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Round my lips was a hot fire, for I had grasped a handful of snow and melted it in my mouth as I ran. We were past the peat hags, and the ground fell away under our feet; the heather got scantier and sprits more common, until we had descended, maybe, five hundred feet into a wide valley with a level plain at its heart, with many clumps of stunted birches and hardy firs.
Picture her, if you will, at liberty to start from it in terror and scramble up a companion ladder to an open deck, and pick her way through shrouds and a bare headway of restless sprits above, and Heaven knows what of coiled cordage and inexplicable bulkhead underfoot, to some haven where a merciful old mariner, alone upon his watch, shuts his eyes to his duty and tolerates the beautiful girl on deck, when he is told by her that she cannot sleep for the rats.
Now we saw a Tonquinese trader running before the wind, a curious craft, with one mast and a single sail bent to a yard at the head and stiffened by bamboo sprits running from luff to leech; now a dingy nondescript junk; now in the offing a fleet of proas, which caused us grave concern. But in all our passage only one event was really worth noting.
Instead of playing that the dirt was a host of evil sprits, as Migwan did, which she could vanquish with the aid of her magic broom, Betty went at it sullenly and with a firm determination to do as little as possible and get through just as quickly as she could. She made up her mind that when Migwan went to market in the afternoon she would go along with her in the automobile.
I will call again to-morrow; he will be quieter then, and we'll see what can be done for you. Those children must be cold. Have you no blankets?" "None, sir. We have nothing in the world. What, you see here, even to the straw, belongs, to the landlord of the house, who has been charitable enough to give us shelter." "Well, never mind don't despond don't give way keep the poor fellow's sprits up.
"Ay, well, I whistled and I whistled in that dreary place till the noise of it put a fear on me, and I started on again, and there at my side was the swish, swish in the sprits, and I would be poking my crook among them, but when I would be stopping it would be stopping, and I felt my hair bristle on my neck for the fear on me; but I pushed on, looking at my feet and all round me, till something inside of myself made me be looking up, and there was something before me, wi' eyes glowering at me oh, big, big it was, as a stack o' hay, and it was in my path, and I shut my eyes and stood, for it would kill me.
Officers and guests were all in the best of sprits, and nothing seemed wanting to make the occasion one of unalloyed pleasure. Upon the return, and when almost directly opposite Mount Vernon, the company were summoned by the Commodore from the dinner table to witness the testing of the gun. Preceded by an officer, the guests were soon assembled in proximity to the gun.
And whilst they waited thus, under cover of the darkness and as the tide began to ebb, Captain Blood's fleet weighed anchor quietly; and, as once before, with no more canvas spread than that which their sprits could carry, so as to give them steering way and even these having been painted black the four vessels, without a light showing, groped their way by soundings to the channel which led to that narrow passage out to sea.
It had been a providential deliverance all around, and the men could not be otherwise than in the best sprits. "The next thing is to hunt up the younker," said the scout, as they sat upon the the ground discussing incidents of the past few days. "I'm a little troubled about him, 'cause we've been away longer than we expected, and some of the varmints may have got on his trail."
Among the peasant classes of South Holland it is the custom, as soon as the ice will bear, to skate to Gouda, men and women together, there to buy long Gouda pipes for the men and 'Goudsche sprits' for the women, and then to skate home with these brittle objects without breaking them.
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