THE CALL OF THE SEA
time this last voyage, after we left Honolulu for home, and I won't say there was n't a while when I'd have given a month's pay to feel solid land under my feet. But it's forgotten now."
"Were you ever shipwrecked?" the boy asked.
"Three times. Once off the coast of China, once in the Mediterranean, and once hard by New Guinea."
He paused for a moment, while allowing his memory to dwell upon those vivid moments.
"I don't know, though," he went on, "that any of them shipwrecks ever proved quite so excitin' as the last shakin' up we had in this steamer. When you get an easterly gale blowin' in that part of the Pacific, it suttinly comes good and hard. We were making a course 'most due sou'-east when the wind hit us. It came sudden, cuttin' slices clean off the surface, and the old ship listed over till I thought she was a goner. Her port rail was right under water, and the big waves
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