United States or Austria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Gannet. 'Unconscious, was the reply. Miss Denham glided about the room and disappeared. Her business was to remove Dr. Shrapnel, that he might be out of the way when Lord Romfrey should pass him again: but Dr. Shrapnel heard one voice only, and moaned, 'My Beauchamp! She could not get him to stir.
The Gannet had now been some time on the station, and had performed a number of deeds worthy of note, taken several prizes, and injured the enemy in a variety of ways, when one morning, just at daybreak, as she lay not far from Porto Rico, a schooner was seen creeping out from under the land towards her. Captain Brine had done his best to make his ship look as much as possible like a merchantman.
Lieutenant Gannet didn't ask what Jimmie had said; he told Jimmie what he had said, and informed him that that kind of talk wasn't going on in the army while he was in hearing. Jimmie's business was to keep some motor-cycles in repair, and some cyclists on their job; about other matters let him hold his tongue, and not try to run the affairs of the nation.
At daybreak next day, Captain Brine found that the misnamed Swift had drifted close in towards the land, while within her lay a frigate, and to all appearance the very frigate he had beaten off the day before. Not a breath of wind ruffled the calm surface of that tropical sea. It was evident that the Gannet herself could do nothing to assist her prize.
All this time, the frigate astern and the lugger ahead of the Gannet were keeping up a warm fire on the shore, to hold the troops in check. They wisely concealed themselves when no boats appeared; but as the various merchantmen, one after the other, were attacked by the boats of the squadron, they sallied bravely out, and endeavoured to drive back their assailants.
After a few shots, the stranger's main-topsail-yard was shot away, when she brought to, and proved to be the Swift, a British merchant ship, bound to Barbadoes, a prize to the frigate the Gannet had just beaten off.
They nest and incubate upon the ground, and show not the slightest fear of the approach of human visitors. In one rookery there were many varieties of these oceanic birds, and a species of booby that seems to be peculiar to Christmas Island. In size and colour they much resemble the ordinary gannet of our cold northern seas.
The voice of a broomstick-witch in the clouds could not be thinner and stranger: Lord Romfrey had some such thought. Dr. Gannet was the bearer of Miss Denham's excuses to Lord Romfrey for the delay in begging him to enter the house: in the confusion of the household his lordship's card had been laid on the table below, and she was in the sick-room. 'Is my nephew a dead man? said the earl.
A considerable time had passed after that celebrated 1st of June, and the French had learned to suspect who were to be the masters at sea, whatever they might have thought of their own powers on shore, when a fine new corvette of eighteen guns, the Gannet, was standing across the British Channel on a cruise. Her master and commander was Captain Brine, long first lieutenant of the Ruby.
There was some old tragic tale about it, how he had volunteered to swim with a rope round his waist to a ship breaking up a few yards from the rocks in a sea that a gannet could scarcely live upon. He had pushed aside the men who remonstrated with him, turning on them a face ghastly in the moonlight.