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

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There was plenty of time, and Hardy did not walk very fast. He enjoyed the sweets of the country, all the aromas of the darkling land which came along in the faint, cold, evening air. When a sailor arrives from a long voyage he makes up his mind to button the flaps of his ears to his head, and to steer a straight course for the deepest inshore recess. He does not do so because he usually brings up at the nearest grog-shop on his arrival, or makes his way to the boarding-house where he was robbed and stripped when he was last in the place, and in a short time he is away at sea again with no clothes but what he stands up in, and no bed but the bundle of hay or straw which he flings, with curses deep as the sea and dark as the ship's hold, down the hatch under which he sleeps. But it is an illustration of his hatred of salt water that he should resolve to bury himself deep inshore when he lands.

George Hardy did not belong to the class who live in boarding-houses and wear knives on their hips. He was the son of a gentleman, he was a man of taste and feeling which his seafaring life had heightened and enlarged; he had the eye of an artist and the spirit of a poet, and was too good for a calling that does not require these qualities.