United States or Ireland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Think we can come about, Cap'n?" asked Lank, anxiously. "Ain't goin to try, Lank. I'm layin' a straight course for home. Stand by to bail." How they could possibly escape capsizing Lank could not understand until, just as Barnacles was about to make the turn, he saw the Captain tighten the right-hand rein until it was as taut as a weatherstay.
I pulled in the end of the signal-cord, and I found it had not been rubbed and torn by barnacles; the end of it had been clean cut with a knife. I remembered that this was the case with the air-tube; as I placed it into the bung-hole of the first hogshead I had noticed how smoothly it had been severed. "Now I felt a tug at the rope by which I was raised and lowered. I didn't like this.
The hull of the sunken ship, lying slant and open to the sun, has been long enough submerged to be crusted with barnacles, hydropores, crustacea and the labored constructions of the microscopic existences and vegetation that fill the sea.
The rocks under water took on the most exquisite shades purple and malachite and brown; the barnacles clung to them; the long sea-weeds, in half a dozen varieties, some in vivid colors, swept over them, flowing with the restless tide, like the long locks of a drowned woman's hair.
But the lines held up his head and kept his nose pointing straight for the little beach on Sculpin Point, perhaps a quarter of a mile distant. Somewhat heavy weather the deep-laden dory made of it, and in spite of Lank's vigorous bailing the water sloshed around Mrs. Bean's boot-tops, yet in time the sail and Barnacles brought them safely home.
With the help of your barnacles, I worked my way clean through the whole yarn, and I seed the report of killed and wounded; and I'll take my affidavy that there warn't an officer in the fleet as lost the number of his mess in that action, and a most clipping affair it was; only think of mounseer turning tail to marchant vessels! Damn my old buttons! what will our jolly fellows do next?"
And at last, with his fretting and crying, he grew quite lean and thin. But one day among the rocks he found a playfellow. It was not a water-baby, alas! but it was a lobster; and a very distinguished lobster he was; for he had live barnacles on his claws, which is a great mark of distinction in lobsterdom, and no more to be bought for money than a good conscience or the Victoria Cross.
The grotto-like place, shut in by some rocks overshadowed by others, was so gloomy that it was hard to make out everything, but twice over I noted a bit of a rift on my left all fringed with sea-weed and slippery with anemones, where it was not rough with limpets and barnacles. "Was it down here, Bob, down on the left, that you found the conger?" "No," he shouted, "on the right."
Sovereignty is like an old ship stuck fast in the docks, and unfit for sailing the wide seas crusted with barnacles of custom and prejudice, and in every gale of wind pulling and straining at a rusty chain anchor. But the spirit of Change is in the world; a hurrying movement that has wings of fire, and might possibly be called Revolution!
Peter Cooper heard the wail of the Baltimoreans, and said, "I'll knock an engine together in six weeks that will pull carriages ten miles an hour and beat any canal-boat that ever collected barnacles." Peter Cooper went back from Baltimore to New York with a few misgivings as to whether he had not promised too much.
Word Of The Day