Let me assure you my dears . . . that going to sea is not all the thing that we have taken it to be. You know how often we have longed for a sea voyage, as the fulfillment of all our dreams of poetry and romance, the realization of our highest conceptions of free, joyous existence.

You remember our ship-launching parties in Maine, when we used to ride to the seaside though dark pine forests, lighted up with the gold, scarlet and orange tints of autumn. What exhilaration there was, as the beautiful inland bays, one by one, unrolled like silver ribbons before us! And how all our sympathies went forth with the grand new ship about to be launched! How we longed to be with her, and a part of her — to go with her to India, China or anywhere, so that we might rise and fall on the bosom of that magnificent ocean, and share a part of that glorified existence! That ocean! That blue, sparkling, heaving, mysterious ocean, with all the signs and wonders of heaven emblazoned on its bosom, and another world of mystery hidden beneath its waters! Alas! what a contrast between all this poetry and the real prose fact of going to sea! No man, the proverb says, is a hero to his valet de chambre. Certainly, no poet, no hero, no inspired prophet, ever lost so much on near acquaintance as this same mystic, grandiloquent old Ocean. The one step from the sublime to the ridiculous is never taken with such alacrity as in a sea voyage.