half-smothered sentence, more
forcible than polite, was audible from the lips of the democrat, in which
those accustomed to the vernacular of America could plainly distinguish
"darned old fool." Meantime, in spite of political discussions, or
amorous revelations, or prophetic disaster, in spite of mid-ocean storm
and misty-fog-bank, our gigantic screw, unceasing as the whirl of life
itself, had wound its way into the waters which wash the rugged shores of
New England. To those whose lives are spent in ceaseless movement over
the world, who wander from continent to continent, from island to island,
who dwell in many cities but are the citizens of no city, who sail away
and come back again, whose home is the broad earth itself, to such as
these the coming in sight of land is no unusual occurrence, and yet the
man has grown old at his trade of wandering who can look utterly
uninterested upon the first glimpse of land rising out of the waste of
ocean: small as that glimpse may be, only a rock, a cape, a mountain
crest, it has the power of localizing an idea, the very vastness Of which
prevents its realization on shore. From the deck of an outward-bound
vessel one sees rising, faint and blue, a rocky headland or a mountain
summit-one does not ask if the mountain be of Maine, or of Mexico, or the
Cape be St. Ann's or Hatteras, one only sees America. Behind that strip
of blue coast lies a world, and that world the new one. Far away inland
lie scattered many landscapes glorious with mountain, lake, river, and
forest, all unseen, all unknown to the wanderer who for the first time
seeks the American shore; yet instinctively their presence is felt in
that faint outline of sea-lapped coast which lifts itself above the
ocean; and even if in after-time it becomes the lot of the wanderer, as
it became my lot, to look again upon these mountain summits, these
immense inland seas; these mighty rivers whose waters seek their mother
ocean through 3000 miles of meadow, in none of these glorious parts, vast
though they be, will the sense of the still vaster whole be realized as
strongly as in that first glimpse of land showing dimly over the western
horizon of the Atlantic.

The sunset of a very beautiful evening in May was making bright the
shores of Massachusetts as the "Samaria," under her fullest head of
steam, ran up the entrance to Plymouth Sound. To save daylight into port
was an object of moment to the Captain, for the approach to Bo