Crossword-Solution: SCRAPERS 8 letters, 12 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged soldier.

Otherwise I might wonder at the completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the birds of the air—have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and mud—have forgotten all about live trees, and make roosting-places of shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers.

Straight off I heard him sing out—“Below there, ahoy! Shake her up, shake her up! Heave on a hundred million billion tons of brimstone!” “Ay-ay, sir!” “Pipe the stabboard watch! All hands on deck!” “Ay-ay, sir!” “Send two hundred thousand million men aloft to shake out royals and sky-scrapers!” “Ay-ay, sir!” “Hand the stuns’ls! Hang out every rag you’ve got! Clothe her from stem to rudder-post!” “Ay-ay, sir!” In about a second I begun to see I’d woke up a pretty ugly customer, Peters.

The children have appointed themselves official lickers and scrapers of the spoons and icing pans, also official guides on their auntie’s walks.

And to tell you plainly, these are scrapers such as the Esquimaux in North America still use to scrape the flesh off bones, and to clean the insides of skins.