Afloat and Ashore: A Sea Tale - Couverture rigide

Cooper, James Fenimore

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0404644619 ISBN 13 : 9780404644611

Editeur : AMS Press, 2004

Synopsis

First published in 1844, this narrative chronicles the adventures of Miles Wallingford, who runs away to sea to embark on a career as a merchant sailor. He runs the hazards of life at sea and intervals ashore involve him in the delights of romance and perils of legal and financial intrigue.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

"And I—my joy of life is fled, My spirit's power, my bosom's glow; The raven locks that grac'd my head, Wave in a wreath of snow! And where the star of youth arose, I deem'd life's lingering ray should close, And those lov'd trees my tomb o'ershade, Beneath whose arching bowers my childhood play'd." MRS. HEMANS. I was born in a valley not very remote from the sea. My father had been a sailor in youth, and some of my earliest recollections are connected with the history of his adventures, and the recollections they excited. He had been a boy in the war of the revolution, and had seen some service in the shipping of that period. Among other scenes he witnessed, he had been on board the Trumbull, in her action with the Watt—the hardest-fought naval combat of that war—and he particularly delighted in relating its incidents. He had been wounded in the battle, and bore the marks of the injury, in a scar that slightly disfigured a face, that, without this blemish, would have been singularly handsome. My mother, after my poor father's death, always spoke of even this scar as 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 was displeased. My father died on the farm on which he was born, and which descended to him from his great-grandfather, an English emigrant that had purchased it of the Dutch colonist who had originally cleared it from the woods. The place was called Clawbonny, which some said was good Dutch others bad Dutch; and, now and then, a person ventured a conjecture that it might be Indian. Bonny it was, in one sense at least, for a lovelier farm there is not on the whole of the wide surface of the Empire State. What does not always happen in this wicked, world, it was as good as it was handsome. It consisted of three hundred and seventy-two acres of first-rate land, either arable, or of rich river bottom in meadows, and of more than a hundred of rocky mountain side, that was very tolerably covered with wood. The first of our family who owned the place had built a substantial one-story stone house, that bears the date of 1707 on one of its gables; and to which each of his successors had added a little, until the whole structure got to resemble a cluster of cottages thrown together without the least attention to order or regularity. There were a porch, a front door, and a lawn, however; the latter containing half a dozen acres of a soil as black as one's hat, and nourishing eight or ten elms that were scattered about, as if their seeds had been sown broad-cast. In addition to the trees, and a suitable garniture of shrubbery, this lawn was coated with a sward that, in the proper seasons, rivalled all I have read, or imagined, of the emerald and shorn slopes of the Swiss valleys.

Biographie de l'auteur

James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: AMS Press
• Date d'édition: 2004
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0404644619
• ISBN 13: 9780404644611
• Reliure: Relié
• Éditeur: Philbrick Marianne, Philbrick Thomas L.
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible