Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
The Etna had a reputation familiar to seamen and a nickname too; they called her the "Hell-packet." Of all the tall and beautiful ships which maintained their smartness and their beauty upon the agony of wronged and driven seamen, the Etna was the most terrible, a blue-water penitentiary, a floating place of torment.
In the street, the mean cobbled street of the Barbary Coast, the man who nudged took Goodwin by the arm and spoke urgently. "Say, ain't ye got no sense?" he demanded. "Talkin' like that to Tom Mowbray! Don't ye know that's the way to fix him to ship ye aboard the 'Hell-packet?" "He can't ship me aboard any 'Hell-packet," answered Goodwin serenely.
"The Etna for mine, if I can make it," he breathed to himself as he went at a run in the shadow of the silent houses. "God! If anyone was to see me!" And thus it was that the first pallor of dawn beheld the incredible and unprecedented sight of an able seaman, with his clothes strapped upon his head, swimming at peril of his life in San Francisco bay, to get aboard of the "Hell-packet."
She stood up over her anchors like a piece of architecture, poising like a tower; the sailor in him paid tribute to the builders who had conceived her beauty. They had devised a ship: it needed Mr. Fant and his colleagues to degrade her into a sea-going prophet and give aptness to her by-name of "Hell-packet."
"We call her the 'Hell-packet," he answered seriously. The missioner nodded, and his smile, though it flickered, survived. "It's an ugly name," he said; "but maybe she deserves it. An' so you saw our door open and just stepped in? It's always open in the evenin's and on Sundays, an' we'll always be glad to see you.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking