THE DANES

Sketched by Themselves.

[THE FAIR PROSPECT.]

From 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 seashore. 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 heads!