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At any other time such rare amusement would have overjoyed me; but the wonders of the great theatre that from other boys I had heard so much of, that from gaudy-coloured posters I had built up for myself, were floating vague and undefined before me in the air; and neither the open-mouthed sleeper, swallowing his endless chain of rats; nor even the live rabbit found in the stout old gentleman's hat the last sort of person in whose hat one would have expected to find such a thing could draw away my mind from the joy I had caught a glimpse of only to lose.
A few beads, together with three or four gaudy-coloured cotton handkerchiefs, a zinc mirror, and a fourpenny butcher's knife, would purchase a tusk worth twenty or thirty pounds. I calculated all the expenses of transport from England, together with interest on capital. In some cases we purchased ivory at 2,000 per cent. profit, and both sellers and buyers felt perfectly contented.
A dirty gaudy-coloured dress hung unfastened about her shoulders, coarse black hair unbrushed, uncombed, dangled about her face, over which her evil habits had spread a genuine bacchanalian glow, whilst in a loud masculine voice she uttered the most awful words that ever disgraced the mouth of man ten thousand times more awful when proceeding from a woman's lips.
The Jujube grows to a height already betraying signs of African luxuriance: through its foliage flit birds, gaudy-coloured as kingfishers, of vivid red, yellow, and changing-green.
Here I enjoyed some pictures of the native life: wide-eyed, naked children, mingled with pigs; a youth asleep under a tree; an old gentleman spelling through glasses his Hawaiian Bible; the somewhat embarrassing spectacle of a lady at her bath in a spring; and the glimpse of gaudy-coloured gowns in the deep shade of the houses.
This gaudy-coloured and noisy bird seems to proclaim aloud that it fears no foe. Its formidable beak protects it from every danger, for no hawk or predatory mammal dares attack a bird so strongly armed. Here the necessity for concealment does not exist, and sexual selection has had no check in developing the brightest and most conspicuous colours.
But other evenings we were merry, and many were the wonderful stories of adventure told over bottled beer and an extraordinary salad which old Gugga mixed before us to make an appetite, as he said. We got to love Podgorica in the end, and left its streets, full of gaudy-coloured humanity, the old shot-riddled town across the river, and the glorious mountain panorama, with sorrow.
He despises money, but is thankful for a knife, a hatchet, or a gaudy-coloured cloth, or brass pot for cooking. The women are horribly ugly and are almost entirely naked. They have no matrimonial regulations, and the children are squalid and miserable. Still these people are perfectly happy, and would prefer their present wandering life to the most luxurious restraint.
The salmon is cooked when already in the tin, and the heating is so severe that all the bone becomes soft too. You know this well in tinned salmon, don't you? You know, too, the look of the tins, with their gaudy-coloured labels, as they are sold in shops in England? These labels are stuck on after they leave the cannery, which deals with the insides, not the outsides, of the tins.
The gaudy-coloured child and dog irritates me, I confess; but I have watched a grimy, inartistic personage, smoothing it affectionately with toil-stained hand, while eager faces crowded round to admire and wonder at its blatant crudity.
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