United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We'll take to the life-boat as soon as the cable parts. There isn't any use in trying to save this bark under all the circumstances. I've done my duty. I couldn't have calculated on heavy shot first, and then for a whole gang of cruisers watching for me off the coast. This 'ere norther, too! Well, I didn't make the war, and I don't see that I ought to lose any money by it. I won't, either."
They proceeded to go to sleep in the shady security of the lee side of a life-boat; but, as ill luck would have it, their own sergeant soon spotted them, and it was useless to pull his leg. It was a loading fatigue, of course, and they were sent away along the water-front to shove trucks about. They eventually selected one and brought it down alongside their ship.
I stood upon the lonely strand, the cold waves beating against my feet, and the bleak winds piercing through my unsheltered heart. I stretched out my arms to the wild waste of waters, in whose billows my life-boat was whelmed, and I called, but there was none to answer. I cried for help, but none came.
They reached the beach, and there stretched lifeless on the sand beside his overturned life-boat lay Prince Sadna, and beside him a young officer, whom Redmond recognized as a distant cousin.
The next evening I walked down to the Porth and launched my boat. A row of idlers watched me from the long bench under the life-boat house, and a small knot on the beach inspected my fishing-gear and lent a hand to push off. "Ben't goin' alone, be 'e?" asked Renatus Warne. "Yes," said I. "The conger'll have 'ee then, sure enough."
"If you had told our captain that, he would never have sent out a life-boat," declared the man. "He thought it was some one drowning near at hand, for the story of Wau-Winet Island is no news to the people hereabouts." "What do you mean?" cried Varrick. "I can tell you the story in a very few words, sir," returned the man; "and surely there's no one more competent to relate it than myself.
Then they got their mast and yard tackles aloft, arranged the chocks in place on the main hatch, and with a tremendous amount of fuss, with the assistance of snatch-blocks, the windlass, and the winch, they contrived to hoist in and stow the life-boat that had stood me in such good stead for nearly a fortnight.
He took me up and jumped just as the ship sank, and we were all night in the freezing water. We nearly died, didn't we? He fainted, and so did I, mummie dear it was so cold. He held me up until we were rescued, though, and then there wasn't room in the life-boat for both of us. But he made them take me in, just the same, while he stayed in the water. He was unconscious when he reached the shore.
"Oh well, there is no other place for them." So I jumped into the life-boat again, and reclaimed my treasures. "Rather," said Miss Woolley and I, "die on shore than in that horrid boat." Indeed we felt quite cheerful now we had the boat to ourselves; and Kimchack said he had already been two nights on board the Good Luck and had had no room to lie down.
He would have been invaluable to a fire-office; never was a man with such a natural taste for pumping engines, running up ladders, and throwing furniture out of two-pair-of-stairs’ windows: nor was this the only element in which he was at home; he was a humane society in himself, a portable drag, an animated life-preserver, and had saved more people, in his time, from drowning, than the Plymouth life-boat, or Captain Manby’s apparatus.
Word Of The Day