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The coffin was draped with the Union Jack, and was carried shoulder high by the boat boys, who wore black singlets and mourning loin-cloths, but no caps. At the cemetery on Mission Hill stood a throng of natives. Old Mammy Fuller who had loved Mary so much, sat alone at the top of the grave. When the procession was approaching she heard some women beginning to wail, and at once rose.
The guards wore revolvers and side-arms, but did not appear at all particular in the matter of uniform. Names of various ships appeared on their caps, while some had on their caps only the words "Kaiserliche Marine." Some were barefoot, some wore singlets and shorts, while some even dispensed with the former.
Having then proclaimed strict silence he ordered us to make ready and begin. Both my opponent and I were now stripped to the waist, our singlets being used as bandages for the right arm to protect it from a chance wound from the dagger knives with which we were armed, we being allowed no other weapon.
For a brief spell, by some unforeseen miracle of good fortune, there was nothing to do for the moment, and the four of us, in clean singlets and dungarees, were leaning on the off rail of the after well-deck smoking. Port Duluth was behind us.
He had been cast for it on account of his stature and grave manners for he was now at the end of his second year at Belvedere and in number two. A score of the younger boys in white knickers and singlets came pattering down from the stage, through the vestry and to the chapel. The vestry and chapel were peopled with eager masters and boys.
Selecting the corner of an upstairs verandah where there might be some possibility of a faint draught, and having cigars, whisky and iced soda well within reach, we would take off our white jackets for greater coolness and sit perspiring in singlets round the table between guttering candles, when with bare heads and naked arms we must have had the appearance of desperate gamblers, though only playing the regulation twenty-five cent points with longs and shorts and a dollar on the rub, so that the damage could not be very extensive.
Their skin was blackened by sweat and coal dust; soaked singlets, tight like gloves, clung to their lean bodies. Nobody else, however, was actively occupied. The negroes lay on the deck and the white men lounged in the shade of the awning. They had done all that flesh and blood could do, in a climate that breaks the white man's strength, and now the tide ought to finish their labor.
Morris might have made something out of it for a dado. It is composed of an arrangement in line of stretched out singlets. Vaseline the revolver. Wish those men would leave off chattering. Kefalla seems to know the worst about most of the people, black and white, down in Ambas Bay, but I do not believe those last two stories.
Prince Dressup was the dandy of the ship, a "swell guy" even at sea. His singlets were open-work, his moleskins were tailor-made, and his toe-nails were pedicured. The others wore only singlets and "pants," but had the regulation costume been as in the Garden of Eden, his fig-leaf would have been the greenest and freshest there!
He remembered how they had all stood at the starting-post in the windy sunshine, straight lads in their singlets and shorts, utterly uninvolved in anything but this clean thing of running a race; the women were all behind the barriers, tolerated spectators, and one was too busy to see them; his clothing had been stiff with sweat, and when he wriggled his body the cool air passed between his damp vest and his damp flesh, giving him a cold, pure feeling.
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