[Sailing Alone Around The World by Joshua Slocum]@TWC D-Link bookSailing Alone Around The World CHAPTER IX 4/22
As it was, however, my own blood was all that was spilt--and from the trifling accident of sometimes breaking the flesh against a cleat or a pin which came in the way when I was in haste.
Sea-cuts in my hands from pulling on hard, wet ropes were sometimes painful and often bled freely; but these healed when I finally got away from the strait into fine weather. After clearing Snug Bay I hauled the sloop to the wind, repaired the windlass, and hove the anchor to the hawse, catted it, and then stretched across to a port of refuge under a high mountain about six miles away, and came to in nine fathoms close under the face of a perpendicular cliff.
Here my own voice answered back, and I named the place "Echo Mountain." Seeing dead trees farther along where the shore was broken, I made a landing for fuel, taking, besides my ax, a rifle, which on these days I never left far from hand; but I saw no living thing here, except a small spider, which had nested in a dry log that I boated to the sloop.
The conduct of this insect interested me now more than anything else around the wild place.
In my cabin it met, oddly enough, a spider of its own size and species that had come all the way from Boston--a very civil little chap, too, but mighty spry. Well, the Fuegian threw up its antennae for a fight; but my little Bostonian downed it at once, then broke its legs, and pulled them off, one by one, so dexterously that in less than three minutes from the time the battle began the Fuegian spider didn't know itself from a fly. I made haste the following morning to be under way after a night of wakefulness on the weird shore.
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