ds and out along the yards. The sails are
slatting and flapping, and one can hardly see the row of broad backs
against the dusky sky as they bend over the canvas. There are hoarse
murmurs, and calls to "light up the sail to windward"; and presently
from the fore-topsail-yard comes the cry, ringing and clear,--"Haul away
to leeward!"--repeated next moment from the main and echoed from the
mizzen. Sheltered by the weather-bulwarks, and with one arm round a
mizzen-backstay, there is a capital place to watch all this and feel the
glorious thrill of the sea,--to look down the sloping deck into the
black billows, with here and there a white patch of foam, and while the
organ-harp overhead is sounding its magnificent symphony. It is but
wood and iron and hemp and canvas that is doing all this, with some
thirty poor, broken-down, dissipated wretches, who, being fit for
nothing else, of course _are_ fit for the fo'castle of a Liverpool
Liner. Yet it is, for all that, something which haunts the memory
long,--which comes back years after in inland vales and quiet
farm-houses like brown-moss agates set in emerald meadows, in book-lined
studios, and in close city streets. For it is part of the might and
mystery of the sea, the secret influence that sets the blood on fire and
the heart throbbing,--of any in whose veins runs some of the true
salt-water sympathy. Men are born landsmen, and are born on land, but
belong to the Ocean's family. Sooner or later, whatever their calling,
they recognize the tie. They may struggle against it, and scotch it, but
cannot kill it. They may not be seamen,--they may wear black coats and
respectable white ties, and have large balances in the bank, but they
are the Sea's men,--brothers by blood-relationship, if not by trade, of
Ulysses and Vasco, of Columbus and Cabot, of Frobisher and Drake.

Other stories of the sea are floating through my memory as I
write,--tales told with elbows leaning on cabin-tables, while the
swinging-lamp oscillated drearily overhead, and sent uncertain shadows
into the state-room doors. There is the story which Vivian Grey told us
of the beautiful clipper "Nighthawk,"--her who sailed with the "Bonita"
and "Driving-Scud" and "Mazeppa," in the great Sea-Derby, whose course
lay round the world. How, one Christmas-day, off the pitch of Cape Horn,
he, standing on her deck, saw her dive bodily into a sea, and all of her
to the mainmast was lost in ocean,--her stately spars seemingl