alone upon the deck watching the low, swampy banks slipping past us on
either side, the gloomy cypress-trees heavy with gray moss, the
abandoned cotton-gins and disused negro quarters. As I did so a
feeling of homesickness and depression came upon me, and my
disgraceful failure at the Point, the loss of my grandfather, and my
desertion of Beatrice, for so it began to seem to me, filled me with a
bitter melancholy.

The sun set the first day over great wastes of swamp, swamp-land, and
pools of inky black, which stretched as far as the eye could reach;
gloomy, silent, and barren of any form of life. It was a picture which
held neither the freedom of the open sea nor the human element of the
solid earth. It seemed to me as though the world must have looked so
when darkness brooded over the face of the waters, and as I went to my
berth that night I felt as though I were saying good-by forever to
allthat was dear to me--my country, my home, and the girl I loved.

I was awakened in the morning by a motion which I had never before
experienced. I was being gently lifted and lowered and rolled to and
fro as a hammock is rocked by the breeze. For some minutes I lay
between sleep and waking, struggling back to consciousness, until with
a sudden gasp of delight it came to me that at last I was at sea. I
scrambled from my berth and pulled back the curtains of the air port.
It was as though over night the ocean had crept up to my window. It
stretched below me in great distances of a deep, beautiful blue.
Tumbling waves were chasing each other over it, and millions of white
caps glanced and flashed as they raced by me in the sun. It was my
first real view of the ocean, and the restlessness of it and the
freedom of it stirred me with a great happiness. I drank in its beauty
as eagerly as I filled my lungs with the keen salt air, and thanked