Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the matter. On one occasion, when I was about three years old, the frigate was canght in a typhoon. I was safe below in my poor mother's arms, but Quacko remained on deck to see what was going forward. Nobody was thinking of him. The seamen, indeed, had to hold on with might and main to secure their own lives. Some preparation had been made, and fortunately it was so, for all the sails still set were blown out of the bolt ropes. The frigate was hove on her beam ends. Where Quacko had come from nobody knew, when on a sudden he was seen hanging to the slack end of a rope. In vain one of the topmen made an attempt to grasp him. The rope swung away far over the foaming sea. He swung back, but it was to strike the side apparently, for the next instant the rope returned on board and no Quacko hanging to it. The ship righted without having sufiered much damage; indeed, the loss of Quacko was our greatest misfortune. After the sad event just mentioned, Quacko's friends made various attempts to appropriate me ; indeed, Mrs. King and Toby Kiddle had, in order to console them for their loss, to give me up to them occasionally. ' Here, Toby, let's have the little chap and learn him to ride,' said Tom Trimmers, one of the topmen. ' Why, Nanny will be forgetting how to carry a human being as she has been accustomed to do, and you will soon see what a capital horseman he will make, won't you, Ben?' 'Ay, ay,' I answered, for though I could not say much I could say that, and so Nanny was brought forth, and I was placed on her back. Toby, however, remarking, that though some day I should have more sense than the defunct Quacko ever had, yet at present, as I had no experience in riding, he must decline allowing me to mount unless he held me up. ' It will be time when the little chap has had...
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