Light was furnished from an apparatus like a fishing jack attached to the wall; every few minutes the woman fed it with a splinter of pine wood.

Very few of the peasants on the Amoor can afford the expense of candles, and as they rarely have fire-places they must burn pine splinters in this way.
Along the Amoor nearly every peasant house contains hundreds, and I think thousands, of cockroaches.

They are quiet in the day but do not fail to make themselves known at night.

The table where these children were eating swarmed with them, and I can safely say there wore five dozen on a space three feet square.

They ran everywhere about the premises except into the fire.