Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 15, 2024
Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, there lies a certain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic, on the other the North Sea, bombard its pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short- living, inbred fishers and their families herd in its few huts; in the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood stand for monuments; there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot.
To our great satisfaction the crab was still inside alive and uninjured; but we found no more relics of our expedition. The other baskets were gone with the eel and prawns, and the third net was wanting. I must except, though, one of Bigley's shoes, which had been cast up four hundred yards from the rock pool, and lay at high-water mark in a heap of sea-weed, battered wreck-wood and shells.
The Registrar's mother lived in the fishing-village, two miles down the coombe. Her cottage leant back against the cliff so closely, that the boys, as they followed the path above, could toss tabs of turf down her chimney: and this was her chief annoyance. Now, it was close on the dinner-hour, and she stood in her kitchen beside a pot of stew that simmered over the wreck-wood fire.
The fire they fed from a stack of drift and wreck wood piled to the right of the door, and fuel for the fetching strewed the frozen beach outside whole trees notched into lengths by lumberers' axes and washed thither from they knew not what continent. But the wreck-wood came from their own ship, the J. R. MacNeill, which had brought them from Dundee.
I sat down at the top of the beach, with elbows on knees, head between hands, and face set out to sea, not knowing well why I was there or what I sought, but only thinking that Elzevir was floating somewhere in that floating skin of wreck-wood, and that I must be at hand to meet him when he came ashore. He would surely come in time, for I had seen others come ashore that way.
"Yes, Ching find water;" and we tramped back, the loose dry sand falling in and obliterating our footprints. Ching led the way to a pile of tangled wreck-wood, and took out a jar covered with bamboo basket-work, and having a cross handle a vessel that would probably hold about half a pailful.
Raymond stared at the embers of wreck-wood on the hearth. From that night Oxford became the main scene of Taffy's imaginings; a wholly fictitious Oxford, pieced together of odds and ends from picture-books, and peopled with all the old heroes. And so, with contests on the models of the Fifth Aeneid, the story went forward gallantly for many months.
The naked spots of the two islands are hideous in their sterility: melancholy bits of wreck-wood their only relief, save for one or two grotesque beacons, and, most bizarre of all, a great church-tower, standing actually in the water, on the north side of Wangeroog, a striking witness to the encroachment of the sea.
The whole rear of the Tamaseses was enfiladed by this flank fire; and I have seen a house there, by the river brink, that was riddled with bullets like a piece of worm-eaten wreck-wood. At this point of the field befell a trait of Samoan warfare worth recording. He saw him fall, and, inflamed with the lust of glory, passed the river single-handed in that storm of missiles to secure the head.
"I should like to stop and have a pipe mysen, Master Aleck," said Tom, once. "Well, have one; only don't be long, Tom." "Nay, sir; I'll have it as we sails over, bime by. I won't stop now. It's a long job, and it'll be quite dark afore I've done." He fetched the pitch kettle from the little fire a fisherman had been feeding with chips of wreck-wood and adze cuttings from a lugger on the stacks.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking