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Updated: May 17, 2025
And, peering out, it had beheld a spindling child; a human atom, without strength or weapon. Fear changed to fury in the bob-cat's feline heart. Here was no opponent; but a mere item of prey. And, with fury, stirred long-unsatisfied hunger; the famine hunger of mid-winter which makes the folk of the wilderness risk capture or death by raiding guarded hencoops.
At dinner there was the ordinary display of what is called in the west a TWO-BIT HOUSE: the tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough coatless men devoting it in silence.
And next it we observe a very powerfully executed oil painting representing a schooner-yacht, with topmasts struck and all other top-hamper down on deck, hove-to under close-reefed storm-trysail and spitfire jib, in close proximity to an evidently disabled and sinking ocean steamer, over whose more than half-submerged hull the mountain seas are breaking with terrific violence, sweeping away boats, hencoops, deck-fittings, bulwarks, and even some of the unfortunate people, who are dimly seen through the torrents of driving spray and cataracts of pouring water clinging here and there to the stanchions and rigging: the fury of the gale in which the great ship is perishing is admirably conveyed in the height and shape of the huge olive-green seas, their crests torn off and swept away to leeward in horizontal showers of spindrift, and the black, menacing hue of the sky, across which tattered shreds of smoky-looking cloud are careering wildly.
Meanwhile, the fog had gradually been growing less dense, and within about half an hour of the incident of the hencoops a few stars became visible overhead. An hour later the fog had completely disappeared, revealing a star-studded sky that spread dome-like and unbroken from zenith to horizon.
"Ay, ay, sir," I replied, and with that, liberating myself from the rope, I clawed my way along the line of the hencoops the decks sometimes sloping almost up and down to the heavy weather scends of the huge black billows, and descended into the midshipmen's berth. It was not the first time I had made a cup of coffee for myself and the second mate in the middle watch during cold weather.
Bella, I'm going to learn carpentering, you see if I don't, and then I'll be able to make lots of things, hot-beds and greenhouses, and hencoops, and wheelbarrows." Bella laughed. "We seem to be going to do a lot some day, but I think we shall be old men and women before that day comes." Tom's enthusiasm was very cheering, though.
From our elevated position we could look down into a sea of bamboo huts, the habitations of the pearl-fishers: neat enough abodes, with courtyards paved with helix shells. In these courtyards stood quaint, large water-jars, which women filled from goat-skins carried on their shoulders from the wells, wobbling when full like live headless animals; and cradles, like hencoops, for their babies.
For a moment he was doubtful whether, being so far away, what he saw could possibly be wreckage from the Golden Fleece; but a little reflection suggested to him that, if this wreckage should happen to be floating deep, it would be quite possible for him and his companion, with the hencoops floating on the very surface as they all were to have been driven quite this distance to leeward by the mere wash of the sea.
In the morning the journalist could see but five sail; but as the day advanced the rest began to reappear, and at three o'clock he counted thirty-one from the deck of the "Prince d'Orange." The gale was subsiding, but its effects were seen in hencoops, casks, and chests floating on the surges and telling the fate of one or more of the fleet.
At the same time I seized my musket, which thus far I had not fired, and, kneeling down, with one of the poop hencoops as a rest, aimed straight at the body of the junk's helmsman, just as he was thrusting the tiller hard down.
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