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

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Thus in effect thought I, as I stood upon the quarter-deck of the Royal Brunswicker, viewing the noble elevation of the white South Foreland off which the ship was then leisurely rolling as she flapped her way to the Downs with her yards squared to the weak westerly breeze; for—to take you into my confidence at once—this part of the coast of old England I had the best of all reasons for loving. First of all, I was born at Folkestone; next, on losing my parents, I was taken charge of by a maternal uncle, Captain Joseph Round, whose house stood on the road between Sandwich and Deal; and then, when I first went to sea, I was bound apprentice to a master sailing out of Dover Harbor; so that this range of coast had peculiar associations for me. Consider. It comprised the sum of my boyish, and of most, therefore, of my happiest, memories; indeed, I could not gaze long at those terraces of chalk, with their green slopes of down on top, and with clusters of houses between sparkling like frost, and many a lozenge-shaped window glancing back the light of the sun with the clear, sharp gleam of the diamond, without recollection stealing in a moisture into my eyes.