The Fireside Dickens: A Cyclopedia of the Best Thoughts of Charles Dickens. Comprising a Careful Selection of His Best Writings. Arranged in Subjects and in Alphabetical Order, with a Complete Index...

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G.W. Carleton & Company, 1883 - 564 pages

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Page 181 - It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling...
Page 97 - Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding!
Page 387 - My father had left a small collection of books in a little room up-stairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) -and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company.
Page 97 - Cratchit said that, now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing. At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and...
Page 123 - ... letters that must be viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye — letters that were evidently intended at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands they might fall. Let me read the first: 'Garraway's, twelve o'clock. Dear Mrs. B. — Chops and Tomato sauce. Yours, PICKWICK.
Page 97 - Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs. Cratchit, looking slowly all along the...
Page 138 - Where were the traces of her early cares, her sufferings, and fatigues? All gone. Sorrow was dead indeed in her, but peace and perfect happiness were born ; imaged in her tranquil beauty and profound repose. And still her former self lay there, unaltered in this change. Yes. The old fireside had smiled upon that same sweet face; it had passed, like a dream, through haunts of misery and care ; at the door of the poor schoolmaster on the summer evening, before the furnace fire upon the cold wet night,...
Page 125 - ... might, the means abundantly of wearying out the right ; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope ; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart ; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, " Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here...
Page 97 - ... gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!
Page 96 - Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course—and in truth it was something very like it in that house.

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