writing-table's left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like
a handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree of
knowledge. Strange! It seems that it is for these few bits of paper,
headed by the names of a few ships and signed by the names of a
few Scots and English shipmasters, that I have faced the astonished
indignations, the mockeries and the reproaches of a sort hard to
bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been charged with the want of
patriotism, the want of sense, and the want of heart too; that I went
through agonies of self-conflict and shed secret tears not a few, and
had the beauties of the Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have been called
an "incorrigible Don Quixote," in allusion to the book-born madness of
the knight. For that spoil! They rustle, those bits of paper--some dozen
of them in all. In that faint, ghostly sound there live the memories of
twenty years, the voices of rough men now no more, the strong voice of
the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a mysterious spell, the murmur
of the great sea, which must have somehow reached my inland cradle and
entered my unconscious ear, like that formula of Mohammedan faith the
Mussulman father whispers into the ear of his new-born infant, making
him one of the faithful almost with his first breath. I do not know
whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very
faithful one. And after all there is that handful of "characters" from
various ships to prove that all these years have not been altogether a
dream. There they are, brief, and monotonous in tone, but as suggestive
bits of writing to me as any inspired page to be found in literature.
But then, you see, I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be
helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist
also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up
to it, at whatever cost, for a change. With this end in view, I will
confide to you coyly, and only because there is no one about to see my
blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that these suggestive bits