United States or Benin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I don't know how he'd got on if it hadn't bin for the old sailor, yonder," says the jailer, pointing to Spunyarn, who is crouched down at the great black fire-place, blowing the coals under a small pan. "He took to Tom when he first came in, and hasn't left him for a day. He'll steal to supply Tom's hunger, and fight if a prisoner attempts to impose upon his charge.
I stuck it into my belt with a scrap of spunyarn, feeling that it made me a wonderful piratical figure. If I had had a lantern I should have been a very king there. Then, at eleven or twelve o'clock, I would, I thought, creep downstairs, to explore all over the house, down even to the cellars. It shocked me when I remembered that I was locked in. I dared not pick the lock of that door.
This done, he ingeniously replaces the bottle, slides the flask suspiciously into his bosom, saying, "It'll taste just as strong to a vote-cribber," and seeks that greasy potentate, the prison cook. This dignitary has always laid something aside for Spunyarn; he knows Spunyarn has something laid aside for him, which makes the condition mutual.
But unless we do now and then enter them, our conceptions of how much misery man can inflict upon man will be small indeed. The man of sailor-like deportment, and whom the prisoners salute with the sobriquet of "Old Spunyarn," entered, you will please remember, the cell, as the young theologian left in search of Mrs. Swiggs.
Abaft that again was the sail-room, well-stocked with bolts of canvas of varying degrees of coarseness and several sails, many of which seemed to be quite new, neatly rolled up into long bundles, stopped with spunyarn, and each labelled legibly with the description of the sail.
"Why, you've been and activally gone and triced the poor beggar up with a bit of spunyarn. No wonder he come down all standing on his cocoanut!"
The Honourable Digby Lanyard, our first lieutenant, was a tall supercilious young man of five-and-twenty or so who wore an eyeglass. This was more for effect than from any defect of vision, for he was as sharp as a needle; and could see a bit of spunyarn adrift or a rope out of place aloft even quicker than the commander, keen-sighted as he was.
"'Charge the cost to the State! says I. 'Do you take Spunyarn for a marine? At this he hauled his wind, and stood out." "You have had a hearing before the Grand Jury, have you not?" inquires Tom, evincing a deep interest in the story of his old friend. "Not I. This South Carolina justice is a hard old craft to sail in.
For the coral, they lower down a swab, composed of what is called spunyarn on board our ships of war, hanging in distinct threads, and sunk by means of a great weight, which, striking against the coral in its descent, disengages it from the rocks; and some of the pieces being intangled among the threads of the swab, are brought up with it above water.
But it won't do to shut down until I get over this bit of a fog I'm now in." With childlike simplicity, Tom gives his hand to the young man, who, as old Spunyarn enters the cell to, as he says, get the latitude of his friend's nerves, departs in search of Mrs. Swiggs. Mrs.
Word Of The Day