Project Gutenberg's The Cruise of the Dolphin, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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Title: The Cruise of the Dolphin

Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Posting Date: October 1, 2008 [EBook #1757]
Release Date: May, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUISE OF THE DOLPHIN ***

Produced by Susan L. Farley

THE CRUISE OF THE DOLPHIN

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

(An episode from The Story of a Bad Boy, the narrator being
Tom Bailey, the hero of the tale.)

Every Rivermouth boy looks upon the sea as being in some way mixed up
with his destiny. While he is yet a baby lying in his cradle, he hears
the dull, far-off boom of the breakers; when he is older, he wanders by
the sandy shore, watching the waves that come plunging up the beach
like white-maned sea-horses, as Thoreau calls them; his eye follows the
lessening sail as it fades into the blue horizon, and he burns for the
time when he shall stand on the quarter-deck of his own ship, and go
sailing proudly across that mysterious waste of waters.

Then the town itself is full of hints and flavors of the sea. The gables
and roofs of the houses facing eastward are covered with red rust, like
the flukes of old anchors; a salty smell pervades the air, and dense
gray fogs, the very breath of Ocean, periodically creep up into the
quiet streets and envelop everything. The terrific storms that lash
the coast; the kelp and spars, and sometimes the bodies of drowned men,
tossed on shore by the scornful waves; the shipyards, the wharves, and
the tawny fleet of fishing-smacks yearly fitted out at Rivermouth--these
things, and a hundred other, feed the imagination and fill the brain of
every healthy boy with dreams of adventure. He learns to swim almost
as soon as he can walk; he draws in with his mother's milk the art of
handling an oar: he is born a sailor, whatever he may turn out to be
afterwards.

To own the whole or a portion of a rowboat is his earliest ambition. No
wonder that I, born to this life, and coming back to it with freshest
sympathies, should have caught the prevailing infection. No wonder I
longed to buy a part of the trim