The Cruise of a Schooner

SUNSET ON THE MOJAVE DESERT
THE CRUISE OF A SCHOONER By Albert W. Harris With Illustrations from Photographs Privately Printed
Copyright, 1911, By Albert W. Harris Arranged and Printed by Charles Daniel Frey Chicago
To My Friend Dr. H. W. Lancaster
PREFACE
Years ago, no matter how many, my head was filled with queer notions. Probably there are still a few queer thoughts and notions left there. I refer to them as queer from the point of view from which the reader will look at them. Personally, I have considered them very sane and serious, and quite worth working out.
To begin with, when a boy, I had a great yearning for a pony. I had all sorts of notions about ponies, but when I didn’t get one as a boy, I planned to have more ponies when I grew up, and better ones, than any one ever had before. In fact, I built a “pony” castle in the air.
I had another notion that I wanted to be a farmer, and have a big ranch with horses and cattle, but when I could not, as a boy, see any chance to work this out at once, I proceeded in my mind to make it come true, and pictured and planned it all out, and built such a fine castle of a farm that I could see it almost as plainly in my mind’s eye as though it were a reality.
The nearest I ever got to my castle for many years was when riding over the plains on a cow pony, the cattle and the pony belonging to some one else; the fun, however, was all mine. I still worked on my castles and added another. I pictured myself some time riding or driving overland to California, crossing the plains and mountains with a party of congenial spirits, and following the old Santa Fe trail to the Pacific Ocean.
When I talked seriously of these things to ordinary mortals, they smiled, and said, “You think you will do these things some day, but you never will; they are all air castles.” Similar expressions greeted any reference to ponies, farms, or overland trips, as the years went by, till they began to take some such place in my own mind, and I found myself saying, “Air Castles, nothing but Air Castles.” Still, as these castles began to crumble and grow mossy with years, I resolved to repair them, and in so doing awoke to the fact that two of my castles had materialized. They had come to earth, so to speak, and I found myself actually possessed of the farm and the ponies; the identical ponies, it seemed to me, I had seen in my mind’s eye when a boy. It took me some time to actually realize that the farm and the ponies were really mine, but, when I finally came to accept them as realities, I knew my other castle could not be far off, and I began again planning to take the overland trip.