" Only usually he uses the word "We," there being
some occult virtue in the first person plural which makes it specially
fit for critical and royal declarations. I have a small handful of these
sea appreciations, signed by various masters, yellowing slowly in my
writing-table's left hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like
a handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree of
knowledge. Strange! It seems that it is for these few bits of paper,
headed by the names of a few Scots and English shipmasters, that I have
faced the astonished indignations, the mockeries, and the reproaches of
a sort hard to bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been charged with
the want of patriotism, the want of sense, and the want of heart, too;
that I went through agonies of self-conflict and shed secret tears not
a few, and had the beauties of the Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have
been called an "incorrigible Don Quixote," in allusion to the book-born
madness of the knight. For that spoil! They rustle, those bits of
paper--some dozen of them in all. In that faint, ghostly sound there
live the memories of twenty years, the voices of rough men now no
more, the strong voice of the everlasting winds, and the whisper of a
mysterious spell, the murmur of the great sea, which must have somehow
reached my inland cradle and entered my unconscious ear, like that
formula of Mohammedan faith the Mussulman father whispers into the ear
of his new-born infant, making him one of the faithful almost with his
first breath.
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