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It seemed to him a solemn time: and he wondered if that was the time when the fellows in Clongowes wore blue coats with brass buttons and yellow waistcoats and caps of rabbitskin and drank beer like grown-up people and kept greyhounds of their own to course the hares with. He looked at the window and saw that the daylight had grown weaker. There would be cloudy grey light over the playgrounds.
So the first garment of the earth's first baby was a rabbitskin, which accounts for the rhyme which mothers sing about "Gone to fetch a rabbitskin, to wrap the baby bunting in." When the rabbit had presented his gift, he hopped down from the Woman's lap very much thinner. "And now can I bring the other animals?" he asked. The Man hesitated.
For very cold weather both men and women were provided with togas for their protection. Sometimes the men would have a bearskin or elkskin for a toga; more often they made their togas by piecing together the skins of wolves, mountain lions, wolverines, wild cats, beavers, and otters. The women sometimes made theirs of fawnskins, but rabbitskin robes were far more common.
These rabbitskins were tanned with the fur on, and cut into strips; then cords were made of the fiber of wild flax or yucca plants, and round these cords the strips of rabbitskin were rolled, so that they made long ropes of rabbitskin coils with a central cord of vegetal fiber; then these coils were woven in parallel strings with cross strands of fiber.
Their aboriginal clothing was very scant, the most important being wildcatskin and wolfskin robes for the men, and rabbitskin robes for the women, though for occasions of festival they had clothing of tanned deer and antelope skins, often decorated with fantastic ornaments of snake skins, feathers, and the tails of squirrels and chipmunks.
In it, cradled in close fine-woven osiers with a lining of rabbitskin, lay a solemn black-eyed baby, looking almost as old as the old woman herself. "It's like a changeling," thought Eleanor, looking with fascinated eyes at the weird little being. Lady Philippa smiled, and laid her hand softly on the furry black head. "This is an unusual sight in your cottage," she said. "Whence came it, Goody?"
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