Even brother’s melancholy countenance grew animated as he gazed on the scene before us.  A bright sheet of water separated the peak on which we were standing from another rocky ledge, connected with the main land by a narrow strip, called Marblehead Neck, that looked like a wall inclosing the quiet bay.  Behind us lay the town, with its strange, wild confusion of roofs and spires, and to the south we could descry Nahant and Boston, with Cape Cod stretching out beyond them, along the horizon.  My eyes, however, did not rest on the land, but turned to the broad ocean, which lay beyond the light-house, that stood up like a spectre in the moonlight, and I thought I could spy here and there a sail among the many which I had seen that afternoon scattered over the waves.

Clarendon sat down on one of the rocks, and his love of the beautiful overcame, at that moment, his dislike to praising any thing in which he has no personal interest.  “This is magnificent,” he said, and commenced repeating with enthusiasm Byron’s address to the ocean,—­

  “Roll on, thou dark blue ocean! roll,” &c.

At the sound of his fine, manly voice, a boy about my age started up from a rock near him, and listened to the lines with the most profound attention.  When they were concluded, he remarked with a modest yet independent air,—­“That certainly is very fine, Sir; but we have poets of our own that can match it.”

Clarendon at first frowned at what he deemed the height of impertinence; but as he looked on the boy’s broad, open forehead, and frank, sweet mouth, in which the white teeth glittered as he spoke, his haughty manner vanished, and he replied quite civilly,—­“So you know something about poetry, my little lad.”

“To be sure, Sir,” replied David Cobb, for such I afterwards found to be his name.  “How could a boy be two years at the Boston High School and not know something about it?  But I knew Drake’s Address to the Flag, and Pierpont’s Pilgrim Fathers, and Percival’s New England, when I was not more than ten years old.”

“Percival’s New England!” said Clarendon, quite contemptuously.  “Pray, what could a poet say about such a puny subject as this Yankee land of yours?”

“Do you not know that poem?” asked David; and we could see, by the moonlight, that there was something very like indignation at such ignorance in his fine dark eyes.

“Hear it, then, and see if you do not call it poetry.”

If you could only have seen him, Bennie, as he stood on the cliff, with his rough, sailor-like hat in hand, and the breeze lifting his dark hair from his broad forehead, while, looking with absolute fondness on the scene around him, he repeated,—­

  “Hail to the land whereon we tread,
      Our fondest boast! 
  The sepulchre of mighty dead,
  The truest hearts that ever bled,
  Who sleep on glory’s brightest bed,
      A fearless host;
  No slave is here;—­our unchained feet
  Walk freely, as the waves that beat
      Our coast.