Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
Had my letters been delivered in Bolderhead within reasonable time, my mother and Ham, and the others must have been aware of the explanation of my absence a week or two previous to the sailing of the Peveril from Boston. I had told Mr.
He was not alone, and the instant I spied him with two hang-dog fellows, I knew he was like the hen in the story "laying for me!" Paul Downes knew half the riff-raff of Bolderhead which, like most small seaports, boasted more than a sufficient quantity of wharf-rats. Mr. Downes had been wont to expatiate to my mother on my taste for low company; but he must have had his own son in mind.
You know how it is yourself. Wait till the next fellow makes disparaging remarks about your bicycle, for instance or your motor cycle, or canoe, or what-not, and see how you feel! "What's the use of talking that way, Paul?" I demanded, interrupting him. "You know the Wavecrest is by far the lightest-footed craft of her class in Bolderhead Harbor." "No such thing!" he declared.
It would be fifteen years the coming spring that my father had disappeared. Tom Anderly had hit the time near enough. Had there been any man named Carver who had suffered such an accident off Bolderhead Neck as the old seaman told of, I would have heard the particulars, knocking about among the Bolderhead docks as I had for years. The story seemed conclusive.
The tide had not long since turned and was running out, while the wind out of its present quarter was with the tide. Any craft could sail out of Bolderhead harbor this night with both gale and sea in its favor; but heaven help the vessel striving to beat into the inlet! The reefs and ledges along this coast are as dangerous as any down on the charts.
A steamship bound for the Cape of Good Hope, even, would get a letter to Bolderhead, via London, before I could get back myself from any South American port that the Scarboro might be obliged to touch at. I knew, however, that the whaling bark was not likely to touch at any port unless she suffered seriously from the gales.
"I'm smart I admit it," said I, cooly; "but I can't govern the wind. We'll get in by bedtime." "And nothing to eat aboard," growled Paul. "There's the fish you caught," said I, chuckling. Paul had had abominable luck all day, the only thing he landed being what we Bolderhead boys called a "grunter" a frog-mouthed fish of most unpleasant aspect and of absolutely no use as food.
The mere fact that I had left my tender tied to the mooring buoy might not be understood. Beside, the tender might have been cut adrift, too. Or the gale might have done much havoc in Bolderhead Inlet. Other craft could easily have been strewn along the rocky shores, or carried like the Wavecrest out into the open sea.
As I understood it I was but two years old when grandfather died, and my own father was drowned three weeks after grandfather's burial. We had gone to live at once in mother's old home; but she had a tender feeling for Bolderhead, and as I grew older and evinced such a love for the sea, she had built our summer home here.
"If you'd had to depend upon the post-box in the Straits of Magellan, for instance, it might be six months before Bolderhead folk would ever know what had become of you." I must confess that every day I was becoming more and more enamored of this life at sea. We had had little fair weather and were kept busy making sail and then reefing again, or repairing the small damages made by the gale.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking