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It will easily be seen that the slightest weight on either side of this poised platform will throw the catch from the end of the spindle, and release the hoop and the platform in an instant is covered by the net, capturing whatever unlucky little bird may have chanced to jump upon it. This is a very pretty little trap, and will well repay the trouble of making it.
Then arena-slaves carried in and set down on the sand a full hundred feet from the hoop and chains, a dozen or more wicker crates full of quacking white ducks with yellow bills. They and the noise they made recalled unpleasantly to me my sensations as I clung to the alder bush immersed in Bran Brook, after Agathemer and I had crawled through the drain at Villa Andivia.
The sitting-room contained nothing but a collection of odds and ends of rubbish which belonged to Charley his 'things' as he called them bits of wood, string and rope; one wheel of a perambulator, a top, an iron hoop and so on.
The parrot, swinging in the gilded hoop within her gaudy cage, attempted in vain to attract notice, for Carker was too observant of his visitor to heed her; and the visitor, abstracted in meditation, looked fixedly, not to say sullenly, over his stiff neckcloth, without raising his eyes from the table-cloth.
"Ah!" breathed Bubby, in intense relief, for perhaps the twentieth time. "Now tell about the girl that went to seek her fortune!" "Away wid ye!" cried Bridget Foye. "Kape yer promish, an' lave that till ye come back!" So Herbert and his hoop trundled off to the big tree. "An' how are yees now, honey?" says Bridget to Glory, a whole catechism of questions in the one inquiry.
They wear as Ornaments, Necklaces made of Shells, Bracelets, or Hoops, about their Arms, made mostly of Hair Twisted and made like a Cord Hoop; these they wear tight about the upper parts of their Arms, and some have Girdles made in the same manner. Some of these we saw on Possession Island wore breast plates, which we supposed were made of Mother of Pearl Shells.
She's never mentioned his name. D'you mind that ring of rubies she wears, like drops of blood all round the hoop? 'Twas his. She shifted it to the left hand, I saw. It was broken once, and what do you think she did? She put a blow-pipe at the candle-flame, and, holding it up in tiny pincers, soldered the two ends together without taking it off her finger, and it burning into the bone!
One of my inventions was a large thermometer made of an iron rod, about three feet long and five eighths of an inch in diameter, that had formed part of a wagon-box. The expansion and contraction of this rod was multiplied by a series of levers made of strips of hoop iron.
By care and caution, the slaves at the rope obeying my signals promptly, I at last had all seven apes clear of their cages, and not swinging too much. Then the cages were removed and the hoop lowered somewhat. Then I steadied each chain till none had any side-ways swing. Each ape finally hung on a level with every other ape, and about two yards above the sand of the arena.
While the young man whose troubled career it is here proposed to follow was wearing his first jacket, and bowling his first hoop, a domestic misfortune, falling on a household of strangers, was destined nevertheless to have its ultimate influence over his happiness, and to shape the whole aftercourse of his life.
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