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Mademoiselle de Verneuil was asking herself how it was possible for human beings to live in such habitual filth, when a ragged boy about eight or nine years old suddenly presented his fresh and rosy face, with a pair of fat cheeks, lively eyes, ivory teeth, and a mass of fair hair, which fell in curls upon his half-naked shoulders.
I have seen the Indians in all phases of their existence, from the half-naked savage, perched, like a bird of prey, in a red blanket upon a rock, trying to catch his miserable dinner of fish, to the neat maiden in Mr. Duncan's school at Metlakhatla, as modest and as well dressed as any clergyman's daughter in an English parish.
Our banquet soon assumed a somewhat unpleasant similitude to that of Dives; for the Chioggoti, in all stages of decrepitude and squalor, crowded round to beg for scraps indescribable old women, enveloped in their own petticoats thrown over their heads; girls hooded with sombre black mantles; old men wrinkled beyond recognition by their nearest relatives; jabbering, half-naked boys; slow, slouching fishermen with clay pipes in their mouths and philosophical acceptance on their sober foreheads.
In sooth, they were a strange people, he observed, surpassing wise in many things, yet ignorant and childish in all others, else why should a half-naked man go wandering idly through the thickets holding a knotted rag behind his back, and that when the glades were dense and the moss-chinks filled with the singing people who lived for blood?
In the breeze her heavy masses of hair stirred luringly. He felt its silken caress on his half-naked shoulder, and in his ears the blood began to pound with strange insistence. Quite gone now the daze and drowsiness of the first wakening. Stern did not even feel weak or shaken. On the contrary, never had life bounded more warmly, more fully, in his veins.
One man was standing up and waving, in a very excited manner, something which turned out ultimately to be a piece of cotton-waste. Our engines having been stopped, the canoe came alongside, and we beheld six wild-looking half-naked creatures two men, three women, and a very small boy, who was crouching over a fire at the bottom of the boat.
The sun shone down on the half-naked giant moving through the jungle, a new white-skinned animal who was braver than the rest, a creature who dared to trail the king of the jungle. "It's all my fault!" said Connel disgustedly. "I should have been able to read his trail signs." Tom did not answer. He pulled the straps of his jungle pack tighter and slung it over his shoulder.
For the space of about thirty seconds, a half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood upon the bank of the tropical river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry that, had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods, as true, as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came from the depths of an easy-chair to disturb the impure wilderness of chimneys and roofs.
On the now famous Common a half-naked woman, with a baby in her arms, was publicly whipped for the crime of free speech; and on the same spot Mary Dyer, another Quaker woman, was hanged in 1659. In fact, Boston has been the scene of more than one wanton crime committed by Puritanism. Salem, in the summer of 1692, killed eighteen people for witchcraft.
The hot sun, falling upon the boat, made its brown, wet sides sparkle like the brilliant wings of some gigantic scarabee; and, upon the patched, scorched deck, six or seven half-naked, sunburned children, boys and girls, played at the feet of a bundle of rags and brown flesh, which was a woman, a young woman, but prematurely old and wasted, who was nursing a little baby.
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