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It seems to have a conscious life of its own, so large and glorious it is, so sensitive to every breath of air, so nobly placed upon its bending stem, so royal in its solitude. I first saw it years ago on the Simplon, feathering the drizzling crags above Isella. Then we found it near Baveno, in a crack of sombre cliff beneath the mines.
Out of this there arose, during the spring succeeding, a talk in the parish that Gabriel Oak was feathering his nest fast. "Whatever d'ye think," said Susan Tall, "Gable Oak is coming it quite the dand. He now wears shining boots with hardly a hob in 'em, two or three times a-week, and a tall hat a-Sundays, and 'a hardly knows the name of smockfrock.
There was a God in heaven, and the rabbit-stew would be ready soon. It was useless to attempt to force matters. And as for his taunts, well, he was but feathering my arrows. So I sat on like a stone. "Go, Master Wheatman," she urged faintly, but I did not even turn to look at her. My heart was thumping on my ribs, my nerves tingling, my muscles involuntarily tightening for a spring.
There are cases in which tarring and feathering would soothe the moral sense of the right-minded onlooker. And even where things are not so bad as in the case of which we have been thinking, it remains the social curse of this age, that people with a few hundreds a year determinedly act in various respects as if they had as many thousands.
The Baroness Riedesel, the wife of one of Burgoyne's generals, who was in Boston in 1777, says that the people were all dressed alike in a peasant costume with a leather strap round the waist, that they were of very low and insignificant stature, and that only one in ten of them could read or write. She pictures New Englanders as tarring and feathering cultivated English ladies.
The feathering action of the floats is accomplished by means of a pin fixed to the interior of the paddle box, set 3 inches in advance of the centre of the shaft, and in the same horizontal line.
I should enjoy fighting old Pompous if I were in his place. But they're as civil as butter to each other, and then old Pompous goes on feathering his nest, and backing up the tradespeople, and the governor pitches into the young men of the present day." "He did give you the bigger allowance, didn't he?" said I, at this pause in Jem's rhetoric. "Yes, he did. He's awfully good to me.
And each missile bore its individual message to his memory a tiny tuft of scarlet inserted in the feathering. Quinton Edge waited an instant or so, as though out of pure politeness, then turned and faced the great building that towered mountainously above his head.
Then the actual difficulties of handling the long and heavy oars, the first essays at feathering, with a complicated splash of air and water, as when a wild-duck in rising swims and flies together, and uses neither element handsomely, the occasional pulling of a particularly vigorous stroke through the atmosphere alone, and at other times the compensating disappearance of nearly the whole oar beneath the liquid surface, as if some Uncle Kühleborn had grasped it, while our Undine by main strength tugged it from the beguiling wave.
No colours could paint the beauty of these lovely little creatures, which seemed to be of several different kinds, for some had patches of scarlet, of orange, blue, and white to add to the brilliancy of their feathering; and so little used were they to the sight of man that they seemed to pay no attention to us, but allowed us to go very close, so that we could see them flit and hover and balance themselves before the sweet-scented starry bell-flowers, into whose depths they thrust their long thin beaks after the honey and insects that made them their home.
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