By the way, I endeavoured to stir up Lyell (who has been staying here some days with me) to theorise on the coal: his oolitic UPRIGHT Equisetums are dreadful for my submarine flora. I should die much easier if some one would solve me the coal question. I sometimes think it could not have been formed at all. Old Sir Anthony Carlisle once said to me gravely, that he supposed Megatherium and such cattle were just sent down from heaven to see whether the earth would support them; and I suppose the coal was rained down to puzzle mortals. You must work the coal well in India.英文原著 · 《The Life and Letters-1》
Next, Lord Cromer, at Port Said, stretched out the arm of international law, and laid it upon the Spanish fleet. Belligerents may legally take coal enough at neutral ports to reach their nearest "home port." That Spanish fleet was on its way from Spain to Manila through the Suez Canal. It could have reached there, had Lord Cromer allowed it coal enough to make the nearest home port ahead of it--Manila. But there was a home port behind it, still nearer, namely, Barcelona. He let it take coal enough to get back to Barcelona. Thus, England again stepped in.英文原著 · 《A Straight Deal》
"It's no good with North. Wait until the highly-intelligent Meekin comes. You can twist that worthy successor of the Apostles round your little finger!"
"Silence there!" cries the overseer. "Do you want me to report yer?"
Amid such diversions the days rolled on, and Rufus Dawes almost longed for the Coal Mines. To be sent from the settlement to the Coal Mines, and from the Coal Mines to the settlement, was to these unhappy men a "trip". At Port Arthur one went to an out-station, as more fortunate people go to Queenscliff or the Ocean Beach now-a-days for "change of air".英文原著 · 《For the Term of His Natural Life》
"Let us sit on this log at the roadside," says I, "and forget the inhumanity and ribaldry of the poets. It is in the glorious columns of ascertained facts and legalised measures that beauty is to be found. In this very log we sit upon, Mrs. Sampson," says I, "is statistics more wonderful than any poem. The rings show it was sixty years old. At the depth of two thousand feet it would become coal in three thousand years. The deepest coal mine in the world is at Killingworth, near Newcastle. A box four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet eight inches deep will hold one ton of coal.英文原著 · 《Heart of the West》
What is more, if the English want coal they propose to buy it in an ordinary decent way from a Christian coal-dealer in their own country. They do not purpose to ruin their own coal industry for the sake of building up the prosperity of the German nation.英文原著 · 《My Discovery of England》
"Coal!" he shouted, rushing to the front of the cave. "Coal! Oh, Jack! Dear old Jack! It's coal!"
Trembling between fear and hope, he broke in pieces the glowing lumps, rushed back to the seam, gathered more of the black stuff, and heaped it around the fire. Soon his doubts were all at rest. The black lumps were soon on fire and blazed up with a blue flame. But for his foot, he would have mounted Jacob and ridden straight off for the ranch through all the storm.英文原著 · 《The Foreigner》
Is it heated in here, or did you teach the rats to shovel coal into the engine?美剧 · 《2 Broke Girls》