Four ---- A day or two will be spent here, enjoying the fruit and wild scenery of these islands, and the voyage continued, and Gibraltar reached in three or four days. The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week in the aggregate. Half-past six was no longer half-past six to these pilgrims from New England, the South, and the Mississippi Valley, it was “seven bells”; eight, twelve, and four o'clock were “eight bells”; the captain did not take the longitude at nine o'clock, but at “two bells.” You stand off three or four steps, with some broad wooden disks before you on the deck, and these you send forward with a vigorous thrust of a long crutch. The game is 100, and four can play at a time. Do you know — I reckon I'm as much as four thousand pages behind hand. We skirted around two-thirds of the island, four miles from shore, and all the opera glasses in the ship were called into requisition to settle disputes as to whether mossy spots on the uplands were groves of trees or groves of weeds, or whether the white villages down by the sea were really villages or only the clustering tombstones of cemeteries. The great altar of the cathedral and also three or four minor ones are a perfect mass of gilt gimcracks and gingerbread. Gibraltar has stood several protracted sieges, one of them of nearly four years' duration (it failed), and the English only captured it by stratagem. I will explain that the Oracle is an innocent old ass who eats for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think of a longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of any long word he uses or ever gets it in the right place; yet he will serenely venture an opinion on the most abstruse subject and back it up complacently with quotations from authors who never existed, and finally when cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has been there all the time, and come back at you with your own spoken arguments, only with the big words all tangled, and play them in your very teeth as original with himself. And it was a town, though a queer one, when Hercules, clad in his lion skin, landed here, four thousand years ago. I saw none but what.

Numbers in The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

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1380

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95 pages

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epub

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