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Updated: May 5, 2025
Next to the pleasures of the table, the passion for expensive furniture seemed to be the prevailing folly. We read of couches gemmed with tortoise-shell, and tables of citron-wood from Africa. Gold services adorned the sideboard. Couches were covered with purple silks. Chairs were elaborately carved; costly mirrors hung against the walls, and bronze lamps were suspended from the painted ceilings.
As the three women seated themselves at the supper-table, embellished by the unwonted addition of pound cake and sweet pickles, the dress-maker's sharp swarthy person stood out vividly between the neutral-tinted sisters. Miss Mellins was a small woman with a glossy yellow face and a frizz of black hair bristling with imitation tortoise-shell pins.
The great man's wife having expressed a desire to see the strangers, we were introduced to her. She was a very handsome person; her hair, jet-black, ornamented with amber and tortoise-shell combs, with a large quantity of hair on the top mixed with flowers and ribbons. Her costume was magnificent sky-blue crape, embroidered with gold and silver, and a profusion of flowers.
Thinking to make friends with the second mate, I took out an old tortoise-shell snuff-box of my father's, in which I had put a piece of Cavendish tobacco, to look sailor-like, and offered the box to him very politely.
Shall we try? Wait a minute; I'll run for a comb. 'But suppose some one came 'Nobody will come, my dear boy. Hardly any one knows I'm here. I like to get away from people now and then; that's why I've taken refuge in this cock-loft. She disappeared, and came back with a comb of tortoise-shell. 'Sit down there. Oh, what hair it is, to be sure! Almost as fine as my own.
There is a still lower depth of atrocity, but as far as enquiry of the Government at Sydney can make out, unconnected with labour traffic, but with the tortoise-shell trade. Skulls, it will be remembered, were the ornament of old Iri's house at Bauro, and skulls are still the trophies in the more savage islands.
Before the last knot of the bundle was untied by the mite's busy fingers there crawled out a tiny tortoise-shell kitten, with its diminutive little tail erect like a young bottle-brush, which gave vent to a "phiz- phit," as if indignant at its long confinement, and then proceeded to rub itself against Jupp's leg, with a purring mew on recognising a friend.
"Charming; perfectly charming," Mary replied, vaguely; the tears were near her eyes. "You must come again, to-morrow, and do it under my supervision. It only needs this, now." She thrust two heavy tortoise-shell pins into the coils on either side of Mary's head. "Those beautiful pins! I am afraid I shall lose them!" "But they are yours, mementoes of the new era in hair-dressing.
Because it was talked about and crowded, ordinary untutored motorists judged Miss Mitchin's the best place to go, and permitted their wives to drag them past the tortoise-shell spectacles and the unprostituted art and the angular young ladies in baggy smocks breaking out in sudden irresponsible imitations of Pavlova.
Caxton, recovering himself. "Get me the new tortoise-shell spectacles and a large slice of bread. You see that when fish are reduced to a pond they recognize a benefactor, which they never do when rising at flies or groping for worms in the waste world of a river. Hem! a hint for the Ulverstones.
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