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It is truly the "simple life" that they lead, and to us it seems a very narrow one; yet it has its advantages over the "strenuous life" that most of us are compelled to live. There was little or no drunkenness or quarreling among the men, whose chief vice seemed to be gambling. This gambling instinct is gratified mainly by means of the cockpit.
Some of them were retained, but most of them sent on shore as unserviceable; for it is the custom, when a man either enters or is impressed, to send him down to the surgeon in the cockpit, where he is stripped and examined all over, to see if he be sound and fit for his majesty's service; and if not, he is sent on shore again.
All these things which he had read and doubted, which had left him unmoved, now took on a terrible reality. He could see these things about which the returned soldier spoke, and seeing them believed. Believing, there rose within him a protest that choked him with its force as he sat in the cockpit beside this veteran of Flanders. The man had fallen silent, staring into the green depths overside.
The Elizabethan critics could not know the difference between the theater of Dionysius in Athens and the bare cockpit of the Globe in London; and there are their kin to-day who cannot perceive the difference between the half-roofed playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote and the electric-lighted place of amusement to which we are now accustomed.
The waves, rolling over me, almost knocked me out of the boat, I lost my hold on the oars and grabbed the sides of the boat; then, regaining the oars, I finished the run by pulling with the bow headed downstream, for the boat had "swapped ends" in the interval, and was heavy with about three barrels of water in the cockpit. I bailed out with a grocery box, kept under the seat for that purpose.
The patrol who sighted the Thunder Bird at that height, with no motor hum to call his attention upward, must have sharp eyes and a habit of sky-gazing. Cliff, peering down over the edge of the cockpit, must have thought so, for he laughed aloud triumphantly. "Fine! I think we are putting one over on my friends, the guards," he cried, with more animation than Johnny had yet observed in him.
McGee was on the point of nodding to the crew to remove the wheel chocks when he remembered that for the first time in his experience as a pilot he had climbed into the cockpit without first casting an appraising eye over braces, struts and turn buckles. He promptly cut the motor and climbed from the plane, saying, half aloud; "I must be getting balmy. It's the weather, I guess."
The Belgian loves his land and sits by his home though it be in ruins. The history of the land of the Belgians shows that, as the cockpit of Europe, it was the battle-ground of centuries; yet her people are more immobile than those of any other country in Europe. Earthquakes do not make sunny Italy or golden California less attractive to their inhabitants.
'No one comes so last as old Ritchie. 'But of course, said Aubrey, rather taken aback, 'if I were not youngest, I should have to knock under to some one. Ethel and Harry both laughed heartily; one congratulating him on not having carried the principle into the cockpit, the other adding, 'Don't indoctrinate Leonard with it; there is enough already to breed bitterness between those brothers!
With that Dan drew himself aboard. Back in the cockpit Mrs. Meade and some of the girls were in frenzied way doing their best to revive Pauline Butler, who, at the present moment, showed no signs of life. "Let me take charge of this reviving job. I've taken several tin medals in first aid to the injured," proclaimed Farley modestly.
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