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However precious and coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul.
She lets him guide her hand in the delicate operation, and she crimps, fringes, shades or shapes its leaflets to his will, even to a thousand varieties. He moistens her fingers with the fluids she uses on her easel, and puts them to the rootlets of the rose, and they transpose its hues, or fringe it or tinge it with a new glory.
In the ardor of her work, or talk, or both, Bel's hair, as usual, had got pushed recklessly aside. "O, I only have a little smile in my hair early in the morning," replies quick, cheery Bel. "It never crimps decidedly, and it all gets straightened out prim enough as the day's work comes on.
It was almost noon the following day when Chief Mate Chatters of the whaleship Greenland, en route for Behring Sea, went into the forecastle to appraise some members of a crew hastily and informally shipped. "Shanghaiing," it was called. But one had to have men. One paid the waterfront "crimps" a certain sum and asked no questions. "Who the devil's this?"
Drunken seamen and marines, and women, and Jews, and crimps, all crowded together so that it was difficult to get through the surging mass of human beings, many of them fighting and wrangling and swearing, while the Jews were trying to sell their trumpery wares to such of the poor ignorant sailors as had any money left in their pockets, and the more sober of the men were endeavouring to lift their tipsy shipmates into the boats.
Aware of this, the sailors, as soon as they arrive, desert, and are secreted and fed by the crimps, who make their market of them in the fall of the year by selling them to the captains; procuring for the men an exorbitant sum for the voyage home, and for themselves a handsome douceur for their trouble, both from the captain and the sailor.
Everyone was now busy: Jack and Mesty at Portsmouth, fitting out the vessel, and offering three guineas ahead to the crimps for every good able seaman Mr Hanson obtaining the English register, and the letters of licence, and Dr Middleton in search of a good naval dry-nurse. Jack found time to write to Don Philip and Agnes, apprising them of the death of his father, and his intentions.
"You do look so funny, Esmeralda," she begins. "Your feet do seem positively immense, as the teacher said." "Pardon me; I said not that," gently interposes the teacher; "only that they looked too big, bigger than they are, when she turns them outward." "And you do sit very much on one side," she continues to Versatilia: "and your crimps are quite flat, my dear," to the beauty.
We ain't 'xactly such soft good natur'd ignorant big babies as some o' your well-meanin' pheelanthropists would make us out; but we are uncommon hard put to it when we git ashore, for every port is alive with crimps an' land-sharks to swaller us up when we come off a long voyage; an' the wust of it is, that we're in a wild reckless humour for the most part when we git ashore with our pockets full o' yellow boys, an' are too often quite willin' to be swallered up, so that lots of us are constantly a-goin' to sticks an' stivers.
And it was said on Board that they would not unfrequently decoy by false signals, or positively haul, a vessel in distress on to those same Goodwins, in whose fatal depths so many tall Ships lie Engulfed, in order to have the Plunder of her, which was more profitable than the Salvage, that being in the long-run mostly swallowed up by the Crimps and Longshore Lawyers of Deal and other Ports, who were wont to buy the Boatmen's rights at a Ruinous Discount.
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