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Updated: June 4, 2025
But now she fires: as the broadsides drench her anew, she fires, the hulk all round the horizon lowing in travail: and as there is no question of missing on the one side, so on the other is assurance, the Boodah's broad-sides of 19.5-inchers and 9.5-inchers, ninety- two in all, being fired by the hand of Quilter-Beckett, who sits at a table grim with knobs, buttons, dial-faces, in a cabinet near a saloon where Hogarth, Loveday, and five lieutenants are lunching; and where he sits he can hear the band in an alcove rendering for the eaters Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: hear, not heed: for two gunners in each casemate have sighted a ship through pivoted glasses, whose fixing, disturbing an electrical circuit, prints the ship's distance on an indicator before the Admiral: whereupon he touches a button many buttons in intense succession: the Boodah bawls: and the thrust-back of her resentment becomes intolerable, the ships just like fawns under the paws of an old lion whose grisly jaws drip gore; the sharks that infest her will fare well of her hand.
There, at the south edge, stood a marine trumpeting something at Hogarth's yacht; and, just landing at the Boodah from his gig, a fretful Yankee skipper, register in hand with a bag of L900 sea-rent in gold, while twenty yards yonder rode his smoking ship loaded with grain for Rouen; and on the eastern horizon the armada, in crescent at present, moving with fires banked at two knots, a glare hiding them from the naked eye, but the glass revealing them like toys in the abstract, ethereally hazy.
The Kaiser passengers had now been sent off to New York, the Boodah's halls seemed the home of desolation; and, as the night advanced, Hogarth and Loveday walked on the roof: for they could find no rest, the sky without moon or star, the sea making of three sides of the Boodah a roaring reef, the wind blowing cold, they two wrapped to the nose in oilskins with sou'-westers, lashed by rages of rain and spray.
He anticipated no nuisance. Nevertheless, the fever heightened. The light-system of the Boodah, now included in the usual alphabetical lists of derelicts, was conned by thousands of mariners, while in the crowded captains', underwriters', and committee rooms at Lloyd's discussion buzzed and speechified in every tone of gravity.
But nothing happened or the opposite of what was feared: for, as months passed, the Boodah, planted there in the ocean, rapidly became the recognized gathering-point of the fashion and gaiety of Europe, thither flocking the socially ambitious and the "arrived" together, and to have been invited to those revels of taste and elegance became a superiority.
He was away: for the moment was near, the Boodah now surrounded with a series of floating squares hanging deep torpedo-nets against submarines, on both horizons effusions of smoke, the ships no more visions, but middle-sized sea-things, seeming fixed in the thick of the sea, though steaming quickly.
And now a Deputation of Five took boat in the Prince George, to wait upon the Lord of the Sea in the Boodah Throne Room, where the Lord President read the information that they were a Committee appointed to attend His Lordship's Majesty with the Resolutions of the Houses.
And no question of missing: the Boodah stationary and huge; every shell told. But, the deluge over, that thunder-marred visage again looked grimly forth, a face new-risen from smallpox, an apparition, roof-houses gone, lighthouse tops, one of her great 19.5 inchers in fragments, in her casemates seventeen dead.
The ship's-officers were received on the Boodah in a deck-room containing a number of boats with castored keels, capable of being quickly launched down an incline, where Mr.
During the next month England was in a general-election turmoil; at the same time a Land Bill in the French Chamber, and one in the Reichstag, was thrown out: whereupon a ukase from the Boodah announced the raising of sea-rent to 5s. on all ships over 2000 tons after the 1st February, the month of grace over, the "screw tightening".
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