United States or Uruguay ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
An hour later, I creep up to the higher deck, to have a look-out forward, where the sailors are playing leap-frog and dancing fore-and-afters. His monologue, and its interruptions, ran very much as follows: I. This is a pleasant sight, isn't it? Can Grande.
"The barge of my old ship, the Colossus, was rigged as a fore-and-aft schooner, and I've sailed her many's the time; and I suppose all fore-and-afters are handled in pretty much the same way. The matter of mere size won't make very much difference, I imagine."
Every little stone bes worth more nor all the fore-and-afters on the coast. I bes a rich man now richer nor the governor, richer nor any marchant in St. John's richer nor the king o' England, maybe. Holy saints be praised! Never agin will I wet a line at the fishin' nor feel the ache o' hunger in my belly. Denny Nolan will soon be cursin' the day he batted me about like a swile."
"Nothing but so many bloody sloops," growled the mate. "Such in-and-in fore-and-afters that their booms won't stay guyed-out, even after you've been at the pains to use a hawser." "Well, a sloop is a pleasant object to a sailor, when he can set nothing better. Then there is this Mr. Van Tassel to settle with you may have a ten years' law-suit on your hands, to amuse you."
One kept near the other, at night more than in the daytime. I noticed that. They were fond of sitting on that anchor, and they generally tucked away their pipes under it, for the Helen B. was a dry boat in most weather, and like most fore-and-afters was better on a wind than going free. With a beam sea we sometimes shipped a little water aft.
By and by the children caught sight of the old tarpaulin hat and the blue ribbons and the Captain himself, all in this state of violent excitement; and down they bore at once upon the ancient mariner, as if he were a regular bluff-bowed old East Indiaman, full of golden ingots, and they were clipper-built, copper-fastened, rakish fore-and-afters of the piratical pattern. "Heyday!"
So we accordingly entered and cast anchor among a fleet of fore-and-afters in one of those magnificent ports with which the eastern coast is so liberally supplied.
He soon came to know them all French brigs and chasse-marees, Russian fore-and-afters, Dutch billyboys, galliots from the East coast, and Thames hay-barges with vanes and wind-boards.
A fleet of fore-and-afters at anchor has its own slender graciousness. The setting of their sails resembles more than anything else the unfolding of a bird's wings; the facility of their evolutions is a pleasure to the eye. They are birds of the sea, whose swimming is like flying, and resembles more a natural function than the handling of man-invented appliances.
Word Of The Day