Clad in their clean shirts, and with faces shining with soap-polish, the men looked rather well, despite their repulsive and generally villainous features. But the women, wrinkled, filthy, quarrelsome and disgusting, they might have stood for incarnations of the witch-hags in Macbeth; and as we watched them guzzling down the food, and then turning their upper garments into impromptu bags to carry off what remained, it is hard to say whether the feeling of pity or disgust they raised was the stronger.
After the feast, Jack, for Maggie's entertainment, tried to get up the blacks to engage in a corroboree, and give an exhibition of boomerang and spear-throwing; but the inner man had been too largely satisfied, and they declined violent exertion, so the toys were distributed and our guests dismissed.
When she and I were dressing that evening for our own Christmas dinner, Maggie kept talking all the time of the strange experience she had passed through that day.
A Striking Picture
"I'll never forget it," she said. "Savages are so different from our English ideas of them. Did you notice the dogs? I counted nineteen go off with the first native that left. And the women! Weren't they horrors? I don't think I'll ever feel pride in my sex again. But above all, I'll never forget the way in which Jack drove from the table that native who hadn't a clean shirt on. It was a picture of Christ's parable of the 'Marriage Feast,'" she added softly.
Before I could reply the gong, strengthened by Jack's imperative "Hurry up, I'm starving," summoned us to dinner.
My Mistress Elizabeth
BY