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It is like going to a foreign country. The shop signs, written in Hebrew characters, suggest a combination of horseshoes and carpet-tacks, and you may walk for blocks without hearing an English word spoken. Ask your whereabouts of a street boy and he will quite likely turn pale and edge away. He does not understand. You are an alien, a foreign devil.
So, at any rate, the matter seemed to these husky young recruits, who were learning to march in the mud and sleep in the rain and chew up carpet-tacks and grind Huns into leber-wurst.
Kate went in, but stopped, as she came out with our letters, to read a written notice securely fastened to the grocery door by four large carpet-tacks with wide leathers round their necks. "Dear," said she, exultantly, "there's going to be a lecture to-night in the church, a free lecture on the Elements of True Manhood. Wouldn't you like to go?" And we went.
But as no one else was willing to come along, and as I drew the line at dogs, I said no more about the matter, but simply loaded my guns. At this point in my dilemma Captain Pedro Samblich, a good Austrian of large experience, coming along, gave me a bag of carpet-tacks, worth more than all the fighting men and dogs of Tierra del Fuego. I protested that I had no use for carpet-tacks on board.
A couple of slats were placed over the aperture to prevent the floor-cloth from being forced in by the pressure of the water. Both of the boys then went to work nailing on the carpet, which was new and very heavy. The nails were put very close together, and most of them being carpet-tacks, with broad heads, they pressed the oilcloth closely down to the wood-work.
Two of the savages standing erect wore sea-boots, and this sustained the suspicion that they had fallen upon some luckless ship's crew, and also added a hint that they had already visited the Spray's deck, and would now, if they could, try her again. Their sea-boots, I have no doubt, would have protected their feet and rendered carpet-tacks harmless.
A well-known sound the fluttering and scraping of chaparral against wooden stirrups came from the thick brush above the camp. The rangers listened cautiously. They heard a loud and cheerful voice call out reassuringly: "Brace up, Muriel, old girl, we're 'most there now! Been a long ride for ye, ain't it, ye old antediluvian handful of animated carpet-tacks? Hey, now, quit a tryin' to kiss me!
IV. It was Saturday afternoon, the 24th of December, and the weary sisters of the Dorcas band rose from their bruised knees and removed their little stores of carpet-tacks from their mouths. This was a feminine custom of long standing, and as no village dressmaker had ever died of pins in the digestive organs, so were no symptoms of carpet-tacks ever discovered in any Dorcas, living or dead.
Weighing anchor at Buenos Aires An outburst of emotion at the mouth of the Plate Submerged by a great wave A stormy entrance to the strait Captain Samblich's happy gift of a bag of carpet-tacks Off Cape Froward Chased by Indians from Fortescue Bay A miss-shot for "Black Pedro" Taking in supplies of wood and water at Three Island Cove Animal life.
I see, as I look back over my own small achievement, a kit of not too elaborate carpenters' tools, a tin clock, and some carpet-tacks, not a great many, to facilitate the enterprise as already mentioned in the story.
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