United States or Honduras ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Above her water-line emerged all round a half-floating fringe of fresh-green sea-weed, proving old neglect; an abortive attempt had apparently been made to lower, or take in, the larch-wood pram, for there she hung by a jammed davit-rope, stern up, bow in the water; the only two arms of the windmill moved this way and that, through some three degrees, with an andante creaking sing-song; some washed clothes, tied on the bow-sprit rigging to dry, were still there; the iron casing all round the bluff bows was red and rough with rust; at several points the rigging was in considerable tangle; occasionally the boom moved a little with a tortured skirling cadence; and the sail, rotten, I presume, from exposure for she had certainly encountered no bad weather gave out anon a heavy languid flap at a rent down the middle.
To this half-floating, half-submerged mass, the boat's painter was made fast, and as it dragged through the water much more slowly than the boat, the latter checked in its drift came head to sea, and yielding to the send of each wave rode over crests and combers which would otherwise have swamped her.
In some places one of these streams becomes too deep for the bur-reed, and its surface is only diversified by the half-floating leaves of one or two aquatic plants. On approaching one of these places, I find the water to be apparently without inmates. They had only been alarmed by my approach, which, as I had but little time to spare, was not as cautious as it ought to have been.
The very spirit of spring is seen in all the half-floating, half-dancing, gliding, diaphanous figures of the forest. The flowers of "La Primavera's" crown are blue and white cornflowers and primroses. She scatters over the earth tulips, anemones, and narcissus. The painting is allegorical and unique.
Matters at last came to a crisis. Giovanni was about to leave the palace one morning a day or two after the Masco dinner, when a neatly dressed woman passed him on the grand stairway. She was wearing a thick veil, but he had an eye for outline and he knew that there was only one woman in Rome with just that half-floating lightness of movement. At once he blocked her way.
The great blue kingfisher, which is common here, is so tame, as scarcely to move, as the boat passes, and we frequently saw, and passed close to large alligators, which generally appeared to be asleep, stretched on the half-floating logs. Several were fired at from the vessel, but none procured. One pair that I saw together, must have been each upwards of twelve feet long.
Now, once more, he grasped at this slight circumstance that appeared to favor his hopes, and sought to find some way by which that half-floating boat could be made to float wholly, and bear him away to those shores that were so near by.
A tallow candle stood on a high bracket, made from a fungus which Reuben had found in the woods. When the candle flared and dripped, Draxy sprang up on the stand, and, poised on one foot, reached over her father's head to snuff it. She looked like a dainty fairy half-floating in the air, but nobody knew it.
Word Of The Day