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"When you come near the house, hide yourself until Time goes out; and as soon as he has gone forth, enter, and you will find an old, old woman, with a beard that touches the ground and a hump reaching to the sky. Her hair, like the tail of a dapple-grey horse, covers her heels; her face looks like a plaited collar, with the folds stiffened by the starch of years.
She sifted the brown sand between her fingers, and cleansed it from all impurities; and she brought the prettiest of the pebbles and laid them in tasteful patterns. She plaited a kind of hammock out of the sea grass, and hung it at the entrance of the archway; and in the afternoons, when the sun was hot, she lay in it and took her siesta.
One day she tried the line, with which she was to lower herself down; it was too short. And so she plaited more. But as time went on, the brothers began to long for their sister. And they all set to work making crossbows.
She dried her brown, muscular arms, rubbed her body vigorously with one of the rags and then began to comb out her long, tangled hair, not gently but with a sort of relentless energy. Swiftly, deftly she plaited it into two long braids, which she left hanging down in front of her shoulders, squaw fashion. "How long had you known this man Suggs, Moll?" suddenly inquired the other woman.
We then continued our walk till we arrived at a house, built in the native style, by the side of a rocky stream, like a Scotch burn. The uprights of the house were banana trees, transplanted with their leaves on, so as to shade the roof, which was formed of plaited cocoa-nut palm-leaves, each about fifteen feet long, laid transversely across bamboo rafters.
She was "artistic," I suspected, so far as Grimwinter allowed such tendencies. She had a soft, surprised eye, and thin lips, with very pretty teeth. Round her neck she wore what ladies call, I believe, a "ruche," fastened with a very small pin in pink coral, and in her hand she carried a fan made of plaited straw and adorned with pink ribbon. She wore a scanty black silk dress.
He took out the rushes which had somehow got mixed up with the hay, and plaited them quickly. 'My son, what are you doing? asked the horse wonderingly. 'Oh, nothing! replied he. 'Just weaving a chin strap to bind your jaws together, in case you might wish to eat any more! The white horse sighed deeply when it heard this, and made up its mind to be content with what it had eaten.
But the brethren that morning had plaited some whale sinew, and fastened the haft of the ax with which they intended to cut up the whale; and he, supposing that they had been the sinews of the rein-deer, raised the cry. Being informed of his mistake, he changed his tone and exclaimed, "O! the rotten wood! O! the rotten wood!"
My face was uncommonly flushed, and a look of indignation had crept, somehow, even into my braids, which, having been plaited too tightly, stuck out in crooks and kinks from the side of my head. Incidentally, I was horrified to notice how thin I was thin, even for a dying Antony and my frock was so outgrown that it hardly covered my knees. "Ridiculous!"
"Even to you, old friend, I have nothing more to say of this killing than I have said to Doc, and the rest of 'em. I've done many a fool trick in my time, and maybe I'm doing another now. But I'm doing it with my eyes wide open. There's the rope ahead, a nasty, ugly, curly rope; maybe plaited by a half-breed with dirty hands. But what's the odds?
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