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I was wrecked off the Spanish Main on my first voyage, and I 've run afoul of pirates and come near walking the plank more times than one, I 'm telling ye, but somehow I always had the luck to get away! And here I be, safe and sound." At this point the lobsters made a commotion in the wooden puncheon, and the Captain turned his attention to them.

The village contained only two men; the rest were drinking, at Prince's town, the proceeds of a puncheon of palm-oil. The plantations still showed fruits and flowers probably left by the Portuguese wild oranges, mangoes, limes, pine-apples, and the 'four o'clock, a kind of 'marvel of Peru, supposed to open at that hour.

Stools, benches, and tables were roughed out with auger and broadax; the puncheon floor was left bare, and if the earth formed the floor, no rug ever replaced the grass which was its first carpet. The cabin had but one room where the whole of life went on by day; the father and mother slept there at night, and the children mounted to their chamber in the loft by means of a ladder.

Except fragments of wood, I perceived nothing until I arrived at the pool where we were accustomed to bathe; and I found that the sea had thrown into it two articles of large dimensions one was a cask of the size of a puncheon, which lay in about a foot of water farthest from the seaward; and the other was a seaman's chest.

Without these, farming could be carried on only upon a very limited scale. They had, however, twenty barrels of flour, a puncheon and a half of wine, a few gallons of brandy, one or two swine, and one cock and hen. The exploring party of fifty set out in two bands, in October, from the bay, which he had named St. Louis.

He would not undertake to dance, for he readily perceived that the gyrations in the ball-room were utterly dissimilar to the clumsy capering to which he had been accustomed on the puncheon floor of a mountain cabin.

"A wet day is considerable tiresome, any where or any way you can fix it; but it's wus at an English country house than any where else, cause you are among strangers, formal, cold, gallus polite, and as thick in the head-piece as a puncheon. You hante nothin' to do yourself and they never have nothin' to do; they don't know nothin' about America, and don't want to.

He remembered, too, the humble child smiling its guileless good-will at the fence. He broke out suddenly. "How kem the fields Purdee's," he cried, leaning his back against the door and striking the puncheon floor with the butt of the gun till it rang again and again, "or the house, or the bin, or the barn? Did he plant 'em? Did he build 'em? Who made 'em his'n?"

I walked about the market-place in front of their inn, pretending to be doing nothing. That Belgian fellow you know who I mean came up to me. The owners of all the good vineyards have kept back their vintages, intending to wait; well, I didn't hinder them. The Belgian was in despair; I saw that. In a minute the bargain was made. He takes my vintage at two hundred francs the puncheon, half down.

The bows of the vessel resembled the side of a tub, and the stern the end of a puncheon cut through the centre lengthways. A passage across the stormy ocean in the "Adamante" in the winter of 1771-2, in comparison to one in an ocean greyhound of 1889, would be much the same as the difference between a ride in an ox-cart and one in a palace car, both for comfort and speed.