Mournfully from the
barge Arthur answered and bade him pray, for "More things are wrought by prayer than the world dreams of," and so he said farewell,
A strayed Indian from Lake Le
Barge was willing to take his place; but Kama was obdurate.
Before they gained Lake Le
Barge, the land was sheeted with snow that would not melt for half a year.
But the heart of King John sinks before the stern faces of the English fighting men, and the arm of King John drops back on to his rein, and he dismounts and takes his seat in the foremost
barge. And the Barons follow in, with each mailed hand upon the sword-hilt, and the word is given to let go.
An ancient and still bullet-speckled stern-wheel steamer, with a
barge lashed to her side, came round the river bend.
One was the
barge which he had brought from Mackinaw; another was of a larger size, such as was formerly used in navigating the Mohawk River, and known by the generic name of the Schenectady
barge; the other was a large keel boat, at that time the grand conveyance on the Mississippi.
At every mooring-chain and rope, at every stationery boat or
barge that split the current into a broad- arrowhead, at the offsets from the piers of Southwark Bridge, at the paddles of the river steamboats as they beat the filthy water, at the floating logs of timber lashed together lying off certain wharves, his shining eyes darted a hungry look.
We must pall the
barge all its length in blackest samite.
Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the state- rooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men: the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty
barge, but a few inches above the water's edge: and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this
barge's deck, are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and every storm of rain it drives along its path.
"You see, I'n been with a
barge this two 'ear; that's how I'n been gettin' my livin',--if it wasn't when I was tentin' the furnace, between whiles, at Torry's mill.
For, now, the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green
barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.
I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam - a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted, because, as the master stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes were frozen-in up-country on
barges and schuyts.