hort work with the giblets.

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.

THE IBEX.

Big as was the body of the peacock, there was not much of it left after
that _dejeuner aux doigts_! Only the bones; and so clean picked were
they, that had Fritz not already been made welcome to the giblets, he
would have had but a scanty meal of it.

The savoury roast did a good deal towards restoring the spirits of the
party; but they could not help dwelling upon the indifferent prospect
they now had of procuring a fresh stock of provisions--so much changed
were circumstances by their powder having been destroyed.

The bow and arrows of Ossaroo were still left, and other bows could be
made, if that one was to get broken. Indeed, Caspar now determined on
having one of his own; and practising archery under the tutelage of the
shikaree, until he should be able to use that old-fashioned and
universal weapon with deadly effect.

Old-fashioned we may well term it: since its existence dates far beyond
the earliest times of historical record; and universal: for go where you
will into the most remote corners of the earth, the bow is found in the
hands of the savage, copied from no model, introduced from no external
source, but evidently native to the country and the tribe, as if when
man was first created the weapon had been put into his hands by the
Creator himself!

Indeed, the occurrence of the bow--with its necessary adjunct, the
arrow--among tribes of savages living widely apart, and who, to all
appearance, could never have communicated the idea to one another--is
one of the most curious circumstances in the history of mankind; and
there is no other way of explaining it, than by the supposition that the
propelling power which exists in the recoil of a tightly-stretched
string must be one of the earliest phenomena that presents itself to the
human mind; and that, therefore, in many parts of the world this idea
has been an indigenous and original conception.

The bow and arrow is certainly one of the oldest weapons on the earth--
as well as one of the most universally distributed. It is a subject
that, in the hands of the skilled ethnologist, might become one of the
most interesting chapters in the history of the human race.

I have said that after eating the peacock our adventurers were in better
spirits; but for all that, they could not help feeling some little
apprehension as to how their food was to be obtained for the future.
Ossaroo's skill