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

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And now on the afternoon of September 19, in the year of God 1814, the Royal Brunswicker was off the South Foreland, languidly flapping with square yards before a light westerly breeze into the Downs that lay broad under her bows, crowded with shipping.

The hour was about three. A small trickle of tide was working eastward, and upon that we floated along, more helped by the fast failing run of the stream than by the wind; but there would be dead water very soon, and then a fast gathering and presently a rushing set to the westward, and I heard Captain Spalding whistle low as he stood on the starboard quarter, sending his gaze aloft over the canvas, and looking at the shipping which had opened upon us as the South Foreland drew away, seeking with his slow, cold blue north-country eye for a comfortable spot in which to bring up.

The coast of France lay, for all its whiteness, in a pale orange streak upon the edge of the sea, where it seemed to hover as though it were some sunny exhalation in process of being drawn up and absorbed by the sun that was shining with September brightness in the southwest sky. But over that smudge of orange-colored land slept a roll of massive white clouds, the thunder-fashioned heads of them a few degrees high, and clouds of a like kind rested in vast shapeless bulks of tufted heaped-up vapor—very cordilleras of clouds—on the ice-smooth edge of the water in the northeast. The sea streamed in thin ripples out of the west; and upon the light movement running through it the smaller of the vessels at anchor in the Downs were lazily flourishing their naked spars. Captain Spalding called to me.