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قراءة كتاب A Little Fleet
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
class="i2">When stars are blinking white;
And sleep has stilled the thrushes,
[Pg 12] And sunset brings the night;
A passer-by can hark
To the old drowned “Monte” seamen
A-singing through the dark.
They sing like anything;
They sing like Jean de Reszke,
This is the song they sing:
Our old bones sing and shout;
We see the dancing midges,
We feel the skipping trout.
Our bones are old and wet;
But the noble deeds that we did
We never can forget.
THE “MOBY DICK”
She startled all the cows;
With touchwood in her galley,
And green paint round her bows.
The “Moby Dick” was supposed to be a Mississippi River steamboat; she was built out of a flat piece of board almost fourteen inches long and six inches broad; on top of that she had a cardboard box with cabin windows drawn on it, and she had cardboard paddle-boxes with her name painted on them with ink; she also had an eagle painted on her deck-house. Inside her deck-house there was a cocoa tin with a[Pg 14] cardboard funnel coming out of the top of it. The tin was there so that we could make a fire in it of paper and touchwood. At first, when we made our fire, it would not burn because there was no draught, so we made a large hole in front of the deck-house and another one abaft, also holes in the side of the cocoa tin; that made a draught, and then you should have seen the smoke coming out of her funnel!
THE FIRST VOYAGE OF THE “MOBY DICK”
She started from No Name Straits, but she had to put back again because her fire was not burning, so we stirred it up a bit and put in some more dry touchwood, then it smoked fine, and we let her go.
She was going the Round Channel when her Mate sung out to the Captain:
“She’ll go through the Two Snags!”
“She’ll never do it!” shouted the Captain.
“Let’s try her!” yelled the Mate.
“Go ahead!” roared the Captain, and the Mate shoved the helm hard[Pg 15] up, and she slid through without touching anywhere.
