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This is happiness enough for a cold winter's night. Mid-ocean, and mid tea-cups! Stupendous change, let us tell you, worthy friend, who never yet set sail where sharks and other strange sea-cattle bob their noses above the brine, who never lived forty days in the bowels of a ship, unable to hold your head up to the captain's bluff "good morning" or the steward's cheery "good night."
If our burning car had been in mid-ocean, serenity would have been sublimity, but to stay in the midst of peril when two steps would take one out of it is idiocy. And that there was peril is conclusively shown by the fact that the very next day the Eastern Railroad Depot took fire and was burned to the ground.
Homesick sailors, too, lost in the profound stillness of mid-ocean, have listened with fearful wonder to the phantom chiming of their village bells.
I followed the sea for many years; and, in the bustle and turmoil of a sailor's life, I almost forgot my brother, from whom I had been so long separated. Yet sometimes, in the lonely hours of my night-watch on deck, when out in mid-ocean, would my thoughts turn to that once-loved brother, and tears would dim my eyes as memory recalled the days of our early childhood.
Bringing with it, away here in mid-ocean, all the kindly recollections of the season and home, and church and friends. Alas! how great the contrast between these things and our present condition. A leaky ship filled with prisoners of war, striving to make a port through the almost constantly recurring gales of the North Atlantic in mid-winter! Sick list ten of the crew, and four prisoners.
Then they again embarked and taking with them the gazelle, set out to return homeward, but the murk of evening overtook them and they missed their way on the main. Moreover a strong wind arose and crave the boat into mid-ocean, so that when they awoke in the morning, they found themselves lost at sea.
"Were your father's adventures as remarkable as yours?" "It was the same man who nearly succeeded in accomplishing the ruin of both Captain Haley was my father's mate, and was he who, in revenge for some fancied slight, set fire to the vessel in mid-ocean, and then escaped." Scarcely had this revelation been made, when a clerk entered, and approaching Mr.
But the profoundest impressions that come to one from travel, come alone from the works of nature. The Crystal Palace in London can not compare in glory with the crystal ripples of a mid-ocean scene. The botannical gardens of the Tuilleries in Paris do not stir the soul as does the splendor of the Welsh mountains.
Why yes, I said, but the fact is that when a man is out of his depth, whether he has fallen into a little swimming bath or into mid-ocean, he has to swim all the same. Very true. And must not we swim and try to reach the shore: we will hope that Arion's dolphin or some other miraculous help may save us? I suppose so, he said. Well then, let us see if any way of escape can be found.
In writing this tale I had in mind not alone to please my young readers, but also to give them a fair picture of life on the ocean as it is to-day, in distinction to what it was years ago, and also to acquaint the boys and girls with some of the beauties of those mid-ocean lands which are generally, so strange to all of us.
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