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And to Dominic Iglesias, just now, it seemed very excellent that posterity should know him for the wind-bag hypocrite he essentially was.
The two principal salt-water craft that have a history behind them and a sphere of active usefulness to-day are the schooner and its tender, the little dory. A schooner is a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel with at least two masts and four sails mainsail, foresail, jib, and the staysail generally called a wind-bag. The schooner rig makes the handiest all-round vessel known.
Alas, it may readily, unless he look to it, make him a worse man; a wretched inflated wind-bag, inflated till he burst, and become a dead lion; for whom, as some one has said, "there is no resurrection of the body;" worse than a living dog! Burns is admirable here. And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of Burns.
He had large white teeth of a kind to crack nuts with, and the full, wide, flexible mouth that denotes the generous talker. "What a wind-bag it is, to be sure!" thought his companion, as he smoked and listened, in a gently ironic silence, to abuse of the Government. He knew or thought he knew young Purdy inside out. But behind all the froth of the boy's talk there lurked, it seemed, a purpose.
Seagrue is a man-killer, but a square one." "How do you know?" "I will tell you sometime but this was not Seagrue." "One of Dunning's men, was it? Stormy Gorman?" "No, no, a very different sort! Stormy is a wind-bag. The man that is after you is in town at this minute, and he has come to stay until he finishes his job." "The devil! That's what makes your eyes so bright, is it? Do you know him?"
He, like Radowitz, was a poseur a wind-bag. That was what made the attraction between them. If she wished to learn Greek "Let me teach you!" And he had bent forward, with his most brilliant and imperious look, his hand upon her reins. But Constance, surprised and ruffled, had protested that Sorell had been her mother's dear friend, and was now her own.
The Wind-god, whose likeness is that of a devil, carries the wind-bag; and the Thunder-god, who is also shaped like a devil, carries a drum and a drumstick. The second gate is called the Gate of the gods Niô, or the Two Princes, whose colossal statues, painted red, and hideous to look upon, stand on either side of it.
"The trouble with you chaps," he said severely, "is that as long as you've managed to get a silly old leather wind-bag over a fool streak of lime you think it doesn't matter how much you've broke yourselves to pieces." "Yes, it's very thoughtless of us," murmured Neil with deep contriteness. "Humph!" growled the doctor. "See you in the morning."
Thus, in time, he had acquired a reputation for being unreliable and a wind-bag, with the result that skippers were chary of engaging him. Not to be too prolix, at the time Captain Scraggs made the disheartening discovery that he had to have a skipper for the Maggie, Mr. Gibney found himself reduced to the alternative of longshore work or a fo'castle berth in a windjammer bound for blue water.
"Because our most dangerous foe was in the audience. You know. The man with the beard who first spoke. He has often denounced me as lukewarm; and then you know words are not as potent as deeds with the proletarians. One assassination is of more value than all the philosophy of Tolstoy. And that old wind-bag sat near us and watched us watched me.
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