Читать книгу The Mate of the Good Ship York; Or, The Ship's Adventure онлайн

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"Do you know London?" said the sailor.

"I was never in London," she answered.

"Have you ever seen a ship?"

"I came home in a ship from India," she replied, "but I was too young to remember the vessel."

"You will not like the East End of London," said Hardy. "I don't know why sailors should make the places they live in dirty, yet it is true that after leaving Whitechapel the closer you draw to the docks, the grimier life looks. Jack has spent his money, you see, and is going away tipsy and ragged, and what he leaves behind him is anything but sweet, and they serve him as though he were a Yahoo. Look at his lodging-house and his boarding-house, at the dens in which he revolves to the ghastly notes of a black fiddler, with objects fit only to be lectured upon, or for the show of a Barnum. Take his line of railway, the Blackwall line; the farmers wouldn't send their swine to market in the carriages, and so the sailor travels in them."

"How long have you been at sea, Mr. Hardy?"

"I went to sea when I was fourteen years old, and I am now twenty-six."