How could I--the first English ship on whose side I ever
laid my hand! The name--I read it letter by letter on the bow--was
James Westoll. Not very romantic, you will say. The name of a very
considerable, well-known, and universally respected North country
ship-owner, I believe. James Westoll! What better name could an
honourable hard-working ship have? To me the very grouping of the
letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw her
floating motionless and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere purity
of the light.
We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I volunteered to
pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to put the pilot on
board while our boat, fanned by the faint air which had attended us all
through the night, went on gliding gently past the black, glistening
length of the ship. A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then
that, for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed
in English--the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long
friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of
ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued,
of remembered emotions--of my very dreams! And if (after being thus
fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not claim
it aloud as my own, then, at any rate, the speech of my children.
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