United States or Madagascar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Out of these the landlord made a good penny, as he charged an extensive percentage upon the original cost, that is, to strangers; but if you were in Button's confidence, then was there no better fellow to intrust with a negotiation for a pair of snow-shoes, or moose-horns, or anything else in that line of business.
When the steamer landed, he acted as cicerone, and pointed out to me the main object of interest thereabouts, the dinner-table. We dined with lumbermen and moose-hunters, scufflingly. The moose is the lion of these regions. Near Greenville, a gigantic pair of moose-horns marks a fork in the road. Thenceforth moose-facts and moose-legends become the staple of conversation.
I blessed mentally the careless individual who had thus unconsciously provided for our especial shelter; and as the wind had now suddenly arisen sharp from the west, driving the fog before it with clouds of fine drifting snow, I was glad to get under the lee of the providential wall, in the hospitable shelter of which, before two minutes had elapsed, "Stephano, my drunken butler," was snoring away like a phalanx of bullfrogs, with his head bolstered up somehow between the great moose-horns, and his brawny limbs rolled carelessly in the warm but somewhat unsavory skin of the dead monarch of the forest.
He was surrounded with the trophies of his rod and gun; the walls were plentifully garnished, he told us, with moose-horns and deer-horns, bear-skins, and fox-tails; for the captain's double-barreled rifle had seen service in Canada and Jamaica; he had killed salmon in Nova Scotia, and trout, by his own account, in all the streams of the three kingdoms.
While Adèle was guiding the missionary to his cottage, he was sitting in his kitchen, which also served for a general reception room, burnishing up an old Dutch fowling-piece. The apartment was furnished with cooking utensils, and coarse wooden furniture; the walls hung around with fishing tackle, moose-horns, skins of wild animals and a variety of firearms.
Like fronds of tree-fern, like great corals or sea-fans, these great palmated plates of bone lift themselves from his head, grand, useless, clumsy. A pair of moose-horns overlooks me as I write; they weigh twenty pounds, are nearly five feet in spread, on the right horn are nine developed and two undeveloped antlers, the plates are sixteen inches broad, a doughty head-piece.
Moose-meat, combining the flavor of beefsteak and the white of turtle, appears on the table. Moose-horns with full explanations, so that the buyer can play the part of hunter, are for sale. Tame mooselings are exhibited. Sportsmen at Kinneo can choose a matinée with the trout or a soirée with the moose. The chief fact of a moose's person is that pair of strange excrescences, his horns.
Out of the spoils of these expeditions he sometimes made a handsome profit: a good pair of moose-horns, for instance, used to fetch from six to ten dollars; and there is always a demand for the venison in the Quebec market.
Word Of The Day