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

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Even as such a ghost might muse, so write I of my youth.

I pocketed the boatman’s newspaper, lest the cabin servant, coming into my cabin, should espy and carry it away. And I also put in my pocket some trifles which I had purchased as curios at one or another of the ports we had visited, and then going on deck I hailed the boat that had been keeping close to us, but that was now lying alongside a brig some little distance away, and bade the fellows put me ashore.

Sheet lightning was playing round the sea, but stars in plenty were shining over our mastheads; the water was very smooth; I did not feel the lightest movement of air. Forward on our ship a man was playing on the fiddle, and a group of seamen in lounging attitudes were listening to him. I also heard the voice of a man singing on the vessel lying astern of us: but all was hushed aboard the frigate; the white lines of her stowed canvas ruled the stars in pallid streaks as though snow lay upon the yards; no light showed aboard of her; she lay grim, hushed, big in the dusk with a suggestion of expectancy in the dominating sheer of her bows and in the hearkening steeve of her bowsprit, as though steed-like she was listening with cocked ears and wide nostrils; and yet, dark as it was, you would have known her for a British man-of-war, spite of the adjacency of some East and West Indiamen which looked in the gloom to float nearly as tall as she.