The Blue Lagoon: a romance by H. De Vere (Henry De Vere) Stacpoole
page 39 of 265 (14%)
page 39 of 265 (14%)
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and star shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest
mainland was perhaps a thousand miles away. The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts, but not longer than the thoughts of this old sailor man smoking his pipe under the stars. Thoughts as long as the world is round. Blazing bar rooms in Callao--harbours over whose oily surfaces the sampans slipped like water-beetles--the lights of Macao--the docks of London. Scarcely ever a sea picture, pure and simple, for why should an old seaman care to think about the sea, where life is all into the fo'cs'le and out again, where one voyage blends and jumbles with another, where after forty-five years of reefing topsails you can't well remember off which ship it was Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or who it was killed who in the fo'cs'le of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror darkly, the fight, and the bloody face over which a man is holding a kerosene lamp. I doubt if Paddy Button could have told you the name of the first ship he ever sailed in. If you had asked him, he would probably have replied: "I disremimber; it was to the Baltic, and cruel cowld weather, and I was say-sick till I near brought me boots up; and it was 'O for ould Ireland!' I was cryin' all the time, an' the captin dhrummin me back with a rope's end to the tune uv it--but the name of the hooker--I disremimber--bad luck to her, whoever she was!" So he sat smoking his pipe, whilst the candles of heaven burned above him, and calling to mind roaring drunken scenes and palmshadowed harbours, and the men and the women he had known--such men and such women! The derelicts of the earth and |
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