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 Joseph! he tries to slip along with the others; but when the holiday comes, instinct takes him straight to the mill-pond, there to construct forbidden rafts and adventure contraband voyages.  The best-worn page of his Malte-Brun Geography is that which treats the youthful student to a packet-passage to England.  He can tell the names of all islands, capes, and bays; but ask him the boundaries of Bohemia or Saxony, the capitals of Western States, and down he goes to the foot of the class.  Thus it continues awhile, till, after a fracas at school, or a neglected duty on the farm, or similar severance of the bonds of home, Master Joe may be seen trudging along the dusty seaport-highway, in a passion of tears, but with a resolute heart, and an ever-deepening conviction that he must go on, and not back.

Then there is another class,—­the poetical, dreamy adventurer, to whom the sea beckons in every white Undine that rises along the beaches of a moonlight night, to whom it calls in that mournful and magic undertone heard only by those who love and listen.  These do not often run away to go to sea; they prefer to voyage genteelly in yachts or packet-ships, and, if the impulse be very strong, will get a commission in the navy.  However, if circumstances compel a Tapleyan “coming out strong,” they will sometimes face their work, and that right nobly; for there is nowhere that gentle blood so tells as at sea.  The utter absence of all sham or room for sham brings out true and noble qualities as well as mean and selfish ones.  For ordinary work, one man’s muscle is as good as another’s.  It is only when the time of trial comes,—­when the volunteers are called to man the boat that is