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Their helmets and shields were of gold or silver, surmounted with plumes or feathers, or with tufts of white horsehair. Their breastplates were adorned with arabesques or repousse work of the highest art. Their belts were covered with gold and studded with gems. Their short kilted skirts were of rich Tyrian purple embroidered with gold.
The body was decorated with repousse work or engraved, and the shape gradually changed until the familiar helmet-shaped cream jug resulted. The helmet cream jugs were beautifully engraved with ribbon and wreath decoration, and frequently there was a beaded pattern round the rim and the handle. The same styles prevailed both in Sheffield plate and in Britannia metal, often misnamed pewter.
When she showed him her presents she was still radiant. There was a queer opera-bag of Chinese needlework, with handles of jade, a Damascus bowl of pierced brass, a tea-caddy in quaint Dutch repoussé; there was a silver-embroidered altar-cloth for a cushion, a bit of Copenhagen faience, all the sophisticated artistry which is sent to those who have no need for the commonplace.
Four female heads in gold repoussé form the pommel; and a bull's head reversed covers the junction of blade and hilt. The edges of the blade are of massive gold; the centre of black bronze damascened with gold. On one side is the solar cartouche of Ahmes, below which a lion pursues a bull, the remaining space being filled in with four grasshoppers in a row.
Some of the ladles were beautifully decorated in repousse, others were shaped like sauce boats; there were ladles without lips, others deep like the porringers, and yet others were quite round like a drinking bowl.
The rich sought after a lavish profusion of silver goblets studded with jewels and sometimes ventured on a cup of gold, although the use of a full gold service was by imperial ordinance restricted to the palace. There were drinking vessels, broad and shallow with richly embossed or repoussé work, or deep with double handles and a foot, or otherwise diversified.
Candace, who had sat down opposite Aunt Myra every day as long as she could remember at the small pine table in the yellow-painted kitchen, with always the same thick iron-stone ware plates and cups, the same little black tray to hold the tea-things, the same good, substantial, prosaic fare, served without the least attempt at grace or decoration, had never dreamed of such a dinner as was usual at the Grays'. She said not a word to express her astonishment; but she glanced at the thick cluster of maiden-hair ferns which quivered in the middle of the table from an oval stand of repoussé brass, at the slender glasses of tea-roses which stood on either side, at the Sèvres dishes of fruit, sweet biscuits, and dried ginger, and wondered if this were to be all the dinner.
It is finished at each end with a golden hawk's head inlaid with blue enamel, and consists of rows of scrolls, four-petalled fleurettes, hawks, vultures, winged uraei, crouching jackals, and figures of antelopes pursued by tigers. The whole of these ornaments are of gold repoussé work, and they were sewn upon the royal winding sheet by means of a small ring soldered to the back of each.
As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge blow going from the spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the repoussé around a goblet.
China pugs guarded the hearth; a brass sunflower smiled from the top of either andiron, and a brass peacock spread its tail before them inside a high filigree fender; on one side was a coalhod in 'repousse' brass, and on the other a wrought iron wood-basket.
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