As recently as the 1950s a character called Frank the Frame Burner drove his horse and cart around London collecting cast-off 19th-century gilt frames to melt down.
But he warned that some MPs believed that support for the current system among peers "is motivated purely by self-interest and that it will somehow melt away if we can be bought off by some vague offer of grandfather rights for existing members".
And Afghanistan is a country not of very powerful cities but of thousands of isolated villages cut off in severe winters, allowing guerrillas and insurgents to melt away and return.
Hot enough to melt the church bells, the Palm Sunday fire peeled five centuries of whitewash off the walls, exposing enormous Gothic frescoes painted when the building was erected.
Colleges and universities see a fair amount of last-minute movement, known in admissions circles as "summer melt, " when students change their plans or decide to attend another school after getting in off the wait list.