United States or Republic of the Congo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Spare, muscular men, all of them, in peaked caps and turbans, sheep-skin coats, and voluminous trousers, girded by the formidable Pathan belt, with its pouches, dagger, and straight-handled sword; their bearded faces lighted up, as they talked, by flashes of white teeth; most of them towering half a head above the squarely-built Englishman, with the jaw of a bull-dog and the eyes of a hawk, who understood their language, their strange mingling of courage and cruelty, of simplicity and cunning, as a man only understands that to which he has devoted a lifetime of labour and thought.
So with the improved display of agricultural produce from Southern Russia, our chief competitor in the grain-market. Our reapers and threshers are supplanting, in Eastern Europe, the ridiculous flails, sickles and straight-handled scythes that figured at New York in 1853. We have sent the Dacians, Huns and Sarmatians weapons to cut our own commercial throats.
It is interesting to think that this very weapon may have figured in some fierce scene of savage warfare. No. 5. Cannibal poniard or straight-handled dagger of the South Sea Islands. It will give the reader almost a thrill of horror to learn that this atrocious weapon, which I bought myself on the third day of collecting, was actually exposed in a second-hand store as a family carving-knife.
Yet Cornishmen, who are conservative creatures, still cling to their straight-handled scythes, although they are less convenient than those with curved handles in use up-country. Nicky had small use for customs such as this, and he poured forth ideas that would have turned John-James pale, if anything could have affected his seamed and weather-beaten countenance.
Word Of The Day