Then came a facetious sailor and whispered to him:  “Do you want ever to get to New York?”—­“Yes, I do,” said the little captain of the midair craft.—­“Well, then, you’d better haul in sail; for you’re set dead agin us now.”  The sails were struck on the instant and never unfurled again.

I wonder why some people are so very inconsiderate when they speak to children, especially to simple or sensitive children?  The small, sad boy took it greatly to heart, and was cast down because he feared that he might have delayed the bark that bore him all too slowly toward the far-distant port.  This was indeed simplicity of the deepest dye, and something of that simplicity the boy was never to escape unto the end of time.  We are as God made us, and we must in all cases put up with ourselves.

What a lonely voyage was that across the vast and vacant sea!  Now and then a distant sail glimmered upon the horizon, but disappeared like a vanishing snowflake.  The equator was crossed; the air grew colder; storm and calm followed each other; the daily entry now becomes monotonous.

“FEBRUARY 2.—­To-day for the first time we saw an albatross.

“7.—­Rather rough and cold; I have spent all day in the cabin.  It makes me homesick to have such weather.

“14.—­I rose at five o’clock and went on deck, and before long saw land.  It was Terra del Fuego; it was a beautiful sight.  Here lay a pretty island, there a towering precipice, and over yonder a mountain covered with snow.  We made the fatal Cape Horn at two o’clock, and passed it at four o’clock.  Now we are in the Atlantic Ocean.

“WASHINGTON’S BIRTHDAY.—­Rough weather:  a sixteen-knot breeze.  To-day we got our one thousandth egg, and the hens are doing well.  At twelve—­eight bells—­we saw a sail on our weather-bow:  she was going the same way as we were.  At two, we overtook and spoke her.  She was the whaler Scotland from New Zealand, bound for New Bedford, with thirty-five hundred barrels of oil.  We soon passed her.  I wish her good luck.”

I will no longer stretch the small, sad boy upon the rack of his dull journal.  He had a glimpse at Juan Fernandez, but the island of his dreams was so far off that he had to climb to the maintop in order to get a sight of its shadowy outline.  When it had faded away like the clouds, the lonely little fellow cried himself to sleep for love of his Robinson Crusoe.

One night the moon—­a large, mellow tropical one,—­rose from a bank of cloud so like a mountain’s chain that the small one clapped his hands in glee and cried:  “Land ho!” But, alas! it was only cloud-land; and his eyes, that were starving for a sight of God’s green earth, were again bedewed.  Indeed he was bound for a distant shore, a voyage of ninety-one days; and during all that voyage he was in sight of land for five days only.  It may be said that the port he was bound for, and where he was destined to pass two years at school, four thousand miles from his own people, may be called “The Vale of Tears.”