were won over to the Indians, and adopted Indian ways of life. They lived in wigwams, wore Indian dress, decorated their long hair with eagle feathers, and made their faces hideous with vermilion, ocher, and soot. ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... strung so thickly on their hair that at a little distance they appeared to have on red caps. It is curious that the taste for red hair should be so general among the Africans here and further north; in the south black mica, called Sebilo, and even soot are used to deepen the colour of the hair; here many smear the head with red-ochre, others plait the inner bark of a tree stained red into it; and a red powder called Mukuru is employed, which some say is obtained from the ground, and others from ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... correct answer was suggested to me one day in the street by an ordinary cabby, who applied the expression "unwashed" to the negro fare he was driving. Unwashed! Does not this mean that a black face, in our imagination, is one daubed over with ink or soot? If so, then a red nose can only be one which has received a coating of vermilion. And so we see that the notion of disguise has passed on something of its comic quality to instances in which there is actually no ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... to get at it? Annie came in from the kitchen armed with a poker. We took out the damper and poked out all the soot and ashes. We brought to the front—what do you think? Why, a little bird, a chimney swallow, chirping and ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... A soot-grimed man approached the door of the furnace room, and respectfully touched his forehead to his superior, then glanced ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... it was on the cleanest piece of paper that could be found in Buck Lanier's sutler's store. After it came back, it was pretty well used up, and looked as if it had gone through a very dark place, and been beat with a soot-bag. But, anyhow, I know that I did not appreciate my furlough half as much as I thought I would. I felt like returning it to the gentlemen with my compliments, declining their kind favors. I felt that it was unwillingly given, and, as like ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... was maintained, the oils split up in large proportion into permanent gas of high illuminating quality, accompanied by little tarry matter, and with only a slight amount of separated carbon or deposited soot. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... pipe is old And caked with soot; My wife remarks: "How can you put That horrid relic, So unclean, Inside your mouth? The nicotine Is strong enough To stupefy A ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... a long, lean young man, black from head to foot with soot and oil. His left arm was badly burned; and seeing a doctor disengaged at last, he came forward to have ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... the mad. [She sits down on the plinth of the column, sorting her flowers, on the lady's right. She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of black straw that has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly: its mousy color can hardly be natural. She wears a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and is shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... with the sharp outlines and innumberable windows of its houses. The Seine gleamed with the subdued brightness of old silver. The edifices on either bank looked as though they had been smeared with soot. The Tower of St. Jacques rose up like some rust-eaten museum curio, whilst the Pantheon assumed the aspect of a gigantic catafalque above the darkened district which it overlooked. Gleams of light peeped only from the gilding of the dome of the Invalides, like lamps burning in the daytime, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... ever came there. I wondered many a time if the timber-merchant was dead or had lost his memory and forgotten all about his business; for his stacks of floorboards, set criss-crosswise to season (you know how they pile them up) were grimy with soot, and nobody ever disturbed the rows of scaffold-poles that stood like palisades along the walls. The entrance was from the street, through a door in a billposter's hoarding; and on the river not far away the steamboats hooted, and, in windy weather, the floorboards ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... hair fell in disorder on her face; her ghastly and livid features expressed impudence and effrontery. The vis-a-vis of these dancers were not less vile. The man of very tall stature, disguised as Robert Macaire, had daubed his bony face with soot in such a manner that he was not recognizable; besides a large band covered his left eye, and the dead white of the right one, standing out in relief with the black face, made it still more hideous. The lower part of the visage ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... looked upon his many expensive idols set here and there in niches about his home, he said to himself: "Well, did Marciano say these images do nothing. They neither draw water, cut wood nor pick coffee. They do not teach school, they do not protect our home, for there is one covered with soot. There is another the rats have gnawed, and recently another fell and was broken. How powerless they are." Then he remembered the Bible which a believer had given him years before. He began to examine it in a closed room. Ag he read he prayed, "Oh, God, if this religion ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... prepared relishes. The rafters were set full of cornel-wood pegs till they looked like weavers-combs. From the pegs hung hams, flitches, strings of smoked sausage, cheeses of all sizes, smoked so heavily that they appeared mere lumps of soot, and bags of a shape unfamiliar to both of us. Agathemer knocked one down and opened it. It was full of tight packed fish, salted, dried and smoked, a fish of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... positive hindrance—like the dead lava-blocks that choke the mouth of a crater, or the two deposits on the bottom of a boiler, soot outside and crust inside, which keep the fire from getting at the water. They have lost their power because they are so familiar. They are weakened by not being practised. The very organs of intelligence are, as it were, ossified. Self-complacency ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... among her books on farming and agriculture, those deposed favourites, wanted no more, which looked out at me so shamefacedly from the bookcase. For hours together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, and the autumn night crept up as black as soot to the windows, I sat brooding over an old glove of hers, or the pen she always used, and her little scissors. I did nothing and saw clearly that everything I had done before, ploughing, sowing, and felling trees, had only been because she wanted it. And ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... said the laundress, "my young master will stick nothing to call an honest woman slut and quean, if there be but a speck of soot upon his band-collar." ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... enquiringly over his shoulder, as though to verify a surmise that somebody had spoken. Such proving to be the case, he turned round to confront Milly—Milly true to type, wearing a grimy matutinal apron, an expression half sleepy, half sullen, and a horrid soot smudge on her ripe, ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... instructs your language! You see, my lords, what goodly fruit she seems; Yet like those apples travellers report To grow where Sodom and Gomorrah stood, I will but touch her, and you straight shall see She 'll fall to soot and ashes. ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... If the morning was clear and shining, this betokened a happy cheerful life; if dull and raining, the contrary result might be anticipated. I have known the following incidents cause grave concern about the future prospects of the young couple:—A clot of soot coming down the chimney and spoiling the breakfast; the bride accidentally breaking a dish; a bird sitting on the window sill chirping for some time; the bird in the cage dying that morning; a dog howling, and the postman forgetting ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... see me in company with the like of you! I wouldn't for the whole world he should be aware I had ever any traffic with chimneys or with soot. It would not be for his honour ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... of having harbored other manlike forms in the past. Remnants of a crude, rock fireplace remained and the walls and ceiling were blackened with the smoke of many fires. Scratched in the soot, and sometimes deeply into the rock beneath, were strange hieroglyphics and the outlines of beasts and birds and reptiles, some of the latter of weird form suggesting the extinct creatures of Jurassic times. Some of the more recently made hieroglyphics Tarzan's companions read with interest ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... when the air is still pure and clear after the coolness of the night, and when the sun is low, the canon lies in deep gloom, and behind the brightly lighted tops of the columns the shadows lie as black as soot. Then the bold sculpturing stands out in all its glory. On a quiet night, when the moon holds its crescent above the earth, an oppressive silence prevails over this region. The roar of the river is not heard, for the distance ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... neither negro nor Indian. It is true he was dressed in a rude Indian garb, and had a red belt or sash swathed round his body; but his face was neither black nor copper-color, but swarthy and dingy, and begrimed with soot, as if he had been accustomed to toil among fires and forges. He had a shock of coarse black hair, that stood out from his head in all directions, and bore an axe ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... having from six up to fifty or sixty teeth. There are, Mariner tells us, certain patterns or forms of the tattoo, and the individual may choose which he likes. On the brown skins of the natives the marks, which are imprinted by means of a tincture made of soot, have a black appearance; but on that of a European, their colour is a fine blue. The women here are not tattooed, though a few of them have some marks on the inside of their fingers. At the Fiji Islands, on the contrary, in the neighbourhood of the ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... gathering that a ghost appeared—a lank, saffron ghost, ragged as a scarecrow—wearing a foolish smile and the cape of a cavalryman's overcoat with no coat beneath it. The apparition was a youth of about twenty, with a downy beard all over his face, and countenance well mellowed with coal-soot, as though he had ridden several days on top of a freight-car ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... his shirt to keep it warm. Its mother had been killed nearby an' th' hole was swum out an' th' rest o' th' litter was dead. He's got it at home now. He found a half-drowned young crow another time an' he brought it home, too, an' tamed it. It's named Soot because it's so black, an' it hops an' flies about with ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... my Lady Wind, Went round about the house to find A chink to set her foot in; She tried the keyhole in the door, She tried the crevice in the floor, And drove the chimney soot in. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... scripta manet, and it will go hard if something bad cannot be made of it. General Harrison, it is well understood, was surrounded, during his candidacy, with the cordon sanitaire of a vigilance committee. No prisoner in Spielberg was ever more cautiously deprived of writing materials. The soot was scraped carefully from the chimney-places; outposts of expert rifle-shooters rendered it sure death for any goose (who came clad in feathers) to approach within a certain limited distance of North Bend; and all domestic fowls about the premises were reduced ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... citizens, with their wives, boys and girls, old and young, were all mercilessly butchered." "The city was set fire to at more than twelve points, and, except the cathedral and about fifty houses, sank into soot and ashes. It was not Tilly and his men, but Magdeburg's own people, who kindled the city to a conflagration."—History of the Thirty Years' War, by Anton Gindely, 1885, ii. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... alarmed and irritated at the man's behaviour, formed a conspiracy with a few young men of his own age, not many, for secrecy's sake, but consisting of sixteen in all. These men smeared their faces with soot, excited themselves by strong drink, and assaulted the Roman officer just at daybreak, while he was offering sacrifice in the market-place. They killed him and several of his attendants, and then made their escape out of the city. During the confusion which followed, the senate of the city ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... and iron rings in the brick wall, evidently put there for the convenience of the chimney-sweeps; and he found his task easier than he had anticipated. The soot, to be sure, blinded his eyes, but where there was nothing to be seen, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... upper lip is generally short and rarely covers the mouth, which is exceptionally large and wide, and displays a set of teeth of remarkable strength and perfection. The whole body is covered with a thick layer of greasy soot. Such is the appearance ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... gentleman who is too lazy to daub his face with vermilion as a symbol of bravery employs a laundress to daub his shirt with starch as a symbol of cleanliness; we shake our heads at the dirt of the middle ages in cities made grimy with soot and foul and disgusting with shameless tobacco smoking; holy water, in its latest form of disinfectant fluid, is more widely used and believed in than ever; public health authorities deliberately go through incantations with burning sulphur (which ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... Window Screen.—Try tacking cheese cloth on the pantry window screen frame. This admits air that is sifted free from smoke and soot, before it comes into ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... take advantage of increased light and improved conditions may look like filial piety in the eyes of some: to us such conduct appears nothing better than a distrust of the Divine Providence, a subtle form of atheism. What are chimneys for, pray? And as for soot and smoke, we were made to live in them. Otherwise, let some of our opponents be kind enough to explain why we were ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the College of Physicians, unless he had Levett with him. He must have been a useful assistant in the chemical processes with which Johnson was fond of amusing himself; and at one of which Murphy, on his first visit, found him in a little room, covered with soot like a chimney-sweeper, making aether. Beauclerk, with his lively exaggeration, used to describe Johnson at breakfast, throwing his crusts to Levett after he had eaten the crumb. The pathetic verses written by Johnson on his death, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... complexion unto her, the hue of soot doth serve; Her mirky colour is as dust on couriers' feet upcast. No sooner fall mine eyes on her, thou but a moment's space, Than troubles and misgivings straight beset ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... Rocherath laughed. No, Michel Solheid had never known a day's illness all his life, and had not died of any illness. He had worked at the machine factory at Verviers, covered with black soot and naked to the waist. Cold and heat had had no effect on him. And he used to come over from Verviers every Saturday and spend Sunday with his family. And it had been the Saturday before the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul somewhat over a ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... look after him when he went by in his wagon, but she couldn't get after him because she hasn't a furnace in her house, but the minute he hung up the sign 'Chimneys Cleaned,' she was down to his shop and had him up to the place, and I know it for a fact, for I took some of the soot out of her eye myself, that she courted him so hard when he got to her house that even when he went to the roof to clean the chimney she stuck her head in the fireplace and talked up the flue ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... covering had a still finer lining. Upon one hand he wore a white kid glove, but the other hand, which was ungloved, looked hardly less white. Now, as the Fidele, like most steamboats, was upon deck a little soot-streaked here and there, especially about the railings, it was marvel how, under such circumstances, these hands retained their spotlessness. But, if you watched them a while, you noticed that they avoided touching anything; you noticed, in short, that a certain ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... him at once to the kitchen, where he took soot from the chimney, which he moistened with water, and, in a couple of minutes, blackened his face and put the bloody shirt over his dress. The change was so completely and quickly effected, that the females for a moment took ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... full of soot, and didn't believe the kitchen stove would ever draw; she was sure that there were dead toads and frogs in the well; the house was inconvenient and always would be till water was brought into the kitchen sink; Julia seemed to have no leaning towards housework and ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... been devised to determine the rate of vibration of different materials and structures, the most important being the vitascope, which has a revolvable cylinder, blackened with soot, and this being rotated at a certain speed, the stylus, which is attached to the vibrating body, in contact with the cylinder, will show the number per second, as well as the particular character ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... when he's got a shoot on, He's got "No Smoking" posted up in big letters in every room in the house. REGGIE said it was awful. He had to lock his bedroom door, shove the chest-of-drawers against it, and smoke with his head stuck right up the chimney. He got a peck of soot, one night, right on the top of his nut. Now I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... each of these tiny yellow tubes stand the stamens, literally putting their heads together. As the pistil within the ring of stamens develops and rises through their midst, two little hair brushes on its tip sweep the pollen from their anthers as a rounded brush would remove the soot from a lamp chimney. Now the pollen is elevated to a point where any insect crawling over the floret must remove it. The pollen gone, the pistil now spreads its two arms, that were kept tightly closed together ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... this rain occurs in Nature, March 2, 1908—cloud of soot that had come from South Wales, crossing the Irish ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... remarkably small. They have their eyebrows and moustaches plucked so as to contain only a single line of hairs. The women are of low size, and unattractive—using a sort of pigment on their bodies, composed of animal blood and soot. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the chimney. She entered the recess, and, listening, looked up the old irregular shaft, with its cavernous hollows, where the smoke blundered about on its way to the square bit of sky at the top, from which the daylight struck down with a pallid glare upon the tatters of soot draping the flue as seaweed drapes a ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... crosses dismal mountains "beset with extraordinary cold".[217] Thorkill crosses a stormy ocean to the region of perpetual darkness, where the ghosts of the dead are confined in loathsome and dusty caves. At the main entrance "the door posts were begrimed with the soot of ages".[218] In the Elder Edda Svipdag is charmed against the perils he will be confronted by as he fares "o'er seas mightier than men do know", or is overtaken by night "wandering on the misty way ".[219] When Odin "downward rode into Misty Hel" he sang spells at a "witch's ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... he could look over the whole city towards the green wood. The sun was just rising. It shone round and great, just in his face, that beamed with triumph, though it was very prettily blacked with soot. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... and ingenious mechanic, was safely conducted to Lombard Street, according to promise, well washed, brushed, and cleaned, from the soot of the furnace and the forge. His daughter, who came with him, was about twenty years old, very pretty, very demure, yet with lively black eyes, that ever and anon contradicted the expression of sobriety, to which silence, reserve, a plain velvet hood, and a cambric ruff, had condemned ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... blazonry: the Turkish Knight's arms and ornaments would be traced from the finest Saracenic arabesques. When my garden door opened on Christmas Eve and St. George of England entered, the appearance of that champion was slightly different. His face was energetically blacked all over with soot, above which he wore an aged and very tall top hat; he wore his shirt outside his coat like a surplice, and he flourished a thick umbrella. Now do not, I beg you, talk about "ignorance"; or suppose ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... sentimental, and she most improperly sorrowful. However, I am pleased enough to beg you would continue. As soon as Mr. Muntz returns from the Vine, you shall have a supply of colours. In the mean time why give up the good old trade of drawing? Have you no Indian ink, no soot-water, no snuff, no Coat of onion, no juice of any thing? If you love me, draw: you would if you knew the real pleasure you can give me. I have been studying all your drawings; and next to architecture and trees, I determine that you succeed in nothing better than animals. Now (as ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... square, for, as it was no thoroughfare, it was only enlivened by the passing and returning now and then of a tradesman's cart; and, as it was winter, there were no children playing in the garden. It was a rainy afternoon. A gray cloud of fog and soot hung from the whole sky. About a score of yellow leaves yet quivered on the trees, and the statue of Queen Anne stood bleak and disconsolate among the bare branches. I am afraid I am getting long-winded, but somehow that afternoon ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... fortunately not as high as his head and Gummy could do this as well as a man. The soot which had gathered in the chimney (perhaps it had not been cleaned out since the house was built) was mostly at the bottom, and the flames came from down there; but the hot bricks would soon set the roof on fire, if not the ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... pile of dirt?" and he pointed to some refuse that had been swept up from the floor of the loft. Ned nodded. "It consists of a lot of shavings, sawdust and, what's more, a lot of soot and lampblack that we used in mixing some paint. We'll sweep the whole pile down on their heads, and make them wish they'd stayed away from ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... I must explain myself. One winter day, in a large city all streaked with the soot that falls from black chimneys of factories and of those horrible houses in the ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... childhood troubled, 210 And my thoughts like withered herbage. As I wander through the bushes, Wandering on through grassy meadows, Pushing through the tangled thickets, And my thoughts are pitch for blackness And my heart than soot not brighter. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... his study hung a portrait of an ancestor garbed in the blue and buff of the army of Independence. Until quite recently this portrait's features had been well-nigh extinguished under the accumulated soot and tarnish of many decades, but Eben had revered them with that veneration of ancestor-worship which is an egoism overflowing the boundaries of a single generation. Lately Conscience had had the picture restored and now the renovated forebear, almost jaunty in his refurbishing, ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... at last we were on the water's edge; a rushing stream some sixty yards wide was the first instalment of our passage. It was about the colour and consistency of cream and soot, and how deep? I had not the remotest idea; the only thing for it was to go in and see. So choosing a spot just above a spit and a rapid—at such spots there is sure to be a ford, if there is a ford anywhere—I walked my mare quickly ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... his thoughts, and after listening a moment or two to make sure that no one was nigh, he walked softly to the fireplace, and stooping, peered up the chimney. Above him yawned a black cavernous depth, inky with the soot of years. Hans straightened himself, and tilting his leathern cap to one side, began scratching his bullet-head; at last he drew a long breath. "Yes, good," he muttered to himself; "he who jumps into the river must e'en swim the best he can. It is a vile, dirty place ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... had offered his tributes to the Lord of the Agibwa marshland. Wearied with this hunt, he lay down to rest toward evening when lo! he spied a monkey and taking his bow and dart arrow he shot it. But he could not cook it. He piled wood upon the fire but still the flesh only blackened with soot and would not cook. In his hunger he ate the flesh raw but he never returned home, for the monkey was an evil spirit and po Bhon fell into his power. Thus it is that until this day he wanders around the woods of Kasilaan and may be heard toward evening calling his dogs together for his ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... ashes, one pint; soot, three or four ounces; boiling water, two quarts. Pour on in a suitable vessel or crock, stir, and let stand, over night, then pour off clear and bottle. Dose: Half a teacupful three times a day, and if too strong weaken with water until ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... of the ship and our lives depended on their bravery and steadfastness to duty. It is difficult to conceive a more trying ordeal to one's courage than was presented to every man in the fire room that escaped destruction. The profound shock of the explosion, followed by instant darkness, falling soot and particles, the knowledge that they were far below the water level, practically enclosed in a trap, the imminent danger of the ship sinking, the added threat of exploding boilers—all these dangers and more must have been apparent to every man below, and yet ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... for fifteen miles. Officers and men alike bristled stiff with a week's beard. Rents in their khaki showed white skin; from their grimed hands and heads you might have judged them half red men, half soot-black. Eyelids hung fat and heavy over hollow cheeks and pointed cheekbones. Only {p.062} the eye remained—the sky-blue, steel-keen, hard, clear, unconquerable English eye—to tell that thirty-two miles without rest, four days without a square meal, six nights—for many—without a stretch ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... What signifies a wart, or e'en a scar? Leave both, skilled hand, and paint us as we are. The crowfeet paint, the wrinkles on the brow, The hollow cheek, the form inclined to bow, The tear-dim'd eye, the hair well streaked with gray, The hardened hand, begrim'd with soot and clay, And if you use the seer's revealing glass, Remember this, "All flesh is as ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... Did it bu'n him! Sich a question, why he did n't give it time; Th'ow'd dem ashes and dem cindahs evah which-a-way I guess, An' you nevah did, I reckon, clap yo' eyes on sich a mess; Fu' he sholy made a picter an' a funny one to boot, Wif his clothes all full o' ashes an' his face all full o' soot. Well, hit laked to stopped de pahty, an' I reckon lak ez not Dat it would ef Tom's wife, Mandy, had n't happened on de spot, To invite us out to suppah—well, we scrambled to de table, An' I 'd lak to ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... which had stood untenanted for years, was burned to the ground, her reputation as a witch was firmly established throughout the country; many a good woman after that event, when the wind carried off the clothes drying on the hedges, or the soot fell down the chimney into the kitchen at night, knew that the Madre was about, playing ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... is cleaning a six-pounder on a Hull boat clips his words between his teeth and would be happier in Gaelic. The whitish singlet and grey trousers held up by what is obviously his soldier brother's spare regimental belt is pure Lowestoft. The complete blue-serge-and-soot suit passing a wire down a hatch is Glasgow as far as you can hear him, which is a fair distance, because he wants something done to the other end of the wire, and the flat-faced boy who should be attending to it hails from the remoter Hebrides, and is looking ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... and various cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques have delighted me. I know the color and the value of tapestry and rich hangings; of mosaics, porphyry, and verd-antiques; of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of the arabesque; but the velvety quality of London soot when applied to the rough surfaces of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveliness gained by grime and smoke, came to me ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... supposition that the letter was no practical joke, but a genuine cry for help. Sowell Street was a scene set for such an adventure. It was narrow, mean-looking, the stucco house-fronts, soot-stained, cracked, and uncared-for, the steps broken and unwashed. As he entered it a cold rain was falling, and a yellow fog that rolled between the houses added to its dreariness. It was now late in the afternoon, ...
— The Lost House • Richard Harding Davis
... comfortless four hours, and went on deck at dawn to find a thick fog, a heavy rain, the boards swimming with soot and water, and one man cowering at the wheel. Most of the gentlemen, induced by the discomfort to be early risers, came up before we reached Bedeque, in oilskin caps, coats, and leggings, wearing that expression on their physiognomies peculiar ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... opposite that on which he had been employed, and he determined to have one look there before going to the Baxter homestead. Almost the first man he saw as he approached the dying fire was Ralph Hazeltine. The electrician's hands and face were blackened by soot, and the ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... looking upon himself as injured already, resolved to inflict punishment. Accordingly, he and sixteen of his companions conspired against the captain; but that the design might be managed without any danger of being discovered, they all daubed their faces at night with soot. Thus disguised and inflamed with wine, they set upon him by break of day, as he was sacrificing in the marketplace; and having killed him, and several others that were with him, they fled out of the city, which was extremely alarmed and troubled at the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... glass it is usual to employ the gas flame only, but I find that it is better in most cases to use the hot air of a gently-blown flame, rather than have the disadvantage of the soot deposited in the alternative operation. When the glass begins to soften, or even before, it may be moved right into the blow-pipe flame, and the ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... you'll find your fields and meadows all shot to pieces; and your house will be surrounded by warehouses, elevators, and factories. Your larks and bobolinks will be scared off by engines and smokestacks, and your flowers spoiled with soot. Don't parley with fate, but cash in and put your ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... us that the filthy mud from the street of a manufacturing town is composed of clay, sand, soot and water; that the clay may be purified into the radiance of the sapphire; that the sand may be developed into the beauty of the opal; that the soot may be crystallized into the glory of the diamond and that the water may be changed into a star of snow. So man ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... hauled in the hawser, and made the loop fast over the piling. At the same moment, he saw two negroes, blacker from soot and grime than nature had made them, who leaped down from the deck, and scampered out of sight. He heard the captain in the ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... shut out every breath of air and almost all the light of heaven, I had climbed up between the water-butt and the angle of the wall for the purpose of fishing out of the dirty fluid which lay there, crusted with soot and alive with insects, to be renewed only three times in the seven days, some of the great larvae and kicking monsters which made up a large item in my list of wonders: all of a sudden the horror of the place came over me; those grim prison-walls ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... to all the buildings, and to the modest little country houses the appearance of elegant mansions. Only on the ceiling, broken by a skylight, which told of the ancient ladder-way leading to the flat-roof above, did there remain any trace of the soot of the fires which used to be lighted in ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... back? Keineswegs, By no manner of means! The Sumptuary Laws have fallen into such a state of desuetude as was never before seen. Our fashionable coat is an amphibium between barn-sack and drayman's doublet. The cloth of it is studiously coarse; the colour a speckled soot-black or rust-brown gray; the nearest approach to a Peasant's. And for shape,—thou shouldst see it! The last consummation of the year now passing over us is definable as Three Bags; a big bag for the body, two small bags for the arms, and by way of collar a hem! The first Antique Cheruscan ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... reptile should wish to be thought an angel; or that he should not be content to writhe and grovel in his native earth, without aspiring to the skies! It is from the love of dress and finery. He is the Chimney-sweeper on May-day all the year round: the soot peeps through the rags and tinsel, and all the flowers of sentiment!" Aphorisms on Man, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... breed of a mastiff and a bull-dog, belonging to a chimney-sweeper, laid, according to his master's orders, on a soot-bag, which he had placed inadvertently almost in the middle of a narrow back street, in a town in the south of England. A loaded cart passing by, the driver desired the dog to move out of the way. On refusing he was scolded, then beaten, ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... KITCHING.' And so saying, I took a dignified ajew of these minnial domestics; and ascending to my epartment in the 4 pair back, brushed the powder out of my air, and taking off those hojous livries for hever, put on a new soot, made for me by Cullin of St. Jeames Street, and which fitted my manly figger ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dressed all in fur from his head to his foot, And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot; A bundle of toys he had flung on his back, And he looked like a pedlar just opening his pack. His eyes—how they twinkled! His dimples, how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry; His droll little mouth was drawn up in a bow, ...
— Dear Santa Claus • Various
... lie at the door of the vulgar alone may well be questioned; for while the star of nobility and dignified distinction was seen to glitter at a cock-match or on a boxing-stage, or near the 'Ring'—where its proprietor was liable to be elbowed by their highnesses of grease and soot, and to be hemmed in by knights of the post and canditates for Tyburn tree—when this motley group alike were fixed in eager attention, alike betted on and enjoyed each blood-drawing stroke of the artificial spur, or blow of the fist well laid in—what distinction ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... The daidokoro had a large wood fire burning in a trench, filling the whole place with stinging smoke, from which my room, which was merely screened off by some dilapidated shoji, was not exempt. The rafters were black and shiny with soot and moisture. The house-master, who knelt persistently on the floor of my room till he was dislodged by Ito, apologised for the dirt of his house, as well he might. Stifling, dark, and smoky, as my ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... they are memories. How strange and crowded the world must seem to you! I have seen photographs and pictures of the old times, the little isolated houses built of bricks made out of burnt mud and all black with soot from your fires, the railway bridges, the simple advertisements, the solemn savage Puritanical men in strange black coats and those tall hats of theirs, iron railway trains on iron bridges overhead, horses and cattle, and even dogs running half wild about the streets. And suddenly, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... attention. Hector had been shoving Tom half-way up the chimney, in hopes of reaching the nest; and the consequences of this amateur chimney-sweeping had been a plentiful bespattering of all the spectators with soot, that so greatly distressed the young ladies, that Mary and Blanche had fled away from ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... warm weather and for convenience at work, was wearing only trousers and a tattered shirt as black as soot. His hair was bound round, workman fashion, with a wisp of lime-tree bast, and his round face seemed rounder and pleasanter ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... there tall factory-chimneys rose up from the barren soil, the only vegetation on that putrid land, where the spring breezes wafted an odor of petroleum and soot, mingled with another smell that was even still less agreeable. At last, however, they crossed the Seine a second time. It was delightful on the bridge; the river sparkled in the sun, and they had a feeling of quiet satisfaction and enjoyment ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... sound, and, like Hop Vine Garden and Violet Lane, and other titles no less reassuring, seems to promise a breath of something better than the soot-laden atmosphere offered by a London winter. But Hop Vine Garden is but a passage between a line of old buildings, and ends in a dark court and a small and dirty "public," the beer-pots of which hold the only suggestion of hops to be discovered. Violet ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... He stood on the deck of the shantyboat, his toes sticking out of his socks, his heart knocking against his ribs. Straight down the river the big packet boat came, purpling the water with its shadow, its smokestacks belching soot. ...
— The Mississippi Saucer • Frank Belknap Long
... propagated by dividing these clustered roots into separate offsets, and planting the divisions in April, in very shallow drills one foot apart; placing them about six inches apart in the drills, and covering them lightly with earth. Soot mixed with the surface-soil has been found of much service to prevent the maggot from committing extensive depredations upon this plant. The only after-culture required is that of keeping them clean from weeds, and occasionally ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... foolish, you say. No doubt, but it interested me and I was of an age when very few things interested me vitally. With clothing black as soot, with hands brown with stain and skinned and swollen and feverish, I kept to my job without regard to Sundays or the ordinary hours of labor. I was not seeking sympathy,—I was renewing my youth. I was both artist and workman. My muscles hardened, my palms ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... have a little nigger, the blackest thing alive, He'll be just four years old if he lives till forty-five; His smooth cheek hath a glossy hue, like a new polished boot, And his hair curls o'er his little head as black as any soot. His lips bulge from his countenance—his little ivories shine— His nose is what we call a little pug, but fashioned very fine: Although not quite a fairy, he is comely to behold, And I wouldn't sell him, 'pon my word, for ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... swallows and martins suddenly appeared above the eyot, arriving, not in hundreds, but in thousands and tens of thousands. The air was thick with them, and their numbers increased from minute to minute. Part drifted above, in clouds, twisting round like soot in a smoke-wreath. Thousands kept sweeping just over the tops of the willows, skimming so thickly that the sky-line was almost blotted out for the height of from three to four feet. The quarter from which ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... his haid an' neck down the chimney that way, he get 'em all black with soot. But he don't mind that. No, Sah, he don' mind that a bit. Fact is, he don' notice it. He so curious he don' notice anything, an' pretty soon he plumb fo'get where he is an' that he is listening where he have no business. ...
— Mother West Wind 'Why' Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... his brothers had come back each with his sweetheart, but these were all so ugly, and foul, and wicked, that they had done nothing but fight with one another on the way home, and on their heads they had a kind of hat that was daubed over with tar and soot, and so the rain had run down off the hats on to their faces, till they got far uglier and nastier than they had been before. When his brothers saw Boots and his sweetheart, they were all as jealous as jealous could be of her; but the King was so overjoyed with them both, that he drove ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... person up two hours before he ought to be out of bed) and think of the tomato-plants—the leaves like fine lace-work, owing to black bugs that skip around and can't be caught. Somebody ought to get up before the dew is off (why don't the dew stay on till after a reasonable breakfast?) and sprinkle soot on the leaves. I wonder if it is I. Soot is so much blacker than the bugs that they are disgusted and go away. You can't get up too early if you have a garden. You must be early due yourself, if you get ahead of the bugs. I think that, on the whole, it would be ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... dust-pan, and an old bushel basket. She swept up chips, scraped up ashes, scoured the preserve shelves, washed the windows, cleaned the vegetable bins, and got gritty, and scarlet-cheeked and streaked with soot. It was a wonderful safety valve, that cellar. A pity it was that the house had ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... in the cases of Aesculus, Phaseolus, and Vicia. Facsimiles are here given (Fig. 27) of two of these tracks; and a third short one was almost as plainly serpentine as that at A. It was also manifest by a greater or less amount of soot having been swept off the glasses, that the tips had [page 40] pressed alternately with greater and less force on them. There must, therefore, have been movement in at least two planes at right angles to one another. These radicles were so delicate that they rarely had the power to sweep the ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... was even more desolate, as it had been more inviting before. There were ashes sifting out of the stove, rings of soot and grease on the table-top, more soot, and the prints of muddy boots on the floor. Milk had soured in the bottles, odds and ends of food were everywhere, Betsey's book was open on the table, propped against the streaked and ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... but taste Deceived; they, fondly thinking to allay Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed, Hunger and thirst constraining; drugged as oft, With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws, With soot and cinders filled; so oft they fell Into the same illusion, not as Man Whom they triumphed once lapsed. Thus were they plagued And worn with famine, long and ceaseless hiss, Till their lost shape, permitted, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... story about Wouldbegoods it is not proper to tell of times when only some of us were naughty, so I will pass lightly over the time when Noel got up the kitchen chimney and brought three bricks and an old starling's nest and about a ton of soot down with him when he fell. They never use the big chimney in the summer, but cook in the wash-house. Nor do I wish to dwell on what H. O. did when he went into the dairy. I do not know what his motive was. But Mrs Pettigrew said SHE ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... leaned out watching a fourwheeler that had stopped next door, in a third a woman sat sewing, and in a fourth a woman was ironing, with a glimpse of a bedstead behind her. And all outside was gloom and soot ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... shops. Besides," she went on, "if a married woman has been knocked about that's only a part of her condition. Elle l'a lien voulu, and if you're married you're married; it's the smoke—or call it the soot!—of the fire. You know, yourself," she roundly pursued, "that ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... deal with them as exhibiting statistical complexes of the effects of their more intimate laws. In a certain sense, they only enter into Physics and Chemistry as technological applications. The reason is that they are too vague. Where does Cleopatra's Needle begin and where does it end? Is the soot part of it? Is it a different object when it sheds a molecule or when its surface enters into chemical combination with the acid of a London fog? The definiteness and permanence of the Needle is nothing to the possible permanent ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... hand the key had been turned; but the danger lay behind us in the shadows where we had not looked for it. Aye, the three in the engine-house, how came I to forget them? They were atop of us before the doctor was out of hearing, and a great hulking German, his face smeared with soot and a bar of iron in his hands, caught me by the shoulder and swung me round almost before I ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... and emitting clouds of fragrant smoke, some one near him exclaimed, in a very sharp and shrill voice, "Booh!" Looking up, Cayenguirago beheld standing behind him a very ugly creature, but whether man or beast, he found it at first difficult to determine. His skin was black as soot, and his hair white as snow. His eyes, which were very large, were of the colour of the green far-eyes[A] with which the pale faces survey distant objects, and stood out so far from the head that, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... off on a three mile walk round Professor Stangerson's estate. He halted for some ten minutes at the corner of a narrow road black with soot, near to some charcoal-burners' huts in the forest of Sainte-Genevieve, which touches on the road from Epinay to Corbeil, to tell me that the murderer had certainly passed that way, before ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... exclaimed delightedly. "You mean that it is quite as remarkable for a coal operator, with carloads of coal and soot weighing down his imagination all day, to come home in the evening and spin off a lot of nonsense like a comedian as it is for a mathematician to have written 'Alice's Adventures ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... James and Miss Mary. Mr James was ivver so much owder than Miss Mary. She come kind o' unexpected like, and she warn't but a little thing when she lost her mother. When she got owd enough Owd Master sent her to a young ladies' skule. She was there a soot o' years, and when she come to staa at home, she was such a pretty young lady, that she was. She was werry fond of cumpany, but there warn't the lissest bit wrong about her. There was a young gentleman, from the ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... hardness and luster than true anthracite, and can be distinguished from it by the fact that when newly fractured it will soot the hands. Its specific gravity is ordinarily about 1.4. It kindles quite readily and burns more ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... reminds us of the gale in which we drove ashore in the Discovery. We have had some trouble with our blubber stove and got the hut very full of smoke on Saturday night. As a result we are all as black as sweeps and our various garments are covered with oily soot. We look a fearful gang of ruffians. The blizzard has delayed our plans and everyone's attention is bent on the stove, the cooking, and the various internal arrangements. Nothing is done without a great amount of advice received from all quarters, and consequently things ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... log-cabin design by the limitations of the fire box, he handled the kindlings awkwardly, got a splinter into his thumb, said something under his breath which was not meant for his wife to hear, and powdered his linen with soot from the stove pipe. At length, however, a ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed |
