winter guest, this year, of all the graceful flotilla of yachts
that helped to make our summer moonlights so charming. While
Europe seems in such ecstasy over the ocean yacht-race, there
lies at anchor, stripped and dismantled, a vessel which was
excluded from the match, it is said, simply because neither of
the three competitors would have had a chance against her. I like
to look across the harbor at the graceful proportions of this
uncrowned victor in the race she never ran; and to my eye her
laurels are the most attractive. She seems a fit emblem of the
genius that waits, while talent merely wins. "Let me know," said
that fine, but unappreciated thinker, Brownlee Brown,--"let me
know what chances a man has passed in contempt; not what he has
made, but what he has refused to make, reserving himself for
higher ends."

All out-door work in winter has a cheerful look, from the triumph
of caloric it implies; but I know none in which man seems to
revert more to the lower modes of being than in searching for
seaclams. One may sometimes observe a dozen men employed in this
way, on one of our beaches, while the cold wind blows keenly off
shore, and the spray drifts back like snow over the green and
sluggish surge. The men pace in and out with the wave, going
steadily to and fro like a pendulum, ankle-deep in the chilly
brine, their steps quickened by hope or slackening with despair.
Where the maidens and children sport and shout in summer, there
in winter these heavy figures succeed. To them the lovely crest
of the emerald billow is but a chariot for clams, and is
valueless if it comes in empty. Really, the position of the clam
is the more dignified, since he moves only with the wave, and the
immortal being in fish-boots wades for him.