I went aft, and mounted the small poop, and looked
towards the aforesaid moon, a glorious resplendent tropical moon, and not
the paper lantern affair hanging in an atmosphere of fog and smoke, about
which your blear--eyed poets haven't so much. By the by, these gentry
are fond of singing of the blessed sun--were they sailors they would
bless the moon also, and be--to them, in place of writing much
wearisome poetry regarding her blighting propensities. But I have lost
the end of my yarn once more, in the strands of these parentheses. Lord,
what a word to pronounce in the plural!--I can no more get out now, than
a girl's silk worm from the innermost of a nest of pill boxes, where, to
ride the simile to death at once, I have warped the thread of my story so
round and round me, that I can't for the life of me unravel it. Very odd
all this. Since I have recovered of this fever, every thing is slack
about me; I can't set up the shrouds and backstays of my mind, not to
speak of bobstays, if I should die for it. The running rigging is all
right enough, and the canvass is there; but I either can't set it, or
when I do, I find I have too little ballast, or I get involved amongst
shoals, and white water, and breakers--don't you hear them roar?--which I
cannot weather, and crooked channels, under some lee--shore, through
which I cannot scrape clear. So down must go the anchor, as at present,
and there--there goes the chain cable, rushing and rumbling through the
hausehole.
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