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The huge steamer Great Britain, bound for Australia, lies right off the Rock Ferry landing; and at a little distance are two old hulks of ships of war, dismantled, roofed over, and anchored in the river, formerly for quarantine purposes, but now used chiefly or solely as homes for old seamen, whose light labor it is to take care of these condemned ships.
"Do you know I've been looking it up the Firth Of Clyde, where all the steel ships are built, isn't half as wide as Oakland Creek down there, where all those old hulks lie? Why ain't it a Firth of Clyde? Because the Oakland City Council spends its time debating about prunes and raisins. What is needed is somebody to see things, and, after that, organization. That's me.
The beams showed the darkness of the strong current; and the craft that lay eastward on the tide, with sail-less spectral masts and black dismal hulks, looked death- like in their stillness.
So they give it up, but there wa'n't a male on the place, from old Dr. Blatt, mixer of Blatt's Burdock Bitters and Blatt's Balm for Beauty, down to the boy that emptied the ashes, who wouldn't have humped himself on all fours and crawled eight miles if she'd asked him to. And that includes me and Cap'n Jonadab, and we're about as tough a couple of women-proof old hulks as you'll find afloat.
And is there not something monstrously fine in the dog-like attachment shown to the man he had made his friend by this wretch in whom were concentrated all the life, the powers, the spirit, and the passions of the hulks, who was, so to speak, their highest expression?
"How many years have passed, Bill, since you crossed the water?" inquired the inspector; meaning, in a polite way, to find out the exact time he had been transported. "It's over six, I think; let me see; it's two years next month since I left my quarters at the hulks and started in search of fortune, and at times a hard one it has been," returned the prisoner. "I've no doubt of it.
But it was a silent world, a black world, in which the hills about him were shapeless, dim hulks, where the wind whined, where the snow swept against his face and drifted down the open space of his collar; a world of coldness, of malice, of icy venom, where everything was a threatening thing, and never a cheering aspect except the fact that the grades had been accomplished, and that from now on he could progress with the knowledge that his engine at least need labor no longer.
It is some beggarly Welschers who have crept up stairs and exchanged for them, unawares, their old leather hulks." "Ah yes," said the wailing woman: "three Welschers, who came for the fair, slept in the barn, and had some bread and cheese before they left, an hour ago."
If it were like anything in nature, it was like Noah's ark, or, to come to something post-diluvian, one of those covered hulks, or "ships in ordinary," which are to be seen at Portsmouth and Devonport.
It seemed the land was being inundated with camels; not the patient brutes we are used to thinking of by that name, with which domestication means ill-treatment and suffering the slow-going burden-bearers, always appealing to our sympathy because always apparently tired, hungry, sleepy, worn-out always reeling on as if looking for quiet places in which to slip their loads of whatever kind, and lie down and die; but the camel aroused, enraged, frightened, panic-struck, rebellious, sending forth strange cries, and running with all its might an army of camels hurling their gigantic hulks along at a rate little less than blind impetus.
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