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Complex the knots were, but his warped and palsied fingers deftly undid them as though long familiar with each turn and twist. Then off came many a layer of the rough brown seaweed fabric and afterward certain coverings of tough shark-skin neatly sewn. "The book!" cried the patriarch. "Now behold it!" "That?" exclaimed Beatrice. "I never saw a book of that shape!"
Shark-skin and finest silk for hilt, silver and gold for guard, lacquer of varied hues for scabbard, robbed the deadliest weapon of half its terror; but these appurtenances are playthings compared with the blade itself. The swordsmith was not a mere artisan but an inspired artist and his workshop a sanctuary.
In its prime it held ten thousand men and filled its ditches with corpses. "At peril of his head," sang Lalun, again and again. A head moved on one of the Ramparts the grey head of an old man and a voice, rough as shark-skin on a sword-hilt, sent back the last line of the chorus and broke into a song that I could not understand, though Lalun and Wali Dad listened intently. "What is it?" I asked.
Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin.
Hobson's Bay is the north-eastern part of Port Philip Harbour, a noble expanse of water of 800 square miles, with a narrow entrance at the "Heads." There are sharks in it, so that bathing is carried on in parts that are fenced off. There used to be a reward offered by the Government for every shark-skin above 2ft. long.
The handle was curiously carved, of walrus ivory, and represented an ancient Danish warrior, in his mail-shirt, and armed with battle-axe and sword. The sheath, slender and flexible, was evidently of more modern make, formed of rough shark-skin, with richly chased mountings of silver. "That is all," said Regnar. "Let us find him a grave."
With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs, when Captain Ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag.
"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go."
Meanwhile, all over the isle, to and fro went heralds, dismally arrayed, beating shark-skin drums; and, at intervals, crying "A man is dead; let no fires be kindled; have mercy, oh Oro! Let no canoes put to sea till the burial. This night, oh Oro! Let no food be cooked."
As to his sword, that was a dagger in a green shark-skin sheath given to him by Robin Hood, who said rightly enough that it was quite big enough for him. Maid Marian found a suitable buckle for the belt, one which Little John cut out of a very soft piece of deer-skin, the same skin forming the cross-belt which went over the boy's shoulder and supported his horn.
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