Adventure stories; Americans -- Foreign countries -- Fiction; Balloon ascensions -- Fiction; Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
“Mars Tom talkin’ sich talk as dat! Choosday in one place en Monday in
t’other, bofe in the same day! Huck, dis ain’t no place to joke—up here
whah we is. Two days in one day! How you gwine to get two days inter
one day? Can’t git two hours inter one hour, kin you? Can’t git two
niggers inter one nigger skin, kin you? Can’t git two gallons of whisky
inter a one-gallon jug, kin you? No, sir, ’twould strain de jug. Yes,
en even den you couldn’t, I don’t believe. Why, looky here, Huck,
s’posen de Choosday was New Year’s—now den! is you gwine to tell me
it’s dis year in one place en las’ year in t’other, bofe in de
identical same minute? It’s de beatenest rubbage! I can’t stan’ it—I
can’t stan’ to hear tell ’bout it.” Then he begun to shiver and turn
gray, and Tom says:
“_Now_ what’s the matter? What’s the trouble?”
Jim could hardly speak, but he says:
“Mars Tom, you ain’t jokin’, en it’s _so?_”
“No, I’m not, and it is so.”
Jim shivered again, and says:
“Den dat Monday could be de las’ day, en dey wouldn’t be no las’ day in
England, en de dead wouldn’t be called. We mustn’t go over dah, Mars
Tom. Please git him to turn back; I wants to be whah—”
All of a sudden we see something, and all jumped up, and forgot
everything and begun to gaze. Tom says:
“Ain’t that the—” He catched his breath, then says: “It _is_, sure as
you live! It’s the ocean!”
That made me and Jim catch our breath, too. Then we all stood petrified
but happy, for none of us had ever seen an ocean, or ever expected to.
Tom kept muttering:
“Atlantic Ocean—Atlantic. Land, don’t it sound great! And that’s
_it_—and _we_ are looking at it—we! Why, it’s just too splendid to
believe!”
Then we see a big bank of black smoke; and when we got nearer, it was a
city—and a monster she was, too, with a thick fringe of ships around
one edge; and we wondered if it was New York, and begun to jaw and
dispute about it, and, first we knowed, it slid from under us and went
flying behind, and here we was, out over the very ocean itself, and
going like a cyclone. Then we woke up, I tell you!
We made a break aft and raised a wail, and begun to beg the professor
to turn back and land us, but he jerked out his pistol and motioned us
back, and we went, but nobody will ever know how bad we felt.
The land was gone, all but a little streak, like a snake, away off on
the edge of the water, and down under us was just ocean, ocean,
ocean—millions of miles of it, heaving and pitching and squirming, and
white sprays blowing from the wave-tops, and only a few ships in sight,
wallowing around and laying over, first on one side and then on
t’other, and sticking their bows under and then their sterns; and
before long there warn’t no ships at all, and we had the sky and the
whole ocean all to ourselves, and the roomiest place I ever see and the
lonesomest.
CHAPTER IV.
STORM
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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