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There are warehouses in this city where it is possible for a person to walk ankle-deep literally to wade in bright-plumaged bird-skins, and see them piled shoulder-high on either side of him a sight to make the angels weep! Not the angel called woman.
There were garments made of fish-skins and bird-skins, smelling of oil and semi-transparent, as if saturated with it; and half-musical instruments, or implements, made of twigs strung full of the beaks of birds that clattered with a weird, unearthly Alaskan clatter.
It consisted of an undercoat of bird-skins, with the feathers inwards; bearskin pantaloons with the hair out; an upper coat of the grey seal; dogskin socks and sealskin boots. That young Eskimo did not visit his bride empty-handed.
Nothing could be plainly seen but the left arms, standing out of the water as stiff and inflexible as so many bars of bronze, relieved against the silvery brightness of the water. These advancing arms were adorned with the material of traffic bird-skins of variegated colors, bows and arrows, and live tamed parrots standing upon perches of bamboo.
Wallace gives the most interesting testimony, in his "Malay Archipelago," to the existence of a very distinct, and in some instances highly developed moral sense in the natives with whom he came in contact. In one case, a Papuan who had been paid in advance for bird-skins and who had not been able to fulfil his contract before Mr.
It is true he was unbribable, but bird-skins, butterflies, beetles, and, above all, news of big game pleased him. In other respects, too, he lived up to the Chinn tradition. He was fever-proof. A night's sitting out over a tethered goat in a damp valley, that would have filled the Major with a month's malaria, had no effect on him. He was, as they said, "salted before he was born."
"The sun has had enough of my bird-skins," he said; "find something else." She went out of the lodge saying to herself, "Was there ever so obstinate a boy?" She did not dare to answer this time that she had nothing. Luckily she thought of her own beautiful hair, and pulling some of it from among her locks, she quickly braided it into a cord, and, returning, she handed it to her brother.
It was one of those monsters which men saw in the old far-off times, quite covered with bird-skins. And it was so big that not a twitch of life could be seen in it. He was afraid now, and turned round, until he could no longer see it. Then he left that way, and came out into another place, where he saw another looking just the same.
They look to me, not like the clay-sparrows that Jesus made fly, but like bird-skins in a glass-case, stuffed with texts. The doubt of a man like my uncle must be a far better thing than their assurance! "Would you have been frightened if you had met him on the moor last night, little one?" he asked, after a pause. "Oh, no, uncle!" I returned.
And when a single house, it is said, advertises for 20,000 bird-skins at a time, no wonder if birds grow scarce; and no wonder, too, if the wholesale destruction of these insect-killers should avenge itself by a plague of vermin, caterpillars, and grubs innumerable.
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