A GREAT FUR SALE.
MORE than three millions of the skins of far-bearing animals were last week sold in four days by public auction from the stores of Sir Charles Lampson, at College Hill, in the City of London. English, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Poles, Canadians, and Americans were there to buy, and the skins were sold, paid for, and on their way to half the countries and capitals of Europe before the week was ended. 1,528,000 skins of the musquash were sold on Friday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and the day's work concluded with a competition for " sundries," comprising hides of tigers, lions, lynxes, and many of the rarest creatures to be seen at the Zoological Gardens' menagerie. At the risk of swamping the sense of proportion by figures, we give the names and numbers of some of the skins, which, through all changes of fashion, have been prized since man first turned hunter, and are now on their way to the furriers from this one gigantic store:—G,550 bears' skins, black, brown, and grizzly; 20 Polar bears' ; 1,460 beavers' skins ; 2,647 Russian sables of the most costly kind ; half-a-million Australian and 120,000 American opossum-skins, and twice that number of skunks' and racoons' ; 36,000 marten or American sables ; 150,000 minks'; 3,000 wolf-skins, and some 20,000 coats of red, white, Asiatic, and even of the tiny " Kitt " foxes, does not exhaust the list. Wallaby, kangaroo, chinchilla, hair- seal, monkey, lamb, and wolf skins swell the total in tens of thousands. The Hudson's Bay Company hold a rival sale of equal calibre ; and in March, the winter catch, of greater quantity and finer quality, will be gathered and dispersed in the City with the same rapidity, and with more eager competition by the fur-loving Russians and Poles. Viewed only as an example of commercial organisation, these sales are a credit to the City. Those who have spent a lifetime in their purchase and preparation, find an endless interest in the furs themselves. Yoa can smell them a street off—an odour of camphor loaded with a faint, heavy savour- xieeieroc, like the fat of sacrifice; for the lofty warehouse is packed on every story, from floor to ceiling, with the undressed skins. The myriad hides of the smaller animals, the musks and musquash, beavers and sables, opossums and martens, are simply stripped from the body of the animal and turned inside out,—drawn off like a glove, and so lie flat, except the sables, which are fastened in bundles by a strip of raw reindeer-hide passed through the muzzles. Stacked in iron racks from floor to ceiling, and divided by partitions, each " lot" is numbered, and scheduled in the sale-catalogue according to its quality and condition, and sample bundles, duly marked, hang in rows at a convenient height for the inspection of the buyers. In the catalogue of sale, a volume of narrow folio of two hundred pages, the quality of each " lot" is marked with scrupulous care, with notes, where needed, stating that the skins are damaged by shot, unusually large or small, dark or pale, woolly or rough, or " cubs," in the case of bears, dyed or stained, choice, poor, middling, or specimen skins. It is the fairest sale in the world, a model of lucid order. It seems at first that no one looks at the skins at all except the porters, who are packing and pressing them into bales. Men come staggering down the stairs under shaggy piles of wolf-skins, with the grinning heads clustered round their ears, or stamp on piles of bear-hides between upright columns of steel ; but no one scans the shelves where the furs lie doable-stacked, like books in a warehoused library. Then, of all incongruous jumbles of thought, the mind travels back to Lord's Cricket- ground. Figures in long white-linen coats, and tall silk hats, the traditional costume of the cricket umpire, are standing at tables tiled with furs, but instead of the bats- man's " blazer " under their arms are tucked bundles of sable, marten, and beaver. They are buyers and merchants, inspecting samples, and guarding their broadcloth in white smocks. Judgment is passed, not only by the quality of the far, to which the catalogue is almost a sufficient guide, but by the soundness and texture of the skin itself; and the dry, yet still oily skins, hide outwards, are fingered, scanned, and criticised with the deftness and certainty born of long ex- perience. These raw skins often bear curious marks from the hands that first stripped them from the mink or musquash in the fur-countries. Laconic Indian letters are found scratched or painted on the skins, sometimes in picture-writing, like the Indian letter transcribed by Marryat in his "Settlers in Canada ; " more often the Indian message is written in Roman characters; and occasionally words of Old French, the legacy of the days of Montcalm, are recognised among the greetings sent by the Indian hunter to the trader or the tribe. The bundles of sables are examined skin by skin. But these are worth £5 to £40 apiece, and can hardly be judged by sample. The very finest and choicest sables have a natural bloom and lustre incomparable among furs, and need neither dressing nor art to enhance their beauty. At the rooms of the International Fur Stores in Regent Street, £500 is asked for a bundle of ten incomparable sable-skins, which are neither tanned nor dressed, but merely strapped together by the reindeer thong, as they left the hands of the merchant at Nijni Novgorod. Seal, beaver, and musquash skins in the rough state are very different from the finished fur. All that is visible isIthe raw hide flattened, and an inner lining of fur at the extremities ; even this is not like the glossy lining or trimming of a coat or jacket, but covered with long dull hair, which must be plucked off by the furrier. Opossum, fox, and racoon skins need little but the currier's process to be fit for wearing. The half-million of opossum-skins in the stores showed only a glimpse of the grey soft fur within ; they are mere dry hides, with an almost invisible fur lining. From the pic-
turesque point of view, the fox-skins are pre-eminent in the warehouses. Whole groves of the soft and deep furs of the red fox—not the English brown-red reynard, but a beautiful warm-tinted mass hang from the ceilings of the passages. Myriads of white and grey fox-skins with blackish tips are piled round the walls, and thousands of pendent " brushes," in diminishing perspective, are seen down the vista of the galleries. Bear-skins, except the rare and coveted pelts of the great Polar species, are a purely commercial article. Yet the sight of rooms-full of the skins of brown and black bears, dry, dusty, and dis- hevelled, need not suggest contempt for a fur which, properly dressed and taken in good condition, makes the warmest wrapping known, except the malodorous sheep-skin. Among the few dressed furs on sale were half-a-dozen exquisite coats of the akin of the Thibetan lamb, dressed in China, pure silky-white without, soft within as chamois-leather, and white as parchment. The Chinese tiger must be a far- commoner and much larger animal than is generally sup- posed. Fourteen of these skins hung in an upper room,. splendid in colour, and of the deepest and richest fur. One of the finest skins of the Northern tiger ever seen in this country now hangs in the International Fur Stores in Regent Street. In its present condition, stretched and dressed, it measares 14 ft. from the nose to the tip of the tail, and the coat is almost as woolly as a bear's. In the March sales of last year, two hundred and fifty tiger-skins were sold. Lions' skins are scarce. It is said that the Chicago Exhibition caused a " boom " in lion-hides, and sent them up to fancy prices_ Amongthe uncatalogued curiosities were a pair of splendid python-skins, and several specimens of an unnamed, but beautiful, grey fur, with a rich patch of chestnut in the centre, which a visit to the Zoo identifies as those of the rare Diana monkey.
Not a fur finds its way into the saleroom. The semi-circle of buyers who throng the desks, with the bulky catalogues before them, might be listening to a scientific lecture, or assisting at some religious function, conducted in musical monotony by the auctioneer. The bids are made by nods, or waves of the pen, and two pairs of practised eyes, on either- side of the seller, ceaselessly scan their allotted section of the benches, and repeat the bids, which are caught and mechani- cally reproduced by the broker. The business is too rapid and too serious to allow of talk. But much exchange of news,. views, and furs takes place later; and the chat after the• January and March sales in London will find an echo in the lodges of the Indians and Esquimaux from Vancouver to. Hudson's Bay, and among the Tartar youarts and reindeer sledges from the Ural to Kamtchatka. "The mystery of the- fur trade," writes the manager of .the great Regent Street firm, in his admirable pamphlet on the uses of furs, "has- disappeared before the development of commerce. The- trappers and hunters are no longer ignorant savages, ready to sell the skins, which they have obtained with toil and peril, for beads or blankets or tobacco, at only a fraction of the true value. They no longer barter on the principle that a musket is worth as many skins as will, when piled close, be the height of the weapon from stock to muzzle; and the days- are past when enormously long-barreled pieces were therefore manufactured expressly for the North American market."
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