Читать книгу Golden Dreams and Leaden Realities - George Payson - Страница 6

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In a few weeks we had run through every variety of climate, and at the end of February, while our friends at home were still shivering in great-coats and cloaks, or rubbing their hands over coal fires, we were basking beneath the sky of June. I had thrown off, one by one, my outer garments, within which I had shrunk (the effects of long sickness and starvation) like a silkworm in its cocoon; and now, like the same insect, I came out light and airy, in a summer suit of bright calico and nankeen.

There is something very pleasant in thus anticipating summer, in forestalling the all too-punctual sun returning leisurely from the south, and in bartering a certain quantity of snow and ice for the unadulterated sunshine of the tropics. Yet I could not help thinking that we were intruders, interlopers, in thus presuming to thrust ourselves where we had no right, and to snatch her bounty from the liberal hand of nature, instead of waiting patiently, like good children, till it was our turn to be served. The baffling winds that opposed our progress into those golden gardens of the Hesperides, seemed to favour this idea,—for many days we were unable to head our course, and were compelled to sail in an easterly direction, and even north of east. It was little consolation to a landsman, naturally credulous as he is in all matters pertaining to "sea-ography," to be told that we were thus making the necessary Easting, and that at sea it is especially true that the longest way round is the nearest way home; nor could I bring myself to believe, when the ship's head was turned towards Europe, that we were actually taking the shortest cut to Cape Horn. Under the most favourable conditions, the Leucothea was a dull sailor, a broken down, superannuated cart-horse, jogging along "the right butter-woman's rank to market," which, in this case, was so distant, that we sometimes doubted whether we should ever get there at all.

This was rendered more tolerable, however, by the delicious breeze, that flowing from the coast of Africa, was tempered by the wide extent of water that lay between.