Cellist

“ The cellar is the foundation of domestic comfort. Into its dark, cavernous recesses the child's imagination fearfully goes. Bogies guard the bins of choicest apples. I know not what comical sprites sit astride the cider-barrels ranged along the walls. The feeble flicker of the tallow-candle does not at all dispel, but creates, illusions, and magnifies all the rich possibilities of this underground treasure-house. When the cellar-door is opened, and the boy begins to descend into the thick darkness, it is always with a heart-beat as of one started upon some adventure. ”

“ Presently she returned, flying. "I know! Let's have it in the cellar! In the cellar! Oh, it'll be lovely!"
The outer door of the cellar was open, and they proceeded down some steps with their treasure. There was plenty of light; the cellar was high-walled, warm, and dry. They named it an ideal place. Two huge cylindrical furnaces were humming away, one at either end. Overhead the beams detonated with the different emotions which agitated the tea party. ”

“ If you so much as open one of the doors, you will suffer for it.”
“Why should I want to go into the cellars?” asked the lad. “The house and the yard are good enough for me.”
“That is well,” answered the master, and then he mounted a great black steed and rode away.
The lad stayed at home and cleaned and polished and ate and drank. “I wonder what can be in those cellars that my master does not want me to see!” thought the lad. “Not that I mean to look, but it does no harm to wonder about it.”
Every hour the lad stayed there in the house alone he grew more curious about the cellars. ”

“ Everything appeared to be in order, and I was on the point of extinguishing my candle, when the thought suggested itself to me to have another glance 'round the cellars. I had not, if I remember rightly, been into them since my hasty search on the evening of the attack.
For, perhaps, the half of a minute, I hesitated. I would have been very willing to forego the task—as, indeed, I am inclined to think any man well might—for of all the great, awe-inspiring rooms in this house, the cellars are the hugest and weirdest. Great, gloomy caverns of places, unlit by any ray of daylight. ”

“ It would have looked unfriendly not to accompany him, so they pushed their way together through the cellar door surmounted by the sociable red triangle.
It was a big cellar, but brown uniforms and ruddy faces crowded it from wall to wall. In one corner the men were sitting on packing-boxes at a long table made of boards laid across barrels, the smoky light of little oil lamps reddening their cheeks and deepening the furrows in their white foreheads as they laboured over their correspondence. ”

“ We are in a cellar about ten feet square, and this is separated from others like it by a partition. We are really in one room of a big cellar stretching under a crowded tenement house over our heads. We look around us; and as soon as our eyes get accustomed to the darkness—for the only light is from the narrow width of glass, reaching from the ground up to the floor which forms the ceiling of the room where we stand—we see that this is the den—for you cannot call it anything else—of an old man and his wife. ”

“ If the cellar of a house does not prove good, that is to say, if it should prove incapable of keeping wine, cheese, milk, beer, meat, and in these days potatoes, from the cold of winter and the heat of summer, the house itself is of little value. This large rock-cellar doubtless answered well the purpose for which it was designed. I pictured it to myself stored with hogsheads of wine, barrels of flour, salt beef and bacon, and tiers of cheese, against the annually recurrent siege of winter, or an expected summer siege from the lord of some neighbouring castle. ”

“ At the roots of the mountains they dig great cellars and grottos, and strike a hole about a foot square, ten or twelve feet into the hill, which all the summer long blows a fresh air into the cellar, so that the wine in those cellars drinks almost as cold as if it were in ice. ”

“ At any moment of the day or night it may come. Each of you then hasten to your appointed place and wait for the sound of my bass in the cellar. There will be no mistake about it; you will hear it rising through the building. Then, each in turn, as it reaches you, lift your voices and call your notes. The chord thus rising through the building will gather in the flying Letters: it will unite them; it will summon them down to the fundamental master-tone I utter in the cellar. The moment the Letter summoned by each particular voice reaches the cellar, that voice must cease its utterance. ”

“ There, to-day as yesterday, are to be seen in Dudley Street, Seven Dials, the deep black cellars, reached through a gap in the pavement, and by means of a steep ladder, and in each, at a greater depth in the earth than the sewers and the nests of the sewer rats, families of human beings - fathers, mothers, and little children-live and eat and drink, and make themselves at home. ”

“ In the centre of the cellar there lies an iron plate. Whosoever ventures to lift it may look into a black and narrow shaft with slippery sides. Cold and sheer it runs down into the heart of the earth. ”

“ What do the little girls in the cellar think that Austin does? He makes believe just the other way: he pretends that the strange great trees with their broad leaves and slab-sided roots are European oaks; and the places on the road up (where you and I and the little girls in the cellar have already gone) he calls by old-fashioned, far-away European names, just as if you were to call the cellar stair and the corner of the next street—if you could only manage to pronounce the names—Upolu and Savaii. And so it is with all of us, with Austin and the lean man and the little girls in the cellar ”

“ Down into the cellar. . . Back to the brothel. . . We don't need any daughter now . . . don't need her. . . She's become what her mother was. . . God won't have it. . . Back to the cellar. . . Down into the brothel!
Sarah
So you want to go back to the cellar? — Into the cellar, then! Much I care! (Resumes her packing.) He wants to ruin us completely. What has come over the man? (For a moment she is absorbed in reflection.) If you're going to stand there like a lunatic, I'll get busy myself! (Takes off her diamond ear-rings.) I'll go over to Shloyme's and give him my diamond ear-rings. ”

“ After working on the night of the 25th, two men were left down in the cellar to cover up all traces of the work during the day, and as soon as it was dark to complete the work—to go into the large sewer, explore it, and have every thing ready by eight or nine o'clock, at which time the bricks would be removed from the hole leading into the cellar, which had to be placed carefully in their original position every night, from the beginning to the completion of the work. ”

“ The ladies gradually became accustomed to the noise of the fire over their heads, and as two of them were naturally of a very lively turn of mind, the cellar presented occasionally a scene of hilarity, fun, and good humour, which strongly contrasted with the more frequent one of alarm, fear, and despondency. It must not be supposed that the ladies were confined prisoners during the whole time in the cellar; curiosity prevailed, even at the risk of life, and there was many a creep up stairs to gain a peep at the scene without. ”

“ It must then be something out of the house. What could it be? I thought of the assistant's fondness for photography, and his trick of vanishing into the cellar. The cellar! There was the end of this tangled clue. Then I made inquiries as to this mysterious assistant, and found that I had to deal with one of the coolest and most daring criminals in London. He was doing something in the cellar—something which took many hours a day for months on end. What could it be, once more? I could think of nothing save that he was running a tunnel to some other building. ”

“ The smells of cellars are a rare treat to dogs, especially ancient Brooklyn cellars which have a cachet all their own. The cellar of the Haunted Bookshop was, to Bock, a fascinating place, illuminated by a warm glow from the furnace, and piled high with split packing-cases which Roger used as kindling. ”

“ At length they reached the gully, and, crossing it, they ascended the steep slope on the other side. This brought them to the old French orchard, and to the very cellar which had been the scene of their memorable midnight operations. Looking down into the cellar, they could see the traces of their work very plainly. They had filled in the hole as well as they could, but the ground bore visible marks of having been turned up.
“If any of the fellows have been up here,” said Bart, “they must have noticed this.” ”

“ What man is he that would complain of having to bale out his cellar every week, if, on the other hand, that cellar gains thereby a fertility that keeps its floor sheeny, soft, and green—an interior tennis-court—from spring to spring, causing the gladsome click of the lawn-mower to be heard within its walls all through the still watches of [Pg 85] the winter day? I tell you, sir, it is the life to lead, that of our rural brother. I do not believe that in this whole vast city there is a cellar like that—an in-door garden-patch, as it were."
"No," returned the Doctor ”

“ Worldly little devil, I would stand about, musingly fitting my bare feet into cracked bricks and crevices of the damp cellar floor—walking over my grandfather's body, so to speak, into the court full of houses, and selling them for meat and drink, and clothes to wear.
At last a change came down into our cellar. The universal came down even as low as that—so will it mount to any heighten which a human creature can perch—and brought other changes with it. ”

“ All under the house runs a great cellar. I knew this from the first, because one broiling hot day, soon after I came, Sally took me down to get cool after I had dressed for somebody's At Home, and looked like a freshly boiled lobster. It's a series of rooms, perfectly ventilated, with rough walls, and cemented floors. One of the rooms is of enormous size, and there are stone pillars dotted about here and there for supports. There is one other that is rather large, but the rest are small. One is used as if it were an ice house ”

“ Next morning I managed to get up at the same gloriously early hour, and though the temperature of the cellar was a little below the freezing point, and my light was only a tallow candle the mill work went joyfully on. There were a few tools in a corner of the cellar,--a vise, files, a hammer, chisels, etc., that father had brought from Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse crooked one that was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine-tooth saw suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned corset, that cut the hardest wood smoothly. ”

“ He took a slice of bread from the drawer, and went into the cellar to draw himself some wine; having put the bread on the door-sill of the cellar, he went back to get his wine, as he did so he saw a dog come up and run away with his bread; he at once threw the spigot after the thief, so the spigot was lost, the bread was lost, and every drop of wine was lost, for it all ran out. Now there was a sack of flour in the cellar, and in order that his wife might not notice the wine he spread the flour over it. A goose was sitting on eggs in the cellar, and as he worked she hissed at him. ”

“ He was just going out again when he saw the glimmer of a candle in the Castle cellar. He stopped. Through the little barred windows he could plainly see a man come into the cellar with a candle in one hand and a chair upholstered in red silk in the other. It was the Master. He was shaved and dressed as though for a great occasion. Perhaps I might knock at the window and give him the Lady's message, thought the Miller, but stood still. ”

“ The water cellar is not a cellar at all, but a stone-paved room off the patio, delightfully cool and sloppy of a fiery July day, with the water-carriers unloading, and filling the array of dripping red jars with the day’s supply from the public fountain.
Every Spanish peasant wears a knife in his sash. ”

“ So she had closets made between the two bed rooms, and likewise between the parlour and kitchen. And she gave them a chance of helping themselves still further by having a good deep, dry cellar, where they could keep their half barrel of fish, and their little joints of meat, and small pots of butter from the heats of summer, and their vegetables from the frosts of winter, and why coal and wood should be kept out of doors in winter was more than she could tell. It was easy to build a cellar, she thought, and so the cellars were made. ”

“ The walls bore notices with a black hand pointing downwards to the cellar steps, and the big room echoed eerily to the footsteps of customers, who tramped across the tiled floor and disappeared downstairs to the vaults.
"One shell," the cashier was saying, "fell close outside there," waving a hand up the cellar steps. "Bang! crash! we feel the building shake—so." His hands left their task of counting notes, seized an imaginary person by the lapels of an imaginary coat and shook him violently. ”

“ It is not every one, and least of all a Londoner or town man, who can scoop him a cellar under the living rock, which is the true matrix for the development of good wine; but you will find no finer hold than that which lies deep, some forty to fifty feet, as the soil allows, without excess of moisture, nor with any opening save one to the north alone. In populous cities pent, the least you should insist on is. ”