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out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram
lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour
waters.
"Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no
satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular.
"
Don't mention it," said Platt.
And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past
the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping
of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the
ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels
and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr.
Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun
could shoot.
The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an
old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In
those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had
yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take
footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding
lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring,
they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded
undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods.
About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop
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