s rising
over the crust of land.

"'To the sea, to the sea, let us go!' I cried; 'it is the very night to
tread the hall of moonbeams that leads to palace of pearls!'

"My mother was weary; she would have stayed at home, but I was her pearl
of price; she forgot herself. You know the stream that comes down from
the mountain and empties into the ocean. It was in that stream that
my boat floated, and a long walk away. Lettie left us. Just after we
started, I missed her, and asked where she had gone.

"'You'll see soon,' replied my mother; and even as I looked back, I
saw Lettie following, with a shadow other than her own falling on the
midsummer grass. She did not hasten; she did not seek to come up with
us. My mother was walking beside me.

"Thus we came to the river, at the place where it wanders out into the
ocean. I saw my boat, my River-Ribbon, floating its cable-length, but
never more, and undulating to the throbs of tide that pulsated along
the blue vein of water, heralding the motion of the heart outside. We
stopped there. The moon was set in the firmament high and fast, as when
it was made to rule the night. The hall of light, lit up along the
twinkling way of waters, looked shining and beckoning in its wavy ways
of grace, a very home for the restless spirit. I wanted to thread its
labyrinth of sparkles; I wanted to cool my wings of desire in its
phosphorescent dew. I said,--

"'I am going out upon the sea.'

"My mother seemed troubled.

"' Abraham, the boat is unsafe; the water comes through. See! it is half
full now'; and she pointed to where it lay in the stream, lined with a
mimic portraiture of the endless corridor of moonlight that went playing
across the bit of water it held.

"'This is childish, this is folly,' I thought, 'to be stayed on such a
_spirit_ mission by a few cups of water in a boat! What shall I ever
accomplish in life, if I yield thus?--and without waiting to more than
half hear, certainly not to obey, my father's stern 'Stay on shore,
Abraham,' I went down the bank, stepped into a bit of a bark, and pushed
it into the stream, where my boat was now rocking on the strengthened
flow of ocean's rise.

"I came to the boat, bailed out the water with a tin cup that lay
floating inside, and calling back to land, 'Go home without me; do
not wait,' I took the oars, and in my River-Ribbon, set free from its
anchorage, I commenced rowing against the tide. I looked back to the
bank I was fast