Europe -- Description and travel -- Juvenile fiction; Young women -- Juvenile fiction
As the night came on, the wind grew stronger and the motion worse. The
"Spartacus" had the reputation of being a dreadful "roller," and seemed
bound to justify it on this particular voyage. Down, down, down the
great hull would slide till Katy would hold her breath with fear lest it
might never right itself again; then slowly, slowly the turn would be
made, and up, up, up it would go, till the cant on the other side was
equally alarming. On the whole, Katy preferred to have her own side of
the ship, the downward one; for it was less difficult to keep herself in
the berth, from which she was in continual danger of being thrown. The
night seemed endless, for she was too frightened to sleep except in
broken snatches; and when day dawned, and she looked through the little
round pane of glass in the port-hole, only gray sky and gray weltering
waves and flying spray and rain met her view.
"Oh, dear, why do people ever go to sea, unless they must?" she thought
feebly to herself. She wanted to get up and see how Mrs. Ashe had lived
through the night, but the attempt to move made her so miserably ill
that she was glad to sink again on her pillows.
The stewardess looked in with offers of tea and toast, the very idea
of which was simply dreadful, and pronounced the other lady "'orridly
ill, worse than you are, Miss," and the little girl "takin' on
dreadful in the h'upper berth." Of this fact Katy soon had audible
proof; for as her dizzy senses rallied a little, she could hear Amy in
the opposite stateroom crying and sobbing pitifully. She seemed to be
angry as well as sick, for she was scolding her poor mother in the
most vehement fashion.
"I hate being at sea," Katy heard her say. "I won't stay in this nasty
old ship. Mamma! Mamma! do you hear me? I won't stay in this ship! It
wasn't a bit kind of you to bring me to such a horrid place. It was very
unkind; it was cru-el. I want to go back, mamma. Tell the captain to
take me back to the land. Mamma, why don't you speak to me? Oh, I am so
sick and so very un-happy. Don't you wish you were dead? I do!"
And then came another storm of sobs, but never a sound from Mrs. Ashe,
who, Katy suspected, was too ill to speak. She felt very sorry for poor
little Amy, raging there in her high berth like some imprisoned
creature, but she was powerless to help her. She could only resign
herself to her own discomforts, and try to believe that somehow,
sometime, this state of things must mend,--either they should all get to
land or all go to the bottom and be drowned, and at that moment she
didn't care very much which it turned out to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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