158 COMMISSION OF CONSERVATION 



them together — they are far from odourless. Those who live always in 

 the atmosphere do not mind it; but it is a little "rich" to the accidental 

 visitor from the fresh air. And the skins are an amazing and humiliating 

 sight. 



If, by any chance, the visitor has shot oi hunted in wild places, he 

 remembers what the individual trophy meant to him — ^the all-day stalk; 

 the long. Clamped vigil over the "kill" among the strange night noises 

 of the jungle; the hours of lying stretched uneasily and motionless by the 

 streamside as dusk fell and slowly it giew too dark to see the sights; 

 the moment when, breathless and quivering with exhaustion, until it was 

 impossible to hold a rifle steady, at last the hunter was face to face with 

 "it" among the forest trees. Then there was the triumph — and a 

 single skin, bullet-spoiled, to show for it. And here they are — 1,100 

 leopards, 11,000 beavers, 208 grizzly bears! — better skins than the 

 visitor ever shot. Between the racks of packed skins, rising from the 

 floor to higher than a man's reach, narrow aisles run the length of these 

 huge rooms. In a dim corner, thrown down where there were a few feet 

 of spare floor space between racks which held hundreds of thousands of 

 raccoons, a shapeless tawny bundle had, as it seemed, been dumped and 

 overlooked. Big skins, evidently, and from one end protruded a great 

 yellow foot with huge claws. Just a few odd pumas (the label called it 

 "panther"), which, perhaps, will come under the catalogue item 

 "sundries." 



BUYING BY SAMPLES 



Just now, hanging on hooks around the racks, are the "sale bundles" 

 — generally 25 skins of such things as muskrat or skunk — which are 

 the samples by which the buyers estimate the value of the lots to be 

 offered in the sales-room. In the case of the more costly skins, as silver 

 . fox (300 of them hanging in a row) or sable (a long, narrow room hung 

 with nothing else, every skin to delight a woman) , the buyer can see the 

 whole "lot", whether one skin or half a dozen. But the cheaper skins 

 are thus shown in sample. And all day long just now the buyers are 

 here looking at the stock from the samples, they, as well as all the em- 

 ployees, being clad from head to feet in long white linen coats. It is 

 well for the visitor when he goes in to put on one of these garments. 

 Otherwise, when he emerges into the daylight of the street he may find 

 himself moderately furry. But to see it all is worth some inconvenience 

 — even the loss of conceit in one's poor individual trophies. 



