Word: tinderbox
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...less in an uproar. The Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Bulgars, Albanians, Rumanians all had their go at the Sultan and then fell to fighting among themselves. Half the time these little nations fought as the puppets of greater European Powers, and the Peninsula's reputation as the tinderbox of Europe was well-earned...
...latest, Here Comes a Candle, her theme is tiny, but so industriously does she magnify it that every character is touched by it, obsessed by it. The setting is New Moon Yard, an old tinderbox of a tenement in London. Some of the characters, mostly tenants of the Yard: a happy old Italian who hoards pound notes against a return to Palermo, scorns wasting two or three of them on fire insurance; an ex-Captain who lost all his nerve under fire, all his possessions in a fire; a cabinetmaker, who keeps forgetting to mail a letter to an insurance...
...last week passed a stream of big cars. Across the terrace of the Roosevelt house marched a parade of important visitors. As they came out, after talking to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there was gloomy information for the press. Said Financier Bernard Baruch, just back from abroad: "Europe is a tinderbox. Anything can happen." Said ordinarily cheerful Ambassador-at-Large Norman H. Davis, of the situation in general: "I can't see anything that is very promising." With two wars and a stockmarket slump to worry about between visitors, Franklin Delano Roosevelt presently absorbed his callers' point of view...
...plain by this time, however, that their efforts would be of little avail, for the flames were already showing signs of subsiding through sheer lack of sustaining fuel. At 5.30 o'clock this morning, the smouldering embers and skeleton walls were a mute testimony to the tinderbox qualities and inadequacy of Soldier Field's superannuated and condemned athletic center...
...methods employed in saving life and property, not knowing how soon he may be called upon in person to put them into operation. But, - and in all seriousness, - the undergraduates know perfectly well that there is constant danger of a terrible calamity by the burning of some of our tinderbox dormitories, and the fact that such a disaster is looked forward to by them was proved rather conclusively a few weeks ago, when an alarm, rung in from the box on Memorial Hall, emptied every building in the yard in less than two minutes, and sent half a thousand...