At the same time
your pleasantly-composed aphorism that the interior nature of persons
does not vary with the colour of their eyes, and that if I searched I
should find the old flying kites and the younger kicking feather
balls or working embroidery, according to their sex, does not appear
to be accurately sustained.
The lesser ones, it is true, engage in a variety of sumptuous
handicrafts, such as the scorching of wooden tablets with the
semblance of a pattern, and gouging others with sharpened implements
into a crude relief; depicting birds and flowers upon the surface of
plates, rending leather into shreds, and entwining beaten iron, brass,
and copper into a diversity of most ingenious complications; but when
I asked a maiden of affectionate and domesticated appearance whether
she had yet worked her age-stricken father's coffin-cloth, she said
that the subject was one upon which she declined to jest, and rapidly
involving herself in a profuse display of emotion, she withdrew,
leaving this one aghast.
To enable my mind to retranquillise, I approached a youth of
highly-gilded appearance, and, with many predictions of
self-inferiority, I suggested that we should engage in the stimulating
rivalry of feather ball. When he learned, however, that the diversion
consisted in propelling upwards a feather-trimmed chip by striking it
against the side of the foot, he candidly replied that he was afraid
he had grown out of shuttle-cock, but did not mind, if I was
vigorously inclined, "taking me on for a set of yang-pong.
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