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'Bout ship, boys, and be smart!" "All hands!" bellowed the mate. In a couple of minutes the small crew were on deck, hauling in the ropes and halyards. The topsail-yards swung round, the helm was put hard down. The sails shivered in the wind as the yacht came about. "Put both the main- and fore-sails on her, Leeks. We must be out of this trap as soon as possible," cried the captain.
There was a brigantine with all her courses set, three jibs, stay-sails, square-sails, main and fore-sails, and gaff-top-sail, looking hanging and listless in that calm place, and wedded to a still copy of herself, mast-downward, in the water; there were three lumber-schooners, a forty-ton steam-boat, a tiny barque, five Norway herring-fishers, and ten or twelve shallops: and the sailing-craft had all fore-and-aft sails set, and about each, as I passed among them, brooded an odour that was both sweet and abhorrent, an odour more suggestive of the very genius of mortality the inner mind and meaning of Azrael than aught that I could have conceived: for all, as I soon saw, were crowded with dead.
The sails were lowered to one third of the masts, and with their fore-sails swelled up like balloons they glided over the waves and anchored in the middle of the harbour.
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