Heath's picturesque annual

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1836
 

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Page 68 - ... the frost than the stone causeway. The honour of the invention is due to M. Gourief ; and I have no doubt he will ultimately see it adopted in most of the great towns towards the north. It is the custom of the peasants to cut down the trees at some distance from the root, and thus a great deal of wood will be turned to a useful purpose which would otherwise only encumber the ground. Every peasant, besides, by means of his axe alone, is able to construct such a pavement, and in Russia hands are...
Page 114 - Suspending himself in his stirrups, he girded the needle with a cord, the ends of which he fastened around his waist ; and, so supported, he leaned gradually back, till the soles of his feet were planted against the spire. In this position he threw, by a strong effort, a coil of cord over the ball ; and so coolly and accurately was the aim taken, that at the first trial, it fell in the required direction, and he saw the end hang down on the opposite side. To draw himself up...
Page 113 - The angel, the object of his visit, was above this ball, and even concealed from his view by its smooth, round, and glittering expanse. 'Only fancy the wretch at that moment, turning up his grave eyes, and graver beard, to an obstacle that seemed to defy the daring and ingenuity of man ! But Telouchkine was not dismayed. He was prepared for the difficulty ; and the means by which he essayed to surmount it exhibited the same prodigious simplicity as the rest of the feat. Suspending himself in his...
Page 114 - ... auxiliary to climb to the summit —were now an easy part of his task; and in a few minutes more Telouchkine stood by the side of the angel, and listened to the shout that burst like sudden thunder from the concourse below, yet came to his ear only like a faint and hollow murmur. The cord, which he had...
Page 139 - When no provision was made in the contract, according to the same authority, they were accustomed " to discipline their wives very severely." At marriage the bridegroom had a whip in one boot, and a jewel in the other, and the poor girl tried her fortune by choosing. "If she happen upon the jewel," says Collins, " she is lucky; if on the whip, she gets a lash.
Page 112 - This man was a roofer of houses (a slater as he would be called in countries where slates were used,) and his speculations by degrees assumed a more practical character than the idle wonders and conjectures of the rest of the crowd. The spire was entirely covered with sheets of gilded copper, and presented a surface to the eye as smooth as if it had been one mass of burnished gold.
Page 113 - The upper loops he fastened upon two of the projecting nails above his head, and placed his foot in the others. Then digging the fingers of one hand into the interstices of the sheets of copper, he raised up one of his stirrups with the other hand so as to make it catch a nail higher up. The same operation he performed on behalf of the other leg, and so on alternately. And thus he climbed, nail by nail, step by step, and stirrup by stirrup, till his...
Page 170 - if you would please a Russian with musick, get a concert of Billingsgate nightingales, which joyned with a flight of screech owls, a nest of jackdaws, a pack of hungry wolves, seven hogs in a windy day, and as many cats with their...
Page 112 - lofty, and light, and small," and is properly represented in the engraving as fading away almost into a point in the sky, is, in reality, terminated by a globe of considerable dimensions, on which an angel stands, supporting a large cross. This angel, less respected by the weather than perhaps his holy character deserved, fell into disrepair; and some suspicions were entertained that he designed re-visiting, uninvoked, the surface of the earth.

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