Merchandise,
curios? Does the captain think he is going to sell them somewhere in the South Seas?"
He received us in a room that might have been in a house in a provincial town in France, and the one or two Polynesian
curios had an odd look.
The blue-and- white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the "Presents from Ramsgate," and "Souvenirs of Margate," that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English
curios.
I traded for postage-stamps, for minerals, for
curios, for birds' eggs, for marbles (I had a more magnificent collection of agates than I have ever seen any boy possess--and the nucleus of the collection was a handful worth at least three dollars, which I had kept as security for twenty cents I loaned to a messenger-boy who was sent to reform school before he could redeem them).
Captain Jim's "few little things" turned out to be a most interesting collection of
curios, hideous, quaint and beautiful.
But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads (great
curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to churches.
We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for
curios.
But soon he had roused himself, and had picked up another
curio to talk about.
From the kinky locks of one of the naked young men he drew a hand-carved, fine-toothed comb, the lofty back of which was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which he later sold in Sydney to a
curio shop for eight shillings.
It seems that an old bookworm who has a book and
curio shop in Baltimore discovered between the leaves of a very old Spanish manuscript a letter written in 1550 detailing the adventures of a crew of mutineers of a Spanish galleon bound from Spain to South America with a vast treasure of "doubloons" and "pieces of eight," I suppose, for they certainly sound weird and piraty.
Between them the two had cornered, at enormous expense, the
curio market of the game.
The traders sell antiquities,
curios, painted miniatures, porcelain figurines and souvenirs.The situation has forced the sellers to diversify their businesses in order to make ends meet.