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Updated: June 5, 2025
He knew that her career must be short, and he fully expected to see her anchor; when it would be easy for him to take possession with his boats. With this expectation, indeed, he shortened sail, furling top-gallant-sails, and hauling up his courage. By this time, the wind had so much freshened, as to induce him to think of putting in a reef, and the step now taken had a double object in view.
Hence such nautical expressions as "taking in a reef," or a "double reef," and "close reefing," which last implies that a sail is to be reduced to its smallest possible dimensions. The only further reduction possible would be folding it up altogether, close to the yard, which would be called "furling" it, and which would render it altogether ineffective.
At length, as the ship, gliding on past three or four vessels at anchor in the roadstead one, a man-of-war just furling her sails came nigh Falmouth town, Israel, from his perch, saw crowds in violent commotion on the shore, while the adjacent roofs were covered with sightseers.
"What d'ye think we're taking off the kites for?" he growled. I looked aloft. The skysails were already furled; men were furling the royals; and the topgallant-yards were running down while clewlines and buntlines bagged the canvas. Yet, if anything, our northerly breeze fanned even more gently. "Bless me if I can see any weather," I said.
She noticed that the ladies treated Signore Graziano with the utmost reverence, even the positive Miss Prunty furling her opinions in deference to his gayest hint. They talked too of Madame Lilli, and always as if she were still young and fair, as if she had died yesterday, leaving the echo of her triumph loud behind her. And yet all this had happened years before Goneril had ever seen the light.
Either that, or air with greater density than any Smith knew about. Suddenly the cruiser came about into the wind, and at the same instant it began to take in sail, all the sheets furling in unison. Simultaneously great finlike wings shot out of slits in the sides of the hull; and immediately they began to beat the air, back and forth, back and forth, with the speed and motion of swallows.
Overhead he heard the muffled noises of the final preparations of the sailors furling sail, spreading the nettings, unslinging the machines, and hanging the armor of bull-hide over the side. Presently quiet settled about the galley again; quiet full of vague dread and expectation, which, interpreted, means READY.
The men had got the canvas clewed up, and were aloft furling it when Miss Trevor emerged through the companion-way; and Leslie, with a word of greeting, hastened to arrange a deck-chair for her accommodation on the lee side of the deck, within the shadow of the main trysail; for although there was a slight veil of thin, streaky cloud overspreading the sky, the sun shone through it with an ardour that made shelter of some sort from it very acceptable, especially to a girl who might be supposed to set some value upon her complexion.
The words had barely left his lips, and the men who had been furling the sails had just gained the deck, when the squall struck them, and the Foam was laid on her beam-ends, hurling all her crew into the scuppers. At the same time terrible darkness overspread the sky like a pall.
Ever changing as you move, hills rising or sinking as you mount or descend, furling or unfurling as you go to the right or to the left, valleys and ravines opening or closing up, the whole country altering, so to speak, its attitude and gesture as quickly almost, and with quite as perfect consecutiveness, as does a great cathedral when you walk round it.
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