rt.

Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were
not all volunteers. Some, in fact, complained pitifully. They had, they
said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly
a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail
this unknown sea. Thus, without a word of warning, they had been
compelled to leave behind them all they held dear. This, one felt, was a
little hard of the captain; but those of us whose position was exactly
the reverse, who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed
were invested there, were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe
on the captain who was taking us thither.

There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two young
lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their
marriage, and there was another. What a surprise it would be to all
three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming. Indeed, it was
just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.

I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now
living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it
would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.

'Oh, well then,' I thought, 'I know what it will be like. There shall be
a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling
the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving
home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water
shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one
bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid
a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go
streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with
the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night
when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown
rose, in the night it is bright as a sailor's star.

'If it be early morning, what shall I do? I shall run to the house in
which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss
my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till
the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I
shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at
last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window. I shall
stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through