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Updated: May 4, 2025
After this our mess was well supplied, and our forager began to look sleek and fat. The secret of his success did not leak out till long afterward, when he astonished the boys by declaring that he "had been 'living like a fighting-cock' on a paper of needles and two skeins of silk."
In the biggest part was a pile of cards with funny marks and holes that looked as though they were meant to make a picture; and in the middle sized part was a pile of gay colored skeins of thread; and in the littlest part was a paper of needles with nice big eyes. "Oh, mother!" exclaimed Mary Jane. That was all she could say, she was so surprised and pleased.
Then he straightened sharply up and stared at her, the working of his eyes showing that he was gathering up tangled skeins of recollection. "Wal, I swow," he finally ejaculated, with an astonished drawl, "ef I hadn't a furgut the hull dum performance, an here I wuz a gittin up an goin to work jess ez if court hadn't been stopped.
"Oh, you should let me take the chair," he answered, "and have the pleasure of holding the skeins myself!" For all reply to this sally he received a stare of undisguised amazement from Miss Garland, who then looked across at Mrs. Hudson with a glance which plainly said: "You see he 's quite the insidious personage we feared."
And yet that heavy affliction darkened his mind as he rolled and unrolled his silks, or carefully matched the skeins that came from the dyers. The sun was shining through the windows, the lower panes of which were dulled in order to obtain a clear high light; but the cloud upon his puckered brow was not lifted. Hour by hour the warehouse clock ticked away the afternoon.
They made awful close stitches and backstitched every now and then to make it hold. They would wax the thread to keep it from rolling up and tangling. "Thread was in balls. They rolled it from skeins to balls. They rolled it from shuck broches to the balls. Put shucks around the spindle to slip it off easy.
He saw how the raw silk which arrived at the factories in bales ranging from eighty to a hundred twisted skeins were weighed; sorted as to quality; soaked in oil so that the gum might be extracted, and the ends freed for winding. He witnessed the drying, or rather the partial drying, of the silk.
Duff's shop did not aspire to that luxurious class of goods; but humble skeins of mixed sewing-silks, that were kept tied up in a piece of wash-leather. Mrs. Duff's head and a customer's head were brought together over the bundle, endeavouring to fix upon a skein of a particular shade, by the help of the one gas-burner which flared away overhead. "Drat the silk!" said Mrs. Duff at length.
They have thatched ruffs and kinder open-work sides, dretful curious-lookin', and on the wide porticos of these housen little native wimmen set and embroider, and wind skeins of gay-colored cotton, and play with their little brown black-eyed babies.
Mountain blocks appeared pushing up in front, and a mountain wall and woods on it, and mountains in the distance, and cliffs riven with falls of water that were silver skeins, down lower to meadows, villages and spires, and lower finally to the whole valley of the foaming river, field and river seeming in imagination rolled out from the hand of the heading mountain.
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