Harper's Round Table, April 14, 1896

Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

It was a beautiful summer morning. There was a light wind from the southwest, which just tempered to a degree of endurance the blazing heat of the full-orbed sun. A few wisps of feathery white lay slantwise across the broad field of deep-toned blue sky, promising a change of weather within a day's time. The sea was a vast undulating mirror of blue, as if all the sapphires in the world and in all the other worlds had been melted and poured into earth's majestic basin. From the rounded slopes of the broad low swells the rays of the sun danced in a million flashes of dazzling silver. The swells themselves ran in slow, sinuous folds to the inner bar, where they reared themselves in curving walls of translucent green shot with bars of snow, and then with the burst of far-off thunder fell forward into spurting, writhing acres of yeasty foam. Softness, warmth, and languorous sparkle lay over the sea.
Far away upon the uncertain horizon loomed the black hull of an ocean liner, cleaving her way across the polished path at twenty knots an hour, to make a new record, homeward bound. The tense cordage of her rigging, the strained squareness of her tapering yards, the horizontal backward rush of the torrents of smoke from her yawning funnels gave her the appearance of a true greyhound, with every nerve and muscle strained in the effort at speed. Nearer the land three schooners, two loaded to their scuppers, and one flying light, so that she seemed to sail on her keel, were making a long leg to the southward, close-hauled on the starboard tack. Further in yet a score of tiny sea skiffs rose and fell on the bosom of the deep, and now and then the glitter of sunlight on the scales of a captured fish could be seen.
Henry Hovey and his little brother George—who was not so little as he used to be—were walking along the ocean road. Often and often they had gone down to the old wooden pier, and sighed much because it no longer held their interesting friend, the Old Sailor. They had met other sailors, but none of them could tell tales of the sea; and, worse than that, none of them knew anything about the wonderful places the Old Sailor had seen. So Henry and George contented themselves with telling the old tales over, and speculating on the causes of the remarkable events related therein. On this beautiful summer day they unconsciously wandered down to the pier, and to their surprise there was a man sitting on the end of it. He looked so much like their old friend that they both stopped short and gasped. Then they shook their heads sadly and walked slowly out on the pier. As they drew near the man they saw that his shoulders were shaking with laughter. George gripped Henry's arm and said, Is it a dream?