"Stew'd, I ashidently turn' over m' drink--bring me nozher brand' 'n'
sozza." ... "Just a minute, Mr. Blosser, I want to tell my husband about
it--he'll be awful interested. Say, listen, Poppa, this gentleman
here knows Maxie Hockstein out in Grand Rapids." ... "Do you think so,
really? A lot of people have said that very same thing to me. They come
up to me and say 'I know you must be a Southerner because you have such
a true Southern accent.' I suppose I must come by it naturally, for
while I was born in New Jersey, my mother was a member of a very old
Virginia family and we've always been very strong Southern sympathizers
and I went to a finishing school in Baltimore and I was always being
mistaken for a Southern girl." ... "Well, I sure had enough of it to
do me for one spell. I seen the whole shootin' match and I don't regret
what it cost me, but, believe me, little old Keokuk is goin' to look
purty good to me when I get back there. Why, them people don't know no
more about makin' a cocktail than a rabbit." ... "That's her standing
yonder talking to the captain. Yes, that's what so many people say, but
as a matter of fact, she's the youngest one of the two. I say, 'These
are my daughters,' and then people say, 'You mean your sisters.' Still
I married very young--at seventeen--and possibly that helps to explain
it." ... "Oh, is that a shark out yonder? Well, anyway, it's a porpoise,
and a porpoise is a kind of shark, isn't it? When a porpoise grows
up, it gets to be a shark--I read that somewhere. Ain't nature just
wonderful?" ... "Raymund Walter Pelham, if I have to speak to you again,
young man, I'm going to take you to the stateroom and give you something
you won't forget in a hurry." ... "Stew'd, hellup me gellup."
Thus the lazy hours slip by and the spell of the sea takes hold on you
and you lose count of the time and can barely muster up the energy to
perform the regular noonday task of putting your watch back half an
hour. A passenger remarks that this is Thursday and you wonder dimly
what happened to Wednesday.
Three days more--just three. The realization comes to you with a joyous
shock. Somebody sights a sea-gull. With eager eyes you watch its curving
flight. Until this moment you have not been particularly interested
in sea-gulls. Heretofore, being a sea-gull seemed to you to have few
attractions as a regular career, except that it keeps one out in the
open air; otherwise it has struck you as being rather a monotonous life
with a sameness as to diet which would grow very tiresome in time. But
now you envy that sea-gull, for he comes direct from the shores of the
United States of America and if so minded may turn around and beat
you to them by a margin of hours and hours and hours. Oh, beauteous
creature! Oh, favored bird!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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