"Oil lamp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Illuminating Engineering Society, D. McFarlan Moore made the following observations: "A few years ago there was practically no way of changing the colors of the various forms of lamps, that is, the candle had its color perforce; such a thing as modifying it was not dreamed of. The oil lamp had its color; the open burner gas flame its color, the incandescent lamp its color, and the arc lamp its color. At the present time there are only two ways widely in use of varying the color; that is, if a ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... the doctor did not care even if the clock did strike nine just as they stopped at their own gate. The night was dark and the bride could not distinguish the exterior of the house, neither was the interior plainly discernible, lighted as it was with an oil lamp, and a single tallow candle. But she scarcely thought of this, so intent was she upon the beautiful face of the crippled boy, who sat in his armchair, eagerly awaiting ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... they finally emerged from the black curtain of oil. "Of all the messy stuff! Betty, you look as though an oil lamp had ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... and both the man and the child were deep in sleep. Then Jan stopped. There was the fire of a keen wakefulness in his eyes as he carefully unfastened the strings of his instrument, and held it close to the oil lamp, so that he could peer down through the ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... dusk. The corners of the great room were in darkness. Beneath the elevated desk, behind which sat Coleman, Bluxome, the secretary, lighted a single oil lamp, the better to see his notes. In the interest of the proceedings a general illumination had not been ordered. Within the shadow, the door opened and Charles Doane, the Grand Marshal of the Vigilantes, advanced three steps ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... her shawl again, drew the bolt, and fared forth over the towans. At first the stars guided her, and the slant of the night-wind on her face; but by and by, in a dip between the hills, she spied her mark and steered for it. This was the spark within St. Gwithian's Chapel, where day and night a tiny oil lamp, with a floating wick, burned before ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... until black, dark night!—not until it was so dark that you couldn't see your hand before you or the girl beside you, which is nearer the truth; not until the stout woman in spectacles with the conversational habit, had brought in a lard-oil lamp with a big globe, which she set down on Margaret's table among her books and papers. And when John did come, and poked his twice-blessed head between the curtains, it was not to sit down inside and talk ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... violets, we rode over to this place, and, hitching our horses to some trees growing over the principal mine, we descended to the entrance. A miner, an intelligent middle-aged man who was off work just then, volunteered to be our guide, and after providing each of us with a little oil lamp like the one he wore in his hat-brim, he led us into the dark opening that yawned in the hillside. The passage was six or seven feet wide, and so low that we could not stand erect. Under our feet was the narrow track, the space between the ties being slippery with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... not far now. With infinite caution he threaded the dark canals, thanking fortune for the faint starlight that showed him the turnings. Here and there a small oil lamp burned before the image of a saint; from a narrow lane on one side, the light streamed across the water, and with it came sounds of ringing glasses, and the tinkling of a lute, and laughing voices; then it was dark ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... Douglass, the engineer-in-chief, and Mr. Ayres, the assistant engineer of the Trinity House. It is practically impossible to compare photo-metrically and directly the flame of the candle with these sun-like lights. A light of intermediate intensity—that of the six-wick Trinity oil lamp—was therefore in the first instance compared with the electric light. The candle power of the oil lamp being afterwards determined, the intensity of the electric light became known. The numbers given in the table prove the superiority ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in that gloomy chamber, dim-lighted by a solitary oil lamp, floor and walls shook and quivered to the concussion of a shell—not very near, it is true, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... he has been introduced; and I would bring before his notice the changes which have taken place in England since I began to breathe the breath of life—a period amounting to seventy years. Gas was unknown. I groped about the streets of London in all but utter darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species of degradation and insult. I have been nine hours in sailing from Dover to Calais, before the invention of steam. It took me nine hours to go from Taunton ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... room, which served him as an office, Murray lit an oil lamp on his desk. Then he set a chair for his visitor so that he should face the light. Kars flung himself into it, while the trader took his place before the desk, and tilted his swivel chair back at a comfortable angle, his round smiling face cordially regarding ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... be, for was it not known all over the countryside that Martha Ellen was the best-dressed young lady outside Cheemaun. Every Sunday, Elizabeth and Rosie, squeezed up against the wall to avoid the drip from the coal-oil lamp above, sat waiting for her arrival and whispering eager speculations as to what new things she would wear. They were seldom disappointed, and to-day their teacher had never looked finer. She wore a brand new white ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine o'clock, and in Murderers' Row that means lights out. Even now, I hear the soft tread of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to censure me for my coal-oil lamp still burning. As if the mere living could censure the doomed ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... a small magic lantern does very well for evening exhibitions, but the lantern can be used in the daytime with good results by directing sunlight through the lens instead of using the oil lamp. A window facing the sun is selected and the shade is drawn almost down, the remaining space being covered by a piece of heavy ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Flying Moon with a crew of twenty more. It was Blake's business to wait and watch like a hawk for such opportunities as there, and tonight—his watch pointed to the hour of twelve, midnight—he was sitting in the light of a sputtering seal-oil lamp adding up figures which told him that his winter, only half gone, had already been an enormously ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... to me, but I am a long way behind on it. Dey lets me stay here and pay what I kin. I rents a room to an old lady fer 75 cents a week. I buys oil and wood wid it. De lights has been cut off. I uses a oil lamp fur light. Lights done cut off. I can't pay light rent, no sir, I haint been able to pay dat in a ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... the New York Central tracks Ed went, and then turned out of the street and disappeared into the station. The evening train had passed and the place was deserted. He went into the dimly lighted waiting-room. An oil lamp, turned low, and fastened by a bracket to the wall made a little circle of light in a corner. The room was like a church in the early morning of a wintry day, cold and still. He went hurriedly to the light, and taking ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... of the poor, endeavouring to make articulate their misery. Thus in a description of Edinburgh slums came the following: "I saw in a 'house' which was made by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden of the rent, a family of three—man, wife, and child—whose lot was hardly 'of their own making.' The man was tall and bronzed, but he was dying of heart disease; he could not do ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... that line at a fair number of places—since writing these words, many miles away in my billet, working in the brick-floored cottage bedroom by the light of an oil lamp, I have stepped to the door, and there I can see it now, always flickering and flashing like faint summer lightning under the clouds on the horizon. When you come to the very limit—to the farthest point which you or any man on earth ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... light from an oil lamp made the interior look warm and attractive, particularly because Marian was standing by the side of Tim, smiling tenderly down at him. Across from her Bonsecours stood, also smiling, but with a look of weariness—perhaps it was unhappiness. The bearers ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... Time has laid its heavy hand on her property. It is the average home of colored people living in this section, two stories, small front yeard, enclosed with wooden picket fence. A large coal stove in front room furnishes heat. In recent years electricity has supplanted the overhead oil lamp. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... "Befo' dey have coal oil lamp dey used to use homemake candles. Dey'd kill de brutes and keep and save all de tallow and one day was set off to make de candles. All de neighbors come and dey have kind of party and eat and things. Sometime dey make three, four ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... subsequently these Tchuktches welcomed the foreigners. The description given of the natives and their dwellings is curious. They live in large tents, which enclose sleeping-places or a kind of inner chambers, heated and lighted by an oil lamp. In these inner rooms the native women sit, with very little clothing on. In summer a fire is kept burning in the centre of the hut, and the smoke goes up through a hole in the roof. In winter there is no fire, and presumably the hut is closed ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... "is what I call my den," throwing open a door leading into a rear room and lighting a hanging oil lamp. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... the Lena Valley to glaze the windows of their huts with slabs of ice, which are better nonconductors of heat and cold, and can be made more perfectly air-tight than glass. Hence these windows have been adopted by Russian colonists. The Eskimo devised the oil lamp, an invention found nowhere else in primitive America, and fishing tackle so perfect that white men coming to fish in Arctic waters found it ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... office, dead to the world. Amos sat by the window sobering up until the grey of the morning. The sleeping man roused, and Amos gave him another half goblet of whisky followed by a sip of water. He had drawn the blinds and left the coal-oil lamp burning when it grew light, lest the sleeping man should arouse and discover it ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... kicked the dogs away. We couldn't see much inside, for the moon wasn't up then, but they led us to a house, and made us go up a ladder on to a verandah and into a nice wooden room, where there was a civilised oil lamp on a bracket, and several women and children sitting and lying about ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... looking; the roof sloped nearly down to the ground, and the door was so low that the family had to creep in on their hands and knees, when they went in and out. There was no one at home but an old Lapland woman, who was cooking fish by the light of a train-oil lamp. The reindeer told her all about Gerda's story, after having first told his own, which seemed to him the most important, but Gerda was so pinched with the cold that she could not speak. "Oh, you poor things," said the Lapland woman, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... opened into a narrow hall, mildewed with the dampness of decay, the dust of disuse. He carried Pauline up the stairs, which groaned and bent under his steps and pushed open a door. There was a broken chair, a table, a cot, a washstand, with pitcher and bowl, and a small oil lamp set in a bracket ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... there rose confused sounds, loud hoarse shouts and thin shrill cries, accompanying the dull thunder caused by the tramping of feet. Then the lights went out, all but the yellow flame of a small oil lamp which none of ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... because he hailed from the same county as myself—having overheard the conversation between Mr Perry and myself, had already come below and roused the occupants of the place, who, by the smoky rays of a flaring oil lamp that did its best to make the atmosphere quite unendurable, were hastily ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... dark below. Only one little oil lamp was burning, on a rock shaped like an altar in one corner. It cast leaping shadows that looked like ghosts on the smooth, uneven walls. The whole place was hardly more than twenty feet wide each way. There was no furniture, not even the usual mats—nothing but naked rock to lie or sit on, polished ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... into the igloo. Their mother was standing beside the oil lamp, putting strands of dried moss into the oil. This lamp was their only stove and their only light. It didn't look much like our stoves. It was just a piece of soapstone, shaped something like a clamshell. It was hollowed out so it would hold the oil. All along the shallow side of the pan there ...
— The Eskimo Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... Samuel's little house was occupied that night when the soft quilts were spread out, and the family and their guests lay down to rest. Naomi and Jonas were cuddled in a corner next their mother. But when Ezra came in late from feeding Michmash, the dim light of the little oil lamp, that burned each night in all but the poorest of Jewish homes, showed him a floor so crowded with soundly sleeping guests that he knew not how to reach his own bed spread at his ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... home, was to be found at the stopping-place. Harris tied his team at the door and went in, shaking the snow and frost from his great-coat. The air inside was close and stifling with tobacco, not unmixed with stronger fumes. A much-smoked oil lamp, hung by a wall-bracket, shed a certain sickly light through the thick air, and was supplemented in its illumination by rays from the door of a capacious wood stove which stood in the centre of the room, and about which half ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... repeated, disturbed the stillness of an empty street of small wooden houses. The night was very dark, but the square mass of the tanner's house could just be discerned, black and solid against the sky. The rays of a solitary oil lamp straggled faintly across the roadway, and showed a man with a large bundle on his back standing on the doorstep of that house, knocking as if he were afraid of the noise ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... would be herself still who had drawn the picture, who had put the coloring into it; all that the other would have to do might be described as varnishing. She took up the first sheet of her writing, and turned up an oil lamp that stood upon the table at her elbow, the better to see ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... musing over a seal oil lamp. He was not in a very happy mood. He was weary of orientalism and mystery. He longed for the quiet of his little old town, Chicago. Wouldn't it be great to put his feet under his old job and say, "Well, Boss, what's ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... An oil lamp in an inner drawing-room, placed to illuminate an easel portrait of Lady Lucy, was smoking atrociously. The two ladies' flew toward it, and were soon lost to sight and hearing amid a labyrinth ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... smaller back room a large, red-faced man sat behind a table. Some other officers were also sitting a little in rear of him, while two stood at attention before the general, who was questioning them. As he talked, the general toyed with an oil lamp that stood upon the table before him. Presently there came a knock upon the door and an aide entered the room. He saluted and reported: "Fraulein Kircher ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... under the oil lamp as the train jolted past Tarn-Taran station. 'What! You don't mean ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... stopped before a little house, which looked very miserable. The roof reached to the ground; and the door was so low, that the family were obliged to creep upon their stomachs when they went in or out. Nobody was at home except an old Lapland woman, who was dressing fish by the light of an oil lamp. And the Reindeer told her the whole of Gerda's history, but first of all his own; for that seemed to him of much greater importance. Gerda was so chilled that she ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... hand seemed to drop a canopy over the vista, and it was night. Bartley lighted the oil lamp and sat staring out into the darkness. From below came the rattle of dishes. Presently Bartley heard heavy, deliberate footsteps ascending the stairway. Then a clanging crash and a thud, right outside ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... for him. He jerked his loosely-jointed body over to the sick man, lifted the seal-oil lamp with his shaky old hands, and looked at the patient long and steadily. When he had set the lamp down again, with a grunt, he put his black thumb on the wick and squeezed out the light. When he came back to the fire, which had burnt low, he pulled ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... alive from the ice-packing which buried my comrades. This was on the evening of the 13th April. I had saved from the wreck of our things most of the whey-powder, pemmican, &c., as well as the theodolite, compass, chronometer, train-oil lamp for cooking, and other implements: I was therefore in no doubt as to my course, and I had provisions for ninety days. But ten days from the start my supply of dog-food failed, and I had to begin to slaughter my ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... in character. There was a short, narrow, gloomy lane or street, shut in between lofty dwelling houses, the lane often dark, always filthy, without sidewalks, a gutter running through the centre, over which, suspended from a rope, hung a dim oil lamp or two—such was the Rue St. Maur, in the Faubourg St. Germain. It was a gloomy approach certainly. But a tall porte cochere opened, and suddenly the whole scene changed. Within those high walls, so forbidding in aspect, there lay charming gardens, gay with parterres of flowers, and shaded ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... were grinding middlings. About three o'clock in the morning the miller in charge went up to the chamber (a large box extending through several stories), as he had often done before, to jar the middlings down, they having clogged. He carried a small, open oil lamp, which he placed on a beam, just behind and above his head. He then opened a slide and thrust in a shovel, which started the middlings down with a thump, raising a great dust. As this dust issued in a thin cloud from ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... as the woman had quitted the room, Lamont returned to his contemplation of the beautiful face of the girl lying so white and still on the wooden settee, as revealed to him by the light of the swinging oil lamp ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... your knife," she said, kneeling beside the smoky oil lamp; and without a word he drew his claspknife from his pocket, opened the blade, and held the handle toward her. She took it from him, and then knelt motionless for an instant looking at the diamond, which shone like a star in ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... and slipped onto his horse as the Texan entered the hotel. Passing through the office where a coal-oil lamp burned dimly in a wall-bracket, he stepped into the narrow hallway and paused with his eyes on the bar of yellow light that showed at the bottom of ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... Nancy selected a small oil lamp with a brass base and stem, and a lovely-shaped glass shade. Mrs. Tomlinson informed her it was another auction bargain that cost fifty cents. Being so expensive they put it on the parlor mantel ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... most of the labourers' dwellings. When we entered, a glowing fire of peat was on the hearth, and the pot with the supper hung over it. Mrs. Duff was spinning, and Elsie, by the light of a little oil lamp suspended against the wall, was teaching her youngest brother to read. Whatever she did, she always seemed in my eyes to do it better than anyone else; and to see her under the lamp, with one arm round the little fellow who stood leaning against her, while the other hand pointed ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... hole in one side of the box into which to insert a thermometer, and, at about the center of the box, place a shelf on which to set the bowl or pan containing the sponge or dough. For heating the interior, use may be made of a single gas burner, an oil lamp, or any other small heating device. This should be placed in the bottom of the box, under the shelf, and over it should be placed a pan of water to keep the air in the box moist, moist air being essential ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... entered the house. Bob had to go with the rest. The room was feebly illuminated by a small oil lamp. Bob noticed that they fastened the door with a huge chain. The fastening of that door was ominous to him, and the clanking of that chain smote him to the heart, and echoed drearily within his soul. It seemed to ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... the seriousness of her voice. Mr. Harris extinguished the oil lamp, covering the chafing dish clumsily with a discordant, disagreeable sound. Mrs. Cheever and Mrs. Enos Jackson swung about abruptly, Maude Lille rose a little from her seat, while the men imitated these movements of expectancy with a clumsy ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... the others were grouped about the door, talking or listening to the rain, she sat near a table on which burned a small unshaded oil lamp, studying out some grievous problems to her, ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... sympathetically. "Your coming child will live. Please follow my instructions carefully. The baby, a girl, will be born at night. See that the oil lamp is kept burning until dawn. Do not fall asleep and thus allow the light to ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... must now go into Black Passage. For a long time no one moved. It is hard to be the first into a darkness where, no matter how far the eye searches, there is not the faintest light. Then Doctor Dorn struck the flint on his oil lamp and walked through the gate. With the light of his lamp ahead of us, the fear became less and we turned on our own lamps and ...
— Out of the Earth • George Edrich
... in a short-legged reed chair, with a grip-sack open on his knees. His coat and vest were off, and the light from the oil lamp at his side made his linen ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... them were seated at the long table, bottle and mug in hand, and the gloomy place was poorly lighted by a swinging whale-oil lamp. Jack Cockrell crept unnoticed into a corner and was giddy and almost helpless with nausea. It seemed ages before Captain Wellsby's legs appeared in the hatchway and he came down into the cabin, bringing a shower of spray with him. His kindly face was haggard and sad and he tottered from ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... the councilor's windows aglow with light, and as he pressed quietly around the end of the building the sound of a low voice came to him through the open door. Cautiously he approached and peered in. A large oil lamp, the light of which he had seen in the window, was burning on a table in the big room but the voice came from the little closet into which Obadiah had taken him the preceding night. For several minutes he crouched and listened. He heard the chuckling laugh of the old councilor—and ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... for Magdalene, although now some sixty years old, was a tall, large framed woman. He followed her to a chamber upstairs, and was furnished by her with all the necessary articles of dress; and in these, as soon as, having placed an oil lamp on the table, she retired, he proceeded to array himself, and presently descended the stairs, feeling very strange and awkward in this new attire. Gertrude Von Harp burst into a fit of merry laughter, and even the ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... dangerous this was; but no one found any better way until, about a hundred years ago, Sir Humphry Davy noticed something which other people had not observed. He discovered that flame would not pass through fine wire gauze, and he made a safety lamp in which a little oil lamp was placed in a round funnel of wire gauze. The light, but not the flame, would pass through it; and all safety lamps that burn oil have been made on this principle. The electric lamp, however, is now in general use. The miner ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... abandon my towel, I ran to open the door, but hardly had I done so when I remained petrified and dumb with surprise, hardly able to believe my own eyes. There stood the Breton twisting his battered cap nervously between his bony fingers. The little oil lamp, which we always kept lighted at night in the passageway, illuminated his ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte |
