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Updated: June 10, 2025
A special brand of taxidermist's soap from London, which contained several substitutes for arsenic and claimed to be equally efficient, may have been at fault in part, though not entirely, the main cause being the moist heat and the almost entire lack of motility in the air.
Here stood a great ape, six feet and over monstrum horrendum head flung back, mouth open, shouting aloud to the imagination of the gazer in the language that was spoken ere the earliest man lifted his face to the chill mystery of the stars. In the right fist was clutched the branch of a M'bina tree, ready lifted to dash your brains out the whole thing a miracle of the taxidermist's art.
Yan had no good excuse for these weaknesses, and he blushed for shame when his elder brother talked "common sense" to him about his follies. He only knew that such things fascinated him. But the crowning glory was a taxidermist's shop kept on Main Street by a man named Sander. Yan spent, all told, many weeks gazing spellbound, with his nose flat white against that window.
"Of course," he said, "of course," mopping at his forehead and so unstrung that she could have laughed. "I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. Is this where you live?" They were before a greasily lighted taxidermist's window of mounted raccoon, fox terrior with legs curled for running, and an owl on a branch.
Yet they never showed the faintest desire to see the end. The contractor dawdled by the month. I never saw such dillydallying. They only abetted it, and when once he brought an absurd and unasked-for excuse to the taxidermist's shop, its proprietor said first shutting the door between them and the wife in the inner room: "Tek yo' time. Mo' sloweh she grow, mo' longeh she stan'."
He met it, pointed to where, beneath swirling billows of black smoke, the pretty gable of the taxidermist's house shone like a white sail against a thundercloud, gave orders and disappeared. The street was filling with people. A row of cottages across the way was being emptied. The crackling flames were but half a square from Manouvrier's house. I called him once more to come.
He was shown the various processes and stages of the taxidermist's art, the amorphous mass of skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers; and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had got in Strathaivron was a fairly good one, as stags now go in the North.
Doubtless the family had their moments of suffering especially on one occasion when a well-meaning maid extracted from my taxidermist's outfit the old tooth-brush with which I put on the skins the arsenical soap necessary for their preservation, partially washed it, and left it with the rest of my wash kit for my own personal use.
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