Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War by G. A. Henty (book club recommendations .txt) 📖
- Author: G. A. Henty
Book online «By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War by G. A. Henty (book club recommendations .txt) 📖». Author G. A. Henty
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.”
The orders, indeed, came in much faster than Frank could fulfill them, although he worked twelve hours a day; laying aside all other work, however, for three hours in order to devote himself to the shop cases, which were to be chef d'oeuvres.
CHAPTER VII: AN OLD FRIEND
For three months Frank passed a quiet and not unpleasant life with the old naturalist in Ratcliff Highway. The latter took a great liking to him, and treated him like a son rather than an assistant. The two took their meals together now, and Frank's salary had been raised from twelve to eighteen shillings a week. So attractive had the cases in the windows proved that quite a little crowd was generally collected round them, and the business had greatly augmented. The old naturalist was less pleased at this change than most men would have been in his position. He had got into a groove and did not care to get out of it. He had no relatives or any one dependent on him, and he had been well content to go on in a jog trot way, just paying his expenses of shop and living. The extra bustle and push worried rather than pleased him.
“I am an old man,” he said to Frank one day, as after the shop was closed they sat over their tea. “I have no motive in laying by money, and had enough for my wants. I was influenced more by my liking for your face and my appreciation of your talent, than by any desire of increasing my business. I am taking now three times as much as I did before. Now I should not mind, indeed, I should be glad, if I thought that you would succeed me here as a son would do. I would gladly take you into partnership with me, and you would have the whole business after my death. But I know, my boy, that it wouldn't do. I know that the time will come when you will not be content with so dull a life here. You will either get an offer from some West End house which would open higher prospects to you, or you will be wandering away as a collector. In any case you would not stop here, of that I am quite sure, and therefore do not care, as I should have done, had you been my son, for the increase of the business. As it is, lad, I could not even wish to see you waste your life here.”
Frank, after he was once fairly settled at his new work, had written to his friend the doctor, at Deal, telling him of the position he had taken, and that he was in a fair way to make at least a comfortable living, and that at a pursuit of which he was passionately fond. He asked him, however, while writing to him from time to time to give him news of his sister, not
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