E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Josephine Paolucci, Joshua Hutchinson,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
WIDE COURSES
CONTENTS
The Wrecker
Laying The Hose-Pipe Ghost
The Seizure Of The "Aurora Borealis"
Light-Ship 67
Captain Blaise
Don Quixote Kieran, Pump-Man
Jan Tingloff
Cogan Capeador
ILLUSTRATIONS
My boy wanted to do the divin', but 'twas me that went down
He brings out the blue-book and shows the boson
Sam made a couple of tremendous swipes, and then down went the Aurora's captain and one of his crew
By and by he caught an answering call
"Don't call me a mutineer, captain—I've disobeyed no order"
He said he hoped they'd meet again next day and bowed himself out
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The Wrecker
Sometimes the notion comes to me while I'm talkin' to people that maybe I don't make myself clear, and it's been so for some time now—the things I see in my mind fadin' away from me at times, like ships in a fog. And that's strange enough, too, if what people tell me so often is true—that it used to be so one time that the office clerks would correct their account-books by what I told 'em out of my head. But sometimes—not often—things come back to me, like to-day—maybe because 'tis a winter day and a gale o' wind drivin' the sea afore it in the bay below there. Things come to me then—like pictures—wind and sea and fog and the wrecks on a lee shore.
In my business—but of course you know—runnin' after wrecks, from Newfoundland to Cuba, I had to be days and maybe weeks away from home—which was no harm when I had no more home than a room in a sailor's boardin'-house, and no harm later with Sarah. Even if anything happened to me, I used to feel t