VII THE SKUNK, CALMLY CONSIDERED 243 
It is sable only in artificial hue, and probably came 
from Connecticut; but it is a good, warm, hand- 
some fur for all that, and there is no occasion to 
gird at its real origin. It seems to me that the 
use of the skins without dyeing, employing their 
natural contrast of. white and black, might serve 
admirably in certain goods, as robes; but this is 
rarely if ever seen. If the reason is that the prej- 
udice against the name is too great to be over- 
come with the average purchaser, several better 
euphemisms than the false and meaningless 
“ Alaska sable” might have been chosen by the 
furriers. Nobody knows the source of the word 
skunk, but it is probably an early Canadian F rench- 
English shortening and corruption of the Abenaki 
Indian term secancu or the Huron scangaresse. 
The Crees of the Canadian Northwest called the 
animal seecawk,; but a better trade name would - 
have been chinga, by which the animal became 
known to the early European naturalists by speci- 
mens from French sources in the Mississippi 
valley. 
The pelts are now worth from fifty cents to one 
dollar and a half to the trapper. The business at 
best is not one calculated to make the practitioner 
popular in fastidious society; and reminds one of 
the force of the somewhat coarse maxim formerly 
quoted in admonishing a person not to spread 
abroad home-scandals,— ‘Let every man skin 
his own skunk!” 
