Harper's Round Table, March 16, 1897

Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

Some boys, like some men, have greatness thrust upon them. Bruce Marvel became one of these boys one day to his own great surprise.
Bruce was a good shot with either rifle or shot-gun; he could pitch, catch, or strike a ball as well as any other boy of his age, and he could handle a horse better than some men who travel with circuses. Still, he had spent most of his life in an inland village where the largest body of water was a brook about six feet wide. It stands to reason, therefore, as boys are very like men in longing most for what is farthest from their reach, that Bruce's consuming desire, in the line of sport, was for a sail-boat and for water in which to sail it. He studied pictures of sailing-craft, which he found in a pictorial dictionary, until he could redraw any of them from memory; he learned the names of all the sails of a full-rigged ship, and he delighted in sea stories of all kinds, while he longed for the day in which he could see broad water and such boats as were moved by wind, and when he could sit in a boat and manage the sails and rudder.
Fortune finally seemed to favor him, for in his fifteenth year he was invited to spend a month at the sea-shore with an aunt of his mother's. As the aunt's family contained no men, it had no boats, so Bruce was sadly disappointed. But he was not of the kind that gives up when disappointment comes; he spent most of his waking hours in walking the beach of the little bay about which the town was built, looking at the boats, and scraping acquaintance with boys whose fathers owned boats; he kept up his spirits by hoping that in the course of time some one would invite him out sailing, and perhaps to take part in the management of a craft of some sort, Bruce cared not what, so that it had sails.
But sailing was anything but sport to the boys whom Bruce came to know, for most of these boys were fishermen's sons, to whom sailing meant hard, every-day work, of which they did not care to do more than was absolutely necessary for business purposes.