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Having spoken this with a sententious air, the Doctor took his shovel-shaped hat, and went down to the Castle green, to conclude a match of bowls with Whitaker, which had probably suggested this notable illustration of the uncertain course of human events. Two days afterwards, Sir Geoffrey arrived.
Carved forked sticks which serve as torch-holders stand in various parts of the room, while somewhere near the stove is a miscellany of wooden meat blocks, bamboo fans and fly swatters, gourds filled with millet, salt, or mashed peppers, and shovel-shaped or round rice winnowers, which also serve as common eating dishes for the family and guests.
Things did not look restful, nor these Fans personally pleasant. Every man among them no women showed was armed with a gun, and they loosened their shovel-shaped knives in their sheaths as they came, evidently regarding a fight quite as imminent as we did. They drew up about twenty paces from us in silence.
These minas articulated so humanly that I did know whether a bird or a Malay spoke. There were four love-birds in an exquisitely made bamboo cage, lovely little creatures with red beaks and blue and green plumage. The children catch small grasshoppers for their birds with a shovel-shaped instrument of open rattan work.
Only one man could solve the mystery of this apathy, the secret of this insensibility, and his lips were sealed as securely as the door of a donjon-keep: Jehan. Not even the Chevalier could gather a single ray of light from the grim old valet. He was silence itself. Two weeks, and then Brother Jacques rose, put on his gown and his rosary and his shovel-shaped hat.
As for the deacon, he was still slumbering at my feet slumbering with his breast, the breast of a prize-fighter, turned uppermost, and his fine, golden shock of hair falling like a nimbus around his head, and hot, fat, flushed red features and gaping mouth and ceaselessly twitching moustache. In passing, I had noticed that his hands were long, and that they were set upon shovel-shaped wrists.
The unequalled industry of gnawing down trees and cutting twigs, peeling off the tender cuticle of the willow bushes, digging away banks, and carrying on their shovel-shaped tails the earth, together with innumerable foot-prints and sometimes dams, were the items which filled up the catalogue of "signs" on which the trappers' vision was regaled after long and dangerous tramps in search of them.
The man before us was tall and ferocious, and his native ferocity was further enhanced by the heavy black beard which he wore in open defiance of the compulsory shaving laws. His black shovel-shaped hat and his black clothes lent him a singularly sinister appearance, while his legs were bound in tight gaiters, as if ready for an instant spring.
He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, in a shovel-shaped mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider end of it, and laid the pipe of the elder stem along the portion which represented the handle of the shovel.
He was presumed by the verdant patrons of the paper to be its owner and principal editor, its type-setter, pressman, and carrier. His hair was elaborately curled, and his ears were perfect racks of long and dandyfied pens; a broad, shovel-shaped gold pen lay forever opposite his high stool; he had an arrogant and patronizing address, and was the perpetual cabbager of editorial perquisites.
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