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قراءة كتاب The Golden Magnet
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ill I do feel!—if you’d been ten times as bad as I am, you’d have died ten times over. Oh, dear! oh, dear! How is it the doctors can’t cure this horrid—? Oh, dear me! how ill I do feel!”
It was very unfeeling, of course, but all the same I sat down close to poor Tom as he lay upon the deck, and roared with laughter to see his miserable yellow face, and the way in which he screwed up his eyes. But it was only three days before when I was really ill that Tom was strutting about the deck ridiculing sea-sickness, and telling me what a poor sort of a fellow I was to knuckle under to a few qualms like that.
For I must confess to having been one of the first attacked when we were well out at sea. It was the first time I had ever seen the blue water; and no sooner did a bit of a gale spring up, and the great steamer begin to climb up the waves and then seem to be falling down, down, down in the most horrible way possible, than I began to prove what a thorough landsman I was, and, like a great many more passengers, was exceedingly ill.
I remember thinking that it would have been much better if I had stayed at home instead of tempting the seas.
Then as I grew worse I called myself by all sorts of names for coming upon such a mad expedition.
Then I vowed that if I could get on shore again, I’d never come to sea any more.
Lastly I grew so bad that I didn’t care what became of me, and I felt that if the steamer sank I should be relieved from all my terrible pains.
And all this time Tom was skipping about the deck as merry as a lark, chaffing with the sailors or making friends with the firemen, and every now and then coming to me and making me so cross that I felt as if I could hit him.
“Now do let me fetch the doctor to you, Mas’r Harry,” he kept on saying, pulling a solemn face, but with his eyes looking full of fun.
“I tell you I don’t want the doctor. Don’t be such an ass, Tom,” I cried.
“But you do seem so ill, Mas’r Harry,” he said with mock sympathy. “Let me see if I can get you some brimstone and treacle.”
“Just you wait till I get better, Tom,” I said feebly. “You nasty wretch, you. Brimstone and treacle! Ugh!”
My sufferings ought to have awakened his sympathy, but it did not in the least, and I found that nobody thought anything of a sea-sick passenger.
But at last I got over it, and, to my intense delight, all of a sudden Tom was smitten with the complaint, and became more prostrate than even I.
I did not forget the way he had tortured me, and you may be sure that I did not omit to ask him if he would try the brimstone and treacle. I behaved worse to him, I believe, for I tortured him by taking him cold fat pork and hard biscuits, and paid him various other little attentions of a kindred sort, making him groan with pain, till one day—it was while the sea was very rough, and I thought him too ill to move—he suddenly got up.
“Tell you what, Mas’r Harry,” he said, “I’m not going to stand your games no longer. I shall get up and be better;” and better he seemed to grow at once, so that by the next day he was almost himself again, and we stood by the high bulwarks watching the great Atlantic rollers as they came slowly on, as if to swallow up our ship.
Chapter Five.
A Sailor on Sea-Serpents.
“It do puzzle me, Mas’r Harry,” said Tom, as we sat in the chains one bright, sunny day, when the storm was over, but a fine stiff breeze was helping the toiling engines to send the steamer along at a splendid rate.
“What puzzles you, Tom?” I asked.
“Why, where all the water comes from. Just look at it now. Here have we been coming along for more’n a week, and it’s been nothing but water, water, water.”
“And we could go on for months, Tom, sailing, sailing away into the distant ocean, and still it would be nothing but water, water, water.”
“Well, but what’s the good of it all, Mas’r Harry? Why, if I was to get up a company to do it, and drain it all off, the bottom of the sea here would be all land, and people could walk or have railways instead of being cooped up in a great long tossing box like this, and made so—Oh, dear me, it nearly makes me ill again to think of it.”
“Ah! that would be a capital arrangement, Tom,” I said smiling. “What a lot more room there would be on the earth then!”
“Wouldn’t there, Mas’r Harry?” he cried eagerly.
“A tremendous deal more, Tom. Every poor fellow might have an estate of his own; but where would you drain the water to?”
“Where would I drain the water to, Mas’r Harry?”
“To be sure,” I said, enjoying his puzzled look. “If you take it away from here you must send it somewhere else.”
“Of course, Mas’r Harry, of course,” he replied eagerly. “Oh, I’d employ thousands of navvies to dig a big drain and let the water right off.”
“Yes, I understand that,” I replied; “but where is the drain to lead?”
“Where’s the drain to lead?”
“Yes; where is the water to run?”
“Where’s the water to run?” said Tom, scratching his head. “Where’s the water to run, Mas’r Harry? Why, I never thought of that.”
“No, Tom, you never thought of that; and you can’t alter it, so it is of no use to grumble.”
“Don’t you two young fellows slacken your hold there,” said a sailor, looking over at us.
“’Taint likely, is it?” said Tom grinning; “why, where should we be if we did?”
“Down at the bottom some day,” growled the sailor as he walked away, and Tom looked at me.
“Just as if it was likely that a fellow would let go and try and drown hisself, Mas’r Harry. Think it’s deep here?” he added as he gazed down into the dense blue water.
“Yes, Tom, very,” I replied, gazing down as well, for the water was beautifully transparent, and the foam left by the bows of the steamer sparkled in the brilliant sunshine as we rushed along.
“Deep, Tom?” I said, “yes, very.”
“How deep, Mas’r Harry; forty or fifty foot?”
“Two or three miles, p’r’aps, Tom,” I replied.
“Go along! Two or three miles indeed!” he said, laughing.
“I don’t know that it is here, Tom,” I continued, “but I believe they have found the depth nearly double that in some places.”
“What! have they measured it, Mas’r Harry?”
“Yes, Tom.”
“With a bit of string?”
“With a sounding-line, Tom.”
“And a bit of lead at the end?”
“Yes, Tom, a sounding-lead with a great bullet, which they left at the bottom when they pulled the line in again.”
“Think o’ that, now!” cried Tom. “Why, I was wondering whether a fellow couldn’t go down in a diving-bell and see what the bottom was like, and look at the fishes—say, Mas’r Harry, some of ’em must be whoppers.”
“Ay, my lad,” said the same sailor who had before spoken, and he rested his arms on the bulwark and stared down at us; “there’s some big chaps out at sea here.”
“Could we catch some of ’em?” asked Tom.
“Oh, yes,” said the sailor. “Dessay you could, my lad, but I wouldn’t advise you to try a sixpenny fishing-line with a cork float and a three-joint hazel rod with a whalebone top—you know that sort, eh?”
“Know it? I should think I do,” cried Tom. “So does Mas’r Harry here. We used to ketch the gudgeons like hooroar down in the sharp water below the mill up at home.”
“Ah!” said the sailor, “so used I when I was a boy; but there ain’t no gudgeons here.”
“What sort o’ fish are there, then?” said Tom.
“Oh, all sorts: bonito, and albicore, and flying-fish, sometimes dolphins and sharks.”
“Any whales?” cried Tom, winking at me.
“Sometimes;