List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of IncidentRussell, William Clark
General
List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident
Russell, William Clark
English fiction -- 19th century; Sea stories
Anxiety lay very heavy upon me all this time. I had confidence in Yan
Bol’s seamanship, but I had more faith in myself; and I was up and down
in my watch below to look after the brig, till, when the twenty-four
hours had come round, I would find I had not passed two of them in
sleep.
The cold found the lady Aurora without warm apparel. The dress she had
been shipwrecked in was of some gay, glossy stuff, plentiful in skirt,
and as warm as a cobweb. What was to be done? It was not to be borne
that she should sit shivering in the cabin for the want of apparel that
would enable her to look abroad whenever she had a mind to pass through
the hatch; so, after turning the matter over in my mind, one morning,
soon after our meeting with the whaler, I ordered Jimmy and another to
bring the slop chest into the cabin. It was a great box, and one of two.
Both were of Tulp’s providing. The old chap guessed he saw his way to
making money out of the sailors by putting cheap clothes aboard for
sale, and it was likely enough he would find his little venture in this
way answerable to his expectations when we got home, for already one of
the chests was emptied of two-thirds of its contents, the sailors (I
being one of them) having purchased at an advance of about eighty per
cent. upon what would be rated ashore as a very high selling price.
Well, one of the slop chests was brought up and put in the cabin. I had
tried to make Miss Aurora understand what I meant--to no purpose. Now,
lifting the lid of the chest, she standing by me and looking down upon
the queer collection of sailors’ clothing, I pulled out a monkey coat,
big enough for the sheathing of even Yan Bol’s bolster-like figure, and,
holding it up, went to work to make myself intelligible. I put the coat
on her. I then touched it here and there to signify that, by shaping a
waist, and cutting in at the dip of the back, by shortening the sleeves
and fixing the velvet collar to suit her throat, she might make a very
good figure of a jacket for herself out of the coat. I then took a cap
from the chest, and I placed it upon her head, advising, as best I could
by signs and words, that she should stitch flaps to it to shelter her
ears, with strings to keep the thing on her head in wind. I went further
still, being resolved that the lady should go warmly clad round the
Horn, and, calling to Jimmy, bade him bring me up a bale of spare
blankets. I heartily longed for a Spanish dictionary, that I might give
her the word _petticoat_ out of it. However, she caught my drift after a
little, on my selecting one of the finest of the blankets and putting
it about her and holding it to her waist. She nodded and laughed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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