What lit your eyes with tearful power,
Like moonlight on a falling shower?
Who lent you, love, your mortal dower
Of pensive thought and aspect pale,
Your melancholy sweet and frail
As perfume of the cuckoo-flower?
Tennyson.
Frederic Preston was the eldest son of a respectable merchant, in one of the most important seaport towns of New England. He was a young man of fine personal appearance, a warm and honorable heart, and a spirit singularly brave and adventurous. From his boyhood his inclinations had led him to a seafaring life, and at the age of twenty-six, when he is presented to the reader, he had already made several voyages to the East Indies, as supercargo in the employ of the house in which his father was a partner. He was now at home for a year, awaiting the completion of a vessel, which was to trade with Canton, and which he was to command.
Preston had, for all his love of change and adventure, a taste for literature—always taking a well-selected library with him on his long voyages—was even, for one of his pursuits, remarkable for scholarly attainments; yet he sometimes wearied of books and study, and, as he had little taste for general society, often found the time drag heavily in his shore-life. Thus it was that he one day cheerfully accepted the invitation of his mother to accompany her to a school examination, in which his sister was to take a part.
Our young gentleman was shown a seat in front, near the platform on which were ranged the “patient pupils”—“beauties, every shade of brown and fair.”