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Around his head at Christmas-times drives a snow-storm of bills. He must keep the wolf from the door, and he has only his goose-quills to confront it with. And here it is, having to deal with alien powers, that his special temperament comes into play, and may work him evil. Wit is not worldly wisdom. A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles on the road.
The celestial secretary, with goose wings on his shoulders, goose-quills in each hand, looking very much like a goose, mounted on a mule, gaily caparisoned in colours quadripartite, and covered with jingling brass bells. Five thousand old women, singing the praises of the said secretary and taking snuff to the flourish of hautboys.
She interrupted me with a gesture too familiar to be mistaken. A tumbler was on the desk filled with goose-quills. Taking this up like a bouquet, and stretching it out at arm's length to an imaginary passer-by, she sang, with a mischievous professional brio, "Fresh roses to-day, all fresh!
The inhabitants are not unfavorable to washings, conducted on the principle formerly mentioned. At present they wash only when in want of a little calico. They know the value of gold perfectly well, for they bring it for sale in goose-quills, and demand 24 yards of calico for one penful.
"I will mow the thistles; their down I can contrive to work up into cotton, and the stalks into cordage: and, with the profit I shall make of these thistles, and of my decoy, and of my goose-quills and feathers, and of my silver sprig rabbits, I will buy jackets for my sheep, for my sheep shall all have jackets after shearing.
The history of rats and mice is interesting, but not to themselves, interesting only to man, and this because he is man; but if men are nothing but rats and mice, pray let them look for cheese, and look out for the cat, and let goose-quills and history alone. But the truth is that Person and Society are mutually supporting facts, each weakened by any impoverishment of its reciprocal term.
For writing we used exclusively goose-quills, for though steel pens were invented soon after I was born, they were probably very imperfect; and, moreover, had to combat a violent prejudice, for at the first school we attended we were strictly forbidden to use them.
But the burrows are sometimes much more numerous, for when digging in a grass-field near Maer Hall, I found a cake of dry earth, as large as my two open hands, which was penetrated by seven burrows, as large as goose-quills. Weight of the earth ejected from a single burrow, and from all the burrows within a given space.
They sealed up neither his room nor his effects, because, in the first place, there were no heirs, and, in the second, there was very little to inherit beyond a bundle of goose-quills, a quire of white official paper, three pairs of socks, two or three buttons which had burst off his trousers, and the mantle already known to the reader. To whom all this fell, God knows.
When the valuation was completed a number of goose-quills were handed to the Indians each quill representing a sum of about two shillings whereby each man had a fair notion of the extent of his fortune. "What iss it you will be wanting now?" said the trader, addressing himself to Nazinred with the air of a man whose powers of production are illimitable. But the chief did not reply for some time.
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