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The Aurora's boat was swept alongside the brig, and Captain Acton and the Admiral clambered over the side up a short flight of steps, and in an instant Lucy was clasped in the devouring embrace of her father. Such an old-world scene taxes the highest gifts of the pen or the brush. This Louisa Ann was about fifty years old; she was nearly as broad as she was long. Her fore-mast was stepped far in the bows; her decks were stained and grimy; the paint had faded out of the inside of her bulwarks. Her sails were patched and so dingy that they might have been coloured as a smack's. Her rusty sides were lined with yawning seams amid which three little circular windows were merged with no accentuation from the dirt-shrouded glass which prevented the sea from entering the blistered, worn, mani-coloured hull. Her sailors looked as though[Pg 359] they were shipwrecked: long-haired, bearded, sallow, in clothes considerably tattered, in aspect melancholy and dejected with lack of nourishment, dullness of sailing and ceaseless motion: for here was the tub wallowing like a buoy in a popple upon a smooth sea, and the frightful weather she would make off Cape Horn or in a gale of wind the imagination of a sailor could readily picture by witnessing her motions now. "That's my business," said Billy. "Jacobs," he said, crisply, "I'll give you twenty-four hours in which to lose yourself. You can't stay here.".
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kez_ h (Kez_h)
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"There's going to be a regular epidemic of love affairs in Hillsboro, I do believe," she continued in her usual strain of sentimental speculation. "I saw Mr. Graves talking to Delia Hawes in front of the draper's an hour ago, as I came out from looking at the blue chintz to match Pet for the west wing, and they were both so absorbed they didn't even see me. That was what might have been called a conflagration dinner you gave the other night, Molly, in more ways than one. I wish a spark had set off Benton Wade and Henrietta, too. Maybe it did, but is just taking fire slowly."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
She never finished what she was about to say, for at that moment Dido stretched out one arm, and uttered one name, "Batt'sea!"
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Conrad
He stood musing. It was, as we have seen, about a quarter past ten. Captain Acton would not have completed his business until[Pg 169] something after eleven. Should the Admiral invade him with the announcement of this strange disappearance of his ship? He considered the matter a little, and concluded that it must be impossible but that, although Captain Acton had been silent on the subject at the breakfast table, he must know the business of his ship, and that it was understood between him and Mr Lawrence that if the wind served, or anything unforeseen befell, or if Mr Lawrence in his judgment chose to sail before the time announced, he was at liberty to let go his fasts and blow into the open at any hour he pleased. Thus it struck the old man, though secretly he did not regard his own reasoning as sagacious. "Send George at once," said Captain Acton, "with the gig as fast as the mare can trot to Captain Weaver. He must call at his house first—the Paragon out of Lower Street. If not at home, he must find out where he is, and drive him back here with express orders from me that I must see him without loss of an instant's time." "No, madam. He is ashore getting his dinner." It is needless, of course, to say that this searching walk was in vain. Whatever lay white in his road he rushed at, and in his gizzard he cursed the vast number of pieces of white paper which did somehow, as though distributed by innumerable malicious Greyquills, attract his eye and retard his progress whilst he turned them over..
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