He had a very powerful presentiment that we were never to see the shores of America.  By what agency our destruction was to be accomplished he did not enlighten us, but the ship had not well commenced her voyage before he commenced his evil prognostications.  That these were not founded upon any prophetic knowledge of future events will be sufficiently apparent from the fact of this book being written.  Indeed, when the mid Atlantic had been passed our Massachusetts acquaintance began to entertain more hopeful expectations of once more pressing his wife to his bosom, although he repeatedly reiterated that if that domestic event was really destined to take place no persuasion on earth, medical or other wise, would ever induce him to place the treacherous billows of the Atlantic between him and the person of that bosom’s partner.  It was drawing near the end of the voyage when an event occurred which, though in itself of a most trivial nature, had for some time a disturbing effect upon our party.  The priest’s sister, an elderly maiden lady of placidly weak intellect, announced one morning at breakfast that the sea-captain from Maine had on the previous day addressed her in terms of endearment, and had, in fact, called her his “little duck.”  This announcement, which was made generally to the table, and which was received in dead silence by every member of the community, had by no means a pleasurable effect upon the countenance of the person most closely concerned.  Indeed, amidst the silence which succeeded the revelation, a half-smothered sentence, more forcible than polite, was audible from the lips of the democrat, in which those accustomed to the vernacular of America could plainly distinguish “darned old fool.”  Meantime, in spite of political discussions, or amorous revelations, or prophetic disaster, in spite of mid-ocean storm and misty-fog-bank, our gigantic screw, unceasing as the whirl of life itself, had wound its way into the waters which wash the rugged shores of New England.  To those whose lives are spent in ceaseless movement over the world, who wander from continent to continent, from island to island, who dwell in many cities but are the citizens of no city, who sail away and come back again, whose home is the broad earth itself, to such as these the coming in sight of land is no unusual occurrence, and yet the man has grown old at his trade of wandering who can look utterly uninterested upon the first glimpse of land rising out of the waste of ocean:  small as that glimpse may be, only a rock, a cape, a mountain crest, it has the power of localizing an idea, the very vastness Of which prevents its realization on shore.  From the deck of an outward-bound vessel one sees rising, faint and blue, a rocky headland or a mountain summit-one does not ask if the mountain be of Maine, or of Mexico, or the Cape be St. Ann’s or Hatteras, one only sees America.  Behind that strip of blue coast lies a world, and that world the new one.  Far away inland lie scattered many landscapes