tallow-candles

In a fragment of a speech written in 1858, describing those who stubbornly opposed the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, he came up with this marvelous sentence: "Though they blazed, like tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by the smell."

All the Presidents' Literature Jonathan Raban 2009

According to the custom of the time, the Master of Ravenswood attended the Lord Keeper to his apartment, followed by Caleb, who placed on the table, with all the ceremonials due to torches of wax, two rudely-framed tallow-candles, such as in those days were only used by the peasantry, hooped in paltry clasps of wire, which served for candlesticks.

The Bride of Lammermoor 2008

If you are a countryman, who would introduce a cow into the metropolis, the city demands twenty-four francs for such a privilege: if you have a hundredweight of tallow-candles, you must, previously, disburse three francs: if a drove of hogs, nine francs per whole hog: but upon these subjects Mr. Bulwer, Mrs. Trollope, and other writers, have already enlightened the public.

The Paris Sketch Book 2006

Numbers of sheep are reared in the mountains, principally for the sake of the tallow, for the consumption of tallow-candles in the mines is enormous.

Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern Edward Burnett Tylor

Meanwhile, I had forgotten that Sir Walter Raleigh's century knew nothing of gas-light, and that it would require a prodigious and wasteful expenditure of tallow-candles to illuminate the Tunnel sufficiently to discern even a ghost.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 67, May, 1863 Various

Esquimaux, with his daily twenty-pound quantum of train-oil, gravy, and tallow-candles, -- the alderman puffing over callipash and callipee, -- the backwoodsman hungering after fattest of pork, -- such men as these were no common sinners: they were assassins who struck at the very fountain of life, and throttled a human stomach.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 Various

Add to this two or three tallow-candles stuck on a cocoa tin, and the fact that none of the officers had shaved, or had had their clothes off for a week, and had walked some forty-five miles through rivers and mud, and you will have some idea of how the officers 'mess of one of the smartest of Her Majesty's foot regiments do for themselves in time of war.

South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, 15th Dec. 1899 Louis Creswicke

Preparations had been made by Father M'Clane for holding a regular confessional; and an hour before sunset, he had taken his seat in the little darkened chamber, behind a table on which four tallow-candles were burning, with an uncertain, flickering light.

Live to be Useful or, The Story of Annie Lee and her Irish Nurse Anonymous

The streets were dimly lighted, but the chairs, each carried by four bearers, were preceded and followed by outriders bearing large silk lanterns in which were tallow-candles, while a heavy cart with relays of bearers brought up the rear.

Court Life In China 1909

She looked round her and now perceived that someone was sitting at the table, the other side of the tallow-candles -- a man, with head bent over a bundle of papers and shading his face against the light with his hand.

The Elusive Pimpernel Emmuska Orczy Orczy 1906