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It is a substitute for twine, and useful for many a purpose, and is now sold to the merchants at about a shilling per pound. Baskets and fans are made as of old of the cocoa-nut leaflet, floor mats and a finer kind of baskets from the pandanus leaf. Twenty or thirty pieces of the rib of the cocoa-nut leaflet, fastened close together with a thread of cinnet, form a comb.
"Your request shall be granted; but as the crime of Sôgorô was great, his body must be exposed for three days and three nights, after which the corpse shall be given to you." When the hour had arrived, the condemned were dragged forth bound, and made to sit upon coarse mats.
A high dais at the further end was roofed in by a broad canopy of scarlet velvet spangled with silver fleurs-de-lis, and supported at either corner by silver rods. This was approached by four steps carpeted with the same material, while all round were scattered rich cushions, oriental mats and costly rugs of fur.
We entered, and the pilgrims broke specimens from the foundation walls, though they had to touch, and even step, upon the "praying carpets" to do it. It was almost the same as breaking pieces from the hearts of those old Arabs. To step rudely upon the sacred praying mats, with booted feet a thing not done by any Arab was to inflict pain upon men who had not offended us in any way.
It's like the little Scotch girl who said she knew when she got religion, for she had to sweep under the mats. Peggy was all a-grin, and Lord! how she went at it. Later, she attacked the mats. It had set her thinking. I saw 'em hanging out, and she beating them as she must often feel like beating Pete." A real laugh greeted this, and Jock glowed with approval.
We knew not what it was, but we breathed it in, and it went to the marrow of our bones. Opechancanough we rarely saw, though we were bestowed so near to him that his sentinels served for ours. Like some god, he kept within his lodge with the winding passage, and the hanging mats between him and the world without. At other times, issuing from that retirement, he would stride away into the forest.
I stuck my head into one of the windows, and the sight was so new to me for things went quite different in the islands I was acquainted with that I stayed and looked on. The congregation sat on the floor on mats, the women on one side, the men on the other, all rigged out to kill the women with dresses and trade hats, the men in white jackets and shirts.
Stone hammers and axes, obsidian, flint and other arrow-heads, spear-heads, and knives, mortars and pestles, metates or meal grinders, obsidian and flint drills for making holes through stone or shell, bows and arrows, the bows of tough wood often brought from afar, and the arrows pointed with chipped flint or obsidian, deftly and securely tied to the shaft with tough and durable strings of sinews; shell beads, pipes, bone awls, punches, needles, etc.; stone fetiches in semblance of animals, the like of which were never seen on land or sea; ornaments of shell, turquoise and onyx, and even a kind of jade; sandals and mats of yucca fibre, and exquisitely delicate feather robes, these are some of the things that the excavators have found.
Luckily, one day, grubbing in a mound of snow between the huts of a village in the hope of finding there a frozen potato or some vegetable garbage he could put between his long and shaky teeth, Colonel D'Hubert uncovered a couple of mats of the sort Russian peasants use to line the sides of their carts with.
"Yes; and so would you if you knew her as I do. I'd trust my money, and my life, and everything with her. D'ye see that waggon of mats and baskets? That's her department; started on her own 'ook. My word, she's a daisy." "Well, Shorty, I'm delighted to see you. And now I must be going. You seem quite happy." "Happy," said the boatswain, "that's not a name for it.
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