United States or Laos ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It vexed me often to see a fine, generous lad surrounded by spongers who rooked him at every turn; but what could one do? The sponger has no mercy and no manliness; he is always a person with violent appetites, and he will procure excitement at the cost of his manliness and even of his honesty.
Take an instance: if a man who did not understand navigation took charge of a ship in a stormy sea, would he be safe? Tyc. Not he. Si. Why, now? Because he wants the art which would enable him to save his life? Tyc. Exactly. Si. It follows that, if sponging was the negative of art, the sponger would not save his life by its means? Tyc. Yes. Si. A man is saved by art, not by the absence of it?
Harry was quite unashamedly afraid to throw the dogs their beggarly half or quarter ration; and but for Beeching, it may be the dogs had starved while food still remained on the sled. Maybe the fact that Beeching, with all his faults, had never reached Harry's depths as a sponger, preserved him from this particular crime.
One of the crew came out in a dingy to help, but Dick asked him to pick up his boat and oar and take them to the sponger and said that he would ride back on the turtle. Sometimes his steed was manageable, and once he got within a few yards of the big boat, when it broke loose and carried him fifty yards away.
Then it is no news to any one that other professions slave habitually, and get just one or two holidays a month; States keep some monthly and some yearly festivals; these are their times of enjoyment. But the sponger has thirty festivals a month; every day is a red-letter day with him.
Rosa was weeping softly; Norine had lifted Esteban and now clutched him tight, while her tears fell upon his face. The schooner was a sponger bound for Nassau; its blackbird crew spoke English and they willingly helped the strangers overside, laughing and shouting in a child-like display of excitement. How firm, how grateful was the feel of that stout deck! How safe the schooner's measured roll!
I have shown you, then, and without exaggeration, the philosophic passion for sponging. On the other hand, no one can point to a sponger who ever cared to philosophize. But of course, if never to be hungry, thirsty, or cold, is to be happy, the sponger is the man who is in that position.
There he is, that black-mustached fellow, with little rings in his ears. He will let you know what your duties are." A string of four dingies trailed behind the sponger and as many poles, each thirty feet long, with a sponge-hook at one end, lay upon the deck. Pedro was examining one of these poles when Billy went to him and said: "Pedro, I am to go in your boat. What do I have to do?"
Si. Oh, there are plenty of authorities; but I will specify Aristoxenus the musician, a weighty one enough, and himself attached as a sponger to Neleus. Then you of course know that Euripides held this relation to Archelaus till the day of his death, and Anaxarchus to Alexander. As for Aristotle, that tiro in all arts was a tiro here too.
The week had been a hard one, the work incessant and each night he felt as if his back were broken. He was used to the fresh, sweet air of his country home and the sloop he was in was arranged like most of the sponging craft, with quarters sufficient for half the crew it carried. The deck of the sponger was piled with the result of the work of the week.
Word Of The Day