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"I like the idea," said Captain Acton, "of a naval officer being in charge of my vessel. The men of the Merchant Service are a very rough lot. Many of the masters and mates can scarcely read or write. They grope their way about by dead reckoning. They so little understand the treatment of men that their crews consider themselves as good as they, particularly when they bring the sailors aft, and hob-and-nob with the rum cask lifted through the hatch and broached in the cabin, till half the company lie motionless in drink, and the rest are fighting and running about mad. Two things the Navy teaches us: discipline and the art of it." "By what, my dear?" The woman stood frowning and considering. "Well," she said at length. "I'll go an' have Anson come fer you but you see you don't budge an inch till he comes.".
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“You are to hurry right home, John.”I tried logging in using my phone number and I
was supposed to get a verification code text,but didn't
get it. I clicked resend a couple time, tried the "call
me instead" option twice but didn't get a call
either. the trouble shooting had no info on if the call
me instead fails.There was
Whilst she was busy with the hairdressing, they said to her, "Cinderella, should you be very glad to go to the ball?"
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Conrad
He finished his supper in a very gloomy mood. His character has been imperfectly drawn if it leaves upon the reader the impression that he was no more than a gallant, handsome, hectoring scoundrel, a drunkard, a liar, and a gambler. He was more than this, and better than this. In him was a very great deal of honest, sturdy, British human nature, and amongst those who saw the white skin of his character peeping through the rags and tatters of his morals was the young lady whom he had locked up in his cabin. Was he driving, had he driven her mad? This was an awful thought to him, a figure, a presentment on the canvas of his scheme which his utmost imagination never could have painted. He was passionately [Pg 298]fond of her. In truth he was risking his neck to win her. His inmost sensibility as a man and as a gentleman was in perpetual posture of recoil over the reflection that his hand it was that had made this gently-nurtured, beautiful, adorable girl a prisoner in a little ship that was rolling to a port in which she was to be fraudulently sold. He thought of her in the lovely drawing-room of Old Harbour House: the soft illumination of wax lights; the sweet incense of flowers; the piano whose keys were accompanied by her own melodious warblings; her little dog; all the comforts and luxuries which wealth could provide her with; all that a tender-hearted and loving father could endow his only child whom he loved with. And then he thought of her torn from all this pleasantness and sweetness and elegance, so robed that in a short period she must become beggarly to the eye; after her father's hospitable and plentiful table, fed with the poor fare of a common little ship. As the ship ahead was almost stern on, they ran the British ensign to the Aurora's mizzen-mast head whence it streamed, a "meteor flag," in the silver-white glory of the sun. In a few moments the English colours were hoisted aboard the stranger, on which the Admiral delivered a British cheer, which was caught up and re-echoed by a few of the crew forward. Keeler paused, and sighed deeply. "'Course, sir, you've heerd what happened an' how? He was tryin' to save some horses from a burnin' stable. A blazin' beam fell across his face; his eyes they—" Keeler's voice grew husky. Maurice Keeler, wan, hollow-eyed, and miserable, was seated on a stool just outside the door in the early morning sunlight. Near him sat his mother, peeling potatoes, her portly form obscured by a trailing wistaria vine. What Maurice had endured during his two weeks with the measles nobody knew but himself. His days had been lonely, filled with remorse that he had ever been born to give people trouble and care; his nights longer even than the days. Hideous nightmares had robbed him of slumber. Old Scroggie's ghost had visited him almost nightly. The Twin Oaks robbers, ugly, hairy giants armed with red-hot pitch-forks, had bound him to a tree and applied fire to his feet. What use to struggle or cry aloud for help? Even Billy, his dearest chum, had sat and laughed with all the mouths of his eight heads at his pain. Of course he had awakened to learn these were but dreams; but to a boy dreams are closely akin to reality..
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