Sam’l Gilman.”
Sam had added “Esq.” to the above flourish, but afterwards scratched it out, as if he concluded it was not quite proper. There was a lengthy postscript, in which several messages for Ben were included, and ending—
“I try to do as I know you want me to, mother. I have read my Bible every Sunday, and keep my promise, so far.” Blotted and hurried as were the lines, it was the most precious part of that long, and carefully-written and boyishly egotistical letter; dear as it all was to his mother.
Ben came over the next day with the Sea Journal, which was as good as hearing again from the travellers, and though Mr. Gilman’s promised letter by the “Racer,” never arrived, his wife felt that she ought to be only too thankful for this. The precious letter was kept between the leaves of the family Bible, and every fold was worn long before another came.
CHAPTER VIII.
SAN FRANCISCO.
It was the Fourth of July, the great holiday of boys, if not of the nation, when the Swiftsure came slowly into the magnificent harbor of San Francisco. The weather-beaten sails and canvas told of a long and disastrous voyage. The crew were sullen and discontented, the passengers worn down by long confinement and miserable fare. They had escaped any furious gales after leaving Rio, but encountered head winds, and long unhealthy calms, almost from the time of entering the Pacific. They laid scarcely out of sight of Valparaiso twenty days together. Sam was not the only one on ship-board, who thought then, with almost longing, of the stiff gales and driving sleet and mist off Cape Horn. Our young sailor had comparatively a very comfortable experience of that great bugbear to all seamen. Sometimes the weather was fine for several days together; and gentle-eyed cape pigeons, so tame that it seemed cruel to capture them, came round the ship, or the passengers amused themselves in snaring an albatross, and watching the flapping of its useless wings from the deck.
This strange looking bird reminded Sam of the story he had read in verse, from a book belonging to his last teacher. Ben and he had carried it off from the desk to hide it, and have their own fun in the search, but finding the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” read it over so frequently, that they could remember more than half, when the hue and cry after the missing volume compelled them to restore it. Jackson and his messmates were favored with recitations as they passed within sight of the rugged and barren promontory, and stretching far away for a favorable wind, entered the long, rolling swell of the Pacific. There was life and excitement in the hardest squall they encountered there, that Sam considered in every way more agreeable than the sameness of a calm in a southern latitude.
Jackson was sure a sailor must have written the description Sam used to spout from his favorite “Ancient Mariner,” and was disappointed to find it was only a poet—“a kind of craft” he had very little respect for. And so it was—
“Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,