Post by nikeajax on Oct 27, 2014 22:33:58 GMT -8
WHOA-NELLY!
I found a great book on Project Gutenberg called, "Careers of Danger and Daring" from 1901:
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33146
The first story is about steeple-jacks, wow-crazy macho doesn't begin to describe it. The second is about hard hat divers. Here's an excerpt from it...
"Most divers are poor story-tellers (perhaps because the marvelous grows commonplace to them from over-indulgence in it), but the stories are there in their lives, if only you can dig them out. I asked Bean if he often went down himself, and found that he was still in active service, after twenty-odd years of it, which certainly had agreed with him. He was just back from a sad errand in Pennsylvania. A boy had gone swimming in a slate-quarry, and been drowned; they had dragged for him, and fired cannon over the water, but nothing had availed, and so, finally, a diver was sent for from the city, the diver being Bean. The quarry was a great chasm four or five hundred feet deep, with eighty feet of water filling various galleries and rock shelves, in one of which the poor lad had been caught and held. The question was in which one.
"Well," said Bean, coming abruptly to the end, "I went down and got him."
That was his way of telling the story: he "went down and got him." There was nothing more to say; nothing about the two days' perilous search through every tunnel and recess of those rocky walls; nothing about the three thousand excited people who crowded around the quarry's mouth, awaiting the issue, nor the scene when that pitiful burden was hauled up from the depths."
This was a children's book too: I sure wish they could make kids books this good today! This book is free to download if you want to read it.
Jaybird
I found a great book on Project Gutenberg called, "Careers of Danger and Daring" from 1901:
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33146
The first story is about steeple-jacks, wow-crazy macho doesn't begin to describe it. The second is about hard hat divers. Here's an excerpt from it...
"Most divers are poor story-tellers (perhaps because the marvelous grows commonplace to them from over-indulgence in it), but the stories are there in their lives, if only you can dig them out. I asked Bean if he often went down himself, and found that he was still in active service, after twenty-odd years of it, which certainly had agreed with him. He was just back from a sad errand in Pennsylvania. A boy had gone swimming in a slate-quarry, and been drowned; they had dragged for him, and fired cannon over the water, but nothing had availed, and so, finally, a diver was sent for from the city, the diver being Bean. The quarry was a great chasm four or five hundred feet deep, with eighty feet of water filling various galleries and rock shelves, in one of which the poor lad had been caught and held. The question was in which one.
"Well," said Bean, coming abruptly to the end, "I went down and got him."
That was his way of telling the story: he "went down and got him." There was nothing more to say; nothing about the two days' perilous search through every tunnel and recess of those rocky walls; nothing about the three thousand excited people who crowded around the quarry's mouth, awaiting the issue, nor the scene when that pitiful burden was hauled up from the depths."
This was a children's book too: I sure wish they could make kids books this good today! This book is free to download if you want to read it.
Jaybird
