e disguised Achilles among the
maids-of-honor,--by his magic book, summons to the service of the sea
its predestined ones. Why is it, but from a difference in blood and
soul, that the sea gets its own so surely? The farmer's sons grow up
about the fireside, do chores together, together range the woods for
squirrels, woodchucks, chestnuts, and sassafras, go to the same
"deestrick-school," and succeed to the same ambitions and hopes.
Reuben, the first-born, comes in due time to the care of the paternal
acres and oxen. Simeon, Dan, Judah, Benjamin, and the rest, grow up and
emigrate to Western clearings. Levi, it may be, pale, thoughtful Levi,
sees other fields "white to harvest," and struggles up through a New
England academy- and college-education, to find a seat in the
lecture-rooms of Andover, and to hope for a pulpit hereafter. But
Joseph, the pet and pride of the household,--what becomes of him?
Unlucky little duck! why could he not go "peeping" at the heels of the
maternal parent with his brother and sister biddies? Why must he be
born with webbed toes, and run at once to the wash-tub, there to make
nautical experiments with walnut-shells?

I know why the boys of a seaport-town take kindly to the water. All the
birds of the shore are something marine, and their table-flavor is apt
to be fishy. We youngsters, who were rocked to sleep with the roar of
the surf in our ears,--one wall of whose play-room was colored in blue
edged with white, in striking contrast with the peaceful green of the
three other sides,--who have many a night lain warm in bed and listened
to the distant roll of a sea-chorus and the swinging tramp of a dozen
jolly blue-jackets,--we whose greatest indulgence was a sail with Old
Card, _the_ boatman _par excellence_,--we who knew ships, as the
farmer's boy knows his oxen, before we had mastered the
multiplication-table,--it is not strange that we should take kindly to
salt water. So, too, all along the lovely "fiords" of Maine, in the
villages which cluster about the headlands of Essex, in the brown and
weather-mossed cottages which dot the white sands of Cape Cod, by the
southern shore of Long Island, wherever the sea and the land meet, the
boy grows up drawing into his lungs the salt air, which passes in
Nature's mysterious alchemy into his blood, so that he can never wholly
disown his birthright. But what is it that draws from the remote inland
the predestinate children of the deep?

Poor little