He looked from the tracing of his name to the west.

“The sun is going down once more,” he said, and bowed his head, as one does, waiting for pastoral benediction.  His eyes were fixed now, as I had seen his sister’s held, but his lips poured out words.

“The moonlight sheened the earth, hot and heavy and still, that night.  My father, mother, and Lettie were in the home where you have seen sorrow come.  Up from the sea came the low, hollow boom of surges rising over the crust of land.

“‘To the sea, to the sea, let us go!’ I cried; ’it is the very night to tread the hall of moonbeams that leads to palace of pearls!’

“My mother was weary; she would have stayed at home, but I was her pearl of price; she forgot herself.  You know the stream that comes down from the mountain and empties into the ocean.  It was in that stream that my boat floated, and a long walk away.  Lettie left us.  Just after we started, I missed her, and asked where she had gone.

“‘You’ll see soon,’ replied my mother; and even as I looked back, I saw Lettie following, with a shadow other than her own falling on the midsummer grass.  She did not hasten; she did not seek to come up with us.  My mother was walking beside me.

“Thus we came to the river, at the place where it wanders out into the ocean.  I saw my boat, my River-Ribbon, floating its cable-length, but never more, and undulating to the throbs of tide that pulsated along the blue vein of water, heralding the motion of the heart outside.  We stopped there.  The moon was set in the firmament high and fast, as when it was made to rule the night.  The hall of light, lit up along the twinkling way of waters, looked shining and beckoning in its wavy ways of grace, a very home for the restless spirit.  I wanted to thread its labyrinth of sparkles; I wanted to cool my wings of desire in its phosphorescent dew.  I said,—­

“‘I am going out upon the sea.’

“My mother seemed troubled.

“’ Abraham, the boat is unsafe; the water comes through.  See! it is half full now’; and she pointed to where it lay in the stream, lined with a mimic portraiture of the endless corridor of moonlight that went playing across the bit of water it held.

“‘This is childish, this is folly,’ I thought, ’to be stayed on such a spirit mission by a few cups of water in a boat!  What shall I ever accomplish in life, if I yield thus?—­and without waiting to more than half hear, certainly not to obey, my father’s stern ’Stay on shore, Abraham,’ I went down the bank, stepped into a bit of a bark, and pushed it into the stream, where my boat was now rocking on the strengthened flow of ocean’s rise.

“I came to the boat, bailed out the water with a tin cup that lay floating inside, and calling back to land, ’Go home without me; do not wait,’ I took the oars, and in my River-Ribbon, set free from its anchorage, I commenced rowing against the tide.  I looked back to the bank I was fast leaving.  I saw figures standing there.