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A fire in the study now daily, for the sake of the books: one in the drawing-room, weekly, for the sake of the piano and the furniture. And for Betty, in far-away Paris, a fire of crackling twigs and long logs in the rusty fire-basket, and blue and yellow flames leaping to lick the royal arms of France on the wrought-iron fire-back. The rooms were lonely to Betty now that Paula was gone.
You see, Jim has got the idea that he's looking to his laurels, and he ain't doing nothing but barking at his barrels, and empty ones at that." "You'd best not try to illustrate if you can't use words decent enough to listen to," answered Miss Pipkin as she left the room. Late that evening Mr. McGowan drew the Captain into his study. A cheery fire was crackling in the fire-back.
Besides apes, elephants, dogs, and other pets, there are some fine jungle-fowls, a pheasant, a "fire-back," I think, and an argus pheasant of glorious beauty; but glorious is not quite the word either, for the hundred-eyed feathers of its tail are painted rather in browns than colors.
The sky was alive with myriads of twinkling and palpitating stars, which seemed to come and go, like sparks on a fire-back, as one gazed upward into the vast depths and tried to place them. They played hide-and-seek with one another and with the innumerable meteors which shot recklessly every now and again across the field of the firmament, leaving momentary furrows of light behind them.
He did the honours of the humble cabin with the air of a seigneur in his chateau. There was little furniture, but from some broken mansion he had extracted an iron fire-back, which adorned his grate. It was a fine, mediaeval bit of work, with Venus, in her traditional costume, in the centre of it. It seemed the last touch in the picture of the gallant, virile Cyrano.
"Just put it on the fire-back, Bozzle," she said one morning, as her husband stood before her reading for the second time a somewhat lengthy epistle which had reached him from Italy, while he held the baby over his shoulder with his left arm. He had just washed himself at the sink, and though his face was clean, his hair was rough, and his shirt sleeves were tucked up.
He walked from the threshold to the hearth, and strange coincidence he set the unsheathed blade he carried in the self-same angle, beside the fire-back, from which she had once taken a sword to attempt his life. And still he did not look at her, but stood with bowed head. At last he turned. "God forgive us all," he said. She broke into wild weeping.
So the Argus pheasants, male and female, are, I feel sure, protected by their tints corresponding to dead leaves of the dry lofty forests in which they dwell; and the female of the gorgeous fire-back pheasant, Lophura viellottii, is of a very similar rich brown colour.
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