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Updated: June 5, 2025
But the sun had sunk behind the moor where the broom was only budding, and the last sea-mew had flown to its scaur, and the smouldering whins had leaped up into the first yellow flame of the bonfires, and the more shifting, fantastic, brilliant banners of the aurora borealis shot across the frosty sky, before the first faint shout announced that Staneholme and his lady had come home.
The Great Pacific is the scene of our story. On a beautiful morning, many years ago, a little schooner might have been seen floating, light and graceful as a sea-mew, on the breast of the slumbering ocean. She was one of those low black-hulled vessels, with raking, taper masts, trimly cut sails, and elegant form, which we are accustomed to associate with the idea of a yacht or a pirate.
Man has envied the birds since the world began. Who has not watched, with something more than admiration, the easy gyrations of the sea-mew, and listened, with something more than delight, to the song of the soaring lark?
While freedom struggled in the hearts of the common people to assert its rights and declare that all men were equal and ought to be free, scheming nobles sought to enchain them in one form or another of slavery. "Adieu! adieu! My native shore Fades o'er the waters blue. The night winds sigh, the breakers roar, And shrieks the wild sea-mew."
There was a great knocking at its gates, hurried steps upon the stairs, and a voice crying urgently through the bars. But he could not stay to listen. He was too far away to hear. The voice was to him but like the thin harsh cry of the sea-mew wheeling near, blended in with the marvel of his freedom. He took no heed of it. He was afloat on the great sea-faring tide.
But in the summer time Jack and Seimke sat together on the headland in the warm evenings, and the gnats buzzed and the fishes spouted close ashore in the stillness, and the eider-duck swam about. "If only some one would build me a boat as swift and nimble as a fish, and able to ride upon the billows like a sea-mew!" sighed and lamented Jack, "then I could be off."
And as this conviction dawned on him, withering all his energy of heart, the wind wailed over him, the water bubbled in his ears, and the sea-mew, napping as it flew past him, uttered above his head its plaintive scream. His heart sank within him.
Second Scene The Hut of the Sea-mew. Good-by to England! Good-by to inhabited and civilized regions of the earth! Two years have passed since the voyagers sailed from their native shores. The enterprise has failed the Arctic expedition is lost and ice-locked in the Polar wastes. The good ships Wanderer and Sea-mew, entombed in ice, will never ride the buoyant waters more.
"Nay, nay, you are altogether too hard," returned the Jew, with a deprecating smile; "but come to my little office. We shall have more privacy there. How comes it, Pungarin, that you are so far from your own waters? It is a longish way from Ceylon to Borneo." "How comes it," replied the Malay, "that the sea-mew flies far from home?
Over the hill-top he went twelve miles an hour at the least until he reached the slope on the other side; then down he rushed again, driving at the first part of the descent like an insane steam-engine, till the pace must have increased to twenty miles, at which point, the whirl of the wheel becoming too rapid, he was obliged once more to rest his legs on the handles, and take to repose, contemplation, and wiping his heated brow equivalent this, we might say, to the floating descent of the sea-mew.
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