Befeathered

He bore about the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves, abundant mantle, and a large befeathered and beribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.

It was the zenith of London’s last, maddest “season”; but her pleasure crowd—the dancers in her night-clubs; the befeathered scantily-draped women of her Opera House; the placemen, the panderers and the nincompoops who made pretence of governing her—had departed; were “week-ending” in pseudo-rusticity, twenty, thirty, a hundred miles away.

[…] here is a conversation between this towering Christian and his absolute antithesis in the imperial hierarchy, a befeathered pagan rain-doctor of the Bakwain tribe in central Africa—the very class of man, one might suppose, for whose enlightenment Victoria’s Empire existed.

Biting works well against other attacking ants but not against befeathered birds.