United States or Anguilla ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was slumped down in his chair, which he had wheeled about so that he could rest his feet comfortably on the window-sill, and beneath his wandering thoughts he was only dreamily conscious of cinders clinking in the lamp funnels and the low monotone of the rushing train.
"But, do you know, Uncle Porges, you don't look as though you had a ship for your very own, somehow." "Don't I?" "You see, a ship is such a very big thing for one man to have for his very own self. An' has it got masts, an' funnels, an' anchors?" "Lots of 'em." "Then, please, when will you take me an' Auntie Anthea sailing all over the oceans?" "Just so soon as she is ready to come."
An ear-shattering roar broke in on it all. Our Cunarder was starting. Smoke belching black from her funnels, the monster was beginning to move. But what was this woman doing close by us? Out of the cabin of a barge she had dragged a little rocking chair, and now she had brought out a baby, all dressed up in its Sunday best, and was rocking expectantly, watching the ship.
But he returned always to the Berenice moving away up the Asia passage, so cautiously that between whiles she seemed to be drifting; but always moving, with the smoke blown level from her buff-coloured funnels, with clean white sides and clean white ensign, and here and there a sparkle of sunlight on rail or gun-breech or torpedo-tube.
When the lamp was lighted, as the Skipper said, nobody could tell, for when the water in the tin boiled, the steam came out of the funnels, and when the wind blew, it was almost as good as having real engines. Tom Jeffs looked very serious over the work, and shook his head a great deal when it was done.
I can still see, in steel-black relief, the silhouetted superstructure, funnels and stanchions; the indigo shadows and ghostly spots of white under a low-swinging half-moon and large softly-glowing stars. The sky was clear and smiling, in the risor sardonicus of my dream.
She could see the leading boat as it passed not three hundred yards away, and the next, both spouting flames from their funnels, throwing up water, which fell in silvery, phosphorescent spray racketing, clawing the restless sea, chugging, hissing with shouts of vengeance hurtling from their decks, First ploughed the flag-ship El Toro, next El Teuera, and last the "battleship" El Manuel, sitting almost on her stern, plugging along doggedly in a Herculean effort to be first in at the death of the presumptuous kidnappers.
The narrow, low-lying craft spun about in almost her own length, a series of quick puffs of dense black smoke came from the funnels, and then the haze swallowed up the whole fabric. We were left to take our discomfiture with what philosophy we could muster. When "secure" was sounded we left our guns with a sense of great danger averted and a feeling of relief.
Each cruiser also carried two under-water torpedo tubes ahead and two astern. The funnels emitted no smoke, but merely supplied draught to the petroleum furnaces, which burned with practically no waste, and developed a head of steam which drove the long submerged hulls through the water at a rate of thirty-two knots, or more than thirty-six miles an hour.
The more distant of the two ships was long in shape and dark in colour; she had four masts upon which topsails and staysails were set, and two funnels painted white, but marked with the anchor which clearly set her down to be one of the famous Black Anchor fleet.
Word Of The Day