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Before the expiration of his apprenticeship he had a shop of his own, and sold japanned tea-trays and bellows. When he was able to rent a house, he made all the furniture with his own hands, and took a pride in having it very good, either solid mahogany or veneered. He saved money in the japanning business, and then on these savings undertook to teach himself painting.
Dignified, as became his exalted station, he never slapped his visitors' shoulders, or called them by their Christian names, but he treated them as entitled to his consideration without that stilted courtesy which rebuffs even when veneered with formal civility.
I am hoping that the boys and girls who come out in case-lots from these huge school plants will not be rows of lithographed cans on the shelves of life. I am hoping they will not be shorn of their individuality, but will have it stimulated and unfettered. I am anxious that they be not veneered but inspired, not denatured but discovered. All this school machinery is only machinery.
Now they arrived at the base of a great knob or dome veneered with ice and powdered with snow the utmost, summit, the last bit of solidity between them and the hollow vault of heaven.
He has made us hate all forms of tyranny and oppression and autocracy; he has made us hate all forms of hypocrisy and deceit. There have been some forms of kaiserism dwelling among us for many years, so veneered with respectability and custom that some were deceived by them; but the lid is off now the veneer has cracked the veil is torn, and we see things as they are.
Gilded cabinets veneered with tortoise-shell held, behind glass doors, all sorts of costly toys, and dolls in full costume. On a Venetian table with mosaic top lay a pack of cards and three heaps of money one of gold, one of silver, the third of copper. On a low, three-legged table was a something shaped like an organ, with a long row of metal and wooden pipes.
How far have we not gone past all that we of the oldest settled Western country, who have so veneered our lives that we no longer know of what wood they are made! Whom generations have so soaked with the preserve "good form" that we are impervious to the claims and clamour of that ill-bred creature life!
The secretary entered the drawing-room with the unembarrassed step of a somnambulist. His manner was that of one aware that the best manner consists in the absence of any at all. His coat might have come from Piccadilly, and when he found a seat Eden noticed that the soles of his shoes were veneered in black. In brief, he looked well-bred and well-groomed.
'The sandal-wood is not yet gone! But, my dear Joan, the altar of sandal-wood! If it is to be solid and not veneered, why, £50 would not buy it at Erromango. It sells in Sydney for about £70 a ton, and it is very heavy wood. However, I will send some of the largest planks I ever saw of the wood, and it is now well seasoned.
They have the solid grain of the English oak, not veneered by learning and the classics; not inlaid with arabesques from other nations, but developing wholly out of the English nationality. I have heard that Goethe said the reason for the great enthusiasm with which his countrymen regarded him was, that he did know how to write German, and so also these men knew how to write English.
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