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The necessary expense of board and instruction was beyond anything that she could manage, so much so that it was quite out of the question. It was all over with Toni's plans. She rose and thanked the wood-carver for his willingness to take the boy, but she would have to decline his offer. Then she beckoned to Toni, whose eyes were still so fastened to the glass case that he paid no attention.
The Great Church was always a pleasant sight, with its crowded congregation of every hue, all well dressed, and with the universal West Indian look of comfort; and its noble span of roof overhead, all cut from island timber another proof of what the wood-carver may effect in the island hereafter. Certainly distractions were frequent and troublesome, at least to a newcomer.
The hawk hovering over its prey, which the dumb old wood-carver had begun as a symbol of the feeling of vengeance he could not give utterance to when brooding over Roland Sefton's crime, had been brought to a marvellous perfection by Jean Merle's practised hand, and it had been placed by him under the crucifix which old Marlowe had fastened in the window-frame, where the last rays of daylight fell upon the bowed head hidden by the crown of thorns.
There was Sing You the fruit-seller, and Li Ton-ti the wood-carver; Hi Seng left his clients to cry in vain for water; and Wang Yu, the idle pipe-maker, closed his shop of "The Fountain of Beauty," and hung on the shutter the gilt dragon to keep away customers in his absence.
I refer of course to those figures which the artist must be supposed to have executed with his own hand, as, for example, the central figure of the Crucifixion group and those of the Magdalene and St. John. The greater number of the figures were probably, as was suggested to me by Mr. Ranshaw, of Lowth, executed by a local wood-carver from models in clay and wax furnished by the artist himself.
Then he turned to Peter, and for a minute the two men stood looking furtively at one another, as though each were trying to read his companion's thoughts. Finally, the wood-carver spoke. "I grieve, Master Burkgmäier," he said, with courteous sympathy, "that you should have lost your foster-son, to whom report says you were much attached.
And everybody's curious to know just what Hen Tomlins's been doing to the furniture. You know when the minister found out what a fine wood-carver and cabinet-maker Hen was he had him go through the house. And they say that Bernard Rollins, the portraiture man, is mixed up in the housewarming too. But nobody can figure out how. And that ain't the worst.
The heads of this company were Jacone, the goldsmith Piloto, and the wood-carver Tasso; but the worst of them all was Jacone, for the reason that, among his other fine qualities, his every word was always a foul slander against somebody.
With the increased quality of the carved woodwork manufactured, there was a proportion of ill-finished and over-ornamented work produced; and although, as has been before observed, the manufacture of cheap marqueterie in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities was bringing the name of Dutch furniture into ill-repute still, so far as the writer's observations have gone, the Flemish wood-carver appears to have been, at the time now under consideration, ahead of his fellow craftsmen in Europe; and when in the ensuing chapter we come to notice some of the representative exhibits in the great International Competition of 1851, it will be seen that the Antwerp designer and carver was certainly in the foremost rank.
Grotesque design, for the reason already stated, frequently appears in the details of church architecture and furniture during the Middle Ages, particularly from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. The capital of a column was the favourite place for the indulgence of the mason’s taste in caricature; the misereres, or folding scats of the choir, for that of the wood-carver.
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