“Oh, I’ll help you,” I said, and I waited with some curiosity while he opened the lock, and, after hanging it on a nail, slowly raised the lid, and I looked in to see a strange assortment of odds and ends. What seemed to be dead birds were mixed up with tow, feathers, wire, a file, a pair of cutting pincers, and a flat pomatum pot, on which was printed the word “poison.”
“What’s that for?” I said wonderingly.
“Oh, that’s soap,” he said.
“No, no, that—the poison.”
“Soap, I tell you. Take off the lid.”
I hesitated for a moment, and then raised the lid, to see that the box was half full of a creamy-looking paste, which exhaled an aromatic odour.
“Is that soap?” I said.
“Yes, to brush over the skins of things I want to preserve. Don’t touch it. You have to wash your hands ever so many times when you’ve been using it. Look, that’s a starling I began to stuff, but it don’t look much like a bird, does it?”
“Looks more like a pincushion,” I said. “What’s the cotton for?”
“Oh, that’s to keep the wings in their places till they’re dry. You wind cotton over them, and that holds their feathers down, but I didn’t get this one right.”