Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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I stepped below into my cabin to change my clothes. It will not be supposed that my slender wardrobe showed very handsomely after two years of hard wear. I put on the best garments I had, a shaggy pilot coat, with large horn buttons, and a velvet waistcoat, and on my head I seated a round hat with a small quantity of ribbon floating down abaft it, so that on the whole my appearance was rather that of a respectable forecastle hand than that of the chief mate of a ship.

Here whilst I am brushing my hair before a bit of broken looking glass in my cabin let me give you in a few sentences a description of myself. And first of all, having been born in the year 1790, I was aged twenty-four, but looked a man of thirty, owing to the many years I had passed at sea and the rough life of the calling. I was about five foot eleven in height, shouldered and chested in proportion, very strong on my legs, which were slightly curved into a kind of easy bowling, rolling air by the ceaseless slanting of decks under me; in short taking me altogether you would fairly have termed me at that age of twenty-four a fine young fellow. I was fair, with dark reddish hair and dark blue eyes, which the girls sometimes called violet; my cheeks and chin were smooth shaven, according to the practice of those times; my teeth very good, white, and even; my nose straight, shapely, and proper, but in my throat and neck I was something heavy. Such was I, William Fielding, at the age of twenty-four. I write without vanity. God knows it is too late for vanity! Suppose a ghost capable of thinking: figure it musing upon the ashes of the body it had occupied—ashes moldering and infragrant in a clay-rotted coffin twelve foot deep.