The Cruise of The Violetta

But this was a creditable jail, built in the fervour of the Reformation, with a considerable veranda in front facing on Main Street. In the fervour of the Reformation it had bee...

|The festival of Christmas was approaching. Susannah was greatly excited over the preparations. Mrs. Ulswater was making mince pies. Ram Nad--whose opinion of himself is that he...

|WE left Nassau the following morning. On the third day we passed the Inaguas and sighted Tortuga. They were days rich with the tropical outpourings of Dr. Ulswater, into whose...

|IF Mrs. Ulswater, then, had planned her riot in order to make my position in Portate untenable--as a sort of explosion of blasting powder to loosen me from South America, it se...

|THE deck of the _Violetta_ had resumed its ordinary domestic look. True, no Dolores lay on the carpet, no Georgiana pecked and scratched in the scuppers. At some distance apart...

|AT the upper end of the hall was a low platform, on the left side of which sat twelve men on benches. At the right end of the platform stood that familiar oblong box that conta...

|THE city of Portate, on the west coast of South America, when I knew it, had already a distinct flavour of enterprise. Two Northern companies had much to do with its affairs. O...

|WHEN I awoke the sun was shining in at the port-holes, and the ship appeared to be quiet, but slanting. It was the slant that had rolled me off the sofa and awakened me. Hence...

|WE sought you at your house, Kit,” said Dr. Ulswater; “we sought you also at the establishment where you generate that mystical fluid which now travels meekly, invisibly, its s...

|IN the history of Zionville the dates of the Discovery of the Eureka Mine, of the Reformation, and of the Burial of Hannah Atkins, are like 1492 and 1776 in the history of this...

“Then I'll expand your imagination, Susannah,” said Dr. Ulswater. “Huayna Capac was the great Inca who died in 1527, the year Pizarro landed. Three of his sons contended for the...

“Shortly thereafter he was driving us with two small ferocious horses through the starlit night, over tumultuous roads, circling the city, in order that--without passing through...

|SADLER came down late in the afternoon, and with him little Irish and King Ogel. If Mrs. Ulswater was expecting a contrite king, she was disappointed. He strutted across the de...

|FOREVER shall my voice bear testimony to Mrs. Ulswater. She has gathered the races about her knee. The races didn't all stay there, but it's just as well they didn't. She has f...

|MRS. MINK was a pleasant looking woman, though somewhat thin, and with sharp gray eyes. She wore a plain, neat black dress, such as a self-respecting woman might wear to church...

|IN San Francisco Dr. Ulswater set about despatching Hannah Atkins eastward, and I got into communication with The Union Electric Company. Sadler disappeared. He went with Dr. U...

|WHEN I awoke in the morning, the sunlight was shining brightly through the shutters, and I lay awhile getting things straightened out in my mind, wondering what the authorities...

“Take your dirty hands off me!” Bang, went the door again, and there in the patio stood a little squat Irishman with red hair and stubby black clay pipe in his mouth.

|IT was at Colombo in Ceylon that we met with Ram Nad. I asked for him in the market place, and found him. He was sitting on a cobblestone, and leaning over his basket, asleep.

|SO spoke Jimmie Hagan. We sat looking at each other, and smoking silently for a moment. I got up and shooed the motley collection of human things around us back to a pleasanter...

|IN respect to incisive logic, decision, and force, I have sometimes thought that Susannah resembles Mrs. Ulswater. The characters of both, in contact with my temperament, produ...

|CAPTAIN JANSEN met us at the gangway. There were some changes in the look of the _Violetta_'s deck since last I had seen it, a year and a half before, in the West Indies. The a...

|MY family at midnight lay asleep in their staterooms. The Indian moon shone on the _Violetta_, which lay lifting slowly with the swell. The watchman sat forward. Ram Nad, with...

From the way in which Mrs. Mink collected you and me, it was clear that she had a knack, a genius, nay, even let us say, a tendency toward collecting people. In point of fact, n...

|IT seemed to me that a Prime Minister who composed poetry impromptu and played the banjo, was a species never yet examined and classified by me. But as to Kolosama's entry into...

|WHEN I reached the place, the prow of the _Violetta_ had already run aground, and the stern had swung about, dragging the attached tree trunks after it, so that the yacht lay i...

|THE _Violetta_ was towed out into deep water. Captain Jansen used some badly broken English on the condition of his starboard rail. Not but that he had expected more damage tha...

|IN the Fall of the year when Krakatoa blew its head off in the East Indies, and sent its dust around the world, I fell sick of a fever in the city of Portate, which is on the w...

First Stanza: As the Ancient Mariner began his marvellous tale, “There was a ship,” so Susannah begins, “There was a cat”--boldly, ruggedly, a leap _in médias res_. The first st...

After all, marriage would disturb my pursuits. A man with a liquid and non-resistant name like “Ulswater,” with a fleshy and floating physique, with a mind as full of refuse as...

We were nearing the end of our cruise. I never wanted less to go back to Portate, but my health was too boisterously good to be denied. It was toward the end of November. In the...

|PEACEFULLY we journey then over this balmy sea. My enlarged family is at peace, excepting Susannah. The meekness, the surprised interest of Ram Nad in us, in our purposes and h...

The four reasons: First; the poet Sadler claims to have been once banished by executive edict from the city of Portate, and has a notion he would like to examine his condition o...

There are, without doubt, many methods of selecting the beneficiaries of a mission, asylum, home for curables or incurables, or similar foundation. Mrs. Ulswater's favourite met...

is not what you would call amethystine or ethereal; but poetry, of a kind, we have come to expect of him. But when Susannah brought me a ballad, composed by herself, on the fore...