Page:Letters from England.djvu/72

 coverings or a rubber beef-steak; and I will not describe to you all the various African corn-grains, nuts from heaven knows where, berries, seeds, cores, fruits, kernels, bulbs, wheat-ears, poppy-heads, tubers, pods, piths and fibres and roots and leaves, things desiccated, floury, oily, and leafy in all colours and palpable qualities, the names of which, for the most part very beautiful, I have forgotten, and the use of which is somewhat of a riddle to me; I think that their final mission is to lubricate machines, to imitate flour or to anoint the suspicious-looking tarts in Lyons’ wholesale feeding establishments. From these flame-coloured, striped, magenta, dusky and metallically resonant timbers, of course, old English furniture is made, and not negro idols or temples or the thrones of black or brown kings. At the most only baskets or bags from bark, in which this abundance of British Imperial trade articles was conveyed here, tell their tale of the negro or Malay hands which inscribed them with the strange and beautiful technique of