Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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“I saw the bailiff staring wildly around him, as if he really would jump overboard, and it was worth a month’s pay to see him looking like that, and holding his hat on.

“‘Why, man,’ he shouts to the captain, ‘you’re never in earnest: d’ye know what you’re a doing of?’ and, finding that the skipper took no notice, he calls out to the men, ‘You’ll work this vessel at your peril if you obey your captain. My orders are to stop this brig, and if you don’t allow me to execute my duty——’ But just as he came to this the wessel met the first of the seas which were rolling outside the harbour—stiff seas they wos, for it was blowing half a gale o’ wind; she put her nose into it, and then rolled over, fit to bring her lower yardarms into the water; away flew the bailiff’s chimbley-pot hat clean overboard, and ye may boil me alive if I didn’t think he meant to follow it; for the send o’ the wessel tripped him over the weather hatch coamings, and he seemed to shoot—ay, as neatly as if he’d been kicked by one of them giants I used to read about when I was a little ’un—clean into the lee scuppers, where he lay stunned as I thought, until all on a sudden he jumped up and went clawing along till he come to the lee o’ the after deck house, where he squatted down, looking with his yaller face and blowing hair like a Madagascar monkey recovering from a fit of intoxication.”