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But when I caught my first glimpse of him, there in the Corrugated gen'ral offices that mornin', there was more or less comedy idea to his get-up; the high-sided, flat-topped derby, for instance. Once in a while you run across an old sport who still sticks to that type of hard-boiled lid. Gen'rally they're short-stemmed old ginks who seem to think the high crown makes 'em loom up taller.
At last she reached the sunshiny cove, with shoals of minnows flickering about its amber shallows, which was the goal of her flight. Here, tethered to a stake on the bank, lay the high-sided old bateau, which Mandy Ann had long coveted as a perfectly ideal play-house. Its high prow lightly aground, its stern afloat, it swung lazily in the occasional puffs of lazy air.
But it was not a fisherman's boat, it was a light, high-sided row boat and the man in it stood up and pushed forward on his stout oars. He made a landing on the sand before Lucia reached him, and he jumped out hurriedly. Whatever his business was it occupied all his thoughts, for he did not look to right or left but ran straight to the wall. Another figure came out of the shadows to meet him.
She was followed by a small cargo steamer, and the flag they hauled down aboard while we were looking showed her to be a Norwegian. She made an awful lot of smoke; and before it had quite blown away, a high-sided, short, wooden barque, in ballast and towed by a paddle-tug, appeared in front of the windows.
Huge ferryboats passed slowly up and down, their tiers of decks crowded with sightseers. Tug-boats and launches darted about, clearing the course, or convoying racing boats to the starting lines. Ships' boats of all kinds were massed together close inshore: gigs and pinnaces, lean whaleboats, squat dinghys, even high-sided ocean lifeboats with their sombre broad belts of ribbed cork.
English ships and barks with painted ports and spider-web braces, high-sided, square-sterned American half-clippers, clumsy, square-bowed "Dutchmen," coasting-brigs of any nation, lumber-schooners from "'Frisco," hide-carriers from Valparaiso, pearl-boats and fishermen, and even a couple of homesick Malay proas from the west crowded the roadstead; for the guano trade was booming, and Callao prosperous.
It is somewhat like the arrangement in baronial halls where there was an upper and lower table and some sat below the salt and others above. On one side, opposite, but not as high, is the jury-box. This is a pen with twelve seats within a high-sided inclosure like an old-fashioned pew.
Nine high-sided battle-ships of ten-gun type nine floating forts, each one, unopposed, able to reduce to smoking ruin a city out of sight of its gunners; each one impregnable to the shell fire of any fortification in the world, and to the impact of the heaviest torpedo yet constructed they came silently along in line-ahead formation, like Indians on a trail.
Long before this time the lessons of the Civil War had hastened the adoption of armor, the new ships ranging from high-sided vessels with guns in broadside, as in the past, to low freeboard craft influenced by the Monitor design, with a few large guns protected by revolving turrets or fixed barbettes, and with better provision for all-around fire.
Certain old writers remark that the rostrum or beak used by the Romans could not have existed in the English ships, nor was the manoeuvre employed by which one ship attempts to break the oars of another. From this they conclude that the English fleet must have consisted of high-sided ships, worked chiefly by sails. Probably, however, they had oars also.
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