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A bit that turns up on certain sands, here at home, for aught I know, as often as anywhere." "Which means Nazareth. We must teach you, Sir, that there are some things at home as rare as those abroad." "I am taught," he said, very low, and without looking up. "Just tell me, what is amber?" "Fossil gum." "Can you say those words and not like it?
I'd just as soon be as peaked and blue-white as Mrs. Jo G.'s Maud, but I know pretty looks are just so much to the good " "Or bad!" broke in David. "Well, have it that way. But it is according to how you use them. I'm going to use my good looks wisely!" "By gum!" muttered David. This was his escape valve. When other words failed, "by gum" eased the tension.
We ought, it is true, to remove superstition from the persuasion we have of the gods, as we would the gum from our eyes; but if that be impossible, we must not root out and extinguish with it the belief which the most have of the gods; nor is that a dismaying and sour one either, as these gentlemen feign, while they libel and abuse the blessed Providence, representing her as a witch or as some fell and tragic fury.
Starting early, we crossed the Hanson, and got through the scrub to the gum plains, where we camped at sundown, the horses not being able to do the whole journey in one day. The creeks empty themselves into the plains, but there is no water. Still, from the number of birds that are about, I think there must be water not far away, but I have no time to search for it.
They are clothed with garments which they make of the fibres of the inner bark of certain trees, which fibres have such a consistence that they can be woven, and also cemented together by a kind of gum they have among them. They related further that they know how to make fluid fires, from which they have light during evening and night.
It is from Auckland that the Kauri gum is shipped. For a long time now about 8,000 tons of it have been brought into the town per year. It is worth about $300 per ton, unassorted; assorted, the finest grades are worth about $1,000. It goes to America, chiefly. It is in lumps, and is hard and smooth, and looks like amber the light-colored like new amber, and the dark brown like rich old amber.
Different kinds of earthenware, I have elsewhere observed, are manufactured in the island. They have a practice of perfuming their hair with oil of benzoin, which they distil themselves from the gum by a process doubtless of their own invention. In procuring it a priuk, or earthen rice-pot, covered close, is used for a retort.
By chance a resinous substance which had come from the far North fell into his hands, and he found that when combined with an African gum it gave astonishing results. Before this happened, however, his employers had sent him out on the road, and as they were sceptical about his discovery and he would not take them fully into his confidence, they merely promised to keep his place open for a time.
"But you must not squeak it out in a little wee false voice, as small as this"; the maestro held up his thumb and finger, with a pinch of snuff between them. "Bah? Sor Ercole, do you take me for a soprano?" cried the boy, laughing, as he washed off the paint and the gum where the beard had stuck.
Next day the continued rain made road work impossible, and as he hobbled back and forth to feed the mules, chewing gum hid two triangular cuts in his shackles. Again that night, storm and rain drowned out the sound that came from the tent where he sat hunched forward on his cot, sawing patiently and methodically away.
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