proud.

Fritz was tall and manly, by virtue of his two-and-twenty years and a
small fringe of dark down that covered his upper lip; Eric was shorter
by some inches, but more thick-set and with broader shoulders,
predicting that he would be the bigger of the two as time rolled on.

The firstborn, Fritz, with his closely cropped hair and swarthy
complexion, took after his dead father, who had been a Holsteiner--a
mariner by profession, who had sailed his ship from the Elbe some years
before for the last time, and left his wife to bring up her fatherless
boys by the sweat of her brow and her own exertions; for Captain Dort
had left but little worldly goods behind him, his all being embarked
with himself in his ship, which was lost, with all hands on board, in
the North Sea. Fritz and Eric had both been too young at the time to
appreciate the struggles of their mother to support herself and them,
until she had achieved a comfortable competency by teaching music and
languages in several rich Hanoverian families; and now she had no longer
to battle for her bread.

Eric took after her in face and expression, having the same light-
coloured hair and bright blue eyes; but there the resemblance ceased, as
hardly had he grown to boyhood than he evinced that desire for a sea
life which he must have inherited with his father's blood--he would, he
must be a sailor!

Being the youngest, he naturally was her pet; and thus, although the
recollection of her husband's fate was ever before her, and Madame Dort
had a dread of the sea which only those who have suffered a similar
bereavement can fully understand, she could not resist the boy's
continual pleadings, backed up as they were by his evident and
unaffected bias of mind towards everything connected with ships and
shipping; for, Eric never seemed so happy as when frequenting the quays
and talking with the sailors and sea-captains who came to the old port
of Lubeck, where of late years the mother had taken up her residence, in
order to be near Fritz, who had obtained a clerkship in a merchant's
house there, through the friendly offices of the parents of one of the
music-teacher's pupils.

Eric had already received his `sea-baptism,' so to speak, having been on
a trip to England in a Hamburgh cattle-boat, and on a cruise up the
Baltic in a timber-ship; but he was now going away in a Dutch vessel to
the East Indies, the voyage promising to occupy more than a year, so
there is no w