The Green Hand: Adventures of a Naval LieutenantCupples, George
General
The Green Hand: Adventures of a Naval Lieutenant
Cupples, George
Sea stories; Seafaring life -- Juvenile fiction; Voyages and travels -- Juvenile fiction
"The young lady stood noticing what I did, first in a perplexed sort of
a way, and then with no little surprise, especially when the shark gave
every now and then a fiercer tug, as he took a sweep astern; by this
time, however, everybody was on deck in a crowd, the passengers all in a
flurry, and half of the men scrambling up from alongside to tail on to
the line, and run him out of water. So away they went with it full-speed
towards the bows, as soon as the ladies were out of the way--dragging
two or three cadets back-foremost, head over heels, down the poop
stair--till, in spite of his tugging, the shark's round snout showed
over the taffrail, with the mouth wide open under his chin, as it were,
and one row of teeth laid flat behind another, like a comb-maker's
shop-counter. A running bowline passed round his handsome waist, then
another pull, and over he came on the poop, floundering fourteen feet
long, and flourishing his tail for room, till the carpenter chopped it
across, in a lucky moment with his axe.
"All hands gathered round the shark to see him cut up, which was as good
as a play to them, becalmed as we were; when, to my no small dismay, I
heard Mrs Brigadier Brady's loud voice asking where her dog was; and the
brigadier himself, who seemed more afraid of his wife than anybody else,
kept poking about with his red-faced English butler to find the animal.
'For God's sake,' said he, in a half whisper, twenty times over,
'haven't ye seen Mrs Brady's dog, any of ye?--she'll rout the ship
inside out for it, captain, if we don't soon ase her mind.' However, I
knew only Miss Hyde was aware who caught the shark, and as she didn't
appear to have told, why of course I kept all fast myself. 'Here's a
'baccy-box!' sung out the big old boatswain, standing astride over the
tail, while the cook and his black mate ripped away from the tail up.
'Hand over, if ye please, sir,' said 'ugly' Harry, 'it's mine, Mr
Burton!' Harry gave it a wipe on his knee, and coolly bit a quid off the
end of his lost pigtail. The next thing was Ford's hat, which no one
claimed, so black Sambo clapped it on his woolly head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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