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Her accommodations were somewhat cramped, as compared with the newer and larger class of frigates; but as far as I was concerned, coming into her from the little "Scourge," there seemed to be a positive superabundance of room. She mounted thirty-two long twelves, and mustered a crew of 190 men.
My own duties took me to the dark lower deck, a vile place indeed, and reeking with the smell of tar and stale victuals. There I had charge of the battery of old eighteens, while Mr. Dale commanded the twelves on the middle deck.
A mighty muffled blast sent the Bon homme Richard rolling to larboard, and the smoke eddied from our hatches and lifted out of the space between the ships. The Englishman had blown off his gun-ports. And next some one shouted that our battery of twelves was fighting them muzzle to muzzle below, our rammers leaning into the Serapis to send their shot home.
Well, fifty ones are fifty. Fifty months equal four twelves are forty-eight and two over four years and two months. Yes, out of the short life God allows even for the longest love you would voluntarily throw away four years and two months!"
Every resonant quarter was anticipated up to the blow, without averting its murderous abruptness; and an executioner Midnight that sounded, in addition to the reiterated quarters, four and twenty ringing hammerstrokes, with the aching pause between the twelves, left them the prey of the legions of torturers which are summed, though not described, in the title of a sleepless night.
"He is but a little fellow," said Griffith to the Pilot, who hovered at his elbow with a sort of fatherly interest in the other's conduct of the battle, "though he carries a stout heart." "We must crush him at a blow," returned the stranger; "not a shot must be delivered until our yards are locking." "I see him training his twelves upon us already; we may soon expect his fire."
My own duties took me to the dark lower deck, a vile place indeed, and reeking with the smell of tar and stale victuals. There I had charge of the battery of old eighteens, while Mr. Dale commanded the twelves on the middle deck.
She imagined that she must be pale and hollow-eyed enough to excite the compassion of the black-haired girl, for she had not slept at all for thinking, and her eyes ached and her hands felt weak, resting upon the brick of the window sill. Horses raced past, shaking the building, in pairs, in fours, in twelves.
Afterward, when I was hauling logs for pontooning, on the Goulburn, I kept buying up steers and breaking them in, till I had two twelves; and one day I left sixteen of them standing in yoke while I went looking round for a good log; and suddenly I heard a crash that rattled back and forward across the river for a quarter of an hour.
Jimmy began with two-times-two and worked his way through the long table to the twelves. When he finished, his teacher appointed one of the better-behaved children to watch the class. "Jimmy," she said, "I'm going to see if we can't put you up in the next grade. You don't belong here. Come along." They went to the principal's office. "Mr.