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Updated: June 5, 2025
He stands with his legs wide apart, in half-armor, a great sash tied over his shoulder and swinging round his legs, an immense sword at his side, and a great hat with two ostrich-feathers on his head, looking the very type of a "swashing blade."
The art of costuming was by no means so well understood in those days as it has been since, and mine was out of all correctness. I was made to sport an enormous plume of black ostrich-feathers, such as never was worn by any Highland chief, and had a huge tiger-skin sporran to dangle like an apron before innumerable yards of plaid petticoat.
At the bottom of the alley he stopped, and, turning, looked up the vista of box ending in the brilliantly-lighted rooms, where gentlemen, with powdered heads, lace ruffles, and glittering knee-buckles, were handing ladies in stiff brocades, whose towering heads were shaded by ostrich-feathers and sparkling with gems. "Quite court-like, on my word!" he said.
His noble horses were richly caparisoned; purple housings, embroidered with turquoise beads, covered their backs and necks, and a crown-shaped ornament was fixed on their heads, from which fluttered a bunch of white ostrich-feathers.
This tribe has had so much communication with sealers and whalers, that most of the men can speak a little English and Spanish; and they are half civilised, and proportionally demoralised. The next morning a large party went on shore, to barter for skins and ostrich-feathers; fire-arms being refused, tobacco was in greatest request, far more so than axes or tools.
They were men who had for many years been living on the borders of the colony, part of their time engaged in fighting Kaffirs and Griquas, and robbing them of their cattle, the other part in trading with the natives for ostrich-feathers and ivory.
"You ought to have taken away those bits of vanity before he went into action." "What bits of vanity?" I said. "Those white ostrich-feathers. They make him stand out so clear to a shooter. Ah! he's down." Just then Joeboy was seen to drop forward right out of sight.
Dainty green plants, swayed to and fro by the plashing water, grew everywhere on the bottom of the brook, and, wherever on its course it could flow more smoothly, ferns, nodding gracefully, surrounded it like ostrich-feathers waving about the cradle of a royal babe. Xanthe liked to watch the stream disappear in the myrtle-grove.
It has done this to perfection, not with its flowers, which, in their modesty, continue intractable, but with its curly and variegated leaves, which have the undulating grace of Ostrich-feathers and the rich colouring of a mixed bouquet. None who beholds it in this magnificence will recognize the near relation of the vulgar "greens" that form the basis of our cabbage-soup.
On a portion of this pavement, raised above the rest, stood the priests, some wearing ostrich-feathers on their bald and shining heads; others panther-skins over their white-robed shoulders. Muttering and singing, bowing low and rising again, they swung the censers and poured libations of pure water to the gods out of golden vessels. In this immense temple man seemed a dwarf in his own eyes.
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