Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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Here my companion broke into a loud laugh, which he repeated again and again, as if the thoughts awakened in his mind were of too exquisite a kind to be dismissed with a single guffaw.

“I don’t know,” he continued, after a bit, wiping his eyes, and then fixing his dismal and malignant squint upon me, “whether on the whole we should ha’ done better by dropping him overboard. The brig was as deep as pretty nigh twice her tonnage in coal could make her; she was a wet boat at any time; but now she tumbled about as if she had made up her mind to drown herself. I reckon she knew she had a bailiff aboard. Every dip forrards threw the water over her head in oceans; she’d roll to wind’ard almost as heavily as to leeward, so that the decks was all awash, and I was looking and hoping all the time to see the bailiff fetch away. But there was enough law left in him to keep him holding on. I was standing to wind’ard of the house—the skipper being aft agin the wheel—when Mr. Bailiff comes staggering round, his breeches clinging to his legs like wet brown paper, and his shoes full o’ water.