greater miracle is wrought at our very feet, if we have
but eyes to see it.

I had now been a year at Rivermouth. If you do not know what sort of boy
I was, it is not because I haven't been frank with you. Of my progress
at school I say little; for this is a story, pure and simple, and not
a treatise on education. Behold me, however, well up in most of the
classes. I have worn my Latin grammar into tatters, and am in the first
book of Virgil. I interlard my conversation at home with easy quotations
from that poet, and impress Captain Nutter with a lofty notion of my
learning. I am likewise translating Les Aventures de Telemaque from the
French, and shall tackle Blair's Lectures the next term. I am ashamed of
my crude composition about The Horse, and can do better now. Sometimes
my head almost aches with the variety of my knowledge. I consider Mr.
Grimshaw the greatest scholar that ever lived, and I don't know which I
would rather be--a learned man like him, or a circus rider.

My thoughts revert to this particular spring more frequently than to any
other period of my boyhood, for it was marked by an event that left an
indelible impression on my memory. As I pen these pages, I feel that
I am writing of something which happened yesterday, so vividly it all
comes back to me.

Every Rivermouth boy looks upon the sea as being in some way mixed up
with his destiny. While he is yet a baby lying in his cradle, he hears
the dull, far-off boom of the breakers; when he is older, he wanders by
the sandy shore, watching the waves that come plunging up the beach
like white-maned seahorses, as Thoreau calls them; his eye follows the
lessening sail as it fades into the blue horizon, and he burns for the
time when he shall stand on the quarter-deck of his own ship, and go
sailing proudly across that mysterious waste of waters.

Then the town itself is full of hints and flavors of the sea. The gables
and roofs of the houses facing eastward are covered with red rust, like
the flukes of old anchors; a salty smell pervades the air, and dense
gray fogs, the very breath of Ocean, periodically creep up into the
quiet streets and envelop everything. The terrific storms that lash
the coast; the kelp and spars, and sometimes the bodies of drowned men,
tossed on shore by the scornful waves; the shipyards, the wharves, and
the tawny fleet of fishing-smacks yearly fitted out at Rivermouth--these
things, and a hundred other, feed the imagination a