A Voyage at Anchor Author:William Clark Russell General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1900 Original Publisher: F.V. White Subjects: Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and the... more »re may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III THE DESERTER The vast red ruin of burning light sank over the shining terrace of cliffs in the north-west. I have noticed that the sunsets are very splendid in these parts; white, green and red. The waters began to darken into slate, and the firmament deepened into clear indigo. The stars came out presently in their multitudes, and seeming to find a reflection more brilliant than themselves in the galaxy of twinkling riding-lights on board the ships anchored in the Downs. Ashore, the glimmer of the lights was like the hovering of innumerable fireflies. It was a breathless summer evening, warm, but not sultry, and but for the babble of the tide, past the massive links of our cable, you would have found the water stirless as a sheet of glass. The sounds from the land reached us in drowsy, faraway echoes, like the rustle of life from a Lilliputian kingdom; occasionally the clear, thin notes of a bugle from the Marine barracks at Walmer floatedto our ears, and once or twice we caught the muffled throbbing of drums and the reedy trilling of fifes. We had sat down to dinner at half-past seven, whilst the lower limb of the sun still looked twice a man's height above the horizon. The saloon or cuddy of our ship looked quite radiant in the western glow, falling slantwise through the skylights on to the snow-white damask of the long centre table, with its furniture of glass and silver plate, flashing myriads of tiny suns of ...« less