Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 410, December 1849

Оглавление

Various. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 410, December 1849

THE NATIONAL DEBT AND THE STOCK EXCHANGE.1

MY PENINSULAR MEDAL. BY AN OLD PENINSULAR. PART II

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

MAJOR KRAUSS

SLUICY SAM

THE MAN THAT WASN'T DROWNED

THE CONJUROR

THE TRIAL

THE NATURALIST

THE EMBARKATION

THE MONKEY AND THE CAT

MY DREAM

SPAIN UNDER NARVAEZ AND CHRISTINA

THE GREEN HAND. A "SHORT" YARN. – PART VI

THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH

Dream-Fugue. ON THE ABOVE THEME OF SUDDEN DEATH

1

2

3

4

5

FREE TRADE AT ITS ZENITH

Отрывок из книги

We held our course, after parting with our friends in the boat, and were soon at the harbour's mouth. The breeze continued to freshen, and the swell to increase. Our little Wilhelmina now began to give us a specimen of her qualities as a sea-boat. Labouring through the curled and crested seas, creaking, groaning, vibrating from stem to stern; now balancing, with her keel half bare, on the summit of a lofty surge, now deep in a liquid trough; now kicking up behind, now running her nose bang into a bank of water; now pointing skywards, as if bound to the moon, and not to Lisbon; now pitching, now jig-jigging it, she simulated the paces of a Spanish genet – a great deal of action, very little progress.

By the time we were clear of the harbour, and in comparatively smooth water, the wind had shifted to the north-west; our course lay south, and, being sheltered by the land, we soon exchanged the jig-jigging of our exit from port for a far more agreeable, because more equable motion, as we drove over ocean's swell. It had already become palpably evident that none of our military friends were good sailors. Now, however, they were all able to stand without holding – all, I should say, but one unhappy individual, and that was Mr Commissary Capsicum, who had been reduced to a miserable state of disorder by the active movements of the brig, and whose actual symptoms were by no means those of convalescence.

.....

"I'll tell you what," said Capsicum precipitately; "I'm a Christian for all that, and my father was an Englishman. True, I was bred at Canton; but I wasn't born there. Born at Macao. My mother – "

Here, in a voice which ran through all the notes of the gamut, not however in due order, but like the cat's minuet, high and low alternately, Gingham struck up a strange outlandish sort of utterance, whether talking or singing I could not tell; but, if singing, it was the rummest song I ever heard – a jumping, dissonant compound of bass and treble. Capsicum responded in a similar fugue. The two funny rogues were speaking Chinese! The discovery of Capsicum's semi-gentile extraction tickled my fancy not a little.

.....