I had now been a year at Rivermouth.  If you do not know what sort of boy I was, it is not because I haven’t been frank with you.  Of my progress at school I say little; for this is a story, pure and simple, and not a treatise on education.  Behold me, however, well up in most of the classes.  I have worn my Latin grammar into tatters, and am in the first book of Virgil.  I interlard my conversation at home with easy quotations from that poet, and impress Captain Nutter with a lofty notion of my learning.  I am likewise translating Les Aventures de Telemaque from the French, and shall tackle Blair’s Lectures the next term.  I am ashamed of my crude composition about The Horse, and can do better now.  Sometimes my head almost aches with the variety of my knowledge.  I consider Mr. Grimshaw the greatest scholar that ever lived, and I don’t know which I would rather be—­a learned man like him, or a circus rider.

My thoughts revert to this particular spring more frequently than to any other period of my boyhood, for it was marked by an event that left an indelible impression on my memory.  As I pen these pages, I feel that I am writing of something which happened yesterday, so vividly it all comes back to me.

Every Rivermouth boy looks upon the sea as being in some way mixed up with his destiny.  While he is yet a baby lying in his cradle, he hears the dull, far-off boom of the breakers; when he is older, he wanders by the sandy shore, watching the waves that come plunging up the beach like white-maned seahorses, as Thoreau calls them; his eye follows the lessening sail as it fades into the blue horizon, and he burns for the time when he shall stand on the quarter-deck of his own ship, and go sailing proudly across that mysterious waste of waters.

Then the town itself is full of hints and flavors of the sea.  The gables and roofs of the houses facing eastward are covered with red rust, like the flukes of old anchors; a salty smell pervades the air, and dense gray fogs, the very breath of Ocean, periodically creep up into the quiet streets and envelop everything.  The terrific storms that lash the coast; the kelp and spars, and sometimes the bodies of drowned men, tossed on shore by the scornful waves; the shipyards, the wharves, and the tawny fleet of fishing-smacks yearly fitted out at Rivermouth—­these things, and a hundred other, feed the imagination and fill the brain of every healthy boy with dreams of adventure.  He learns to swim almost as soon as he can walk; he draws in with his mother’s milk the art of handling an oar:  he is born a sailor, whatever he may turn out to be afterwards.

To own the whole or a portion of a row-boat is his earliest ambition.  No wonder that I, born to this life, and coming back to it with freshest sympathies, should have caught the prevailing infection.  No wonder I longed to buy a part of the trim little sailboat Dolphin, which chanced just then to be in the market.  This was in the latter part of May.