had seen them still and silent as a soul in holy trance; he had seen them
raving in a fury of livid green, swarming with 'white-mouthed waves;' he
had seen them lying in one narrow ridge of unbroken blue, where the eye,
finding no marks to measure the distance withal, saw miles as furlongs;
and he had seen sweeps and shadows innumerable stretched along its calm
expanse, so dividing it into regions, and graduating the distance, that
the eye seemed to wander on and on from sea to sea, and the ships to float
in oceans beyond oceans of infinite reach. O lonely space! awful indeed
wert thou, did no one love us! But he had yet to receive one more vision
of the waters, and that was to be in a dream. With this dream I will close
the story of his holiday; for it went with him ever after, breaking forth
from the dream-home, and encompassing his waking thoughts with an
atmosphere of courage and hope, when his heart was ready to sink in a
world which was not the world the boy had thought to enter, when he ran to
welcome his fate.

"On their last Sunday, Herbert went with his mother to the evening service
in a little chapel in the midst of the fishermen's cottages. It was a
curious little place, with galleries round, that nearly met in the middle,
and a high pulpit with a great sounding-board over it, from which came the
voice of an earnest little Methodist, magnified by his position into a
mighty prophet. The good man was preaching on the parable of _the sheep
and the goats;_ and, in his earnestness for his own theology and the souls
of his hearers, was not content that the Lord should say these things in
his own way, but he must say them in his too. And a terrible utterance it
was! Looking about, unconsciously seeking some relief from the
accumulation of horrors with which the preacher was threatening the goats
of his congregation, Herbert spied, in the very front of one of the side
galleries, his little pupil, white with terror, and staring with round
unwinking eyes full in the face of the prophet of fear. Never after could