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Updated: May 2, 2025
In sheer joyousness of spirit that eminent personage had betaken himself to the top of the port paddle-box, and thence was suffering his mountain-cleaving voice to go at large: so quickening was the company in which he found himself; so stimulating was the racy fervour of his own Southern sun! From Givors the river runs almost in a straight line to Vienne.
The huge paddle-wheels make a perfect pudding of thousands of them, as they are dashed against the paddle-box and whipped into a froth like white of eggs or churned into a thick cream by the propeller blades. Sometimes the shoals are of great breadth, and then it veritably looks as though a crockery shop had been upset in the ocean, and ten thousand white dinner-plates had broken loose.
Scared by its new position and by the shouts of the people, it rushed into the first hole it could discover; this was the open door of the immense paddle-box, and the captain rushed to the spot and immediately closed the entrance, thereby boxing the tiger most completely.
A dozen hands were held out to help her to climb the ladder on the shelving paddle-box. "Keep off," they cried to the boy, and he swung away from the churning wheel. Susannah stood upon the deck pale and trembling. The magnitude of the step came upon her, and she was beset by natural timidity and the painfulness of her dependence.
You'll find Mr Saunders already in the bows to help you," said Mr Mackay, hailing at the same time the master of the tug that had brought us so far down the river, and who was at his post on the paddle-box waiting for the pilot's orders to "stand by," the little steamer, having already stopped her engines and now busy blowing off her waste steam, waiting for us to cast off her towing-hawser from our bollard, where it was belayed on the forecastle.
"Are you ready?" now hailed the master of the tug from the paddle-box of his little vessel, calling out to Mr Mackay who was leaning over the poop of ours which seemed so big in comparison, the hull of the ship towering above the tug and quite overshadowing her. "Are you ready, sir?" "Aye, aye!" sang out Mr Mackay in answer. "You can start as soon as you like. Fire up and heave ahead!"
The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids how first one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows and then the other, and at what point it was that her smokestack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break and part asunder and how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the incredible feat of traveling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten which.
It was severely cold now, and our young friend condescended to prance and jump over the ice-skimmed puddles to keep his blood in motion. The little rusty, pudgy steamboat lay at the down-stream side of the Foundry wharf. Her name was so long and her paddle-box so short, that the painter, beginning with ambitious large letters, had been compelled to abbreviate the last syllable.
We got it hand over hand alongside, aft the paddle-box, and a Burman in a canoe hitched a noose over its tail, and we hoisted it on board. I couldn't see the beast very clearly, as it was growing dusk, and all hands crowded round us to give advice. It looked rather like a cod, and weighed thirty-five lbs.
I was not to be out-done. "Have a cigarette?" I said. "Thanks." "Do you happen to know what all this business is?" I asked him. "It's a collision," he said. "We were struck on the port paddle-box. That saved us for the moment." "How did it occur?" "Don't know." "And where's the ship that struck us?" "Oh, somewhere over there two or three miles away." He pointed vaguely to the northeast.
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