eyes to make out Marblehead on account of Whittier's ballad; we
scrutinized the entrance to Salem Harbor because a genius once sat in
its decaying custom-house and made of it a throne of the imagination.
Upon this low shore line, which lies blinking in the midday sun, the
waves of history have beaten for two centuries and a half, and
romance has had time to grow there. Out of any of these coves might
have sailed Sir Patrick Spens "to Noroway, to Noroway,"

"They hadna sailed upon the sea
A day but barely three,

Till loud and boisterous grew the wind,
And gurly grew the sea."

The sea was anything but gurly now; it lay idle and shining in an
August holiday. It seemed as if we could sit all day and watch the
suggestive shore and dream about it. But we could not. No man, and
few women, can sit all day on those little round penitential stools
that the company provide for the discomfort of their passengers.
There is no scenery in the world that can be enjoyed from one of
those stools. And when the traveler is at sea, with the land failing
away in his horizon, and has to create his own scenery by an effort
of the imagination, these stools are no assistance to him. The
imagination, when one is sitting, will not work unless the back is
supported. Besides, it began to be cold; notwithstanding the shiny,
specious appearance of things, it was cold, except in a sheltered
nook or two where the sun beat. This was nothing to be complained of
by persons who had left the parching land in order to get cool. They
knew that there would be a wind and a draught everywhere, and that
they would be occupied nearly all the time in moving the little