Afloat And Ashore Esprios Classics

Author : James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (987 download)

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Download or read book Afloat and Ashore written by James Fenimore Cooper and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-24 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I was born in a valley not very remote from the sea. My father had been a sailor in youth, andsome of my earliest recollections are connected with the history of his adventures, and therecollections they excited. He had been a boy in the war of the revolution, and had seen someservice in the shipping of that period. Among other scenes he witnessed, he had been on board theTrumbull, in her action with the Watt-the hardest-fought naval combat of that war-and heparticularly delighted in relating its incidents. He had been wounded in the battle, and bore themarks of the injury, in a scar that slightly disfigured a face, that, without this blemish, would havebeen singularly handsome. My mother, after my poor father's death, always spoke of even this scaras a beauty spot. Agreeably to my own recollections, the mark scarcely deserved that commendation, as it gave one side of the face a grim and fierce appearance, particularly when its owner wasdispleased.My father died on the farm on which he was born, and which descended to him from his greatgrandfather, an English emigrant that had purchased it of the Dutch colonist who had originallycleared it from the woods. The place was called Clawbonny, which some said was good Dutchothers bad Dutch; and, now and then, a person ventured a conjecture that it might be Indian. Bonnyit was, in one sense at least, for a lovelier farm there is not on the whole of the wide surface of theEmpire State. What does not always happen in this wicked, world, it was as good as it washandsome. It consisted of three hundred and seventy-two acres of first-rate land, either arable, or ofrich river bottom in meadows, and of more than a hundred of rocky mountain side, that was verytolerably covered with wood. The first of our family who owned the place had built a substantialone-story stone house, that bears the date of 1707 on one of its gables; and to which each of hissuccessors had added a little, until the whole structure got to resemble a cluster of cottages throwntogether without the least attention to order or regularity. There were a porch, a front door, and alawn, however; the latter containing half a dozen acres of a soil as black as one's hat, and nourishingeight or ten elms that were scattered about, as if their seeds had been sown broad-cast. In additionto the trees, and a suitable garniture of shrubbery, this lawn was coated with a sward that, in theproper seasons, rivalled all I have read, or imagined, of the emerald and shorn slopes of the Swissvalleys