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Updated: May 13, 2025
There was a calmness and an authority in the tones of the young commander, that curbed the impetuous feelings of the startled crew. Accustomed to obedience, and trained to order, each man broke out of his trance, and eagerly commenced the discharge of his allotted duty. At that instant, an erect and unmoved form stood on the combings of the main hatch.
Attaching a line to any part of the rail or combings, or to any projecting point of the boat, establishes the droit de pêche at that particular spot, a right respected with such rigorous etiquette, that the owner may then go his way with confidence, to inspect the resources of the bar, or join the gay throng of dancers between-decks.
He veritably sees things, and he makes the reader see them. And all the strange and curious sea jargon, of which not one landsman in a thousand understands anything combings and back-stays and dead-eyes, and the rest of it takes a salt smack of romance in his lips.
But the third fact that I observed was still more conclusive. The hairs of which that little tress was composed had not been pulled out at all. They had fallen out spontaneously. They were, in fact, shed hairs probably combings. Let me explain the difference.
In a few minutes he had ascertained that about two feet of deck, the shape of a wedge, had been staved close to the hatch combings; in fact it had never been fastened with nail or bolt. He shouted at the top of his voice, "I have found the leak!" And the little band of men re-echoed with wild delight: "The big leak is found, hurrah! Down with the ensign."
Many a time, after we had gone through the motions of dining, without eating, and as we sat in our dark, hot hole, over our undrinkable potations and our inedible eatables, each of us resting his hungry head upon his aching elbows, watching the progress of some animated piece of biscuit, would Master Daunton, the slave of our lamp, which, by-the-by, was a bottle bearing a miserably consumptive purser's dip, beside which a farthing rushlight would look quite aldermanic I say, this slave of our lamp would perch himself down on the combings of the cable-tier hatchway, in the midst of the flood of Heaven's blessed daylight, that came pouring from aloft into this abyss, and very deliberately take out his private store of viands, and there insultingly wag his jaws, with the most complacent satisfaction, in the faces of his masters.
The crew were still employed in baling; one of whom, in preventing a bucket from being stove against the combings, let go his hold, and fell down the hatchway; with great difficulty he escaped being drowned or dashed against the ship's sides. Having got into a bucket which was instantly lowered, he was providentially hoisted on deck without any injury.
The uproar over his head had drawn a most helpless-looking mortal from a retired corner of the birth-deck, to the ladder of the forward hatch, where, with a body half above the combings, a skein of strong coarse thread around his neck, a piece of bees-wax in one hand, and a needle in the other, he stood staring about him, with just that sort of bewildered air that a Chinese mandarin would manifest, were he to be suddenly initiated in the mysteries of the ballet.
These great collections of gun-food the English inelegantly term "ammunition dumps." Nor do the trains that come up loaded go back empty, for upon the miniature trucks are loaded the combings of the battle-field to be shipped back to the "economy shops" in the rear.
The horrid, mean old THING! To say such things, right to your face! And Grant, where DID she get hold of that knife, do you suppose and that bunch of hair?" She took his hand of her own accord, and patted it, and Evadna was not a demonstrative kind of person usually. "It wasn't just a tangle, like combings," she went on slowly. "I noticed particularly.
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