United States or Andorra ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I maintained a diplomatic blubber long after we had been packed into our pony-carriage and the lodge-gate had clicked behind us, because it served as a sort of armour-plating against heckling and argument and abuse, and I was thinking hard and wanted to be let alone. And the thoughts that I was thinking were two. First I thought, "I've got ahead of Charlotte this time!"
We had come to Kamchatka with minds and mouths heroically made up for an unvarying diet of blubber, tallow candles, and train-oil; but imagine our surprise and delight at being treated instead to such Sybaritic luxuries as purple blueberries, cream, and preserved rose-leaves! Did Lucullus ever feast upon preserved rose-petals in his, vaunted pleasure-gardens of Tusculum? Never!
The same man might be the owner of six or seven ships, any one of which he himself was fitted by education and experience to command; the master of a score of apprentices, each of whom paid a pretty sufficient premium; and the proprietor of the melting-sheds into which his cargoes of blubber and whalebone were conveyed to be fitted for sale.
The day's hunt had afforded all the blubber which they could burn in a month; and their stock of meat, "cached" in another hillock of their berg, was nearly sufficient food for the same period.
There were in this boat several skins of oil and blubber, which I tried hard to purchase, but nothing could induce the old man to part with more than one skin of it; for what reason I could not tell, except that he hoped, by perseverance, to obtain a higher price.
I used to nestle down in the feathers and haul a seal-skin over me; and however hard it blew outside, and however hard it froze, I was warm there. I used to frizzle my meat over the lamp, and every day, when the weather permitted, I went out and brought in a stock of the cabbages. I always kept a good stock of blubber in the den and several bundles of my wicks.
There was only one course open to those who didn't like it, and that was to "grin and bear it." "Cutting out" and "trying in" are the terms used by whale-men to denote the processes of cutting off the flesh or "blubber" from the whale's carcase, and reducing it to oil. At an early hour on the following morning the first of these operations was commenced.
Eagerly we took to the boats and made for our first fish, setting alongside of him in less than half an hour from our first glimpse of his bushy breath. As the irons sank into his blubber, he raised himself a little, and exposed a back like a big ship bottom up. Verily, the skipper's words were justified, for we had seen nothing bigger of the whale-kind that voyage.
The principal imports of Great Britain are cotton wool, raw sugar, tea, flax, coffee, raw silk, train oil and blubber, madder, indigo, wines, &c. &c.
"And I was that took aback, and that delighted, and that flabbergastered!" Hinge positively began to blubber, and what with, the mirth of it, and my own vivid sense of Violet's feeling at the time, and this revelation of the simple fellow's goodness, I was very near doing the same myself.
Word Of The Day