We had run aground, and in one of those seas where the
tides are middling--a sorry matter for the floating of the Nautilus.
They who have turned their attention to the affairs of men, must have perceived that there are
tides in them;
tides very irregular in their duration, strength, and direction, and seldom found to run twice exactly in the same manner or measure.
All I can tell you is that it stands just out of reach of the full
tides, on a piece of rock, dead on the beach and about a mile from the station.
The
tides sweep through Carquinez Straits as in a mill-race, and the full ebb was on when I stumbled overboard.
Been a knocking about with a pretty many
tides, ain't he pardner?
The
tide, beginning to run down at nine, and being with us until three, we intended still to creep on after it had turned, and row against it until dark.
We had to work fast; but before the
tide came in again we had stripped her of her sails and masts, righted her, and filled her about a quarter full of rock ballast.
If D'Artagnan had been a poet, it was a beautiful spectacle: the immense strand of a league or more, the sea covers at high
tide, and which, at the reflux, appears gray and desolate, strewed with polypi and seaweed, with pebbles sparse and white, like bones in some vast old cemetery.
Peggotty's; but I repeated in a whisper, 'With the
tide?'
Charley pondered a moment, and then answered, "The
tide has edged us over a bit out of our course, but if the fog lifts right now, as it is going to lift, you'll find we're not more than a thousand miles off McNear's Landing."
But that which surprised me most was, that the ship was lifted off in the night from the sand where she lay by the swelling of the
tide, and was driven up almost as far as the rock which I at first mentioned, where I had been so bruised by the wave dashing me against it.
It's like the
tide, Jo, when it turns, it goes slowly, but it can't be stopped.."