VIII.  AN OCTOBER ABROAD

I. MELLOW ENGLAND

I will say at the outset, as I believe some one else has said on a like occasion, that in this narrative I shall probably describe myself more than the objects I look upon.  The facts and particulars of the case have already been set down in the guidebooks and in innumerable books of travel.  I shall only attempt to give an account of the pleasure and satisfaction I had in coming face to face with things in the mother country, seeing them as I did with kindred and sympathizing eyes.

The ocean was a dread fascination to me,—­a world whose dominion I had never entered; but I proved to be such a wretched sailor that I am obliged to confess, Hibernian fashion, that the happiest moment I spent upon the sea was when I set my foot upon the land.

It is a wide and fearful gulf that separates the two worlds.  The landsman can know little of the wildness, savageness, and mercilessness of nature till he has been upon the sea.  It is as if he had taken a leap off into the interstellar spaces.  In voyaging to Mars or Jupiter, he might cross such a desert,—­might confront such awful purity and coldness.  An astronomic solitariness and remoteness encompass the sea.  The earth and all remembrance of it is blotted out; there is no hint of it anywhere.  This is not water, this cold, blue-black, vitreous liquid.  It suggests, not life, but death.  Indeed, the regions of everlasting ice and snow are not more cold and inhuman than is the sea.

Almost the only thing about my first sea voyage that I remember with pleasure is the circumstance of the little birds that, during the first few days out, took refuge on the steamer.  The first afternoon, just as we were losing sight of land, a delicate little wood-bird, the black and white creeping warbler,—­having lost its reckoning in making perhaps its first southern voyage,—­came aboard.  It was much fatigued, and had a disheartened, demoralized look.  After an hour or two it disappeared, having, I fear, a hard pull to reach the land in the face of the wind that was blowing, if indeed it reached it at all.

The next day, just at night, I observed a small hawk sailing about conveniently near the vessel, but with a very lofty, independent mien, as if he had just happened that way on his travels, and was only lingering to take a good view of us.  It was amusing to observe his coolness and haughty unconcern in that sad plight he was in; by nothing in his manner betraying that he was several hundred miles at sea, and did not know how he was going to get back to land.  But presently I noticed he found it not inconsistent with his dignity to alight on the rigging under friendly cover of the tops’l, where I saw his feathers rudely ruffled by the wind, till darkness set in.  If the sailors did not disturb him during the night, he certainly needed all his fortitude in the morning to put a cheerful face on his situation.