By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War

“I really cannot undertake them,” the old man said. “Since the death of my daughter I have had but little time to attend to that branch. What with buying and selling, and feeding and attending to the live ones, I have no time for stuffing. Besides, if the things were poisoned, they would not be worth stuffing.”

“It isn’t the question of worth, skipper,” the sailor said; “and I don’t say, mind ye, that these here critturs was pisoned, only if you looks at it that this was the noisiest bird and the worst tempered thievingest cat in the neighborhood—though, Lord bless you, my missus wouldn’t allow it for worlds—why, you know, when they were both found stiff and cold this morning people does have a sort of a suspicion as how they’ve been pisoned;” and he winked one eye in a portentous manner, and grinned hugely. “The missus she’s in a nice taking, screeching, and yelling as you might hear her two cables’ length away, and she turns round on me and will have it as I’d a hand in the matter. Well, just to show my innocence, I offers to get a glass case for ‘em and have ‘em stuffed, if it cost me a couple of pounds. I wouldn’t care if they fell all to pieces a week afterwards, so that it pacified the old woman just at present. If I can’t get ‘em done I shall ship at once, for the place will be too hot to hold me. So you can’t do it nohow?”

The old man shook his head, and the sailor was just turning off when Frank went up to him:

“Will you please wait a moment? Can I speak to you, sir, a minute?” he asked the old man.

The naturalist went into his shop, and Frank followed him.

“I can stuff birds and animals, sir,” he said. “I think I really stuff them well, for some which I did for amusement were sold at ten shillings a case, and the man who bought them of me told me they would be worth four times as much in London. I am out of work, sir, and very very anxious to get my living. You will find me hard working and honest. Do give me a chance. Let me stuff that cat and parrot for the sailor. If you are not satisfied then, I will go away and charge nothing for it.”

The man looked at him keenly.

“I will at any rate give you a trial,” he said. Then he went to the door and called in the sailor. “This lad tells me he can stuff birds. I know nothing about him, but I believe he is speaking truthfully. If you like to intrust them to him he will do his best. If you’re not satisfied he will make no charge.”

Much pleased at seeing a way out of his dilemma, the sailor placed the dead animals on the counter.

“Now,” the old man said to Frank, “you can take these out into the back yard and skin them. Then you can go to work in that back room. You will find arsenical soap, cotton wool, wires, and everything else you require there. This has been a fine cat,” he said, looking at the animal.

“Yes, it has been a splendid creature,” Frank answered. “It is a magnificent macaw also.”

“Ah! you know it is a macaw!” the old man said.

“Of course,” Frank said simply; “it has a tail.”

The old man then furnished Frank with two or three sharp knives and scissors. Taking the bird and cat, he went out into the yard and in the course of an hour had skinned them both. Then he returned to the shop and set to work in the room behind.

“May I make a group of them?” he asked.

“Do them just as you like,” the old man said.

After settling upon his subject, Frank set to work, and, except that he went out for five minutes to buy and eat a penny loaf, continued his work till nightfall. The old man came in several times to look at him, but each time went out again without making a remark. At six o’clock Frank laid down his tools.

“I will come again tomorrow, sir,” he said.

The old man nodded, and Frank went home in high spirits. There was a prospect at last of getting something to do, and that in a line most congenial to his own tastes.

The old man looked up when he entered next morning.

“I shall not come in today,” he remarked. “I will wait to see them finished.”

Working without interruption till the evening, Frank finished them to his satisfaction, and enveloped them with many wrappings of thread to keep them in precisely the attitudes in which he had placed them.

“They are ready for drying now, sir,” he said. “If I might place them in an oven they would be dried by morning.”

The old man led the way to the kitchen, where a small fire was burning.

“I shall put no more coals on the fire,” he said, “and it will be out in a quarter of an hour. Put them in there and leave the door open. I will close it in an hour when the oven cools.”

The next day Frank was again at work. It took him all day to get fur and feather to lie exactly as he wished them. In the afternoon he asked the naturalist for a piece of flat board, three feet long, and a perch, but said that instead of the piece of board he should prefer mounting them in a case at once. The old man had not one in the shop large enough, and therefore Frank arranged his group temporarily on the table. On the board lay the cat. At first sight she seemed asleep, but it was clearly only seeming. Her eyes were half open, the upper lip was curled up, and the sharp teeth showed. The hind feet were drawn somewhat under her as in readiness for an instant spring. Her front paws were before her, the talons were somewhat stretched, and one paw was curved. Her ears lay slightly back. She was evidently on the point of springing. The macaw perch, which had been cut down to a height of two feet, stood behind her. The bird hung by its feet, and, head downwards, stretched with open beak towards the tip of the cat’s tail, which was slightly uplifted. On a piece of paper Frank wrote, “Dangerous Play.”

It was evening before he had finished perfectly to his satisfaction. Then he called the naturalist in. The old man stopped at the door, surveying the group. Then he entered and examined it carefully.

“Wonderful!” he said. “Wonderful! I should have thought them alive. There is not a shop in the West End where it could have been turned out better, if so well.

“Lad, you are a wonder! Tell me now who and what are you? I saw when you first addressed me that you were not what you seemed to be, a working lad.”

“I have been well educated,” Frank said, “and was taught to preserve and stuff by my father, who was a great naturalist. My parents died suddenly, and I was left on my own resources, which,” he said, smiling faintly, “have hitherto proved of very small avail. I am glad you are pleased. If you will take me into your service I will work hard and make myself useful in every way. If you require references I can refer you to the doctor who attended us in the country; but I have not a single friend in London except a railway porter, who has most kindly and generously taken me in and sheltered me for the last two months.”

“I need no references,” the old man said; “your work speaks for itself as to your skill, and your face for your character. But I can offer you nothing fit for you. With such a genius as you have for setting up animals, you ought to be able to earn a good income. Not one man in a thousand can make a dead animal look like a live one. You have the knack or the art.”

“I shall be very content with anything you can give me,” Frank said; “for the present I only ask to earn my living. If later on I can, as you say, do more, all the better.”

The old man stood for some time thinking, and presently said, “I do but little except in live stock. When I had my daughter with me I did a good deal of stuffing, for there is a considerable trade hereabout. The sailors bring home skins of foreign birds, and want them stuffed and put in cases, as presents for their wives and sweethearts. You work fast as well as skillfully. I have known men who would take a fortnight to do such a group as that, and then it would be a failure. It will be quite a new branch for my trade. I do not know how it will act yet, but to begin with I will give you twelve shillings a week, and a room upstairs. If it succeeds we will make other arrangements. I am an old man, and a very lonely one. I shall be glad to have such a companion.”

Frank joyfully embraced the offer, and ran all the way home to tell his friend, the porter, of the engagement.

“I am very glad,” the man said; “heartily glad. I shall miss you sorely. I do not know what I should have done without you when I first lost poor Jane and the kids. But now I can go back to my old ways again.”

“Perhaps,” Frank suggested, “you might arrange to have a room also in the house. It would not be a very long walk, not above twenty or five and twenty minutes, and I should be so glad to have you with me.”

The man sat silent for a time. “No,” he said at last, “I thank you all the same. I should like it too, but I don’t think it would be best in the end. Here all my mates live near, and I shall get on in time. The Christmas holiday season will soon be coming on and we shall be up working late. If you were always going to stop at the place you are going to, it would be different; but you will rise, never fear. I shall be seeing you in gentleman’s clothes again some of these days. I’ve heard you say you were longing to get your books and to be studying again, and you’ll soon fall into your own ways; but if you will let me, I’ll come over sometimes and have a cup of tea and a chat with you. Now, look here, I’m going out with you now, and I’m going to buy you a suit of clothes, something like what you had on when I first saw you. They won’t be altogether unsuitable in a shop. This is a loan, mind, and you may pay me off as you get flush.”

Frank saw he should hurt the good fellow’s feelings by refusing, and accordingly went out with him, and next morning presented himself at the shop in a quiet suit of dark gray tweed, and with his other clothes in a bundle.

“Aha!” said the old man; “you look more as you ought to do now, though you’re a cut above an assistant in a naturalist’s shop in Ratcliff Highway. Now, let me tell you the names of some of these birds. They are, every one of them, foreigners; some of them I don’t know myself.”

“I can tell all the family names,” Frank said quietly, “and the species, but I do not know the varieties.”

“Can you!” the old man said in surprise. “What is this now?”

“That is a mockingbird, the great black capped mockingbird, I think. The one next to it is a golden lory.”

So Frank went round all the cages and perches in the shop.

“Right in every case,” the old man said enthusiastically; “I shall have nothing to teach you. The sailor has been here this morning. I offered him two pounds for the cat and bird to put in my front window, but he would not take it, and has paid me that sum for your work. Here it is. This is yours, you know. You were not in my employment then, and you will want some things to start with, no doubt. Now come upstairs, I will show you your room. I had intended at first to give you the one at the back, but I have decided now on giving you my daughter’s. I think you will like it.”

Frank did like it greatly. It was the front room on the second floor. The old man’s daughter had evidently been a woman of taste and refinement. The room was prettily papered, a quiet carpet covered the floor, and the furniture was neat and in good keeping. Two pairs of spotless muslin curtains hung across the windows.

“I put them up this morning,” the old man said, nodding. “I have got the sheets and bedding airing in the kitchen. They have not been out of the press for the last three years. You can cook in the kitchen. There is always a fire there.

“Now, the first thing to do,” he went on when they returned to the shop, “will be for you to mount a dozen cases for the windows. These drawers are full of skins of birds and small animals. I get them for next to nothing from the sailors, and sell them to furriers and feather preparers, who supply ladies’ hat and bonnet makers. In future, I propose that you shall mount them and sell them direct. We shall get far higher prices than we do now. I seem to be putting most of the work on your shoulders, but do not want you to help me in the shop. I will look after the birds and buy and sell as I used to do; you will have the back room private to yourself for stuffing and mounting.”

Frank was delighted at this allotment of labor, and was soon at work rummaging the drawers and picking out specimens for mounting, and made a selection sufficient to keep him employed for weeks. That evening he sallied out and expended his two pounds in underlinen, of which he was sorely in need. As he required them his employer ordered showcases for the window, of various sizes, getting the backgrounds painted and fitted up as Frank suggested.

Frank did not get on so fast with his work as he had hoped, for the fame of the sailor’s cat and macaw spread rapidly in the neighborhood, and there was a perfect rush of sailors and their wives anxious to have birds and skins, which had been brought from abroad, mounted. The sailor himself looked in one day.

“If you like another two pounds for that ‘ere cat, governor, I’m game to pay you. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Every one’s wanting to see ‘em, and there’s the old woman dressed up in her Sunday clothes a-sitting in the parlor as proud as a peacock a showing of ‘em off. The house ain’t been so quiet since I married. Them animals would be cheap to me at a ten pound note. They’ll get you no end of orders, I can tell you.”