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The first business was to dig a shallow, coffin-shaped trench large enough to contain two; it was much better for two men to bivouac together, since by putting one blanket only to sleep on, we had three with which to cover ourselves, besides our greatcoats. Nobody took any clothes off, with the exception of boots and putties.
The next morning we went fishing, that is, Tehei, Charmian, and I did, in the coffin-shaped canoe; but this time the enormous sail was left behind. There was no room for sailing and fishing at the same time in that tiny craft. Several miles away, inside the reef, in a channel twenty fathoms deep, Tehei dropped his baited hooks and rock-sinkers.
As his eyes brightened from gloom and sullenness to valiant enmity, they suddenly fell on a table in a corner where lay a black coffin-shaped thing of wood. In this case, he knew, was the Sarasate violin. Sarasate once he had paid ten lira to hear Sarasate play the fiddle in Turin, and the memory of it was like the sun on the clouds to him now. In music such of him as was real found a home.
The animal was not over six inches in length; and its long coffin-shaped head, and slender, whip-like tail, were at least two-thirds of this extent. When first noticed, it was passing up the liana, for the latter slanted upwards between the trees. It did not see the boys; or, at all events, did not regard their presence for the chameleon is a bold little animal, and is not afraid of man.
This finally drove me to desperation, and I succeeded, after a prolonged struggle, in getting out of my coffin-shaped box, and seated myself with indignant feelings and murderous inclinations by the side of my imperturbable driver.
"Relighting my candle and shutting the window Achrow is one of those open-air fiends who never had a bronchial cold in his life, and expects everyone else to be equally immune I found myself in a room that was well calculated to strike even the most hardened ghost-hunter with awe. "It was coffin-shaped, large, narrow, and lofty; and floor, panelling, and furniture were of the blackest oak.
Sibilant, wicked, it sounded again, and then a yellow streak slid across the trail and disappeared under a low bush. We waited, and pretty soon a coffin-shaped head came up and waved slowly to and fro. The Chief shot him with his forty-five and the snake twisted and writhed into the trail, then lay still. A moment later I had the rattles in my hatband for a souvenir.
Upon the head of the coffin-shaped board was roughly drawn, in black paint, a skull and cross-bones and, underneath them, the words "Eliab Hill and Nimbus Desmit," and below these still, the mystic cabala, "K.K.K," a formulary at which, just at that time, a great part of the nation was laughing as a capital illustration of American humor.
When we were seated in these sledges our legs were thrust down into the long coffin-shaped boxes upon which the drivers sat, and our heads and shoulders sheltered by the sealskin hoods. Imagine an eight-foot coffin mounted on runners, and a man sitting up in it with a bushel basket over his head, and you will have a very correct idea of a Siberian pavoska.
It was in a London apartment house, out Maida Vale way, that I first beheld the official bathtub of an English family establishment. It was one of those bathtubs that flourished in our own land at about the time of the Green-back craze a coffin-shaped, boxed-in affair lined with zinc; and the zinc was suffering from tetter or other serious skin trouble and was peeling badly.
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