I was wonderful fond of old Capting Pink,
And Pink he was fond o' me,
As he frequently said when he battered me head
Or sousled me into the sea.”
--Wallace Irwin.
BULLY GREEN PRESERVES DISCIPLINE AND THE REBEL LEARNS TO SAY “SIR”
Part 1
On the night of the twenty-second of December Jeff left the _World_
building and moved down Powers Avenue to the all night restaurant he
usually frequented. The man who was both cook and waiter remembered
afterwards that Farnum called for coffee, sausage, and a waffle.
Before the editor left the waffle house it was the morning of the
twenty-third. He had never felt less sleepy. Nor did a book and a pipe
before his gas log seem quite what he wanted. The vagabond streak in him
was awake, the same potent wanderlust that as a boy had driven him to
the solitude of the forests and the hills. This morning it sent him
questing down Powers Avenue to that lower town where the derelicts of
the city floated without a rudder.
A cold damp mist had crept up from the water front and enwrapped the
city so that its lights showed like blurred moons. Some instinct took
him toward the wharves. He could hear the distant cough of a tug as
it fussed across the bay, and as he drew near the big Transcontinental
wharves of Joe Powers the black hulk of a Japanese liner rose black out
of the gray fog shadow. But the freighters, the coasters, tramps that
went hither and thither over the earth wherever fat cargoes lured
them--they were either swallowed in the mist or shadowed to a ghost-like
wraith of themselves so tenuous that all detail was lost in the haze.
Jeff leaned on a pile and let his imagination people the harbor with
the wandering children of the earth who had been drawn from all its
seafaring corners to this Mecca of trade. He knew that here were swarthy
little Japanese with teas and silks, dusky Kanakas with copra, and
Alaskan liners carrying gold and returning miners. There would be
brigs from Buenos Ayres and schooners that had nosed into Robert Louis
Stevenson's magic South Sea islands. Puffy London steamers, Nome and
Skagway liners condemned long since on the Atlantic Coast, queer rigged
hybrids from Rio and other South American ports, were gorging themselves
with lumber or wheat or provisions according to their needs. Here truly
lay before him the romance of the nations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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