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Prue and I by George William Curtis
page 45 of 157 (28%)

"Come unto these yellow sands."
_The Tempest._

"Argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."
_Tennyson_


In the month of June, Prue and I like to walk upon the Battery toward
sunset, and watch the steamers, crowded with passengers, bound for the
pleasant places along the coast where people pass the hot months.
Sea-side lodgings are not very comfortable, I am told; but who would
not be a little pinched in his chamber, if his windows looked upon the
sea?

In such praises of the ocean do I indulge at such times, and so
respectfully do I regard the sailors who may chance to pass, that Prue
often says, with her shrewd smiles, that my mind is a kind of
Greenwich Hospital, full of abortive marine hopes and wishes,
broken-legged intentions, blind regrets, and desires, whose hands have
been shot away in some hard battle of experience, so that they cannot
grasp the results towards which they reach.

She is right, as usual. Such hopes and intentions do lie, ruined and
hopeless now, strewn about the placid contentment of my mental life,
as the old pensioners sit about the grounds at Greenwich, maimed and
musing in the quiet morning sunshine. Many a one among them thinks
what a Nelson he would have been if both his legs had not been
prematurely carried away; or in what a Trafalgar of triumph he would
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