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136 smell of cooped-up men. But as his first seasickness quickly left him, who was son and grandson to English sea-captains, so his health and youth pulled him through the vast misery of the first longing for home. His conscience often upbraided him for his rising spirits. Of course he would not forget his mother and her loneliness. But then, there was so much to see and learn and live through! To sail southward in a vessel sheeted with ice; to beat dizzily and wearily all day into a blind whirl of snowflakes; on a calm morning to see the snow, that strange white creature of the land, so odd and out of place aboard ship, lying ankle-deep along the deck, or capping the deckhouse with a dome, or drifted over the anchor-chains, or caught like thistledown in the dirty fold of a frozen sail; and then, little by little, week by week, as the sun grew higher and warmer, to be sailing into spring weather, with the sweet smell of clean beech and maple rising from the hold, while the Italians thawed into laughter and left their reefers in the forecastle, till all the crew went about the deck