United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A few fish scales transferred themselves from the back of his oakum-coloured hand to his venerable brow. "'Tain't no use," he murmured. "'Er's nigh twenty year' ole come nex' month. Tar ain't no use neither. 'Tis new strakes 'ers wantin'." He thumbed the seams of the old boat that lay on the shingle, with the outgoing tide still lapping round her stern. "An' new strakes do cost tarrible lot."
"Sink this hulk straightway, then," I said, falling to work, with the axe I had in thy hand, on the lowest strakes. My men leaped to work as well, and in two minutes the seams began to gape, and then was a rush of water from broken planking that sent us over the side and into the boat in hot haste.
It was an interesting and exhilarating spectacle to watch these two graceful craft leaping and plunging over the swift-rushing foam- capped emerald surges, spurning them aside with their swelling bows and shivering them into cloud-like showers of snowy spray which they dashed as high as their fore-yards; now rolling heavily to windward as they slid down into a liquid valley, and anon careering to leeward under the influence of wind and wave, as they mounted to the succeeding crest, until their wet gleaming sides and glistening copper flashed in the sun almost down to their garboard strakes.
Diverse bright strakes appeared to flash upwards now and then, dividing the rednesse, through the which the stars seemed to be of a bright sanguine colour. In Februarie next insuing, one night after midnight the like wonder was seene and shortlie after newes came that the king was taken in Almaigne.
Her strakes were a patchwork of various kinds of wood, though when she was tarred their diversity would be hidden from all but the searching of the elements. It was astonishing that Pascoe had done so well. It was still more astonishing that he should think it would serve. "I've given him a hand with it," remarked the barge-builder, "an' more advice than the old 'un 'ud take.
And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods. And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.
Ben Boltrope was found to be right. After tossing to one side the bales and boxes and heavy masses of iron that filled the midship section of the hold, they found a great gap between the timbers through which the water was spouting in at the rate of some hundred gallons an hour the cause of the hole being apparent enough in a long iron girder which had got jammed against the side of the ship, end outwards, and in the working of the ship had made its way clean through the strakes and planking just as if it had been an auger, the hole had been bored so round and neat!
"No," she said faintly; and added, "I shall always be satisfied with you alone, Hugh." He laughed happily, and presently she went up on deck and stood with her face to the breeze. There were no sounds save the musical beat of the water against the strakes, and the low hum of wind on the towering vibrant sails. One moulten silver star stood out above all others.
The three iron-framed stamp-boxes discharge their sludge into two parallel mercury- or amalgam-boxes, which Mr. Appleby declares will arrest 75 to 80 per cent. of free gold. It then passes on to the distributing table, the flow to the strakes being regulated by small sluices. Of the latter there is one to each width of green baize or of mining-cloth made for the purpose.
And Iohn Dannusco the Auditor went with fifteene horsemen, and 40. footemen that way that the Gouernour was to goe, and found a strong fort made, where the Indians staied for him, and many of them walked on the top of it with their weapons, hauing their bodies, thighes and armes okered and died with blacke, white, yellow and red, striped like vnto paines, so that they shewed as though they went in hose and doublets: and some of them had plumes, and others had hornes on their heads, and their faces blacke, and their eies done round about with strakes of red, to seeme more fierce.
Word Of The Day