Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/85



his infancy he had loved the sea, with its restless waves; the dark blue ocean, with its white sails; and the idea of a sailor's pleasant life pervaded his very dreams. During the winter months he was satisfied to go to school, and learn to read and write; but in summer, when the soft wind stole with its balmy breath through the windows of the schoolroom, he used to fancy that it brought him greetings from the adjacent sea—that it came fraught with the odour of the sun-bleached deck, of the tarry rope, of the swelling sail—and then the schoolroom became too confined for him, and his little breast heaved with a longing which he could not repress.

All his holidays were spent at the quays, or on the sea-shore; when a ship arrived from some foreign land, he would gaze at it with longing eyes, and he would wish it were not speechless, that it might tell him of the magnificent clear moonlights on which the tropical skies and the dreamy ocean seemed to unite, and form one wide and bland expanse; or of the dark stormy night on which the tempest, resting on its breezy pinions, broods over the foaming sea. Oh! how he envied the careless, sunburnt sailors who looked down from the gunwale, or hung, apparently in frolic mood, amid the yards above!—who could be so happy as they, to skim over the sea with only a slender plank beneath their feet, with the white sails outstretched like wings above their head!

When it became late in the evening, he would saunter slowly and sorrowfully homewards to the small, confined house in the suburbs of the town, where his mother, who had, perhaps, just finished her day's hard work, would meet him with gentle reproaches for staying out so long. When he had then assisted her to bring in the heavy pail of water, to stretch the somewhat blackened ropes in the court, and prop them up with long sticks, to water the flowers in the little garden, and the pots of balsam and geranium in the window; and when their simple supper was finished, it was his delight to place himself on a low wooden stool at his mother's feet, while she knitted, and listen to the stories she told him of his poor father, who had gone far away and had never returned. Vivid were the pictures the good woman drew from the magic-lantern of her memory. Now, it was of her maritime wedding—with the two waving Dannebrog flags—the numerous smartly-dressed sailors, with their short jackets, white hats, and red pocket-handkerchiefs, each with his sweetheart on his arm; now, of the day when his father came home from a voyage, and found him—the boy—in a cradle, a welcome gift on his arrival; now, of the dreadful hour when the owner of the ship sent for her, and she was informed, in a few cold words, that her husband had died out on the wide ocean, had been wrapped in his hammock, and lowered into the deep. The stories always ended here with the widow's tears; but the boy would sit lost in deep thought, and would follow in his imagination the sinking hammock with his father's corpse down beneath the